kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips + kazuo ishiguro!

YEY!  ISHIGURO!!!  ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and never let me go is my favorite book -- i read it at least twice a year -- so i was super, super excited for this week.

first event!  on march 18, 2015.  kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y!  they both read for roughly 20 minutes each, and the moderator took questions from the audience (submitted on index cards) and selected questions to ask.

things to note:  ishiguro's newest book is the buried giant (knopf, 2015), and phillips' newest book is the lost child (FSG, 2015).  ishiguro's ambition when he was younger (before he was a writer) was to become a singer/songwriter.  phillips and ishiguro have been friends for decades, since the time they were both starting out as writers.  phillips calls ishiguro "ish," and ishiguro calls phillips "caz."

• ishiguro (before he read):  "i felt like i should be proud of my pixies and ogres [...] and not apologize for them."
• his little rule of thumb while writing the buried giant:  if the people of that time could reasonably hold a belief, then i would allow that to literally exist in my fictional world.
  • decided to respect what we might today call superstition.
• ishiguro read chapter 11 of the buried giant.  phillips read different sections from the lost child.
• Q:  do you usually utilize rules of thumb?
  • ishiguro:  no, not usually.  if i'm creating a world that's slightly tilted away from reality, then i like to have one.
  • like many of his generation, he often quotes bob dylan.
  • likes to control the element of surprise.
  • "guidelines to keep my world coherent."
• Q to phillips about taking inspiration from the brontës.
  • didn't have any intention of taking inspiration from wuthering heights.
  • "it sort of ... intruded, impressed itself."
  • started writing and the moors started to intrude.
  • "i grew up in the city, so i'm used to concrete ... and dog poop."
  • prefers to think of it as there being a conversation with the brontës throughout.
  • the brontës were a dysfunctional family, and the father was an irish immigrant who tried to scrape the brogue from his tongue, which is common of migrants, this idea of the amount of accent as demonstrative of how much they belong.
• ishiguro:  has oftentimes felt some kind of pressure that perhaps he ought to be addressing more of the immigrant and multicultural experience.
  • personally finds he can't find much artistic energy as a writer on it.
  • "when i'm writing a novel, i feel like i'm writing from another part of myself."
  • thinks he took it upon himself early on not to take on the immigrant issue -- had other themes he was obsessed with and wanted to explore.
  • phillips doesn't think any migrant is under any obligation to explore that experience.  he also thinks it's different for ishiguro -- japan wasn't a colony.
  • phillips:  "a colonial migrant has a different sort of obligation inculcated into his soul early on."
• ishiguro:  listening to music is a good way to get away from the world of words.
• ishiguro finds it important to keep the musical side of his creative process alive.
  • when we're writing novels, we feel like it needs to be very rational, very logical.
  • oftentimes, though, finds himself having to make decisions that don't seem logical and feels like he makes them in the ways that musicians do --> a more instinctive way.
  • "music is important to me but not as music when i'm writing."
  • phillips:  this man knows more about music than he's saying.
  • phillips can listen to music while he writes as long as there are no words.
  • ishiguro doesn't think he thinks about music on a prose level.  he thinks more about music on a larger structural level.
  • ishiguro thinks that part of the way he writes has to do with his former goals of being a singer-songwriter -- his first-person narratives as being like songs expressing things to a small group of people.  it's why he likes first person and why he likes words that muddle things because they're like songs -- they have to leave room for more than the lyrics.
• phillips:  "i think i've learned more from poetry than i've realized."
• phillips does look for that cadence of rise and fall on the line level.
• Q:  what does a longstanding literary friendship mean to each of you?
  • phillips:  "we have known each other a long time."
  • phillips:  "i don't want to talk about it like it's over."  ishiguro:  "maybe after tonight."
  • phillips:  we met in thatcher's regime, and now we're here in obama's america.
  • phillips:  "writers don't want to write a book; they want a career.  they want to write a shelf of books."
  • ishiguro:  learned very quickly that it's slightly taboo for writers to talk about their work, at least in britain, so he doesn't think he and phillips ever really discussed their work.
  • ishiguro explains that he calls phillips "caz" and phillips calls him "ish" even though his name is kazuo, and he finds that confusing.
  • phillips:  "i'm confused why we're wearing the exact same thing."

---

second event!  on march 19, 2015.  kazuo ishiguro with john freeman at the congregation beth elohim!  event by community bookstore.

• Q:  what about memory interests you in general?  why do you keep coming back to it?  (or did you forget?)
  • kind of got hooked on memory in the beginning of his writing career because a lot of his personal motivation was remembering his early childhood in japan.
  • not memory as in autobiographical memory.
  • left japan at age 5 and grew up in britain and had this idea of japan.
  • wanted to preserve that world in a book.
  • memory became a means by which to explore human nature.
  • this time, the buried giant is about societal memory, how a nation remembers and forgets -- when should a nation face the things it's hiding from?  the same Qs are also applied to a marriage:  when is it better to forget some of the darker passages so the relationship can carry on?
  • the disintegration of yugoslavia and the genocide in rwanda were both catalysts for these Qs about societal memory.
• didn't contemplate setting the novel in "real" places.
• most people in britain don't know much about arthurian legends beyond monty python.
  • he also doesn't know that much about them either.
  • the buried giant doesn't lean heavily on the legends.  he took more from history, though he constantly took pains to remind the reader that all this history is debatable and has no consensus.
• Q:  have you ever been on a quest?
  • "most books i've written feel like that."
  • has to go on his way, pretending like he knows where he's going.
  • in his 20s, he spent a lot of time arguing with people about moral values, political views, philosophies, etcetera, thinking that, if he could figure out a blueprint then, he could cling to it for the rest of his life.  as he's gotten older, he's realized that, although it's fun to figure out and set all these values and such, you can't really stick to that plan.  it's more like, when you get to certain points in your life, you pretend that you intended to get there all along.
• in never let me go, he wanted to explore the heroic.
  • it's a vision of how human nature is an optimistic one.
  • thinks of it as a cheerful book.
  • thought that he wasn't going to make this a book about human frailty but the beautiful sides of humanity -- that, when people are faced with the end of their lives, the insignificant things like amassing fortune or getting vengeance fall away.
• the buried giant as another love story:  often, when we use this term "love story," we think of it as "courtship story" that tells about the pursuit and the happy end of marriage.
  • "i kind of think a love story should be about what happens after that" ... where you have to keep that flame going.
  • "i am interested in a lot of the shared memories of marriage."  [...]  "i think shared memories are really important."
  • Q of, can love continue if these shared memories have been taken away?
• the strategy of never let me go was that readers might start off thinking of the characters as Other but to recognize they are more and more familiar.
• "i have a habit of auditioning characters for narrator."
• "i think it was the singer [part of singer/songwriter] that was wrong."
• re: christianity and its idea of infinite mercy (a God who will forgive as long as you ask in the appropriate way):  is there a danger in that?  especially given the horrid brutalities and atrocities committed by christians throughout history around the world?
• "i do worry that we're going to end up a homogenized literary culture."

marie mutsuki mockett with maud newton @ mcnally jackson!

from last thursday (2015 march 5) (when it snowed and the world was magical):  marie mutsuki mockett wrote a book called where the dead pause and the japanese say goodbye (w.w. norton, 2015) (which i really must read) of her time in japan after her father's death, which was also after the 2011 tohoku earthquake.  this is my second time hearing her read (the first was at AAWW with emily st. john mandel; post here).

maud newton is currently writing a book on the superstitions and science of ancestry for random house.

• mockett wanted to do an event with newton because she (mockett) writes about very ancient rituals and newton is writing a book about ancestry from a modern approach.
• the question of how we deal with loss/suffering is an ancient one.
• when she (mockett) was a child, she'd be confused when she went to people's homes in japan and the first thing she ahd to do was go to the family shrine and light a stick of incense, but, now that she's gotten older, she's come to appreciate that ritual, that sense of assuaging the past and, in a sense, befriending it.
• refers to japan as the "land of exception" -- i.e. owakare is the final parting (of loved ones) ... except for when the dead come home in august (or sometimes july) (again, the land of exception) during obon.
• on the collective experience of grief in japan:
  • she didn't think she was writing a book about herself but about japan -- a common criticism is that there isn't enough about her.
  • it's very clear, though, that's she is grieving.
  • if you're grieving, there isn't one way of dealing with it -- found that useful about japan's many rituals for grief.
  • the common message of all these rituals acknowledged that they couldn't get rid of your pain or make it easier, but they could help you see the collective and see your pain against the pain of others.  they didn't make her pain smaller but made her feel like she was expanding, which in turn made her pain feel smaller.
  • i.e. a trip she took to see a specific temple in kyoto:  she was pissed because it was so crowded so she couldn't see the temple but had to go through these steps of writing something on a sign/paper, but she had to wait on line to get a pen, then to do this, then that -- and the effect of all that was to make her realize that she was one person among all the people there.
• newton:  you can't generalize about DNA.
• newton:  ancestry actually used to be a good thing until christianity intervened and supplanted ancestors with saints.
  • because we're such a rationalistic culture, we tend to look at DNA as a purely scientific endeavor (the idea of scientists as thinking of DNA as a purely technological and scientific endeavor, as something they will be able to decode)
• mockett:  "if you're grieving and you get a card that says something like, 'don't worry; he's still watching over you,' it makes you angry because it's such a platitude."
  • grief is a very raw emotion.
  • tells a story about a temple with a puppet hag (you stand in front of this box, and a terrifying puppet hag pops out at you -- this is a very simplistic explanation of the ritual; she did a much better job describing it):  the idea is that, when you cross the river styx, the hag jumps out at you.  if you're wearing clothes, she takes them, but, if you aren't wearing clothes (because your family wasn't wealthy enough to afford sending you into the afterlife clothed), she takes your skin.  if you look at this hag face-on, she's terrifying, but, if you look at her from the side, she's sad because she doesn't want to do this but has to because it's part of life.
  • the puppet hag shows how death is terrifying but that death happens, and we have no choice but to be sad.
  • old cultures have ways of explaining things in these indirect ways, but mockett also found comfort in that, to think that, a hundred years ago, people had already been thinking about these things.
• used to love ishiguro and was obsessed with steinbeck, but she's starting to read a lot of nonfiction nowadays while exploring the idea of "how can we stretch the story?  where do we go with being east asian and/or multicultural?"
• talked about the duality of being seen as quiet/shy in the west but louder with a lot of questions in japan.
• the beauty of japan is that there are places to go and grieve publicly.  this doesn't really exist in the west.  the west has a narrative of "you grieve ... and then you move on."  she appreciated that, in japan, there was constantly a place where she could go to grieve, the joke being that, if this temple didn't work for you, then you could go to another temple or another because we have lots of temples!  we have lots of gods you can pray to!
• "the thing about grief is that it's universal."

meghan daum with glenn kurtz @ mcnally jackson!

meghan daum is such a pleasure to hear.  and this will be long because i took a ridiculous amount of notes because she and glenn kurtz said a lot of great things -- it was an exceptionally good conversation.

this was part of the "conversations on practice" series at mcnally jackson, and daum and kurtz were discussing her essay collection, the unspeakable, which is fabulous if you haven't read it.

• daum:  "i think there's too much writing about oneself in the world."
  • that said ... found her writing the best when she tapped into her personal voice.
  • kurtz asked why she thought that is, and she said that, one, it's cheaper -- publications don't have to pay for research.  also, aesthetically, it's very natural for a creative person to start with his/her own experience.  also, nowadays, things are generally less taboo -- we can talk openly about more things that wouldn't have been acceptable a few decades ago.
• had originally conceived the collection as one about sentimentality in american life.
  • we sort of don't have authentic experiences because we're so eager to shoehorn them into a sort of feel-good ending that's prescribed for us.
  • none of the essays has a very neatly sewn-up ending -- a reviewer actually criticized that (like, "there's no moral to them, so what's the point?").
  • wanted to think about journeys where we come out on the other end not changed but the same person -- why is that not considered a huge success?
  • kurtz:  "the whole language of development presumes progress."
• daum:  "endings are a funny thing." [...] "it's sort of like landing a plane.  you have to land in a very controlled manner."
• wanted to do a collection of essays that hadn't been published elsewhere to be free from journalistic conventions/structure.
• didn't like some of the endings in the collection -- i.e. "difference maker."  the ending was re-written for the new yorker, and she likes it better.  (maybe they should change it in the paperback.)
• kurtz felt ambivalence coming from daum about a lot of the subjects in the essay.
  • daum:  "i guess i see it as intellectual honesty."
  • can't be intellectually honest without a measure of ambivalence; you have to allow for complexity and ambiguity.
  • set out to explore the themes with as much honesty as possible, which could come across as ambivalence.
• daum:  "there's so much of this diary dump going on ..."
• daum:  "honesty is not the same as disclosing everything.  honesty and disclosure are not the same, just like confession [...] is not the same as sharing a secret, as confiding."
  • you can be honest, but you can still choose not to disclose.
• kurtz:  what does it mean to you, then, in an essay to be really honest?
  • to dig into what you're saying and not being preoccupied with making yourself look good.
  • at the same time, it's not about making yourself look bad.
  • daum:  "those electric moments between writers and readers happen when you're being honest."
  • if you're just presenting the facebook version of yourself in a friendship, that friendship isn't going to go anywhere.  writing is similar to that.
• how do you write about family without hurting them -- a question that comes up all the time, and, "the truth is, i don't know."
• "matricide" (the first essay in the unspeakable) is the hardest thing she's ever written.
  • wasn't going to publish it (wrote it while telling herself she wasn't going to publish it), but close friends read it and said she should.
  • it was the piece that sold the book.
• kurtz:  how did "matricide" develop as an essay?
  • was trying to write it at macdowell during basically a perfect storm of woe.
  • daum:  "i will never be coherent when talking about this piece."
  • kurtz:  "but i think it's what makes it so powerful."
• wanted to write about the expectations regarding the dying, these epiphanies and magical closeness that are expected between the caretaker and the dying.
  • daum:  "there's a whole performance that goes on when someone's dying."
  • daum:  "we just expect the dying person to become this magic person, and that is so unfair."
• kurtz:  why is it titled "matricide"?
  • daum:  "in the end, it's about me rejecting motherhood."
  • wonders if the piece would be read differently had it had a different title.
• uses a lot of parentheses in her column because she has no space.
• daum:  "i see the column as being able to write a little essay every week."
• kurtz:  what makes an essay an essay?
  • kurtz:  one could so easily read "matricide" as a short story.
  • the difference [between an essay and a short story] has less to do with the product than with the process.
  • thinks more long the lines of ideas, not stories.
• daum:  "you never include it unless it's absolutely serving the piece."
• daum:  "nothing is more unknown than death."  (thus the desire to impose something upon it to give structure to it.)
• daum:  "... this thing that facebook does that makes your version of something a failure ..."

elliot ackerman with phil klay @ mcnally jackson!

this post is a week late (this event took place on 2015 february 19); my apologies for that!  i thought about doing a triptych of ackerman and klay like with my van den berg/lacey post, but, idk, to be honest, i thought that triptych was weird, so here's the pie i ate before the ackerman/klay event and the times building during saturday's snow.

i feel like i should also add a disclaimer that i haven't read either elliot ackerman or phil klay yet.

• they talked about the writing of the ackerman's book (green on blue) as a last act of friendship because the novel is dedicated to afghan soldiers ackerman advised while in afghanistan.  klay asked, "what was that last act?"
  • ackerman:  "i think we have a certain conception of war in this country."  one example is that we think of war as having a start and end, and ackerman didn't think these conceptions of war were any that the afghan soldiers could recognize.  to them, war is more cyclical and has economies (not only monetary economies but social economies, &c) built around them.
• green on blue attack = when an afghan soldier turns on his adviser
  • ackerman wondered what happens when the cause you're fighting for threatens to turn on you.
  • he talked about how he was in afghanistan, interacting very closely with afghans then going back home (or to his tent) to see the very 2D portrayals in the news of afghans.
  • he wanted to peel back the green on blue attack as far as he could.  a green on blue attack occurs in the novel (obviously), but, if it made his reader question or understand it even if s/he didn't agree, he felt that the novel had done its job.
• ackerman:  "i'm very hesitant to cast moral judgment on my characters."
• the siren song of war:  if he were to count out the best days of his life on his two hands, at least one hand would be days he was in combat.  at the same time, if he were to count out the worst days of his life, at least one hand would be days he was in combat.  what does that say about him?
• when you're writing about war, it's about the place you're writing from.  when he set out to write this book, he wasn't thinking about his experiences at war or about politics.  he was thinking of himself as a brother (there are brothers in the novel).
• klay:  "we're used to this idea of 'going to war.'"  in our conceptions, we think of going to war and coming back home.
  • all wars are not the same:  ackerman tried to explore that, how it wasn't such a tactical war that foresaw a clear end that would let the afghans go home to their fields or the americans to business school.
• they held movie nights on thursday nights, projecting them on a white sheet, but it was a challenge to find movies the afghans would enjoy/understand.  for some reason, the most popular films were troy and rambo 3.
• his small ambition is that the afghan soldiers he served with would recognize their war [in his book].
• he finds the branding of any opposers as terrorists to be incredibly reductive and incredibly dangerous because of the lack of nuanced understanding.
• "there are so many levels of complexity in this thing that is war."
• one of the audience Qs was about american sniper.  klay said that he was finding the discourse around american sniper to be more interesting than the film itself.  it's always been a Q for him, "what is the civilian's relationship to the people who fight our war?"  this is a conversation we need to be having.
• klay:  "we tend to separate out war like it's this distinctive experience, but it's another category of the human experience."
• ackerman touched upon war as being foundational to the human experience.

laura van den berg with catherine lacey @ mcnally jackson!

today's event!  launch event (?) for laura van den berg's debut novel, find me.  when i first saw the event on the mcnally jackson calendar weeks ago, i immediately thought that laura van den berg and catherine lacey would make this freakishly perfect pairing ... and i was right.

• lacey described find me as "freaky," and berg loved it
• the core of the story was always more the personal dystopia of joy (the narrator) (who's going through life in a haze, trying not to feel).  it took a cataclysmic event to strip down her walls.
• lacey:  "why is florida so fucked up?"  berg:  "florida transcends any sort of explanation."
  • apparently, in florida (or in berg's part of florida), it's normal for alligators to show up in your backyard.  there's a hotline you call when that happens, and the anagram for the hotline is SNAP.
• when she thought of find me as a 2-part story, she couldn't think of it as a short story --> the architecture of the story as being pivotal
• the biggest different between a novel and a short story --> process
  • she can work on a short story anywhere, even on the subway or in the bathroom at a party
  • couldn't do that for the novel -- she had to go away to summer residences to work on it
  • "a novel, it wants your life."
• she doesn't save drafts.  she deletes them or edits on them.  she likes the clean start.
  • (my note/comment:  as someone who obsessively archives her drafts, this is SO WEIRD to me.  O_O)
• "i'm drawn to books that pull from different worlds and put them in one place."