three cents: a good samurai will parry the blow
martinesque
by manjula martin
[three cents is about money, love, and creative work, and i send it to you about once a month]
1. a thing about money
1. a thing about money
I just finished re-reading The Last Samurai, an excellent novel by Helen DeWitt that was first published in 2000, promptly went out of print, and was recently reissued. It's a book that's hard to write about with any sort of brevity but basically it's about a genius, a grad school dropout named Sybilla, who is raising a genius, her son Ludo. Because Ludo has no father, Sybilla brings him up on repeat viewings of Akira Kurasawa's film Seven Samurai, figuring Ludo might as well be exposed to the best male influences if any at all.
In the second half of the book, Ludo, age 11, becomes driven to find a father IRL, someone who can help him "save" his mother, who has previously attempted suicide and is in general just really not very skilled at coping with the world outside her own brilliant, meta-logical brain. And so The Last Samurai is a book about love between a mother and son, about a son's self-actualization, about the despair that can still invade a person's soul despite her intelligence, and about how love can save you but love can't really save you. It's also a book about money.
Ludo and Sybilla have very little money. They often admire expensive books they can't afford, books that Sybilla believes no home should be without. These are books I've never heard of, insanely challenging works of Greek scholarship, primary scholarly sources, first editions, that sort of thing. For people without much money, such books and the pursuits they embody are usually considered a privilege; books aren't really part of the family budget, but Syb keeps breaking the rules. Ludo learns ancient Greek by the age of four, Japanese not long after, then solid-state physics—all from books that his mom, perhaps unwisely, keeps buying him. But what's wisdom, anyhow?
In the second half of the book, Ludo, age 11, becomes driven to find a father IRL, someone who can help him "save" his mother, who has previously attempted suicide and is in general just really not very skilled at coping with the world outside her own brilliant, meta-logical brain. And so The Last Samurai is a book about love between a mother and son, about a son's self-actualization, about the despair that can still invade a person's soul despite her intelligence, and about how love can save you but love can't really save you. It's also a book about money.
So much beneath the surface of this novel is driven by money, the lack of it or the want of it. Syb, an academic, must ride the London subway all day in the winter to keep her kid warm, because they can't afford to eat their house, because she works as a transcriptionist for pence on the word. She's okay, I mean, they're physically okay, although they eat a lot of PB&J, and yet ... she's not entirely okay. She wants to be doing work. Her real work. More than her financial struggles Sybilla resents the time she must spend away from her own pursuit of knowledge, and she resents the structures that make her materially responsible for another human's life.
Helen DeWitt has often spoken about her problems with money and her need for it. She's open about her financial struggles in a way few "acclaimed" authors are. And among other things, in this novel DeWitt is in effect asserting that art—literature, specifically—is a necessary component of survival. Actual, physical, literal survival. This is a sort of revolutionary statement, isn't it?
2. a thing about creative work
After I put down The Last Samurai, I promptly—and rapidly—read Chris Kraus's I Love Dick for the first time. The first half of the book was propulsive—an artist (also named Chris Kraus) who is married to an academic becomes obsessed with a colleague named Dick, and the couple write him letters as a sort of confessional art experiment, sort of stalkery attempt at wooing him. I liked a lot about it. The second half, in which Chris's letters to Dick become more like essays exploring the gender and other structural relationships in contemporary art—theory, more than lust—was difficult for me. It contains a lot of literary and art-world references, names and terms I know and have heard but also names and terms that I am acutely aware very few people have heard of outside certain circles where academia and art and New York City intersect. Chris talks about, and experiences, a particular kind of poverty in the book —a half-poverty in which she lives in financial precarity as an artist and depends on her husband's teaching income but also, you know, owns several houses.
This state of financial existence is so accurate to the particular world of creative intellectualism that Kraus is portraying. The character's poverty is gendered, yes, but also arguably myopic. It's the poverty of having your husband make the income and get all the credit, but also of having your film shown at film festivals. You don't make any money. True. But you do have access, and you have time to take advantage of that access. Time dedicated to nothing but thinking and making. There's a kind of security in that, just as there's security in having heat in the winter. Plus, all that property. Dick — the letters, the book, the guy — feels like an escape hatch of sorts, a way to match or digest the sense of lack that accompanies such risky-yet-somewhat-comfy financial situations. Is art an essential component of Chris's survival? Yeah it is. But is money?
[I also watched the pilot of the TV show, and I sort of agree with Ruth about the importance of the book being based in the 1990s in LA and New York (the TV show is set now, in Marfa)—especially with regards to the landlording potential of the intellectual class. Although, unlike Ruth, thus far I might like the TV show better than the book?]
This state of financial existence is so accurate to the particular world of creative intellectualism that Kraus is portraying. The character's poverty is gendered, yes, but also arguably myopic. It's the poverty of having your husband make the income and get all the credit, but also of having your film shown at film festivals. You don't make any money. True. But you do have access, and you have time to take advantage of that access. Time dedicated to nothing but thinking and making. There's a kind of security in that, just as there's security in having heat in the winter. Plus, all that property. Dick — the letters, the book, the guy — feels like an escape hatch of sorts, a way to match or digest the sense of lack that accompanies such risky-yet-somewhat-comfy financial situations. Is art an essential component of Chris's survival? Yeah it is. But is money?
[I also watched the pilot of the TV show, and I sort of agree with Ruth about the importance of the book being based in the 1990s in LA and New York (the TV show is set now, in Marfa)—especially with regards to the landlording potential of the intellectual class. Although, unlike Ruth, thus far I might like the TV show better than the book?]
3. a thing about love
I finished The Last Samurai late on a Monday night. I'd had a crick in my neck (sp?) since Saturday. I lay flat on my back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, reading glasses balanced on my nose, holding the book at arm's length above my head. I was feeling sorta moody and needed to listen to music without words (I can't read when there are lyrics playing) — preferably something in the "this is 100% me music" category (which is a weird category that includes Ella Fitzgerald and Jawbreaker, among others). So I chose a favorite, John Fahey's Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes. And I remembered that when I worked at a record store in Portland, Oregon, in the early aughts, John Fahey was a regular customer. I never helped him, but I saw him once across the store. He used to, according to my coworkers, come in and trade his paintings for records. For those unfamiliar, John Fahey is a fucking genius, and the thought of him holed up somewhere in Salem without enough money to buy a scratched jazz record is heartbreaking but moreso, infuriating. Yeah, he was crazy and difficult and yeah, maybe folk songs shouldn't be expected to earn one's living, but it's John Fahey, he deserves to be able to pay the rent. Fahey died soon after I saw him in the store, the proverbial genius artist who went out a pauper.
I don't know that I have much to say about this loosely tied thread of anecdotes except: love your friends and love your artists, they need you.
I also highly recommend Fahey's memoir, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. Mid-century suburban angst, child abuse, white appropriation of black music—it's got it all.
linkage:
"One person’s illogical belief is another person’s survival skill." Tressie McMillan Cottom on whether poor people deserve nice things.
"Among my sisters and brothers bussing your lunch table, you will never see an Octavio Paz ... You will see people of the lower class, running for their lives." Luis Alberto Urrea on class, work, and immigration in the land of plenty (a.k.a. the USA).
"Writers are treated like orchids: they keep us in the hothouse, they mist us and attend to our every need, but if this system is going to work, if we are going to survive, we need to come out of the hothouse and take responsibility for ourselves and for the health of the industry.” Ann Patchett, bookseller.
"Writers are treated like orchids: they keep us in the hothouse, they mist us and attend to our every need, but if this system is going to work, if we are going to survive, we need to come out of the hothouse and take responsibility for ourselves and for the health of the industry.” Ann Patchett, bookseller.
There is a lot of wisdom about book publicity in this piece, although I think it's a bit of a fallacy that only authors on indie presses need to do the things that are mentioned therein. It's 2016, all authors need to do this stuff, no matter how big their publisher.
Also in publishing-industry news, this is definitely the best book-deal announcement ever written: Hey Ladies! (Which, if you are unfamiliar, is a biting social satire about e-mail.)
A fascinating deep-dive into the epic fight over who gets credit for costume designing an independent film—a.k.a. ALWAYS READ YOUR CONTRACTS, YOU GUYS.
Do What You Love, and other lies. I think I may have linked to this before but Anna Weiner recently resurfaced this article on social media and reminded me that the relationship between love and work is ... complicated.
Speaking of broke/flush painters, I will always read Luc Sante on Jean-Michel Basquiat. Always.
And speaking of money, I suppose this article could be considered topical if it needs to fit into the rubric of this particular newsletter, but mostly I'm just fascinated with Wendi Deng, Businesswoman.
That's it for this outing. Thanks for reading. Pre-order my book. Etc.
If we were fighting with real swords I would kill you,
That's it for this outing. Thanks for reading. Pre-order my book. Etc.
If we were fighting with real swords I would kill you,
M.
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