Lead Igloo | Stories, Philosophy, Opinion
For reasons that will become clearer (to myself) at a later date, I am reading Ezra Pound & Japan, a collection edited by Sanehide Kodama.
Ezra Pound & Japan collects over fifty years of correspondence between Pound and various Japanese poets and editors. The latter parts of the book also contains Ezra’s actual contributions to Japanese literary journals and newspapers.
But what I want to write – briefly – about are the letters. Ezra never went to Japan, stating that he’d either have to be earning far more than he was if he was to afford a trip there, or he’d have to be offered a professorship at a Japanese university. So the thing that makes the letters contained in Ezra Pound & Japan remarkable is that they document the forming, then the life of friendships - in full. This differs from other collections of letters that I’ve (tried to) read because these records are the extent of the relationship, all the words and the only words spoken between friends.
The Pound to Katue Kitasono correspondence is especially illuminating as it begins with a letter from Kitasono, a young Japanese poet and leader of an avant-garde collective called VOU Club. This first letter is, in essence, one from an admirer, written in the hope Pound will take some time to read his work. Soon, through his connections, Pound has VOU Club’s work translated and published in English.
However, in the middle years of their friendship, which also happen to be the years of WWII, Pound’s letters outweigh Kitasono’s four to one, with Pound expounding (!) on economic and political issues, and his financial situation – all matters literary receive less and less attention. Kitasono has by now gotten Pound a job as an international correspondent for Japan Times and it is clear from the letters spent discussing the types of articles he is writing and JT’s payments for them - he tells KK that a ‘Reporters Card’ would be useful to him as “poets have no civic status among other mere men” – how reliant he is on Kitasono, and on the job.
Or maybe it was just chatter between friends separated by land, brought together by poetry.
Lead Igloo
Once upon a time, there was a wall. The building of it was one of the biggest undertakings in human history. The story of this wall defined a nation, running through it both metaphorically and literally.
Once upon a time, there were people who, from a distance, watched a great wall rise, fall, and rise again. There were those who aided in its building. Those who died in its construction. Those who were defeated by it. Those who brought it down. There were those behind the wall who were inextricably linked to its fortunes. There were those who thought nothing of the wall, other than that it was a wall, when the land, thus the threat, from the north was annexed and disappeared.
Lead Igloo
There is a plant on the kitchen window sill that he waters every night. It’s only small – it’s still in the original flimsy plastic pot – and he keeps it in a little ceramic bowl. But he waters it every night, pouring water into the plant’s centre until the water rises up out of the bowl. Usually, by the next day, the water is gone, consumed by the plant. It loves the water. It’s green and healthy and a little patch of verdant moss grows on the soil. It’s a tiny patch, but it is always moist and so green it almost isn’t green.
The plant sits next to two salt and pepper shakers in the shape of penguins. The penguins’ black coats are faded at the back from days of afternoon sun, faded smooth, almost to white.
Back when he used to work he used to have a coffee at 9.30, on the minute, every morning. At first he bought it from a little sandwich shop that had a side window for the people who back then drank coffee, and there weren’t as many then as there are now. It was an unspoken rule that this side window was for coffee and you didn’t go into the shop to order coffee. It was like it was a secret part of the business, like there was something not quite legal about it. Of course, this window looked out on to a street, not a main road – he worked on the main road – but a busy enough street, always busy with couriers and post vans and taxis. It wasn’t as busy as those kinds of streets are today – this was back in the seventies and eighties when he worked there and got morning coffee – but it was still busy. Today those streets are out of control. You’d be mad to drive into town today.
They had a big silver coffee machine, it almost looked like some sort of industrial coffee maker, right next to the window. A little, apronned woman operated it and dispersed the orders in styrofoam cups. The machine reminded him of a factory, whenever he saw it. One of those factories where they have big silver machines and people who wear hair nets and stir things in large vats with paddles which by all appearances look like oars. Whenever he saw the machine, which was every day, that’s what he thought of.
The coffee was 25 cents a cup, back when you could still buy things in cents. He took a caramel brown briefcase to work every day, opening it on the kitchen table the night before work to unsort then sort his things. Pens and pencils, notepads, documents, manilla folders. On the inside of the top of the briefcase was a little pocket with a zip where he put his coffee money. He never broke a note for a coffee – it was only 25 cents. In the kitchen light, every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night, he slipped some coins into the little pocket so he could buy his morning coffee, then zipped it closed, the money coming from his wallet or his money box or change from that day’s coffee.
He stopped getting coffees from the shop. They didn’t have those little plastic slip-on lids with the hole in the lip for easy drinking and carrying like they do these days, so walking it back up the stairs to his cubicle was always a challenge. But he didn’t stop because of that – he just stopped. They had instant coffee in the office kitchen which was only one level below his. Level two, he was on level three. So he, every morning at 9.30, after he’d been at work for almost exactly an hour and finished his morning tasks and filed them away, got up from his desk and walked down the cream-coloured stairs with flecks of some shiny silver material in them just below the surface and made his way down the hall to the kitchen to make his coffee.
Watering the plant on his kitchen window sill is a bit like coffee time when he worked. It is a marker by which to navigate the day.
The ceramic bowl – the reason he chose this bowl to put the little new plant in in the first place – has an ugly black crack that runs diagonally down its side and fades just before the bowl’s base. It’s common to describe lightning as a ‘crack’ - this crack does look like a permanent spindly black lightning strike.
Lead Igloo
Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America. Extract from the 10th Anniversary Edition of No Logo examining the branding of everything American – including Barack Obama. Great read. Via The Guardian.
Our Boredom, Ourselves. Jennifer Schuesller on how boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. Via The New York Times.
Kabul: City Number One – Part 7: Illustrious Corpses. Adam Curtis’s series on Afghanistan continues, putting into context the mess that is Afghanistan today by looking at it’s history. It is investigate journalism, using the storytelling powers of the web, at its best.
“Well, is that right? Television isn’t real life, sweetie. Neither are the movies. Believe you me, you know nothing about love. You won’t learn nothing about the real world from there. All that stuff you see on TV is make-believe. Your Aunty Vanessa? Good God. She doesn’t know much about anything let alone love. Kaycee, get down from there and pull your arm in. You wanna lose your bloody arm, do you? A truck will go past and rip it clean off. When Vanessa broke up with your Uncle Terry I said to her you’ll be down for a while but just go and find someone else. Go on. You get sad because that person leaves your life. But what happens when you get sad? You don’t stay sad, do you? That’s all you have to do. Kaycee siddown! Levi, grab your sister for me will you? Kaycee, sit next to Levi and stay there. Listen, if a man leaves you, you find yourself another one. Simple as that.”
Her face is red and alert, a deep cleave runs down the middle of her forehead, between her eyebrows.
“Who told you that rubbish? If there was only one person for each of us we’d spend our whole lives looking and we wouldn’t have time for nothing else, now would we? Well, don’t listen to her. I’m your mother, I should know. What if the one right person for you lived in Zimbabwe? Well, I’m certainly never going to Zimbabwe so how would I know? That’s right. What if your father was the only one for me? What should I have done when he left me? Waited out the front of the house for him to come back?”
She laughs but the crease stays, like a line drawn in sand with a stick.
“Now I’ve heard it all. That’s what you think is it? You’ve got a lot to learn, missy. If I had waited around then I wouldn’t have had Levi and Kaycee, would I? Leave that man alone, Levi. I’m sorry, mate. Say sorry to the man, Levi. Kaycee! You’re trying my patience. Behave, you two, only a few more stops and we can get off. Well, you can wait till we get home. There’s ice-blocks and drink there. And we’re having your favourite tonight. Levi, are you listening? We’re having pizza for dinner. How about that? Now be good. Sit still. We’ve had a good day, you don’t want to wreck it now. I’ll tell you something, life just isn’t like that. It’d be nice, but it isn’t. Nobody’d go to the movies if life was like that. If life was like that you could just sit there and watch it in your home in real life. You’d switch the telly off and you wouldn’t need it because life would be magical enough. Would you? TV shows would be boring because you’d see that everyday anyway. The what? I don’t know where it is, darling, where did you put it? If you put it there then that’s where it should be. I haven’t touched it. Here, you have a look.”
She passes a faded, rainbow-striped canvas bag to her youngest daughter.
“I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know. They just do and that’s exactly what I’m trying to say to you. If a man leaves you, get another one.”
Lead Igloo
Others however of the Indians are on the borders of the city of Caspatyros and the country of Pactyïke, dwelling towards the North of the other Indians; and they have a manner of living nearly the same as that of the Bactrians: these are the most warlike of the Indians, and these are they who make expeditions for the gold. For in the parts where they live it is desert on account of the sand; and in this desert and sandy tract are produced ants, which are in size smaller than dogs but larger than foxes, for there are some of them kept at the residence of the king of Persia, which are caught here. These ants then make their dwelling under ground and carry up the sand just in the same manner as the ants found in the land of the Hellenes, which they themselves also very much resemble in form; and the sand which is brought up contains gold. To obtain this sand the Indians make expeditions into the desert, each one having yoked together three camels, placing a female in the middle and a male like a trace-horse to draw by each side. On this female he mounts himself, having arranged carefully that she shall be taken to be yoked from young ones, the more lately born the better. For their female camels are not inferior to horses in speed, and moreover they are much more capable of bearing weights.
As to the form of the camel, I do not here describe it, since the Hellenes for whom I write are already acquainted with it, but I shall tell that which is not commonly known about it, which is this:—the camel has in the hind legs four thighs and four knees, and its organs of generation are between the hind legs, turned towards the tail.
The Indians, I say, ride out to get the gold in the manner and with the kind of yoking which I have described, making calculations so that they may be engaged in carrying it off at the time when the greatest heat prevails; for the heat causes the ants to disappear underground. Now among these nations the sun is hottest in the morning hours, not at midday as with others, but from sunrise to the time of closing the market: and during this time it produces much greater heat than at midday in Hellas, so that it is said that then they drench themselves with water. Midday however has about equal degree of heat with the Indians as with other men, while after midday their sun becomes like the morning sun with other men, and after this, as it goes further away, it produces still greater coolness, until at last at sunset it makes the air very cool indeed.
When the Indians have come to the place with bags, they fill them with the sand and ride away back as quickly as they can, for forthwith the ants, perceiving, as the Persians allege, by the smell, begin to pursue them: and this animal, they say, is superior to every other creature in swiftness, so that unless the Indians got a start in their course, while the ants were gathering together, not one of them would escape. So then the male camels, for they are inferior in speed of running to the females, if they drag behind are even let loose from the side of the female, one after the other; the females however, remembering the young which they left behind, do not show any slackness in their course. Thus it is that the Indians get most part of the gold, as the Persians say; there is however other gold also in their land obtained by digging, but in smaller quantities.
It seems indeed that the extremities of the inhabited world had allotted to them by nature the fairest things, just as it was the lot of Hellas to have its seasons far more fairly tempered than other lands: for first, India is the most distant of inhabited lands towards the East, as I have said a little above, and in this land not only the animals, birds as well as four-footed beasts, are much larger than in other places (except the horses, which are surpassed by those of Media called Nessaian), but also there is gold in abundance there, some got by digging, some brought down by rivers, and some carried off as I explained just now: and there also the trees which grow wild produce wool which surpasses in beauty and excellence that from sheep, and the Indians wear clothing obtained from these trees.
From Volume I, Book III of The Histories by Herodotus. G. C. Macaulay translation.
Is it cynical of me to think that mainstream media outlets are pushing the e-reader’s cause so that they can continue to have control of ‘the news’?
In Rupert Murdoch’s speech about blocking News Corp’s online content from those who don’t subscribe, the thing that struck me was his comment that papers would survive by giving the people the news that they wanted (the implication being that this would be done through a digital means).
I couldn’t make sense of this. Perhaps I’m being naive by thinking that news is current events, both local and international, that the public should know about and there should be no degree of what we should and shouldn’t hear about. Of course, papers do every day what I suppose Murdoch was alluding to. News of Haiti dropped from Australia’s papers pretty quickly (from front pages, at least), that is until the enormity of the event became known. So already there we have automatic news filtering being done based on ‘news cycles’ and what publishers believe readers want.
E-readers will no doubt allow for a more personalised experience, enabling news outlets to give you, the reader, the news that interests you. Which is all a long way of saying mainstream media outlets want you to continue to go to them and e-readers – despite there being every possibility that an e-reader, iTablet etc. is/will be nothing but a streamlined laptop without a keyboard – is what they’re pinning their hopes on. It’s their way of giving you last year’s Christmas present in new wrapping paper.
There’s also a large, outspoken element of the web which likes to see anything technologically new and anything new that is Apple. Online, it is this kind of stuff that makes news and causes fusses. But I*’m wondering if the majority of people who are not of that boisterous online party really want an e/i-anything.
*I, who while interrogating the need for the e-reader have been thinking and reading an awful lot of free online content about it…
Lead Igloo
The Pictures of War you Aren’t Supposed to See. Striking article by Chris Hedges about the impersonality of ‘industrial war’ (great term) and two new books of war photographs that tell a very different story to the media and Hollywood’s “mythic visions of war [which] keep it heroic and entertaining.” Via truth dig.
The Real Question. Scott F. Parker discusses the inevitable comparisons between ‘Good Old Neon’ and its author, David Foster Wallace. Via Fiction Writers Review.
Moscow’s stray dogs. Piece on Moscow’s fondness for the tens of thousands of stray dogs that wander the city’s streets and metro. Via Financial Times.
The Howard impact. Edited extract from How Australia Compares, a new book by Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins analysing the Howard government’s years in power. Via Inside Story.
The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle. The full text of an advance feature by Scott Horton that will appear in the March 2010 Harper’s Magazine on the “suicides” of three Guantanamo prisoners – not an act of desperation “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
Tags: chris hedges, David Foster Wallace, fiction writers review, financial times, guantanamo bay, harper's, howard government, inside story, moscow strays, scott f parker, truth dig, war
He pulls the sliding door across and steps out onto the balcony. His bare feet are warm on the tiled floor. He puts his hands on his hips. This bloody summer sun – his girls have been fried. He picks up the two plastic bottles he keeps by the door and takes them inside. At the basin in the laundry, he fills up the bottles, turning the tap off just as the second bottle is filled to the top and a small jet of water squirts up. Back outside, he begins watering, starting always with the maidenhair fern in the balcony’s right corner. He is fond of his maidenhair fern. Her lovely fronds reach out like octopus legs across the balcony’s tiles. He gives her a good drink, pouring the water right into the centre of the plant. He then waters the herbs – the basil bush and the big messy knot of thyme. Although he doesn’t need to – he could just go back inside and refill the bottle – he rations the water out, like one does when pouring cups of tea for visitors. Some water here, some there, and more if there is any left. Water tinkles onto the tiles while the light of day fades overhead.
His friend Fran – she comes over for tea, is a lesbian with short jetblack hair – once gave him a book on gardening. One of the things it recommended was talking to the plants because the love and attention made them grow and respond to their owner’s care. He stopped reading there and hasn’t looked inside the book since. Sometimes he wonders why he and Fran are even friends. They have nothing in common and most times when she comes over she just complains about her colleagues at work while he nods and sips his tea. Anyway, she probably gave him the book as a joke. She doesn’t understand why he calls the plants his ‘girls’ and he didn’t understand when she said watering plants was like protecting endangered species. She said if you needed to protect a species the cause was already lost, that if they couldn’t survive on their own then that was the end. He didn’t know what she was talking about but he didn’t say that. She can be a real pitbull, Fran. She’s skinny, is part Chinese and so well spoken but her face can scrunch up to match her demeanour and she can be so pitbullish.
The plastic bottle crumples in his hand, empty, as he shakes the last drops off. He tucks it under his arm, moves across his balcony to water those plants with the other bottle. The first to get a drink is always a twisted viney thing with stems that look like bamboo but aren’t. He’s had her for a while – she’s pretty durable. He remembers that the lottery is being drawn tonight and pats his pocket, as if that’s where his ticket is. Last week he won $26.40. He’s put so much money into it, he should win that amount – at least – every week. Gives you a nice little thrill when you win, though.
Next is a bush with tough, waxey leaves in a nice stone pot. When he bought it it was sculptured, a near-perfect sphere of green, but he hasn’t maintained it and now it’s more of a polyhedrom of some sort. When he bought it he had the idea of making it the centrepiece of his balcony, thinking it would compliment the tiles and the other plants nicely and bring it all together. The lady at the counter scanned it in and, as she took the money, said, “Oh,” as if jolted into consciousness, ”that’s cheap.” He didn’t know how to take such a comment and as he heaved away his new plant he wondered if she’d meant good on you for picking up such a bargain or the price is obviously incorrect and I’m doing you a favour by not double-checking and selling it to you for that amount. Her tone hadn’t suggested one more than the other. He thinks of that every time he waters this plant. He doubts she was the shop’s owner, or even manager – it was a big store – so maybe it was a friendly comment. But some people take their jobs so seriously, preferring to put what they perceive as the integrity of their job ahead of those they serve. Making matters worse was the fact he’d taken only vague notice of the price and didn’t know what was and wasn’t cheap for such a plant. He’d just liked it, but the woman at the register had cursed it and it made him not like it, making him go as far as offering it to Fran before relegating it to the balcony’s left corner and giving it probably less water than it needs in the hope it will wither and he could use the pot for something else.
He pours the last of the water into the small petunia with pink flowers then shakes the bottle at his girls, the leaves that catch the drops bouncing under the weight. He supposes he should get a watering can – but he only has nine or ten plants. He screws the caps back on the bottles. What Fran said about it being pointless really struck a nerve. Or a chord. Whichever. He could leave this to nature – he doesn’t even remember the names of all the plants. But it doesn’t rain enough and days like this would kill them in no time without his help. The sun is so hot now, like there’s a raging fire in the sky that just won’t burn out and it just fries everything. His neighbour to the right is out on the balcony, smoking. Nobody uses balconies for much at all. Just for plants and to hang clothes and to smoke. He holds a bottle in each hand and rests his hands on his hips, winces.
LI
E-readers are the way of the reading future, seemingly whether we like it or not. But are digital books an attempt to fix a reading experience that isn’t broken?
I once worked in an art museum where my primary role was to stop people from touching the works. Of course, it didn’t say it like that on the job description, but that was the reality. Viewed as a social experiment it was telling – not only were people blind to prominent signs requesting that they not touch things, there were also obvious differences in the ways people engaged with what they saw.
There were two clear groups. The first would stop and stare, the workings of their mind clear on their face as they contemplated the artwork. And then there were the people it was our job to look out for: those who would raise an arm to do more than just point.
At first I found it inexplicable. That somebody, to aid their understanding of it, would actually put their hand on an artwork worth a large sum of money, something there was only one of, was insanity. But it happened with horrifying regularity. Multiple times a day, people reached out and touched to help them understand.
The internet has already changed our reading habits, putting on the computer screen what we used to hold in our hands. There seems to be general agreement that this change is incomplete and must continue, as if it’s still in the chrysalis stage and some other element is needed to turn it into the beautiful, digital butterfly it is bound to become. E-readers appear to be that element, whether we like it or not.
E-readers are not holograms. While they require your favourite novels being turned into bits of data, they are an attempt to put the digital back in tangible form. But how will this compare to the bound lump of paper, so comfortable in our hands, we call the book?
Part of the experience of reading is going into a book store, perusing the shelves and finding a book I’m interested in. I look at the front cover, scan the back, maybe I find the first page and begin to read. I enjoy that very tactile experience.
But is that just me? Australians historically have welcomed new technology with arms open a surprising width. High definition television is broadcasting to households across the land and we possess some of the highest rates of internet usage per capita in the world. If recent Christmas sales figures are anything to go by, we also buy a lot of books. All the indicators point to e-readers being a success here.
The e-book and reader brings into question the role of technology. In the past, technological advancements were actual advancements. Now, the aim seems to be to make things technologically different, yet similar. A case in point is the apparent need to make e-reader screens easy on the eyes – easier on the eyes than bright computer screens. As easy on the eyes as paper.
MP3 players are everywhere because carrying around a portable CD player and a stack of CDs was impractical. Any dedicated jogger had the feeling, as their Discman endlessly skipped in their sweaty hands, that there had to be something better. Any device which fixes these problems while holding every song in your entire catalogue is pretty darn handy.
Which is all a long way of saying there was if not a need for it, then a demand. It was a logical next step.
However, I am yet to meet anybody who has lamented being unable to carry around their personal library, or who believes the experience of reading words from a book needs to be improved.
Most recently I read Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America and Albert Camus’s The Outsider concurrently. I read such dissimilar books because Camus’s book is a flimsy 117 pages – so small a strong wind would blow it from my grip – and Carey’s is a 450-page hardcover – attractive but terribly impractical for carrying around. I am a devoted reader, so switching between the two – reading Camus on my way to work, Carey in bed at night – was not a problem. For some, maybe it would be.
Which brings me to my next point. The iPod is the logical analogy to draw upon when discussing e-readers as it was the first successful (success seems like a weak term for something that has sold in such vast quantity – catching a pancake after you’ve flipped it is a success) portable digital device. It forced a change in mode and delivery and created a revolution in the digital space.
Not only is there an expectation that Apple will develop the mother of e-readers, there is an expectation the successful e-reader will do something similar to the world that the iPod did.
Although I’m quite fond of my own library, I don’t access it all that much. Maybe being able to do so with the touch of a button will make us all hyper-literate and spontaneous public readings of everything ranging from Hamlet to Harry Potter on trains the world over will become common. If so, cool. But the possibility of being able to carry around my library, or a large portion of it, everywhere I go is not an idea I find attractive.
When Coca-Cola released the first incarnation of its energy drink Mother, they flooded the market. When it turned out nobody liked it, they reformulated it then again flooded the market – this time with cans double their original size and a label that assured buyers it ‘tastes nothing like the old one!’ It appears that if there is no call for a certain product but you’re a big enough company, the strategy is this: flood the market and hope you create a need.
So even if we’re all quite satisfied with the trusty old book, it’s likely we’ll soon be wondering how we ever did without the e-reader.
Digital readers also break the rule of synthesis. A number of media outlets have already called 2010 the year of the e-reader, seemingly for no other reason than a lot of companies are developing them – there are some impressively sleek designs – and because 2010 needs to be the year of some sort of technology. Yet there is little a gadget like the iPhone does not do, especially when we’re talking about the merging of separate elements into a single digital device. It’s a phone, multimedia player, video camera, still camera and clock. It’s an email client and web browser. With a quick visit to Apple’s App Store, it’s also an e-book reader and countless other things.
It seems crazy to take a step back and create a completely separate device to read the formerly printed word. In this sense, e-readers are already old technology.
Of course, the fact a technology is old doesn’t make it bad – the book is well and truly ancient. The Gutenberg press, and thus the invention of movable type, is over 500 years old. The origins of book binding can be traced back to the first century AD. That little has changed in millennia may indeed be a limitation of technology – or maybe we just like the feel of a good book in our hands.
Lead Igloo
