The Beauty of the Written Word
I finished reading Louis Menand's exhausting The Free World a little while ago. I gained much insight into the connections between a variety of artists, writers, and intellectuals, even as I was forced to spend too much time dealing with the tiresome minutiae of a number of them. I admit that at least twice, I simply skipped ahead until the end of a chapter.
In some ways, I ended up admiring Menand's willingness to dive this deeply into a part of history that is now serving as the good-old days for a certain part of the population (white boomers). On the other hand, I kept asking myself whether the writer hadn't simply overdone it -- as if trying to prove that, yes, you can write a 880 page book (a considerable fraction is taken up by footnotes).
Maybe my reaction was based on entering the book after having read a relatively large number of novels written by Japanese women writers. They were detailing their struggles with exactly the kind of thinking that would result in a book that has 880 pages. I'm aware of the fact that you might see this commentary as unfair.
Regardless, I followed up with a book that ended up being too light a read to even mention it here, even as it chronicled its author's life in Tokyo.
And then I finally started reading Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory. Right now, I'm only 34% in, but I'm loving every minute of it (where is the percentage coming from? I'm using an e-reader). It's a book that I picked up after having read this profile of the writer earlier this year.
Photolandians prefer to use the same small number of books as reference points. They might as well add this one to those. Parts of the book deal with photography, whether "merely" describing photographs or, in a chapter entitled Sex and the Dead, diving into what pictures do and how they do it. The photograph, Stepanova writes,
"delivers its message quicker, without wasting words, never tiring of actively engaging with the message: to stun us, to grasp hold of us, to occupy our thoughts. The picture seduces with its illusion of economy: as text begins to unwind its first phrases, a photograph has already come, confounded, conquered -- and then it graciously condescends to allow the text to speak, to add the inessentials of what happened, and where."
What a magnificent expression: "its illusion of economy".
Don't expect a book about photography, though. At the core of In Memory of Memory lies Stepanova's biography -- a Jewish family in the Soviet Union (the mother later emigrated to Germany). That biography is explored in a variety of ways. It is the author's resistance to insert herself too much into the story that has her dive into memory and all the things that can be tied to it. Out of it come at times haunting reminders of what it meant to be Jewish in a hostile world.
One of the worst parts of learning Japanese, they say, is having to learn Kanji. Japanese is written with three different scripts: Hiragana ひらがな, Katakana カタカナ, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana look different, but they're essentially identical: each character stands for a single syllable. For example, the syllable "me" would be め and メ in Hiragana and Katakana, respectively.
Now, why it would make sense to use two scripts when you could just use one, given they're identical in what they cover... No idea. Historically, Hiragana were developed as simplified versions of the Chinese scripts that early Japan had adopted for writing. You can read more about it here, including its originally sexist roots.
Kanji are ideograms borrowed from the Chinese language. There are thousands of them, which obviously is bad news for learners (there are roughly 50 Hiragana and Katakana characters). As if that weren't bad enough, the Japanese decided that Kanji now can be used like ideograms, but they can also stand for a syllable or combination of syllables. Every Kanji ideogram can be used in a multitude of ways, with Chinese and Japanese-based readings. That's even worse news for learners.
For example, 日 is read as "hi", and it means "day" ("hi" is pronounced like the English word "he"). However, 二日 is pronounced "futsuka" (the second u is silent: "futs'ka"), so now 日 is read as "ka" (this means "2nd day of the month"). 日本 is read as "Nihon" (you can guess what that means), and we have "ni" instead of "hi" (or "ka"). 休日 is read as "kyūjitsu" ("holiday" or "day off"), and now we have "jitsu". 今日, however, is read as "kyō" ("today"). Now imagine this very game for every one of the thousands of Kanji ideograms.
How this is not the most uneconomical writing system in the world escapes me. You can literally write the complete Japanese language just with Hiragana (which is how children and foreign learners start out).
Anyway, I'm going to learn Kanji.
It will take me many, many years.
Even as I feel very conflicted about Vivianne Sassen's work -- I find her use of black bodies for essentially decorative purposes very problematic, I can only recommend this profile of the artist by Joanne Cresswell.
The other day, a (different) fellow writer asked me how I would define a critic. I responded that I don't think about what s/he is. Instead, I define her or him by what s/he does, namely to create discourse around an artist or a piece of art in question. S/he will make me consider the artist and have me discover something new around her or him. Joanne's article is a prime example of what I mean.
On top of that, the piece is also written incredibly well and elegantly. This is another reason why I like reading: it puts me in the presence of great minds, and I am able to see them at work. More often than not, it's a humbling experience.
But I've now come to embrace the humbling experiences more than the rewarding ones. Or rather, I'm creating a false dichotomy there. The fact that something is humbling ultimately is rewarding: it hints at the richness of the human condition, and it demonstrates how much can be gained from attempting to dive deeper, with words, into what art might mean.
Much like learning Kanji, attempting to do this yourself involves many small steps and innumerous daily frustrations. But it's the path taken that offers the rewards, not necessarily the outcome.
I'll leave you with that. I hope you're well and safe, wherever you are.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg