Finally getting back to it -

A few days after Worldcon, Kari Maund and I went out with a plan of visiting art galleries around Omotesando. I still had my cold, and it was raining, so it was a good day for doing indoor things. We couldn’t find the first gallery I’d marked on a map, so we headed for the Jan and Eva Svankmajer exhibition at Laforet, a prominent, easily locatable building on Omotesando. Several people had told me the exhibition was a must-see. It was certainly impressive. Housed in several rooms, it included examples of the Svankmajers’ imaginary natural history book plates, featuring detailed engravings of chimerical collage-creatures, monsters made of bones, feathers, snail-shells and other scavenged animal parts, paintings, designs and props from the Svankmajers’ animated films, and drawings. The exhibits were labelled in Japanese and Czech, and between us Kari (who knows a mindboggling number of languages, dead and alive, and also reads some Chinese) and I were able to decipher most of the labels, but the explanatory notes were beyond us, which left us to take the exhibits as we found them. By roughly the middle of the tour through the rooms the appeal of the grotesque had worn thin for both of us. In the later rooms, whimsy and humour were largely superseded by ugliness and horror, and we started to feel that enough was enough. We both wondered about the Svankmajers’ minds: hadn’t they, as artists, ever wanted a break from the grotesque and the nasty? And if not, why not? This article offers a plausible answer, describing Jan Svankmajer’s work as a “symbolic address of the inarticulable and potentially unspeakable fears rooted in our primal identities, now over-socialised in the contemporary world.” However, dragging the fears up out of the mud and putting them on display is only half the battle, surely. Healing them, waving them goodbye, or transforming them comes next - and for all the alchemical imagery and symbolism in the work displayed, there was little indication of interest in those latter stages.
(Side note: Lewis Carroll’s supposed pedophilia, alluded to by Jan Svankmajer in the article above, is by no means to be taken as a fact; recent evidence suggests that all the time he spent with Alice was at least partly a ploy to be near her older sister!)

After that came - shopping! Or window shopping, at any rate. Laforet is full of boutiques and we had a merry time trying things on. I found a perfect trench coat - beautifully tailored, and, this being a country of small people, the right width for my back and shoulders - and lovely white boots to go with it. However, both items were unsuitable for Bangkok’s weather and, in any case, too expensive. It’s funny what you feel you can splurge on, and what not - I will spend on books, art, and perfume, but in the case of everything else I hear my mother saying “You don’t really need that”, or “You could make it yourself”, or, unconsciously, “You don’t deserve it.” I’ve never been able to lash out on clothes. Shoes, yes, sometimes, within reason; but when you come from a family of women who sewed, and who wouldn’t have dreamed of buying something if they could make it themselves, better fitting, out of better fabric, for a fraction of the cost, no matter how long it took, the retail price of good clothing has the stamp of sinful indulgence about it - the sin not of vanity, but sloth. Of course, you can also argue that it’s a sin to buy department store clothes made in Chinese sweatshops. This no-win situation is possibly an indication of why, in their prelapsarian state, Eve and Adam were naked. Clothing was the first sign of their fall, and the garment industry has been dyed with the colours of one sin or another ever since.

Kari headed home after the boutique whirl, and I headed for the Aoyama Book Centre, fairly nearby on another major road, to see “Holy Land”, a collaborative exhibition of Kouichi Kubota’s photographs and poems and Yumiko Amano’s sculptures. The exhibition was in one smallish room and consisted of large black and white photos of Japanese people and scenery. A series of landscape photographs were projected on a screen, each with a short poetic text, accompanied by quiet music. There was yearning, often elegiac tone to the poems: “Not to forget the man who loved here, I wish I could be the grave”, directing one’s perception of the images accordingly; sometimes the yearning was for the barrier between the individual and all else to come down: “To see the sleeping world, I wish I could be the calm night.” Amano’s sculptures seemed at first glance an odd choice of company for all this - whimsical, appealing, verging on cute figures, with upper bodies and heads resembling crescent moons, they might have wandered out of the world of a child’s storybook or cartoon. They were placed around the room, in groups of one or two, sometimes so that they seemed to be looking at the work, sometimes engaged in inscrutable activities of their own, bending towards vacant areas of wall. After a time, their presence started to gel with the other work. As characters they seemed like emotional notations, devoid of the physical features that make one human being repulsive, or another enviable, so that very simple, heartfelt responses to their apparent circumstances of togtherness or separateness were evoked, making it harder to stand back in the safety of the critical mind.

In light of this, somewhat later, I went back to thinking about the Svankmajer exhibition and wondered if I should have felt more sympathy for the rebarbative images and objects. Perhaps the artists took the process of transformation halfway and the viewer was meant to complete it? I’m not quite sure what I’m talking about here. I don’t think that my eventual feeling of “Enough with all this monstrosity, show me something nice” was unnatural, but I’m wondering now about ways of engaging with the monstrous. First reaction: amusement or pleasant horror; second reaction: I’m sick of this; third reaction…? I don’t know, but it might be to ask questions: Who are you? What’s your story? What do you want…?

In my own work I’ve tended to use the monstrous as a kind of decoration, like gargoyles and mascarons on a wall, I guess; but the fact that I keep using it probably points to some need of mine to explore monstrosity in a more thorough and thoughtful way.

It was Rabbit who found the drum:

I’m being a rather bad blogger - I should be writing about Japan. Which I will do, but somehow, despite having been out and about in Tokyo and its nearby towns, most of my travelling on this trip has been inwards. I’ve been writing and thinking, and drifting, and poking in corners. The sketchy messy style I tried out with the last picture has kind of grabbed me. I can do stuff with it…

I don’t know the significance of the drum Rabbit has found. Drums have always made me feel uneasy for some reason, not because of their noise but because of their shape. I don’t know why. Perhaps, too, because they’re such a primitive instrument, with a real skin that once belonged to an animal, they seem more quasi-alive than other instruments. Now that I think about it, goodness knows whose skin the drum in this picture is made of!

I found this article on sorrow by Robert Bly. An article which will probably be useful, but as to the following - “A few years ago in Romania archaeologists found a small basalt statue, very elegant in its blackness, of a man seated. It is the oldest Sorrowing Male so far found. It hints that grief has been for thousands of years a masculine emotion; men’s sorrow seems unusual in that it seems inexplicable.” - sweet Jesus, Mr Bly, do you really think women don’t feel inexplicable sorrow too? That we don’t experience weltschmertz, existential angst, nameless and illogical glooms of the spirit? But now, do women, as artists, make such a great fuss of our sorrow as men do? Perhaps a survey is in order.

Maybe we can, in fact, explain inexplicable sorrow. Might it all be down to the fact that we are sentient individuals and we are going to die? And that all that we love in the world is going to die? But women, with the responsibility of raising the next generation, can hardly afford to wallow in this beastly prospect too much, or we would kill all our children at birth to spare them from the world’s pain. But while women may keep popping out generations in defiance of the Grim Reaper gibbering at the opposite goal, don’t imagine for a minute, Mr Iron John Bly, that your grave and sober sorrow is some sort of singularly male business.

Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest.

I’m usually not satisfied with my skill, either in writing or drawing. This is an exercise in just letting something have its existence and be expressed, however clumsily (perhaps this creature is an expression of clumsiness?). I rather like it. (Though it seems to have simple eyes in the thumbnail that it doesn’t have in the big picture - odd!)

Saturday and Sunday

The very long explanation of the hall costume rules, directed towards the gaijin, includes the following: “When wearing revealing costumes, be sure to wear underwear”. And if you forget, you can always get some from one of those infamous vending machines… (actually, I’ve never seen one, though I keep my eyes peeled). This intrigues me, though, since it implies a dispensation - even a veiled recommendation - to go commando as long as one is not outwardly dressed like Dita von Teese. During the rest of the weekend I wonder whether I am actually the only person here wearing underwear beneath my trousers and shirt, and whether other people are noticing and laughing at me behind my back.

I get grabbed for a panel on slipstream fiction, about which I know nothing. Thankfully the other gaijin panellist, Mark Van Name, seems to know quite a bit. And it turns out that the panel isn’t exactly about slipstream but about strange unclassifiable fiction in general (or is that slipstream? I don’t know!). The point is raised that a lot of recent strange fiction is urban. I have a half formed thought that in high fantasy there’s something going on - or there can be something going on - between the heroic and the pastoral, whether an agon or a cooperation, whereas in urban fantasy there generally is no pastoral. Aspects of urban life that can be kinda sorta bucolic - parks and gardens, even tree-lined streets in the better suburbs - don’t tend to feature. This, I think, must have some effect on the characters. One thing I like about both Melbourne and Bangkok is their greenery, and in Bangkok, the wild and half-wild animal life. Call me a sentimentalist, but all those embassies of nature in the city seem to send out signals of hope. They certainly soothe the spirit and lubricate one’s own sense of connection to the natural world (a sense which, I am starting to think, may not be irrelevant to human wellbeing - or my wellbeing, at least). I don’t think I played up that aspect of Ashamoil enough. I suspect it would have been good for Raule, particularly.

Farah Mendelsohn has done a survey of some 900 SF readers with the aim of discovering what they look for and whether there is actually a particular type of person who goes for SF. The results, broken down into age and gender groups, revealed some interesting patterns. A detail that intrigued me was that among male readers a “sensawunda” was highly valued, but not among female readers, who valued “strange other worlds” instead. A subtle difference? A remarkable feature of the survey was that Farah didn’t give people multiple choice options, instead simply asking them to write their own description of what they liked, and the survey categories were then drawn from these responses.

There was a lot less in the way of manga than I’d thought there would be. Nanny Mouse said manga fans have their own convention, but I somehow expected there to be enough overlap between fandoms that SF and fantasy manga would have been for sale in reasonable quantities. There was actually very little for sale - the dealer’s room was very scanty. I went down to the fanzine room, where I stumbled onto some rather strange shota. The style was delicate, old-fashioned, rather reminiscent of May Gibbs, but the dear little children had fully developed genitals and were doing very adult things with them. The artist had obviously let her (I think) imagination do exactly what it liked, which was intriguing in itself. The characters seemed to be adventuring in an eroticised otherworld, which featured oddities - friend or foe I wasn’t sure - like a tree with breasts hanging from its branches like fruit. I was tempted simply because it was so well-drawn and uninhibited - but I don’t find shota easy to look at (my normally silent inner Puritan tends to go “squick!” loudly at the subject matter, however artistically it’s presented), so I didn’t buy it. I did collect an origami Nazgul, which one group of magazine sellers were giving away for free, and a random manga called “Birth” featuring a hot long-haired guy with a big sword and lots of demon beasties.

I’m going to stop the Worldcon report there, because I’m more than a week behind with this blog. I enjoyed the panels I was on and it was great to catch up with old friends and meet new people, but I was sorry that there weren’t more bilingual program items, particularly in the writing and academic tracks. My impression was that this rather kept Japanese and foreign attendees apart (only my personal impression, I must emphasise).

Coming up: Svankmajer and ‘Holy Land’ exhibitions, Akihabara, the strange melancholy of Tokyo, Harajuku again.

Something a bit more abstract this time, inspired by this conversation on Jeff Ford’s blog debating the pros and cons of a draft for Iraq:

I’ve spent half of today asleep and the rest in a sort of stupor. The cold is getting better, thank goodness. I’ve been writing. I always knew the castle in Horn was called Castle Orpheus. I didn’t know why, but after searching for a plot I’ve realised there’s a door to an underground realm in the slug’s grotto, so now it makes perfect sense. The word is thought to come from the same root as ‘orphan’, which also makes sense in the context of the characters who live there. Have I mentioned the slug? Slugs are actually hermaphrodites, but since ‘it’ is an awkward pronoun for a character I’m making it female. Her name is Rootmold. I didn’t know whether this moniker, which snuck up on me quietly after I’d toyed with things like Hieronymus and Ulysee, was a real word, but it is. Rootmold is a brown stain left in the ground after a root has rotted away.

I just know someone is going to savage me for having a talking slug in this book. And other people are going to savage me for how quiet and gentle and slow it all is (a few violent moments aside). But that doesn’t seem to matter, at least not tonight. If someone were to ask me, today, why I took to writing, I think the answer would be something like ‘To create obituaries for nonexistent beings’.

In some ways flashy writing is harder than sincere writing. It is difficult to write with the direct voice of the heart - or a character’s heart - and make it sound grown up and polished. The heart doesn’t speak with polish, and the writer has to translate its raw language very delicately in order to avoid either leaving too many rough corners on or smoothing too many off. When I’m uncertain about a corner I tend to smooth it. Maybe I should try leaving it there more often…

On Saturday I make sure I get the to con on time for Yoshitaka Amano’s talk with Nozomi Orori. In person Amano seems easygoing, honest, witty and down-to-earth. At one point he says he’d like to travel with a backpack for a couple of years, staying anywhere - even sleep in parks. Most of the questions are of a general nature rather than the specific things an art fan might want to know, although Amano discloses that after producing several detailed works he likes to draw something very simple. I’d like to know whether he does a lot of preliminary work, since his paintings often have the distinction of being very detailed, in whole or in part, beautifully composed, and also very fresh and immediate in their execution. He mentioned having had trouble drawing a torii gate (he had never drawn one before) in one of his illustrations for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters, so perhaps he sometimes makes practice drawings and sometimes doesn’t. There’s very little question time at the end and I don’t have a chance to ask.

What I do, as soon as the interview is over and he’s getting up to leave, is bolt to the front with a fair few other people, my big glossy book from yesterday clasped to my chest. He isn’t going to have an official signing session, and this seems like the best chance to get his autograph. Amano accepts a business card from the first man in line, then plainly seeks to make his escape. Photographers and journalists follow him and hold his attention. He is gracious, but I can see why he might have a backpack and a park bench in mind. I can’t catch his eye. I see Tessa Kum, who I know from conventions in Australia, standing there with a book. We exchange wry dashed looks. Amano is heading for the door, the hounds of the Fourth Estate keeping up with him. I want Tessa to play the Gorgeous Young Thing card, which I think might trump the Yet Another Journalist card, and leap in front of him. But she doesn’t. Daydreams of a Japanese translation and an Amano cover actually sustained me through some of the writing of TEC. I owe this man for a lot of inspiration. I really want to thank him. But to say there isn’t going to be time is so much of an understatement that it’s practically subterranean. So what I do, instead, is pounce like a groupie and call out ‘Amano Sensei!’ from behind him. He turns around. I gaze up at him worshipfully and babble very fast: “IloveyourworkI’mawriteryou’veinspiredmesomuch…would you?” thrusting out opened artbook and pen.

“Hai, hai,” he says. I’m expecting a 0.001 second scrawled initial, and would have been grateful for that. Instead, he takes the time to draw a sketch of a profile recognisably his, facing a creature recognisably a Moogle (might that be me?), with a love heart in the middle. I thank him, my eyes having gone as round as bubbles, and then he’s gone, and a reporter with a French-sounding accent is asking if he can see the picture. Which looks like this:

Nanny Mouse is there. He says, ‘You looked like a hunter’. I assure him I rarely behave like that. His eyes narrow. ‘I’m not so sure’. In a strange instant replay of events, located far further down the fame chain, his friend Lilith is waiting with a yellow Prime edition of TEC for me to autograph. She asks me to draw Gwynn and Raule inside. I do the best I can, and perhaps some of Amano’s magic has rubbed off on the biro, since I’m fairly pleased with the results (Gwynn doesn’t half look like Vampire Hunter D, though). Lord knows what Lilith thinks of me, as all I do is babble about Amano, I’m fairly sure. We take cellphone pictures of each other, but I have no idea how to drive the camera on my rented phone and the shot comes out blurry. I hope I’ll get to catch up with her and Nanny Mouse again before I go home.

For one reason and another - chiefly the fact that my kaffeeklatsch is scheduled in the middle of it, even though I asked the programmers not to timetable me against Amano - I miss his dual painting session with Bob Eggleton. Marianne Plumridge-Eggleton tells me about it afterwards. They had five pieces of paper, and each artist started at one end and worked towards the middle. At the end, the audience played elimination rounds of scissors, paper, rock (called ‘janken’ in Japan - it probably originated in China , all you trivia buffs), the winners each receiving one part of the painting. What a lovely thing to do.

I’m afraid I spent the rest of the day telling everyone about my good fortune, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t quite remember. Perhaps that’s just as well.

Disclaimer: I’m writing this under the influence of a heavy cold with ambitions in the direction of bronchitis and the weirdass Japanese medication I’m taking for it. The only thing I could find with pseudoephedrine in it also contains belladonna alkaloids. I decided to give it a go, since I really needed the PE to stop my nose gushing (it’s impolite to blow your nose in public here - argh!). Never again. The last time I felt this stoned was on hash brownies. The belladonna shit might be a substitute for codeine, which isn’t an otc drug here. I hate it when governments restrict a useful drug so that pill makers raid a witch’s garden for legal alternatives. So I might write things that sound odd(er than usual).

So, yeah, Worldcon. The catering’s great. In the con suite there’s nigiri, inarizushi, savoury crackers, and - big win - Pocky. The Green Room has similar stuff, with the addition of M & Ms. I’m on a panel asking ‘What do you read passionately besides SF’? with Kelly Link, Marianne Plumridge-Eggleton, Grant Carrington, Susan de Guardiola and Carolina Gomez Lagerloff. It’s in a big room with a small audience, and the general discussion brings home to me just how much of an SF fan I’m not. When I was a kid I read it passionately. Now I tend to go for 1920s-40s social novels (I find in the audience a fellow devotee of Anthony Powell, and another who will introduce himself later - is there a quiet, underground Powell fan culture?). For cheap thrills I read lowbrow Japanese fantasies. The only SF I read passionately is Sanzen Karasu o Koroshi, because it’s pure crack with bishounen. I do watch SF on TV - Firefly, Lexx, Babylon 5, reliable old Stargate - and love it, but I don’t read it much anymore. Why don’t I? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it’s because when I was a child I believed there was a chance we’d get offworld in my lifetime. I dreamed of being a space explorer. I remember watching Columbia blast off and being so excited. I assumed FTL travel was a problem some clever person could solve if only they put their mind to it. I thought we’d at least get to Jupiter and find out if there really are strange beasts living in its clouds.

Then, I think, I realised that manned space travel to any place I might want to go was not just around the corner, or even around the next corner. Science fiction stopped speaking to my dreams because there was not point having those dreams anymore. However I wore my hair, I was never going to be Princess Leia. Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter when it’s on TV - maybe because it has always seemed improbable when you see it on the screen.

The panel discussed the appeal of the exotic. Books that were not necessarily fantastical but had a historical setting had fans, as did glossy magazines on food, gardens, clothing and home renovation - and in Carolina’s case, digital camera catalogues. None of us seemed terribly interested in actually cooking, gardening, renovating or shopping. Rather, the attraction seemed to be in the effect such magazines have of transporting you to another, rather limitless world - or at least a world with a limitless budget. This point wasn’t made at the time, but I wondered afterwards if there mightn’t be something more exotic than Jupiter about the world inhabited by those hypothetical people (Italian countesses, perhaps?) who actually do dress fabulously and have huge gardens with pleached allees and marble bedrooms with carpets from Isfahan, who live on chocolate champagne pate and never get fat.

It occurs to me that I never read SF for the science. When I want to read about scientific concepts and discoveries I prefer non-fiction articles and books. I always read it for the sense of wonder and adventure, and I can’t help noticing that since I’ve taken a bit to travelling I’ve developed a taste for novels set mainly in domestic interiors (not necessarily of the rich, though if I open a book and see a word like “epergne” or “Meissen” I’m more likely to buy it, I confess with all due and proper shame). A case of the grass is always greener, perhaps.

All this talk of la bella vita sends me back to the art show, where I haggle with Akio, in the end getting my two desired Amano prints for basically the price I want, with a big glossy book of his art thrown in. Not that I have anywhere to hang them, unless our landlord lets me put hooks in the walls - or, even better, have a picture rail installed, since there are all those etchings from Prague and Romania that also need to be housed somewhere other than their current location in a cupboard. But he is French, so he might perfectly understand the need. Of course, when I have my Palladian villa they will go on the wall on either side of the huge mullioned window (affording a view over beautifully arranged cypresses and fountains) facing my desk across the floral Axminster, and I shall have footmen in powdered wigs and pale blue livery with silver lace codpieces to dust them with peacock and flamingo feathers.

I read to a very small audience later in the afternoon. Thank you to Preston, Don, Edward, Kari and Cat! Edward wondered if Reason has an ambition to be a librarian - which he then had to explain to me. I must be the only person in the world who hasn’t read The Colour of Magic. It made me think, though, that Reason ought to have a goal, and I poked my brain until it came up with something appropriate.

I had dinner with Farah, Edward, Kari, and some others, including Chris O’Shea, aka The Magician, who started flirting, then sort of apologised - but I told him to go ahead and flirt like the wind, saying that I was firmly married, so there was no danger of it leading to complications. He went ahead and told me I have beautiful eyes, which put me in a good mood. I think the last person to say that was my mother. When I was little girl I used to ask her if she thought I was pretty and she always used to say, “No, you’re not pretty, but you have beautiful eyes and hands and a very sexy bottom.” Mothers, when your daughters ask whether they are pretty, just say yes, even if all your daughters look like Benny Hill.

By then I definitely had this cold, though it was only in the sore throat, stuffy head and achey joints stage. Luckily my nose didn’t open its floodgates until after the con. Speaking of matters physical, the toilets at the centre featured three different bidet settings: To Wash the Bottom; To Wash the Bottom Gently; and For Ladies. They also had buttons for playing fake flush sounds as needed (or just for fun), and, for all I know, one to play the “vincero” part from Nessun Dorma at the completion of activities.

While my mind’s on it, some other unusual renditions/presentations of Nessun Dorma:

The Redneck Tenors
Sarah Brightman (lovely as her voice is, I’m not sure it’s an ideal song for a soprano - though I can understand the great temptation to sing it)
Aretha Franklin
Manowar, of course
As a soundtrack to Harry’s crush on Snape (if that description alone is not a warning, I can’t help you)
and my favourite, Joe.

EDITED two days later: Luciano Pavarotti died today. I had no idea.

I had lots of time to doodle on the train. Gwynn & godmody Beth scribble + photoshop:

Btw, now and then I look for images of the Welsh god who’s my Gwynn’s namesake. Here’s a rather nice picture I found. Seems I’m not the only one who thinks he has a lot of hair. He also has his own piano concerto, by Nigel Tufnel Josef Holbrooke. I’ll have to get it!