Congratulations to Spike Jonze on his Sunday win of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his latest film, Her. I just saw this movie on Saturday evening, thanks to the propensity for copious films to be available in pirated DVD forms here in China; definitely some of the best 12 kuai (the rough equivalent of $1.95) I have ever spent. This Poe does not feature an excerpt from the film since I do not dive too deeply into any sort of analysis of the film; however, my intention is to merely mention some of the elements which I enjoyed in viewing without getting overly verbose. Many of the elements of the production design (art design, costuming, cinematography…) were delightful, but I leave those to the hands of others.
First off, I truly appreciate any narrative that features non-normative love between beings which do not necessarily go together in some conservative, anachronistic notion of what that could mean. I recognize it as a whimsical example, but I have always loved Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat because the two beings getting hitched are a bird and feline, which on one hand is silly and fun, and on the other hand can be taken more seriously in showing us an example of a love in which reproduction is clearly not the end-game. I love that Jonze’s narrative normalizes the love between Joaquin Phoenix’s* Theodore and the “operating system,” aka Samantha, deliciously and huskily voiced by Scarlett Johansson**. The Economist magazine actually gave the film a rather negative review, criticizing both Jonze and the fictitious character of Theodore for immaturity in not moving beyond the inherent “master-slave” relationship between a human and the artificial intelligence program designed to cater to his every nuance; however, I find this slightly unfair since I feel that one of the major features of this love story is the ongoing development Samantha experiences in her being, eventually changing to such a degree that she in fact frees herself. (I do not want to give away too much!) Anyway, I viewed Samantha as a little more complex than merely being a love slave to this man. I do, however, fully admit I am a sucker for the adage, Robots have feelings, too! One of my most emotional cinema-viewing moments came at the end of the Steven Spielberg slash Stanley Kubrick mess A.I.—I was balling like a babe by the time little David became “real.”
There’s Oriental Pearl Tower!
The second part of Her (discussed here, at least) which caught my fancy during viewing, most likely due to my China travels of late, is the fact that the Los Angeles of the near future is in fact the Shanghai of the present. While watching, I did not quite suspect this until Theodore takes the high speed train with Samantha on their romantic getaway (I find it charmingly optimistic that Jonze’s narrative assumes California will have got a high speed line done); after Theodore disembarks, the white, streamlined front of the train registered instantly as the same type of train on which I spend an inordinate amount of time zipping around China. With the close of the film, I studiously observed the credits to see where the film had been shot, and sure enough, it was my beloved Shanghai. (Moreover, if you did not know that I love a good train, there is ample evidence here, here and here.) Throughout the moments in which Theodore is wandering thoughtfully around his cityscape, I had kept thinking, I like how they’re doing future-L.A. I dig that Jonze turned to China, often the cliché place of the next step in development and on the cusp of its own future, as the vision of the eventual Los Angeles. As China rapidly urbanizes on a scale unseen in human history, it may be apt that Jonze shows his future metropolis through the lens of this current one, potentially displaying things to come for cities everywhere.
Lastly, on a note relating to the shooting locations and how these have endeared the film to me, I feel that Theodore and Samantha’s trip to an unidentified snowy mountain locale was perhaps filmed at Donner Lake in Truckee, California. This place maintains a special place in my heart because my gentleman friend’s employer rents a cabin on Donner Lake every winter for him and his colleagues (plus their friends) to appreciate, in rotation. I have spent many a late autumn and winter weekend hiking and cavorting around this lake, and the view Theodore gets from the pass looks just like Donner Lake to me. Maybe falsely, I also recognized the type of trees (which, of course, could be anywhere, yet the way in which the bright green moss grows looks familiar) and the cut of the railway cutting across the mountain that I glimpsed briefly in one scene. I think that visiting three (two perhaps in reality) places which mean so much to me, past and present—Los Angeles (around which I grew up and write about here), Shanghai (a metropolis stoking my big-city passions, having popped in and out during the past years of China travel) , and Donner Lake—further affords Her the means to nestle into my affections.
*I have had a little man crush on Joaquin Phoenix ever since his turn as the sinister Commodus in Gladiator. (Additionally, he was super hot as the sexually suppressed clergyman of Quills.)
**I also nurture a little lady crush on Scarlett Johansson, whom I loved in Ghost World and Lost in Translation and find to be one of my favorite mainstream actresses.
On a relatively modest list of my favorite things in life, seeing fireworks in the sky is nearly at the top. I think of the Fourth of July in my hometown, on a hill by my parents’ house. Sometimes New Year’s Eve, depending on where I am or what I am doing. Exploding lights and colors in the sky awakens a very sentimental and romantic part of my being deep down inside, and, spending this year in the People’s Republic of China, I have had many opportunities to feel this love stir. During the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year (celebrating the lunar new year in January of February—depending on the movements of, well, la lune—instead of the new year of the Gregorian calendar celebrated in the West), which I came back for the tail-end of after having been in California, Chinese folks certainly like setting off fireworks. And none of that namby-pamby nonsense of concentrated locales and designations for how these bursting sirens are given to the night sky; everywhere I turned, there were fireworks. Anyone in those moments could have been the Gandalf of Chinese New Year, raining down fiery goodness around us. In Beijing, for my return at the end of the holiday, each night up through February 14 featured a demonstration of evening pyrotechnics, with the most bang coming on this final night. (The previous evenings to the final night sounded like some sort of aerial bombardment—I am glad that I am privileged enough to not actually know what this sounds like.)
From the rooftop of my apartment building in Beijing, each direction in which I could turn contained a show. Electric color shimmering through the milky night—while noxious to breath, the infamous Beijing air pollution rendered this night beautiful. Running down from the roof and out to the surrounding plazas, the roar of the fireworks was absolutely deafening; eventually I retreated back inside due to a soreness in my sweet ear-holes. Some sounds were simply loud explosions, felt in the ear and in my chest. Some fireworks shimmered like thousands of tiny comets pinpricking the night, creating the sound of heavy rain hitting a window. Families were in the streets, setting off smaller fireworks to the jubilation of small kids. Slightly older kids were making little bonfires from the cardboard refuse of these wonders. Having retreated to my apartment, drinking tea in my veranda-kitchen, I attained a moment of pure fixation when a series of fireworks were set off in the street directly below me so that the radiance of light thundered directly at the level of my eleventh floor windows. I was blessed for a moment in what seemed like my very own fireworks show, enjoyed from the comfort of my kitchen table.
While this episode is recent and fresh in my mind, it did not mark the beginning of fireworks magic time in my Chinese sojourn. When I first arrived here, six months ago at this point, I needed to stay in a southern city called Ningbo for a time in order to help out by teaching in one of my company’s English programs. Ningbo is a lovely city, south and around the corner from Shanghai. The high school in which I was teaching is located in a suburban district, slightly off the beaten path. One evening after classes wrapped up, I was told that it was too late to catch the bus back to my apartment, and I would need to take a taxi. I walked out of the school to a forlorn-looking intersection of this suburban night, and not a soul was stirring. In that moment, melancholy set about me; I missed my gentleman-friend and my loved ones at home, and I felt alone with no way to get home. Standing there, waiting for a taxi that did not seem to be coming, I was bummed. Another moment passed, and I had given into the eventuality of starting the somewhat long walk to the apartment, when *WOOSH* *BANG*!!! Above the intersection, from behind a building, a series of fireworks rocketed into the night sky and cast their light upon the whole street like the flares of a shipwrecked soul in the endless sea. The red, green and yellow florescence of light burned away my despair. Moments passed, and fireworks continued shooting into the sky. I stood transfixed, enjoying the surprise and delight of the moment. However, the fireworks ceased after awhile. As the cacophony faded from the night almost as instantly as it had arrived, a taxi drove up. I flagged it down, entered, and got home.
Fun juxtaposition of wild graffiti art and monotone urban cityscape.
Picking up where I left off in gushing over Hong Kong, it is about time that I turned my attention to Shanghai, a place that has come in two visits to be one of my favorite collections of urban nuttiness on this planet. It has turned into my traditional destination when I finish teaching at Wuhan University in July; the perfect place to wind down from the mainland China experience, as it feels more cosmopolitan, globalized and international than other Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Wuhan. This year I stayed right off People’s Square in the heart of the city, and everything was a stone’s throw via the lovely Metro system. In returning with fellow teachers in the Wuhan University teaching program, I certainly enjoyed a fair amount of leadership roles, including as an informal adviser to the general China experience; while this is always the most dramatic when I use my select but effective repertoire of Mandarin language skills, it was often the most enjoyable when navigating groups of friends through the Beijing and Shanghai metro stations labyrinths, changing trains and seeing the sights.
What is is that I enjoy about Shanghai? Despite having had a relatively short existence so far (especially by Chinese standards of the conceptualization of the history of time and civilization in the Middle Kingdom), Shanghai has an intense history to it: Communists vs. Nationalists; imperialism & the fruits of globalization. I attempt to remain critical of the sense that I love Shanghai the most of the cities in China precisely because it is the most familiar, a true world-city. What does that mean for me? More ‘European’ or more ‘like New York’? Folks are actually pretty chill on the subway, not necessarily bum-rushing the doors, yet the raw numbers of the crowds gives it a certain level of intensity. While I get this feeling, I still rub against the pure Chinese ambiance of the city that remains through the haze of chicness. There are certainly still fruit-marts, and steamed buns and dumplings on the street. One can bounce between a host of cold beverage joints that serve highly sweetened kumquat/lime juicy-drinks, such as Happy Lemon and Coco.
It’s funny how hanging out with friends who are writers (Lania Knight and Matt McBride linked, but come right back here folks) when traveling makes one want to write more; I turn to an old post about my joys, experiences, and personal literary connections around taking trains from days of yore (in relation to this record, at least) to re-ignite my own writing through this web journal. On my recent third trip to the People’s Republic of China, a fair number of trains were taken in various contexts. I have been going to Wuhan regularly now during the summer, and there will be a return in a short few weeks, so I am only going to get more of train travel in China. This represents an easy means of initiating some reflection around my recent return from Round 2 of the teaching at Wuhan University, and my upcoming and (temporary) relocation to Beijing.
Looking down the cars on the Shanghai Metro.
One of the most enjoyable things for me in China is being able to ride the subway in the major cities; Beijing and Shanghai are rendered manageable because their metros are quick, relatively clean, and affordable. 2 kuai, anywhere in the vast metropolis which is Beijing! The carriage can be absolutely sardine-like at many hours, including rush, but overall I find it very exiting and enjoyable. To tread into the cliche, China seems to be a country on the move, and this is so well-exemplified by an afternoon on one of the subways. Jam-packed at all sorts of hours, riders whisk back and forth between exits and transfers. The carriage doors separate, initiating the dash on and off, simultaneously in and out all in that moment. Yesterday evening, having returned to my beloved San Francisco, I found the rather proper, lining up of the BART commuters so quaint in comparison. While exhausting, I love the no-nonsense feeling I get from the metro riders in China—I find it reminiscent of the vibe I get in New York. One of my regrets on this latest trip to Wuhan is not having had the opportunity to ride the relatively new Wuhan Metro, despite a somewhat determined effort to do so. With some intention there, group trips to Hankou from Wuchang ended up being cab-based; the one time I made it to Hankou by myself, the metro closed for the night as I arrived to the platform, and I was instructed by the eerily-accurate English language voice to leave the station immediately. While I managed to get to Hankou more than once this year (a goal from last year), I feel satisfied with knowing that eventually taking the Wuhan Metro can come with a future trip to Wuhan.
Here’s the train we took coming over the Yangtze River bridge, eventually passing Wuhan’s famous Yellow Crane Tower.
Taking the overnight train from Beijing to Wuhan is a repeat experience which goes far in making the overall Wuhan experience so much fun, and I believe I am starting to appreciate it in the way that ritualistic train rides have grown on me in other travel experiences. This ride again afforded me the chance to hang out with my fellow teachers and build our eventual friendships—with 8-10 folks jammed into a four-person sleeper card to play Apples to Apples, this year’s overnight ride was so enjoyable, as we drank warm beers and bulshitted about 90’s music, tellingly revealing our generational place. The night passes quickly out the window, and eventually one wakes up to Hubei Province spinning past—some pastoral-light, leading into a tell-take sign of the suburban Chinese experience: rows and rows of anonymous, identical apartment towers.
High-speed train, Shanghai to Suzhou!
The last time I took a high-speed train, I was a green traveler going from Paris to Nîmes, so I was excited to continue my rail journey and experience in China by taking the quick train from Shanghai to Suzhou for a day trip. Despite a little confusion in actually finding the place at the station in which a foreigner can buy a ticket, involving a nice, hot long walk around the entire station, the whole high-speed rail experience was so easy; additionally, it was a quick 25-minute dart to Suzhou and back. The whole thing really put our train experience here in the States to shame! It makes me a little frustrated and sad that we are having such a hard time getting something similar up and running here in California.
Seven years ago today I left Santa Cruz and finally moved up to my desired target of city-living, San Francisco. The city… as Eddie Izzard so aptly poked fun. It’s definitely my city at this point, the home to which a return is always filled with warmth; not to mention awe as I come over the bridge and see the city laid out along the waterfront before me. I feel the energetic draw of San Francisco, a major component of which is the sheer physical beauty of this particular urban landscape. It’s no joke (!); the general love so many people have for this space is understandable and right as I take it all in. I feel so fortunate to be here; here’s to seven more years!
In winning the election on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama uttered the words gay and lesbian during his victory speech, and I must admit I was pretty juiced that such a figure on such a stage had finally recognized us queers as addressable. Since that lovely evening, I have grown less excited for the man’s work, yet I do recognize that it is most likely a tough job and there has been progress. (Yay healthcare!) [While not being thrilled for the repeal of DADT on pacifist grounds, I do appreciate Obama’s work on this issue, as it is so important to the wider community.] However, the man has caught my fancy again by making this announcement, taking the definitive stance and positioning himself in contrast to Mr. Mitt Romney. While cynical notes of the potentiality of this stance being aimed at electioneering the queers onto his side (had we gone anywhere else though?), I still get the warm fuzzies around thinking, “wow, he said it, he said the word gay, he really likes us!” Even if it’s a pragmatic feature of our political theater, I am happy that Obama’s staked this place in our public discourse. How will this impact this upcoming November’s election? What does it mean for the States? The Defense of Marriage Act? Stay tuned and we will all find out: should be exciting.
It would seem that I have a certain proclivity for other writers with a last name starting Ish—. Thinking that Christopher Isherwood as the ubiquitous subject of poe had finally been exhausted, I came back to the beginning and stumbled upon another writer with the same first three letters in his surname, begging comparison to Isherwood and swirling about in my mind recently. This literary mind-quest starts with an account mentioned previously, a few years ago when I was sitting in the Muddy Waters and picked up a tattered copy of Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. I acquired the book that started my passion for Isherwood’s writing, and ultimately the life he lived which informed so much of his work. Somewhere in this initial reading of Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin the old, down and out copy I had found got misplaced, prompting a trip to the library so I could finish these stories. In finding the appropriate area of the fiction section, I found a replacement copy for The Berlin Stories and learned the titles of Isherwood’s other works, yet also noticed his neighbor on the alphabetically aligned shelves: Kazuo Ishiguro.
It turns out that most libraries and bookstores conveniently arrange their books alphabetically, and with my habit of always checking out the Isherwood scene in any library or bookstore in which I find myself (having long since become a devotee of his writings), I find myself saying hello to Ishiguro as well, who is usually sitting just on Isherwood’s left (our right.)
Never having read a hint of his prose, nor having much of an impression beyond having absorbed at some point that The Remains of the Day, a common presence in the otherwise Isherwood-inspired interlude at the shelves, had been morphed into a cinematic adaptation (a process that has sparked my incredulity), I did not keep Ishiguro in mind as a writer to invest reading time in. In no way was this a negative judgment; seeing him regularly next to Isherwood took whatever place Ishiguro might otherwise have occupied on my nebulous, internal list of writings to be read.
With the affordances of a friend’s commode library of leftish magazines, I stumbled upon a review of a similar Ishiguro-to-film transference in Never Let Me Go; and I learned for the first time of the story’s nuanced sinisterness amongst the banality of English schooling. What I now see as Ishiguro’s talent for mixing tropes from across prose forms, which I have come to enjoy as I read more of his work, initially caught my attention for the mixture of science-fiction themes with the realistic and mundane setting. Often feeling satisfied with reading a review of a film over actually viewing it, I did find a place for Never Let Me Go on the grand, above-mentioned list.
Before getting to that reading, a Master’s program exploded all over my life and fully consumed my temporal assets, which allowed little if no personal reading space. However, a literature course on short stories as a global form, taken this past semester, did give me the chance to read my first Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (simply Nocturnes from here on out.) While not loving all of the stories in that collection, I did enjoy two in particular which shared a certain haunting weirdness I have found to be sticking with me in my thoughts, Nocturne (the singular title refers to the collection’s fourth story) and Come Rain or Come Shine. In finally getting to the public library’s copy of Never Let Me Go, I have uncovered for myself more of Ishiguro’s affinity for musical references and styling in his prose, and I feel as though I am gaining a stronger sense of him as a writer and artist. The centrality of music to his work is all the more evident in reading Never Let Me Go after Nocturnes, as they have many striking similarities. There’s a simpler level where names such as Come Rain or Come Shine and Never Let Me Go are the titles of songs which play prominently in their respective narratives. Yet a more nuanced scene is framed with Ishiguro’s twin images of ladies losing themselves in the musical moment. First, Kathy is the subject of the following from Never Let Me Go,
“Maybe the volume had been turned right up by whoever had been using it last, I don’t know. But it was much louder than I usually had it and that was probably why I didn’t hear her before I did. Or maybe I’d just got complacent by then. Anyway, what I was doing was swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast. In fact, to make it all the more embarrassing, it was one of those times I’d grabbed a pillow to stand in for the baby, and I was doing this slow dance, my eyes closed, singing along softly each time those lines came around again: / ‘Oh baby, baby, never let me go…’” (Ishiguro, “Never Let Me Go” 71)
This scene is mirrored in the story Nocturne by Lindy Gardner’s moment of nonlucidness, as she processes her separation from her now ex-husband Tony and goes into a different space with the narrating protagonist actually watching, “After a while, though, I’d stopped paying much attention to the music because there was Lindy in front of me, gone into a kind of dream, dancing slowly to the [Tony’s] song” (Ishiguro, “Nocturnes” 142). Each lady is dancing slowly by herself with different levels of voyeurism going on by another presence, unknown in the first and seemingly known in the second. Both are expressing some sort of disregard for their surroundings in their absorption with their respective music, the first with the inattention to volume and the second with the blatant check out. By reading more of Ishiguro’s work I hope to encounter more of his women characters and their music, in an effort to shed more light on what he is up to with these tropes.
Whereas Ishiguro often invokes music in his writing, Isherwood takes the role of the indifferent camera, having written in his highly autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” (Isherwood 1). In this mode, we get the vivid prose portraits which Isherwood made a hallmark of his work, and about which I have written about extensively on Octopoe so will not gush over now.
While these two men diverge in their writing around whether music or photography influences their prose style, there is a strange connection to be made between Kathy in Never Let Me Go and the later events of Goodbye to Berlin when a post-abortion Sally Bowles says:
“You know, Chris, in some ways I wish I’d had that kid… It would have been rather marvellous to have had it. The last day or two, I’ve been sort of feeling what it would be like to be a mother. Do you know, last night, I sat here for a long time by myself and held this cushion in my arms and imagined it was my baby? And I felt a most marvellous sort of shut-off feeling from all the rest of the world. I imagined how it’d grow up and how I’d work for it, and how, after I’d put it to bed at nights, I’d go out and make love to filthy old men to get money to pay for its food and clothes… It’s all very well for you to grin like that, Chris… I did really!” (Isherwood 55)
Isherwood and Ishiguro provide us with two young ladies, each lost in a moment of cradling a cushion to her breast as an imaginary baby, neither of them able to have children themselves, Kathy due to her biological preconditions (no spoilers this time around) and Sally because of a metaphorical immaturity and unpreparedness to cope with the actual reality of rearing progeny. Still recovering from the operation which satisfied her desire not to have the child, Sally fickly daydreams about motherhood. She loses herself in the moment, shutting everything out as Kathy did in her own pseudo-maternal slow dance, yet follows up with a quick distancing from this personal tone by impersonalizing her own imagined offspring with the genderless pronoun it. Sally’s description of motherly life does not convey confidence that she actually knows what being a mother would be like.
These young women from the worlds of Ishiguro and Isherwood are losing themselves in the fleeting moments of music, or solitude, which might make one slow down and dance, or mutter the most delicate fantasies. Or sing out the wildest dream. I love the humanity these two writers bring to their prose, and having fallen for Isherwood hope to continue exploring Ishiguro’s works for more of the same. Distractingly, however, I feel my appreciation for Isherwood extends into a complex realm where I have found odd little commonalities between us and have read extensively of his works, crowding out other writers. I now increasingly read the work of his peers as well, namely W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles and Gore Vidal. Upon the release of Tom Ford’s adaptation of Isherwood’s seminal A Single Man, I braced myself emotionally for the worst. However, I absolved Mr. Ford upon seeing the film. Further processing had to occur when I was hanging out in the Park Branch public library down from my apartment on Page Street. I read an interview by The Advocate magazine of Ford, who spoke of his affinity for Isherwood and – the catalyst for crazy – spoke to an experience of having met Isherwood in southern California in his youth. Knowing that Isherwood died in 1986, I will never meet my most revered artistic predecessor. Simply, I was jealous of Ford, yet feeling this allowed for his adoption of Isherwood’s text to spark my own mental disengagement from Isherwood’s literary world, in which I had become enmeshed.
Slowly I am moving away from exclusively reading Isherwood & Friends, even if it is only down the library shelf at Ishiguro. Yet what I have read up to this point is promising, and hope that the recently checked out An Artist of the Floating World, and When We Were Orphans contribute to a new pocket of knowledge in the literary solar system in my head.
Works Cited
Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories. New York: New Directions, 1935. Print
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print.
Quickly, Octopoe returns to this concept that we (Americans as generally manifested on the global geopolitical stage) often miss those vicissitudes of history which could otherwise inform our current set of predicaments. It is my sense that our public discourse has increasingly sensationalized an adversarial duality between China and the West, some of which twinges on talk of a seemingly impending military clash. In drawing some connections between this contemporary dilemma and a time from the past, we do not have to jump back to antiquity as before to dig up a historical precedent long since missed about our devastating involvement in Afghanistan. We need only skip back about a century or so to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cheery years filled with fierce nationalistic rivalry for political and economic domination of the globe, intensified by the imperialistic expansion of the industrialized powers – the United States, Europe in many of its national manifestations, the Empire of Japan. Images of industrial war modeled on this period have been featured on Octopoe in the past. In the one hundred years leading up to the end of the Second World War, nearly every corner of the world had been touched by the global economic order (via imperialism or imbalanced foreign relations) and affected by the industrial-scale wars which left swathes of Europe and Asia destroyed. While the history is admittedly complex and nuanced, one can draw simple tropes from the record, such as the reluctance of those powers in relative control of the global geo-political scene to make room for the rising players while nationalistic rhetoric fuels competition and ultimately conflict. Some writers whom I have read on the subject speak to a relative unlikelihood of conflict with the trade connections between the two and the general troublesomeness it would create for a region which will only thrive with continued stability. A country which can barely keep the top on its on kettle at times, and flinches at the mere hint of a whistle (thinking about the Western media’s recent reporting of increased crackdowns within China against artists and dissidents, such as Ai Weiwei) may desperately avoid a destabilizing war. Being an internationalist pacifist and a language educator who has nothing to gain from conflict between my people and my number one client, I hope this recent bout of nationalistic propaganda does not drum us into the horror of the trenches and camps, the aerial bombardment and atom bombs.
[I have been meaning to get to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for some time now, yet have not managed to get a copy in front of my eyes. However, I recently did have to read his collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Not loving all of the stories, I found most of the composition brilliant for its strange amalgamation of musical reference, tender relationship shift, somber invocation of dusk, and harkening to past readings. Having read and considered Nocturnes, I hope to pick up Never Let Me Go very soon.
In considering Ishiguro’s collection, I decided to dust off the web journal and tweaked the poe format slightly. Please read no further if you have not read Nocturnes, as this posting will do nothing but serve as a spoiler. If you have read the collection and have something to comment on, please do so.]
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (from here I will simply refer to the collection as Nocturnes for brevity, omitting the byline – the singular form references only the fourth story, Nocturne), we are afforded a collection of short stories to which music, and those who create and love music, are integral in creating a post-modern effect in which we are lost somewhere between music and prose. In this joining of forms, Ishiguro plays with invoking music and past traditions to give us a collection which is somber and reflective. We come to see that all of the stories are tied to the ideas of music and nightfall, which Ishiguro invokes in both a narrative style modeled on a musical composition and his characters and their circumstances. Interestingly, we also see Ishiguro reference past forms of short fiction, developing a composition which fuses prose and music in a uniquely post-modern fashion.
The overarching structure of Ishiguro’s collection is the initial reference to a musical composition, in that Ishiguro intentioned the five stories to be read as a single unit. This mimics the vinyl LP, from which the audience is intended to experience the entire album as a single auditory experience. Any individual song, and in the case of Nocturnes, any individual story, is not meant to be enjoyed singularly. As a collection, the five stories each bring a sense of musicality to the overall experience, with the stories themselves shifting in tone to create a different feeling in that musical reference. For example, a musical composition might have peaks and troughs of excitement, action, and sound, which the stories of Nocturnes mimic. Crooner starts us off slowly on an emotional note. Come Rain or Come Shine, the title itself taken from another musical composition, increases the intensity and gives us a zanier feel to match the content of the story, which we return to momentarily. Malvern Hills brings us back down to a more relaxing pace before we get the brassy, eerie feeling of the fourth story, Nocturne. Finally, we are again released from the intensity of this flow in the final story, Cellists, which takes a more closing and somber tone.
Another element which signifies the centrality of music to Ishiguro’s work is his cast of characters and the circumstances in which we find them. In considering the title of the collection, a nocturne itself is a musical piece appropriate for the night or evening, often with a dreamy or pensive character. In considering its definition, ‘nocturne’ is a highly apt title for the collection, as nightfall, or dusk, is the moment of universal transition in our day, a moment built into our consciousness. Simply, many of the stories take place during dusk or during the night, yet we catch the characters in Nocturnes in a series of awkward moments in terms of their personal relationships, with notes of transition and thoughtfulness that mirror the end of day. Tony and Lindy Gardner of Crooner are in the process of transition, each perceiving a need to move on from their seeming marriage of convenience. Janeck’s accompanying of Tony on the gondola-bound circling and then serenading of Lindy takes place at the end of day, mirroring the ultimate closing of Tony and Lindy’s marriage.
Later in the collection, Lindy still seems to be in transition, as we hear Tony’s records eerily coming through the hotel wall in Nocturne. She even loses herself for a moment with Steve in the room, “After a while, though, I’d stopped paying much attention to the music because there was Lindy in front of me, gone into a kind of dream, dancing slowly to the [Tony’s] song” (Ishiguro 142). Clearly, we could doubt that Lindy has entirely moved on, yet we might take her dreaminess to originate in the cocktail of medications she is presumably on after her plastic surgery. This note of possible drugged-dreaminess chimes throughout Nocturne. Especially in the more absurdist moments of Steve and Lindy’s nighttime adventure and conversations, “I tried again to pull the statuette out of the turkey” (Ishiguro 178), one might wonder if the pair are inebriated, sniping in the kitchen and being caught out, on stage, turkey on hand by a cell-phoned Hollywood type. This is one element of Nocturne which demonstrates Ishiguro’s mixture of story-telling traditions to create his composition. We get an image that is truly Kafkaesque, with mundane details like heightened air-conditioning because a head swathed in bandages gets warm juxtaposed with the image of Lindy and Steve playing chess and chatting with ghost-like masks on their faces. The masks turn increasingly creepy as the two run through the vast maze of the hotel in the night, as Ishiguro invokes the Gothic tradition and the idea of the monument to create general eeriness. The large hotel, segmented into many rooms with people presumably all around, is only inhabited in our view by our ghost-faced protagonists, “She led the way down hidden stairways, along back corridors, past sauna rooms and vending machines. We didn’t see or hear a soul” (Ishiguro 162). These moments in the story resonate with Truman Capote’s Miriam, which also featured a large monument which invoked spookiness. In that story, Capote isolated the elder Miriam within her large New York apartment building, creating the sense that she was powerless and helpless against the phantasmal younger Miriam despite being surrounded by neighbors. This blend of absurdist and Gothic tropes create a truly post-modern feeling in this particular story in Ishiguro’s composition.
This blending of traditions and the invocations of music and nightfall also shape Come Rain or Come Shine. In this story, we get a much more complex relationship in flux. Ray, Charlie and Emily are bound in a triangular relationship built on: past college friendship, Charlie and Emily’s marriage, and Ray and Emily’s college friendship based on a mutual love of music. Many years later they have reached new stages of their lives, and the old bonds that held them together have broken. Again, we have a completely Kafkaesque whirlwind of moments between these three characters. Charlie’s plot to reignite his marriage with Emily is absurd, being built on manipulation and lies. Ray is so passive in the face of Emily and Charlie’s constantly putting him down, we have to wonder why he remains connected to them. The events only unfold to become more absurd, with Ray’s odorous concoction brewing away on the stove as Ishiguro invokes Franz Kafka’s Samsa Gregor becoming the insect in The Metamorphosis:
“Encouraged, I knelt down, opened one of the magazines and scrunched up a page in a manner, I hoped, would find an echo when eventually Emily came across the diary. But this time the result was disappointing: too obviously the work of a human hand rather than canine teeth. I’d fallen into my earlier error again: I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix. / So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant” (Ishiguro 76).
Ray has become the neighbor’s dog (whose name, most likely a reference to Jimi Hendrix, adding to the musical nature of the collection) in his ridiculous effort to cover up is earlier perceived transgression against Emily’s diary. Ray goes about his task in a practical way, adding to the silliness of the scene. Using his reasoning, he knows he must “merge” with Hendrix, and ultimately makes the move onto all fours (versus the two feet of the acceptable human mode) and bites the magazine as a dog. This exact moment of absurdity is then immediately followed by a banal observation as to the taste of the magazine, a comment which could easily have followed Ray sipping a glass of red wine with Emily. We melt back to reality when Emily eventually discovers Ray in this position, and Ishiguro switches traditions again into a more realist mode, as the pair spends the next part of their evening listening to music and negotiating their relationship through that music. Their mutual love of a particular genre of music acts to both bring them together and separate them. Emily’s incredulity at Ray’s comment that he does not listen to their music anymore shows the historical meaning it has for Emily. Charlie’s willingness to use it as a wedge between the two marks his willingness to let Ray go in order to ultimately have Emily to himself. We are left with the three in flux, the music playing, and the evening progressing. As will mark the collection, we are again left with a sense of impermanence, as though we are only catching this glimpse of this story, one bit of the song.
The other two stories in this collection, Malvern Hills and Cellists, similarly invoke the themes of transition and music. Our protagonist of Malvern Hills is himself continuously working on the bridge of a song, echoing his listless state as the bridge of a song represents a transition from one part to the next. Working on this bridge, he himself is stuck in this transitional space, somewhere between academics and adult life. This stagnancy is balanced against the transition that is going on for Tilo and Sonja, two fellow musicians whose marriage is unraveling in the company of our protagonist. Cellists also conjures references to music and change. Our two characters, the musician Tibor and the pseudo-virtuoso Eloise, are joined together for a moment in a teacher-student bond before the realities of their separate lives bring about change, with Tibor taking a job and Eloise returning from Venice to the United States.
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Throughout Nocturnes, Ishiguro manages to weave invocations of music into his stories. He does this with characters who are themselves music practitioners or lovers – music always plays a central role to their relationships in flux while their stories are littered with references to music. In keeping with the definition of a nocturne itself, Ishiguro keeps our stories in the somber mood of dusk, conjuring change and movement in each of the stories. Each is set in a transitional space as well, featuring tourists and people traveling, moving through and inhabiting spaces that evoke change. Ishiguro in effect affords us a truly post-modern fusion of sound and prose, rendering this ecphrasis while hitting the notes of realism and absurdity which add depth to his composition.
Works Cited
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print.
I do love a thick, teeming city, and Hong Kong is certainly no slouch. Those attributes which make me absolutely swoon over New York — the stark vertical landscape bristling with sky-scraping buildings, trains and buses and non-automotive methods of transit, and a hustling populace who had managed to find a foothold within — are present in Hong Kong. Only the systems of Hong Kong are seemingly much cleaner and more efficient. As discussed in a previous post, I love when the tension of our habitats causes a feeling of insignificance, the sense of being a small part in an otherwise moving, thoughtless machine in which we participate, but over which we have only a fraction of agency.
Before I ever set foot in the city of Hong Kong, I had clocked a good amount of time in the Hong Kong airport en route to other destinations in the region. Getting out of the airport and finally seeing the city was the culmination of a fair amount of anticipation. Hong Kong has been amongst those fantasy destinations to which I have been plotting an escape. While an expatriated existence has been in mind for years, becoming an English teacher (a teacher of English to speakers of other languages) has provided some considerable impetus and instrumentality to the aim. As the final stage in an overall trip to China, I was in Hong Kong not only to finally check out this vibrant city, but also to evaluate it as a potential future locale in which to live and work.
Sitting on the Airport Express making its way to Central, I was glued to the window, absorbing what visuals I could. Getting off this train and stepping out into the MTR, Hong Kong’s subway system, delivers you right into the complex which is the north side of Hong Kong island: cold steel buildings and scampering buses, cars, and people at street level, connected by subway and high-end shopping malls beneath the surface. This underground entanglement of trains and retail spaces always seemed to be inhabited by a sea of people, crowded and bustling no matter the time of day. After San Francisco and riding the subway in New York, it is rather discombobulating to find a Gucci or Coach outlet waiting for you on the other side of the turnstile. At every turn there actually seems to be a shopping mall for your convenience, below or above ground.
The cityscape is so immense, from within while at street-level, or when you manage to reach an elevated point such as Victoria Peak. What little space is available is certainly not wasted, and the scale matches the space. I was amazed by pencil thin buildings, maybe only three or four rooms to a floor, but reaching far into the sky like a reed of grass. Delightfully these stick apartment buildings would have charming names such as “Chungking Mansion”, or “Pacific Manor”. This monolithic cityscape is traversed by an ecstatic amount of public transit, which positively excites me as mentioned. Not only is there the MTR, but also various levels of bus service, double-decked or otherwise.
After having traveled on the mainland, my first meal in Hong Kong was at Life, the perfect throwback to my life in San Francisco as it focuses on raw, organic, and vegan delights. While the food on the mainland was incredible in its own right, having posh mini pizzas and a glass of wine was totally refreshing. Life is right off the escalator in SoHo, so named for its resemblance to the eponymous neighborhood in New York. Only if we had some of those escalators in San Francisco.
While I find the city exciting and thrive off the density and the glow of neon lights, the one element which I did find troublesome is the rampant commercialism. The city seems steeped in a money intensive culture which clashes with my non-materialistic California laxness. As mentioned, you cannot throw a stone in Hong Kong without hitting a luxury shopping mall. While there are endless options for getting around on public transit, there is also a fair share of sleek luxury cars floating around the streets. I was reminded of driving along the 101 south of San Francisco, where office buildings dot the landscape with their requisite software company name emblazoned across their tops, for Hong Kong harbor is littered with giant buildings, obelisks to corporate gods with titles scrolling across their peaks. It also seemed that Hong Kong’s art scene is not as vibrant as I would like, yet I would love to hear from any webfarers out there who know otherwise and can share their experiences.
Even with those faults, I am considering Hong Kong as a place to teach. However I have a few years until I reach my MATESOL, and I may find some other metropolis for which to fall in the intervening years.
Congratulations to Spike Jonze on his Sunday win of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his latest film, Her. I just saw this movie on Saturday evening, thanks to the propensity for copious films to be available in pirated DVD forms here in China; definitely some of the best 12 kuai (the rough equivalent of $1.95) I have ever spent. This Poe does not feature an excerpt from the film since I do not dive too deeply into any sort of analysis of the film; however, my intention is to merely mention some of the elements which I enjoyed in viewing without getting overly verbose. Many of the elements of the production design (art design, costuming, cinematography…) were delightful, but I leave those to the hands of others.
Octopoe 