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Archive for July, 2006

Jul 25 2006

Sasego means “public toilet”

Published by Judah under books

Banana Yoshimoto

Last night I finished Banana Yoshimoto's Amrita. I think that makes all of her major works, but I will have to compare my bookshelf against her bibliography sometime to be sure. As is often the case, her writing is a little bit dark and otherworldly. It's about a girl whose father dies, whose sister becomes a movie star and kills herself, who falls and hits her head and loses her memory, and whose brother suddenly starts to see ghosts. And I guess it's about love and families, too, and… scents.

I wish I read Japanese, because the style of the book (and most of her work) in translation is startlingly simple. Sentences are short and make direct statements. A third grader could read most of her work, the way it has been translated into English, and I wonder if it is the same in Japanese.

She gives an afterward at the end in which she apologizes for the naivete of her writing, and wonders if she will ever write a book so long again. It's a nice contrast to, say, the forewords in early Nabakov novels, where he asserts that he is a genius and takes the time to explain the references and parallels you will miss when you read the book. And at that, there is some kind of similarity between the two styles that I'm having trouble putting my finger on… between Bend Sinister or Invitation to a Beheading and Yoshimoto's writing.

Maybe I'm crazy.

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Jul 20 2006

In the Time of My Ruin

Published by Judah under music

So I’ve been listening to Fast Man Raider Man quite a bit since it came out, but I’ve been pretty quiet about it, here, on the forums, on my own personal blogs. It isn’t that I don’t like the record–because I like it a lot–but so far it hasn’t crystalized into anything I can write. So I don’t know what else to do but talk about, maybe, a handful of the songs that I like best so far.

In The Time Of My Ruin starts off disc 2, and it’s almost as if someone had asked me to describe a Frank Black song and then wrote one based on my description. It has the ABBA rhyme scheme that–despite being a simple thing–he finds a way to make his own. In the verses he sings very rythmically, but in the chorus, he breaks away from the downbeats, and hesitates after “good” before suddenly lurching through the rest of the words in the line, and that, of course, is also something that I would have pointed out as characteristic. Then, of course, this is one of his many songs that are really two songs stitched together, and the second half of this song is arranged very much like a Catholics song, especially with the slide lead, which is beautiful. The singing in the second half sounds more like his early work to me than his Catholics period, but of course, it’s all Frank Black.

I’ve seen It’s Just Not Your Moment called the worst song on the record on the forums, but this was the first one that really grabbed me, and here, again, the slide guitar screams Catholics. The bass line is the big stretch on this song, because it sounds like something out of a Holland-Dozier-Holland track from the 60′s, and unlike any of his work that I can remember, but then, it was this bass track that first drew my attention to the song when I was driving around listening to the record those first few days. This will probably be the first song from FMRM that cracks my top tracks, and notice again, the long coda that is not quite a second song.

Fitzgerald was a sleeper for me. The first few times, I thought it was a quaint piano song, but one of the times I was listening to it, everything got real quiet when Frank Sang “Oh, Fitzy,” and that brought it to my attention. This is the one that doesn’t really sound like a Catholics song to me, although some of the guitar work in the end of the song is close.

And now I see I’ve picked all songs from disc 2, but I just call them like I see them.

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Jul 18 2006

What’s this hell, what’s this pen

Published by Judah under books

So I owe a media post or two anyway, and this seems just about the perfect place for it:

My father, whose taste runs much more towards old style Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction, introduced me to the Foundation series when I was in fifth or sixth grade. He liked it because of the inredible tiny details Asimov imagined, like atomic ballpoint pens and atomic ashtrays and so on. I mostly liked it because it dealt with an entire universe, 25 billion inhabited worlds, full of nothing but people. People and their politics.

About ten years have passed since the last time I read the novels, so I decided to start over. I’m 80% through the sixth of seven, Foundation’s Edge, and I notice a lot of things now that I didn’t notice back when I was a teenager.

First: many of Asimov’s characters seem uncomfortable around women, and all of the books show their age. They were written in the fifties (at least the core three were), and they sound like they were written in the fifties, and the whole affair is one of awkwardness in space. It is very, very cute. See especially Hari Seldon’s flight in Prelude to Foundation, which is like someone working up the courage to ask Jenny to the winter formal.

Second: In the far future, 20,000 years hence, everybody smokes.

Third: Asimov spends a lot of time knocking down religion, but he takes the really easy way out, because we know in advance that all of the religions beliefs presented by the characters are patently false. It’s like being told that the sky is blue in chapter one, and then in chapter ten meeting a religion who believes that the sky is yellow, and ridiculing the character. Not satisfying and he could have done better. Even when he demonstrated the power of religion in Foundation, his religion of science is laughed at by everyone on the foundation who know it is a means of exploiting an ignorant populace.

All of that said, I still think the books are entertaining, and I still think it’s bold to imagine a universe full of nothing but humans* who deal with nothing but human problems.