michael lambe's scrapbook

I really am going to have to get me one of these:

I know you can watch Mr. Gaiman reading the whole book FOR FREE up here: MOUSECIRCUS! but I don’t want to listen to it, I want to READ it. I like hearing the voices in my head.

Did I just write that out loud?

The Graveyard Book available from:amazon.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk

The Mainichi Daily News site is running a series of interviews with popular novelist Murakami Haruki this week in which he talks about his influences, the rhythm of translation, his latest epic (on which he is now working) and the greater purpose of storytelling…

“What I fear more than anything else is ‘psychological enclosure’ imposed by those who are pushing a particular cause. Most people need some sort of boundary, and it becomes unbearable if their boundaries disappear. …but there are lots of cages, or enclosures, and some people get caught up in these and find themselves unable to get out if they’re not careful,” Murakami says.

Murakami says it’s because of this situation that literature is important.

“Stories must exist to work against those psychological enclosures. A good story is not something you can see, but it should give depth and width to people’s minds. And a broad, deep-thinking mind is not something that likes to be shut off in a narrow space,” he says.

And if you want to know what three novels have proven most significant for Murakami’s own writing the list runs as follows:  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye”, and “The Brothers Karamazov,” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Hmmm. I can feel another amazon order coming on.

Links to 1st article, 2nd article and 3rd.

A collaborative creative writing Stanford class project to write a 224 page graphic novel over six weeks, resulted in “Shake Girl” and the results are now available as a free online book. I read it today and was very impressed. The story is based on real events, and its purpose is to raise awareness of violence against women in Cambodia. It’s not a happy story but I’m glad I read it. From journalist Eric Pape’s original article on the tragic story of Tat Marina whose story inspired the book:

The government …is dominated by former Khmer Rouge members who have shown their willingness to use any means necessary to retain their positions of power, from the murder of political opponents to widespread spying and torture. In high society, wives are prepared to battle tooth and nail to avoid losing their husbands and thus their social status to “second wives.” There is even a traditional Cambodian warning to pretty young girls: Beware of powerful men: They may kill you if you refuse their advances. And beware of their wives: They may kill you if you do not.
Link to Eric Pape article.

Link to Shake Girl.
Buy Comics at Things From Another World

Somebody has put up the text of a classic Sandman sequence to dramatize the ongoing struggle for power between Obama and Clinton ~ and it so works!

LINK 

Boingboing has a link up today to a full scan of The Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip In Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond (1979). It’s a very exciting (to a schoolboy) and optimistic vision of a now alternate future of undersea cities, space travel, robots, incredible cybernetic advances in medicine… you know all the fantastical sci-fi stuff we dreamed about when we were kids. The thing is, I can clearly remember reading this as a small boy, poring over those beautiful illustrations and it totally coloured in my vision of what the future would be. I couldn’t wait to grow up and travel to Mars! No mention of Bush, the Iraq War or impending recession in there, eh? I’m still interested in visions of the near future, but these days I find myself reading stuff like this:

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Lot’s of good stuff in here; tales of genetic manipulation, the interweb, virtual reality, apocalypse and of emerging technologies that change what it means to be human and so also change the moral and mental landscape. My favorites would be the delightfully amoral “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick, the heart-breaking “Wedding Album” by David Marusek and “The Calorie Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi; a cautionary tale of what might be if we put too much trust in companies like Monsanto. But every story in here had something to teach me, and more importantly it was a damn good read. The anthology is peppered with excerpts from correspondence between writers Bruce Sterling and John Kessel. Here’s a representative snippet from Kessel to Sterling:

…You are nearer the quick of it with words like ‘wonder,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘visionary drive,’ ‘conceptual novelty’ – and especially ‘cosmic fear.’ This is the dirty little secret of science fiction: that its roots are planted not in the logical, positivistic assumptions of ‘science,’ but in some twisted apprehension (I use the word in the sense both of understanding and fear) that ‘the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.’ We fear and are attracted by that irrationality. It yawns like a pit beneath our attempts to understand technology’s effects on us; it tugs at us like a cliff whispering, ‘come on, jump.’
LINK

Speaking of strange… Last night, I watched the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore on Altertube. Alan Moore is a brilliant writer, and it is fascinating to hear his insights into storytelling, religion, war, pornography, spirituality & materialism, the very nature of the Self…

…Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain; the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually possess such a thing as a Soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn’t it be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it.
LINK

If I were to make a big old list of STUFF I LIKE, I’m pretty sure FREE STUFF and STUFF WRITTEN BY NEIL GAIMAN would be up there in the top ten. Well, I’ve just been listening (and chuckling along) to a free audio download of Neil Gaiman reading (and having lots of fun with) his peculiar and evocative blending of the worlds of Lovecraft and Conan Doyle: A Study In Emerald. Bloody marvellous! His reading really does bring out the humour of this brilliant short story. I especially like the tongue-in-cheek advertisements that intersperse the piece:

{LIVER COMPLAINTS?! BILIOUS ATTACKS?! NEURASTHENIC DISTURBANCES?! QUINSY?! ARTHRITIS?! These are just a handful of the complaints for which a professional EXSANGUINATION can be the remedy. In our offices we have sheaves of TESTIMONIALS which can be inspected by the public at any time. Do not put your health in the hands of amateurs!! We have been doing this for a very long time: V. TEPES PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATOR. (Remember! It is pronouncsed Tzsep-pesh!) Romania, Paris, London, Whitby. You’ve tried the rest – NOW TRY THE BEST!!}

Neil Gaiman: such a dude.

LINK TO FREE AUDIO
LINK TO PRINT VERSION

One of my many New Year’s resolutions (drink less, exercise, save money, meditate, translate poems, be a good boy…) is to make Deep Kyoto profitable. For a long time now I’ve been reading Yaro Starak‘s tips on how to be a successful blogger. Basically he seems to have two key ideas: one being pillar articles and the other being marketing through increased internet presence. Pillar articles are basically posts of valuable information that people will continue to want to read long after they are written. Deep Kyoto is basically a series of reviews of good places in Kyoto so almost every post is a “pillar article” of value (which is partly why I came up with the idea in the first place). However, I haven’t really done any marketing up till now and that is undoubtedly why no-one is reading it. All that is about to change. I’ve come up with one idea for increasing my web-presence and yesterday I started to put it into action.

I’ve written previously on bookcrossing. The idea is you leave books you have read and finished with, out “in the wild” for other people to read and then they write their impressions on the bookcrossing site – and then they re-release them. My idea is a pretty simple one – I register myself on the bookcrossing site as “deepkyoto”, with a brief description of the blog on the profile page. I then place my own bespoke deepkyoto bookplates inside the bookcover along with the bookcrossing id number. In addition, I am leaving the books in places I have already reviewed so each book’s “release notes” contain a link back to a deepkyoto review. Why, it’s almost like a treasure hunt. I have plenty of books I don’t need anymore so I think I can continue to promote myself this way over a fairly wide area. Yesterday I left books at Long Island Cafe and Kyoto Prefectural Information Center. I wonder where they end up and how successful this little strategy will be?

Another key to successful blogging is of course regular postage and to that end there is a fresh review up today on !-style pottery. Enjoy!

There is a fresh post up on Deep Kyoto this evening on the very lovely cafe Yamatoya. This will probably be my last posting on Deep Kyoto this year as I doubt I’ll have time for any more articles before Friday.

For it is official! This Friday I fly back to England, through the usual 24 hour time-warp, stopping first at my sister’s place in Birmingham and then on the 20th going up to sunny Middlesbrough (in time for my father’s 90th – yes he really is that old). I’ll be a week there before going back down to Birmingham, having a wee breather and then hopping on the plane back to Japan on the 29th (and of course losing a day going through the time-warp backwards). How I shall celebrate おみそか is as yet undecided. But unless any kind local readers wish to invite me out to wild and crazy New Year’s Eve parties I imagine I’ll be in S.T.T.

Now, I have just finished this year’s Best American Short Stories, and am now looking back over the list of contents collecting my thoughts. I found last year’s collection incredibly lack-lustre, but noting that this year’s guest editor was Stephen King and that he promised in the blurb that each and every story would be “kick-ass” I gave this year’s a chance. Stephen King is a man who understands what makes a story tick, I thought. He knows that the bottom line is entertainment. I can trust him when he says “kick-ass” to deliver “kick-ass”.

I was disappointed. Looking back over the contents as I am, I think over half these stories are forgettable and there are three in there that make me want to kick the writers’ asses very hard indeed. I’d say there are about seven stories in there that are worth your time and money but only two that really stand out; the hilarious “Bris” by Eileen Pollack and the wonderful “Wake” by Beverly Jensen. The latter in particular had me hooked from the get-go with this unforgettable opener:

Boston, January 1956
“Good God Almighty. We’ve lost the damned body.” Avis stood on the North Station train platform, her small leather suitcase pressed between her knees as though it too, might be whisked away. “Dalton, we’ve lost Dad. What the hell are we going to do?”

Now tell me you don’t want to know what happens next. So, what I would suggest is not buying this collection at all, but just keeping your eyes peeled for work by Pollack and Jensen and buying that instead. I believe Pollack will have a short story collection coming out soon. Sadly, however,  you may have to wait a while for more of Jensen’s work to appear. Apparently, she was working on a series of interellated stories based on her own family history for a number of years but never sought to publish them and then she passed away in 2003. “Wake” is the very first piece to be published. Well, if “Wake” is representative I do hope somebody sees fit to getting them into print because I would love to read that.

When you think about it, this book is about a dreadful piece of history, people in misery, political mistakes – and I throw in poisonous snakes. Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve been teaching this book since it came out in 1998, and I still think it’s terrific.
Bruce Schauble

Last week I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a book I enjoyed reading immensely, and over the last week I’ve been mulling over its effect upon me. So! I’m going to throw down some thoughts here now, before I forget them. If you are not familiar with the book, it’s the story of a Baptist preacher from Georgia, Nathan Price who, lit with missionary zeal, drags his reluctant wife and four daughters out to the Belgian Congo in 1959. Over the following thirty odd years (and 614 pages) his wife and daughters tell the story of their family, of the brief flowering of an independent state in the Congo and of various tragedies and joys on both a familial and greater more national and even global scale. It’s a very meaty read, with lots of nutritious politics, history, international intrigue, poetry, philosophy, romance and social awareness to get your teeth into. It’s also beautifully written and among other points Barbara Kingsolver pulled off quite a feat in giving each of the narrators such distinctive voices; Orleanna the wife and mother frozen with guilt, Rachel the materialist, Leah the social activist, Adah the analytical scientist and Ruth-May who seems ultimately to be a creature born of the spirit. Oh, there’s lots to get involved in with this book. But what gave it added weight for me was the lessons of history it taught me. Kingsolver herself has said on her website: This novel is asking, basically, “What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?”

Although I follow the news around the world, I didn’t really know much about the background to the Congo’s current deleterious situation, rife as it is these days with civil conflicts, occasional invasion from it’s neighbours (it unfortunately has a lot of neighbours) and more recently endemic rape. It always seemed like such an indecipherable mess, (especially as one of it’s neighbours also confusingly bears the name Congo). However this book has taught me a lot and well. The roots of the current “mess” are entirely (and sadly) predictable. There was a part in the book where I felt like weeping “Oh, no not America again! I’m tired of being angry with America!” as I learned of the CIA’s involvement in the murder of the Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and in the installation and continued propping up of the brutal dictator and arch-kleptocrat Joseph Mobutu. Here’s what Kingsolver says on her website:

I live in a country that has done awful things, all over the world, in my name. You can’t miss that. I didn’t make those decisions, but I have benefited from them materially. I live in a society that grew prosperous from exploiting others. England has a strong tradition of postcolonial literature but here in the U.S., we can hardly even say the word “postcolonial.” We like to think we’re the good guys. So we persist in our denial, and live with a legacy of exploitation and racial arrogance that continues to tear people apart, in a million large and small ways.

This book is also in large part about identity and how the choices we make pretty much define the people we become. A lesson for all of us there on both personal, national and yes even global levels. Anyway, I recommend this book. I was hooked from the first page by the intial description of the forest simply dripping with life in all it’s teeming forms and variations and then the author quietly telling us “I want you to be its conscience”.

If you want to learn more and do something about the rape crisis in the Congo there’s a link here: What You Can Do To Help.

Another fresh posting up on THE SISTER BLOG today of the cafe and art gallery etw.

Checking google analytics the other day, I discovered that a lot of people were coming to this blog via the obscenely popular TOEIC BLITZ BLOG written by my old friend and colleague Masaya “The Messiah” Kanzaki. Masaya was kind enough to write a post about my blog, and recommend it as “interesting” and “probably good reading practice”. Which was jolly nice of him. So I thought I’d do a bit of reading practice of my own and read his. Most of the entries (when he is not linking to English articles) are in Japanese, but they are mercifully short and not so difficult for someone of my reading ability. Anyway, in this piece 英語を楽しむ　or “Enjoy English”, Masaya advises his readers to find something they can enjoy doing in English. For a lot of people this will be reading books or magazines of personal interest, or watching movies, or listening to and learning English songs (Masaya closes his post with a nice bit of The Specials). Whatever floats your boat basically. All very good advice because you remember more when you’re having fun and are actively interested, than you do when you are thinking: “God, I hate this! How much longer will it take me to remember this stupid grammar? My brain hurts… etc”. So I was thinking, I don’t really study Japanese much any more, but what enjoyable things do I do that involve learning?

Well, I sit in my regular, sipping beer and chatting in Japanese to the other regulars and through those conversations I do learn a lot… But that could get expensive if I did it every night (まさか!)… Well, another thing I do is I read… Nothing too heavy or overwhelming, but something light and of interest. For instance, recently I’ve been working my way through the very excellent 京都:音楽空間 a guide to all the best music spots of Kyoto, whether they be bars (my regular is in there), or cafes, or live music venues, or record shops etc. It’s great, because there’s enough new vocabulary there for me to be challenged, and plenty of old vocabulary I need to review, but mostly because I want to read it so I do. Through reading this book I can find all kinds of interesting places and meet all kinds of new people that I would never encounter otherwise, which is basically the primary reason to learn a language really (though we sometimes tend to forget it). And of course, it’s proving to be invaluable source material for my Deep Kyoto project too. Life’s too short to be spending your free time suffering after all (that’s what work is for) so have a bit of fun. Enjoy yourself.

It’s getting late now, so I’ll sign off but tomorrow I’ll be doing something else I find an enjoyable method of study: translating the latest meditation at Hozouji Temple. Unless any of you want to have a crack at it first: