Ceci n'est pas un blog

Sat we went to the farmer's market. It turned out to be all about organic cheese and honey with an opportunity for chocolate banana ice cream in a proper waffle cone, made from waffles made there. It was a beautiful day so we walked down to where the local shops were having an outdoor day on a plaza to show off what's available in the area. Really a lovely day to be outside and all of Oslo seemed to be spilling out of cafes with cold drinks or grilling in the parks or jus strolling among the tents trying the cheeses and browsing the clothes.

Sunday the rains swept in but we are dedicated culture goers and weren't going to miss Mela, a festival of Indian/Pakistani/Afro-pop/Reggae music with South Asian and East African food. So we stood in the rain eating tandoori wraps and listening to drummers, a bored-seeming Punjabi singer with a Ricky Martin style keyboardist, and a Euro-pop young lady who lipsynched to a recording of a voice that we can only assume is her own studio session. But the damp overwhelmed us and we went home before the traditional dancers and without trying the many desserts on offer. H was, however, quite pleased with the jugglers and her mango lassi.

Yesterday I missed most of H's cardiology appointment (see more details over at Fjordward) because we had another off-site management day. This time it was all about presenting us with important data, some leadership/culture training, and teambuilding. Because of the importance of the first part, a lot of the country managers and travelling sales leaders were there and it was nice to get to talk with more folks in person. The venue was a farm with sheep, chickens, goats, horses (including a Clydesdale), a very social small black pig, as well as the requisite old dog and young cat. Mostly I dread these things ... anything resembling camp just sort of scares me, but the competitiveness was light hearted, there was no speachifying about what each exercise was teaching us for our work life, and honestly it was just a beautiful place to be with rolling hills of well mown grass, sheep grazing picturesquely in the foreground, and a large lake catching the afternoon light. Ending with a BBQ and buffet outside, I got home well after 10pm anxious to hear what the sonograms showed of our wee girl's heart.

Switching over to media for a moment, I'd like to follow up on an earlier post expressing anxiety about whether season 2 of Sensitive Skin would be as good as the first. It wasn't. Not even close. It is still filmed and scored nicely and the cast are all dead on but my god did the writer not have a story in mind when Series 2 was commissioned. The character driven film quality is replaced by a series of discreet situations usually involving a meet-cute set up and then each episode's situation pops up in the final reel in a clumsy and unnecessarily thorough job of wrapping everything up. I'll stop there. Buy Season 1.

Currently about to finish reading Interpreter of Maladies, a really nice short story collection mostly about Indian ex-pats in the US and England and their first generation children. Lahiri writes beautifully about heartbreak and insecurity and the quiet, subtle, markers of difference and (non)acceptance. With this being such a big anniversary of India's independence and of Partition, we have seen quite a few documentary programs on TV about everything from the experiences of a Diana Rigg as a child at the end of the colonial period to how the Mumbai railway functions. But I learned maybe as much from the things people don't say in Interpreter of Maladies. Many of the stories are terribly sad but they also feel real and very well crafted.

It's actually a nice follow up to Afer Dark (by Murakami) which was a very quick read and felt like a short story in structure, simplicity, and scope of the story. Compared to Kafka on the Shore, After Dark is a very slight thing, it seems to lack weight and ambition and complexities layered upon complexities. But the characters are young, likable; I enjoyed spending their evening and into the next morning with them.

I wish I were a compulsive completist; someone who sees all the films of a director or reads all the books by an author. I haven't seen every Scorsese movie nor every Coen film nor even every Soderberg, whom I like more than either. I have intentionally skipped movies by directors I normally like. But I feel guilty, like a set should be complete and the flaw is in me for breaking it up or leaving a piece out. Until last year, I had even seen every Woody Allen movie but then gave myself permission to start skipping them when Melinda and Melinda came out. And it's harder to keep pace with a living author who is constantly producing even as you try to fill in his back catalogue.

All this to say that I am about to make some generalizations about an author having only read a portion of his canon.

This morning I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, one of the most popular books by Haruki Murakami. He may be my favorite author. He writes novels, short stories, non-fiction and all in a way that is at once artificial and distancing while being inventive, insightful, real and honest. This book not my favorite of his but still it drew me in, kept me interested, surprised me, and was filled with wonderful details. Perhaps too many moments where I could relate even though it was entirely surreal story.

Before talking about this specific book, I should say that his work varies from the extremely surreal to the very real. One of his best collections, in my opinion, is After the Quake. Short stories that all take the Kobe earthquake as their starting point. In one, a busy doctor vacations in Thailand and finds wisdom and truths about herself through her driver. In another a man is visited by a giant mystical frog who needs his help to wrestle the great subterranean worm whose movements threaten to destroy Tokyo. So you get a sense of the range of his surrealism. Often there are just hints around the edges and at other times all of reality seems to have been completely torn apart and reconstructed in a new way.

I first encountered him in a collection of modern Japanese fiction called Monkey Brain Sushi. How could you not love anything with a title like that? and so I have slowly been catching up on his books and short stories. I have a friend who even photocopies stories in magazines and mails them to me.

And so this book. How do I feel about this book? There are two stories here running in parallel and eventually into each other. One is a clearly unreal and metaphysical world where shadows can be cut from their owners and a herd of unicorns are the only creatures allowed to leave the walled town. The other story takes place in a near future where data secrets are encoded using uncrackable algorithms embedded in the Calcutec's brains. Each agent's work unique based on their own subconscious.

In both Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart, the action mostly takes place in our clearly reognizable world and only slowly does that world start to merge with another, different set of rules. Hard-Boiled mostly follows this mode and I think it's one weakness is when the near future world of the Calcutec becomes too otherworldly, too unlike our own. One of the things that so interesting about Kafka on the Shore is how, as the wall between the other world and our own breaks down we begin to learn the rules of this interaction and to see how the novel's meta-reality is organized. And here there is a similar progression but the near future becomes, in the middle of the book, too unlike our own.

However, it ends brilliantly and the characters are real and natural and understandable albeit in circumstances unlike any you will ever have imagined. I greatly enjoy being in his unique universe and the wealth of detail and interesting invention. Another recurring theme of his work is a character with an affinity for the trio of jazz/food/literature. Characters quote Turgenev while making a delicate and complicated cream sauce, Dave Brubeck or Benny Goodman playing in the background. This character is also likely to be the one who doesn't express his emotions well or whose emotional inertia causes him to barely raise an eyebrow when something truly bizarre happens. They might sit at the table, drinking a beer, alone and unfazed by the rips in reality around them. His accumulated life has no meaning, so when it's turned upside down, all you can do is light a cigarette and have a whisky and learn the new system.

So Hard-Boiled has a fascinating first act as you are begin to piece together the rules in these two unique and radically different worlds, gets a bit muddy (for me) in the middle as both plots become so far removed from anything remotely familiar, and then ends beautifully, tantalizing the reader with the resolution you want but giving you exactly the right one, the one that the story demands.

Always fascinating, I can't recommend him enough. If you haven't read any, start with the short stories of The Elephant Vanishes or After the Quake, then move to Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood. If you're a dedicated surrealist with a taste for something entirely unlike any other author, start with Kafka on the Shore and then follow it with Hard-Boiled Wonderland. That said, I haven't read perhaps his most famous book, which is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I'm looking forward to my next visit to a Haruki Murakami universe: they are sometimes flawed, always strange, a bit melancholy, and also like coming home.

Yesterday morning it snowed that soft dry snow that melts before it touches your skin. It fell so slowly that you could be fooled into thinking it might stop and just hang there in the air. When I was out walking along the river it had just started and none had stuck to the ground. The ducks sat with their feathers fluffed on the frost covered grass waiting for it to gather around them.

While I was at work the day warmed enough that the snow turned ever so gradually into a light but constant drizzle.

The result in the evening was a wet, slippery, translucent mush that showed the edges of every footprint in icy outline. It squelched like quick-sand and threatend to topple me headlong into it's grey slushy clutches.

Learning to walk on this new watery, icy, snowy surface reminded me of the Werner Herzog book "Of Walking in Ice". It's a slim little book that I read some years back, an account of his walking from Munich to Paris in a straight line in the winter of 1974. The reason for this trip was that he had been told that the film critic Lotte Eisner was ill and likely to die. Herzog, ever the eccentric, got it into his head that they had to meet and therefore she couldn't die until he got there. So he walked. So she would live longer.

On his journey, he breaks into vacant vacation homes and meets interesting characters and reflects. The book has a nice tone, reads quickly, and is certainly of interest to anyone who has followed German cinema generally or Herzog specifically.

I was just searching for a picture of the cover (this was the best image I could find) to put in this post and found that the paperback version I have is selling only on collector sites for between $285 and $495 (US) depending on condition. The hardback, which I've never seen, is listed at $1200. Who knew.

I read this summer that he, Herzog, has a new film in the works that is comprised almost exclusively of stock documentary footage from NASA and various antarctic scientists but re-cast through editing and dialogue into a science fiction film. Contrast with the now established 'mockumentary' style of Zelig, Spinal Tap, Man Bites Dog, Blair Witch, etc.

In the mean time, I must practice my walking in ice as it's a dangerous business. Somehow the Norwegians make it look effortless, even in spike heel boots that should be treacherous all by themselves.

Spent much of Sunday at the National Gallery. It was lovely. This was a beautifully curated museum with a central area organized by theme with art from all times included and then a series of galleries that moved forward through time, each one focussing on a particular movement or trend in the art of the day. One thing that was particularly nice, in addition to the bilingual plaques, was that they would include reference pieces. For example, several Norwegian women went to study at Ferdinand Léger's Académie Moderne in Paris and brought back works heavily influenced by his abstract and mechanical paintings. So the small gallery of their work included a Léger as well. The Norwegian impressionists were accompanied by a Monet, and so on.

While Munch has his own museum a few miles away, the National Gallery also has quite a few. They are striking. A lot of his larger paintings have an improvisational, almost hurried quality that gives them an urgency and a sensuality but without being sloppy or amateur, he clearly has a well trained technique that is especially evident in a striking portrait of his sister (whose face appears throughout his work). Some of the paintings were so moving that I didn't notice the Scream until I walked right up to it. The breadth of his work is certainly under appreciated outside of Norway.

I heard an interesting theory about the recently returned Munchs that has been stolen. Apparently a few years ago there was a massive bank robbery, the largest in the nations history and every available investigator was hot on the trail of the thieves who needed a big distraction. Cue one art heist. This high-profile theft would surely pull police manpower off the bank case and give the thieves a couple of hostages they could use to bargain with if they did get caught. Curiously, in support of this highly unofficial theory, the paintings were recovered during the sentencing phase of the bank robbers trial.

Later, I went to St. Hanshaugen park and watched the ducks and the children. It is a beautiful park that is a hill, from the center you can see down to the harbor and across to the Nessoden peninsula. Gorgeous day. Yellow and red leaves formed perfect circles on the ground around the trees and young people walked their dogs or pushed prams along the paths. I even saw a man with a ferret riding in his sweater hood.

After dinner I read for a bit. I'm reading the Booker Prize winning "The God of Small Things". (Thank you, CMFM). It's a difficult book. She dances around in time slowly uncovering little bits of information until you start to see what the plot might look like. And the language is mostly beautiful and evocative but often crosses the line into that high school technique of random specificity, "somewhere a dog barks, a trash can falls". The story is fairly unrelentingly depressing and that makes for a slower read but now that the plot is showing itself, should go more quickly.