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 on Page Street from my apartment. 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.

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.

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.

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.

]]> http://octopoe.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/ccsf-donation-drive-for-fall-2010-classes/feed/ 0 octopoe ccsf http://octopoe.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/a-pleasant-surprise-in-film-adaptation/ http://octopoe.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/a-pleasant-surprise-in-film-adaptation/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:28:41 +0000 octopoe http://octopoe.wordpress.com/?p=494 ]]> As mentioned in a previous post, I often feel a slight twinge of disgust when I learn that literature I treasure is going to be morphed into a film adaptation. It’s not that I dislike the act of doing so as a concept; it’s just that the current body of film adaptations does not instill any hope that new ones will be any good. So imagine the horror and despair I felt when I learned that a former fashion designer (a field for which I do not have much respect) had adapted the most accomplished novel from my most revered writer into a new film?

To my pleasant surprise however, Tom Ford’s rendition of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man was highly enjoyable to watch. And while I reserve some criticism around his choices in bringing this devastating story to the screen, I would recommend it overall, particularly for those of you who enjoy Isherwood’s work. It was refreshing to finally see Colin Firth as George break out of those interminable tethers to his famous presentation of Mr. Darcy from Pride & Prejudice, which he seemingly represents in nearly all of his roles. Julianne Moore, as George’s boozy British best friend, is also a delight, but that is nothing new.

Ford manages to convey the power of Isherwood’s story: the ordinariness of George’s pain in losing his long time lover, suffocated underneath the cultural conservatism and fear rampant in mid-century America. In doing this, Ford seems to have done just fine with his film. What more can we ask? As originally determined from the film’s trailer, the visuals are stunning. Sometimes it almost reaches the point where I was not sure if I was watching a commercial for high end luxury products or a film. We can forgive Ford his indulgences, for he does give us imagery that is astounding overall and coaxes his actors into fine performances. I thought the New York Times review of the film did very well in comparing Ford’s work to that of Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-Wai.

This adaptation was tastefully done: any changes made to the story seemed natural in the transition from written word to moving screen image. Adding the gun and George’s desire to commit suicide gave the movie some dramatic impetus, which is needed in a film but can be left out of a piece of literature. My one main criticism has to do with the hyper-stylization of the film, even though I did find it gorgeous. Art directed to the maximum effect, Ford seems to pander to the materialistic and consumptive side of our culture in needing to make everything beautiful. The characters seem to be wealthier than represented in the novel, and everyone is so fashionable! But perhaps this is what audiences want to see, why would we want to be reminded of our drab lives? It just rings a little false in comparison to Isherwood’s original story, which was not glamorous. It seems like Ford did a great job of adapting the novel, but in bringing it to the screen put the entire thing before his personal fashion panel: anything that could be made pretty was done up, the whole tableau of visuals fit together too perfectly.

Overall though, the film was a very pleasant surprise from an untested filmmaker, who managed not to crap all over a seminal work in modern queer literature. For this alone, Ford deserves praise. It will certainly be interesting to see what he does next with his new found path. Hopefully this wonderful novel will get a bit more attention now that the publishers have slapped Colin Firth’s mug on the cover for a re-print.

When this portion of the trip wraps up, I am driven to Union Station in Los Angeles, the disembarkation point of a train (a fresh relief as mentioned before) to the similar if slightly different, same-same but different, San Diego, for more days of driving around to culinary points of interest and passive hanging out activities. Most of this time is spent in Encinitas actually with friends and not in San Diego proper. The only time I see my charming public transit again is after the return flight to San Francisco.

*I fully own my usage of the definite article along with the number of the highway in common vernacular and in writing.

Misfit friends ring in the New Year from a 1930s Berlin nightclub.

Excerpt from: Christopher ISHERWOOD, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935)*

[On New Year's Eve I had supper with my landlady and the other lodgers. I must have been already drunk when I arrived at the Troika, because I remember getting a shock when I looked into the cloakroom mirror and found that I was wearing a false nose. The place was crammed. It was difficult to say who was dancing and who was merely standing up. After hunting about for some time, I came upon Arthur in a corner. He was sitting at a table with another, rather younger gentleman who wore an eyeglass and had sleek dark hair.

"Ah, here you are, William. We were beginning to fear that you'd deserted us. May I introduce two of my most valued friends to each other? Mr. Bradshaw—Baron von Pregnitz."

The Baron, who was fishy and suave, inclined his head. Leaning towards me, like a cod swimming up through water, he asked:

"Excuse me. Do you know Naples?"

"No. I've never been there."

"Forgive me. I'm sorry. I had the feeling that we'd met each other before."

"Perhaps so," I said politely, wondering how he could smile without dropping his eyeglass. It was rimless and ribbonless and looked as though it had been screwed into his pink well-shaved face by means of some horrible surgical operation.

"Perhaps you were at Juan-les-Pins last year?"

"No, I'm afraid I wasn't."

"Yes, I see." He smiled in polite regret. "In that case I must beg your pardon."

"Don't mention it," I said. We both laughed very heartily. Arthur, evidently pleased that I was making a good impression on the Baron, laughed too. I drank a glass of champagne off at a gulp. A three-man band was playing: Gruss' mir mein Hawai, ich bleib' Dir treu, ich hab' Dich gerne. The dancers, locked frigidly together, swayed in partial-paralytic rhythms under a huge sunshade suspended from the ceiling and oscillating gently through cigarette smoke and hot rising air.

"Don't you find it a trifle stuffy in here?" Arthur asked anxiously.

In the windows were bottles filled with coloured liquids brilliantly illuminated from beneath, magenta, emerald, vermilion. They seemed to be lighting up the whole room. The cigarette smoke made my eyes smart until the tears ran down my face. The music kept dying away, then surging up fearfully loud. I passed my hand down the shiny black oil-cloth curtains in the alcove behind my chair. Oddly enough, they were quite cold. The lamps were like alpine cowbells. And there was a fluffy white monkey perched above the bar. In another moment, when I had drunk exactly the right amount of champagne, I should have a vision. I took a sip. And now, with extreme clarity, without passion or malice, I saw what Life really is. It had something, I remember, to do with the revolving sunshade. Yes, I murmured to myself, let them dance. They are dancing. I am glad.

"You know, I like this place. Extraordinarily," I told the Baron with enthusiasm. He did not seem surprised.

Arthur was solemnly stifling a belch.

"Dear Arthur, don't look so sad. Are you tired?"

"No, not tired, William. Only a little contemplative, perhaps. Such an occasion as this is not without its solemn aspect. You young people are quite right to enjoy yourselves. I don't blame you for a moment. One has one's memories."

"Memories are the most precious things we have," said the Baron with approval. As intoxication proceeded, his face seemed slowly to disintegrate. A rigid area of paralysis formed round the monocle. The monocle was holding his face together. He gripped it desperately with his facial muscles, cocking his disengaged eyebrow, his mouth sagging slightly at the corners, minute beads of perspiration appearing along the parting of his thin, satin-smooth dark hair. Catching my eye, he swam up towards me, to the surface of the element which seemed to separate us.

"Excuse me, please. May I ask you something?"

"By all means."

"Have you read Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne?"

"Yes, I have."

"And tell me, please, how did you like it?"

"Very much indeed."

"Then I am very glad. Yes, so did I. Very much."

And now we were all standing up. What had happened? It was midnight. Our glasses touched.

"Cheerio," said the Baron, with the air of one who makes a particularly felicitous quotation.

"Allow me," said Arthur, "to wish you both every success and happiness in nineteen thirty-one. Every success..." His voice trailed off uneasily into silence. Nervously he fingered his heavy fringe of hair. A tremendous crash exploded from the band. Like a car which has slowly, laboriously reached the summit of the mountain railway, we plunged headlong downwards into the New Year.]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Christopher Isherwood will not be the overbearing subject of poe continuously, but due to my mild infatuation with his writings, there is a wide range of material from which to draw. As the Gregorian New Year is upon us, this selection is rather apt. On the first reading of Mr. Norris Changes Trains, this passage stood out. For my holiday vacation reading selection**, I had chosen to indulge the above mentioned infatuation by rereading Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, and came across this familiar passage and delighted in its symmetry with the time of year and whimsical imagery.

This scene of New Year’s revelry takes place early in the novel, and we have only just met Arthur Norris, a character who develops fascinatingly throughout the narrative. This is also our first glimpse of Baron von Pregnitz, who goes by Kuno for much of the novel, and it is one of our first animal-referenced physical descriptions which Isherwood employs so well in his vivid character portraits. Kuno is fishy and suave, like a cod, often “swimming” through his surroundings. My favorite brief moment in this excerpt is,

“Catching my eye, he swam up towards me, to the surface of the element which seemed to separate us.”

The image is so simple but evocative in my mind, I can just picture the man oozing in to ask William his question. (William is in fact supposed to be Isherwood himself.) The slow degradation of their evening is also very humourous, and gives us other silly descriptions of the Baron, most amusingly in reference to that monocle! It practically holds his otherwise drooping and drunk face together. Even in a drunken stupor, Kuno can muster the strength of will to hold that glass to his eye.

As we all move into our New Year’s Eve celebrations, we can draw parallels to Isherwood’s experience described here. In a drunken moment of clarity, he realizes some sort of epiphany on the meaning of it all, only to have us realize his drunken visions are quite silly. We may have all been in a place where drink or other intoxicants deliver truth to us, no? There is the sentimentality of the New Year as well, which we sometimes feel on this auspicious time of year, just like Arthur. And we are reminded that time will keep on chugging, just like that train steaming over the hill into Isherwood’s new year. We can pause, celebrate and reflect, but that dive into the future is inevitable.

*Mr. Norris Changes Trains was published in the United States as The Last of Mr. Norris, due to a recommendation from Isherwood’s publisher, who assumed Americans would not understand the concept of changing trains, as we used the terminology to transfer trains. Isherwood tells us in one of his autobiographies that this was a grave mistake as it only led to confusion amongst his readers and a lifetime of having to clarify this point. Usually, this story is combined with Goodbye to Berlin in the collected volume commonly known as The Berlin Stories.

**In relation to my previous post, I also brought along the collected works of Paul Bowles, amongst several other items which realistically will not be read due to the rough realities of time.

I always overzealously pack more books than I seem to be able to read. But my eyes are always bigger than my stomach, as one could say. Commonly other books and magazines or newspapers are picked up along the way and supplant the originally packed materials, creating all sorts of overlapping capacities amongst the abundant resources. This holiday season, I head back into the hinterlands of suburban southern California, from where I came and will celebrate American Christmas with my family, before moving on to the greater San Diego area southwards. This will necessitate a delightful train ride with ample reading time involved, as mentioned in a post from earlier this month. The original reading intentions may be interrupted again, as it is quite something to see Los Angeles and the areas south of there from the rails than from the roaring concrete slab lined with advertisements and box stores. I think I have brought up to four or five books for a week’s vacation before, and will often read only one or two of them. It seems to be a bit of compulsion and a need for some variety when it comes down to the moment of reading. I have known friends to take many more, and burn through them in a similar vacation-relaxation-reading zone.

How many books do you take on vacation?
(polls)

This reading season, I am considering taking just two books of my own to read. It will force me to read the works of one writer in particular, something I have wanted to do but it might be intense. But it might be nice to not lug heavy paper objects up and down the state of California too, and better for my body in a wellness sense. Any of you web wanderers out there, any recommendations on readings for this holiday season? Anything we should try to pick up at our public library or nearby used-bookstore before hopping on the bus to the train to the bus to the airplane to the car to the house?