imnothinginparticular

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

+collage on paper, 2020

"in the penal colony" 210mm x 297mm.

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Dairies by Franz Kafka. Ordered this when I was in Baltimore over the summer. Kafka is top 5 for me and I thought I had read everything by him until I stumbled on his dairies. This is a recent translation after much criticism of the heavily altered original translation where if anything deemed unfavorable i.e. homosexual connotations, etc was omitted. Believe it was Andre Gide who was the first literary giant to release their journals (man those were hard to find) in a critical manner and right away one could tell he wrote them with an intention of them being published and widely read. Kafka dying quite young of tuberculosis notoriously made it his wish to have his novels burned so he definitely had zero intention of having his dairies see the light of the day. And right away you can see why as this book isn't for everybody. There is no narrative or continuity in its structure making for a janky read. It simply serves to give insight to any real fan of his work: early sections of what would become America, you see the process of In the Penal Colony, his anxiety about marriage, his thoughts about other writers, and his writing struggles in general all sandwiched between shopping lists and half completed sentences. Through it, I kept recalling a really interesting essay by Jorge Luis Borges titled, “Kafka and his Precursors” that sees the Argentinian searching through literary history for anything that could have been considered Kafka-esque before Kafka. He like myself views him too singular, too unique to have had any true precursors. Borges eventually finds really random minuscule coincidences like a 9th century chinese writer who shares a similar tone and other loose things like this…but main take away was that even Borges was convinced of Kafka’s unworldly orginaility. So reading his unabridged/altered dairies became interesting to me for this to search to find anything really. He references Goethe and Tolstoy a lot (obviously easy) but as much appreciation as he gives, it just isn’t there. Certainly Goethe’s character Young Werther could describe Kafka's life in actuality and as far as thought one would think he would be closer to his Russian contemporary Dostoevsky just if anything out of their sheer anxiety they express more than Tolstoy. But like all of these authors and to quote Kafka, "their works serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us."

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Ordered this when I was in Baltimore last summer as it had been on my list for a minute. Think I added it after reading Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as they share in common what would be falling within the genre of magical surrealism unique to African literature, animist realism. It specifies the genres by incorporating correlating tribal tradition (specifically Yoruba here) into its aesthetics and philosophy. The year I read Tutuola it instantly became my favorite book that year and think this might be my favorite of 2024. The first in a trilogy, it follows a spirit child in a Nigerian ghetto simultaneously mixing both the real and spiritual worlds. It plays on the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is fairly central African life if one could venture into generalizing. I like whenever these stories can inject mythology as it became an underlying infatuation for me during COVID...that is getting to the basis of cultures and building directly from them instead of the surface of things as we do now. Not only for general understanding using a sort of structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss approach ala Tristes Tropiques but for my art in general (exhausted with the material pop culture "street" art shit). So during that time I jumped around everything from greek mythology to the bible and Quran, Arabian Nights and Shakespeare, and native American and various tribal mythologies from west Africa which was where I was at before coming back to Japan and just not having the time to indulge like before. But I guess with this brand of magical surrealism, it has just really captured my literary imagination as it (aside from anything Arabic) hasn't been shoved down my throat throat like the majority of western culture. And with everything going on, I am just exhausted with it because we see the wars, the politics, etc and it has just led us to decay with same material based themes remade over and over. So it represents not only an escape which would be a bit easy, but instead a new if not forgotten/ never learned means of moving forward...which is precisely what modern art was predicted on in moving western art forward when the cubist went back to Africa. Course I am watching football highlights as I type this~

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay. Another book I had saw Mekel read during the pandemic and not having any money just left it on my wishlist. This is a recently re-discovered novel from the Harlem Renaissance writer that was too transgressive at the time going into the legacy of the black diaspora, queer identity, and the black body & historic mutilation of it...cleverly combining it all thru its symbolism. The story is about a black sailor who has to stowaway and is caught and locked in a freezer causing frostbite leading to a complete amputation of both of his legs. He meets a lawyer while in the hospital who wins him an unprecedented lawsuit. In it, already you can see the metaphor of the transatlantic slave trade and mistreatment of the black body. He is apperently made whole through the money but is left questioning whether it cannot ever trying compensate what was done to him. He returns to his old town in Marseille where his old friends treat him differently before falling in love again with a prostitute wishing for them to return to Africa before tragedy befalls the affair. In Marseille a lot of the characters are openly queer while the dynamics of the town is explored through race and history. A really tight concise package in under 130 pages.

[imnothinginparticular]

+collage on paper, 2019

"I ain't going out without a fight"

210mm x 297mm.

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck. Picked this up from the free bookstore in Baltimore. I am quite a big fan of his with "East of Eden" being my favorite, so was happy to find a novella that I hadn't read by him for free. This was his propaganda work for the war effort circulated for those under Nazi occupation written right after Pearl Harbor. It was highly criticized at the time for not being aggressive enough, which for a thinking writer like Steinbeck to write such easy propaganda... just wouldn't be possible. The American audience didn't quite get it and as a result it ended up having a huge impact as it was bootlegged throughout Europe with its biggest following in the Scandinavian countries where the locale of the story was loosely upon. Although never actually living under the occupation his work really struck a chord...a result of the interviews he had with people who fled the occupation as the work was for them anyway. Recall in another free book I got from the same place last decade in Sartre's "What is Literature?", he used this novel as an example in his contention that we can have no true understanding of a literary work unless we know who an author is writing for. Also comparative was the famous Vercors resistance novel that circulated through France in "The Silence of the Sea" where the people resisted through silence. There was a pre-French new wave Jean-Pierre Melville film adaptation that was really good as well. All in all a solid read that like a lot of his lesser novels gets its name from Shakespeare. In Macbeth right before Duncan is murdered the two guards mention to each other, "How goes the night, boy?" To which the other replies, " The Moon is down; I have not heard the clock" foreshadowing the descent of evil on to the kingdom. The allusion relates to the spiritual darkness Nazism brought about.

[imnothinginparticular]

+collage on paper, 2024

"it's obvious"

210mm x 297mm.

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Picked this up at the free book store in Baltimore. Recall watching the 1961 film with my grandfather and later at school that had that original Broadway cast from the play that included Sydney Poitier and Ruby Dee. It is my favorite adaptation although the 1989 PBS version with Danny Glover is just as good that even including left out sections in the 1961 film. The most notable section was of the sister going natural with her hair which predated the "black is beautiful" movement that popularized the idea later in that decade going into the 70s. With a running time of nearly 3 hours, I guess they weren't easy editing decisions. But for those uninitiated the story tells of a family's attempt to improve their existence with a pending insurance check payout. Featuring well rounded complex characters, each has their own dream and in dealing with housing discrimination, assimilation and racism...struggle to stay together. The title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" It was the first play to be written and produced on Broadway by an African American woman as well to feature a black director. Unfortunately, she died just 6 years later at age 34 making for one of the bigger "what if's" in our history as she had a lot to say. Her family challenged restrictive housing covenant in a famous Supreme Court case and I was always impressed with what Baldwin recalled in her telling the president off in a private meeting on civil rights. He recalled her as the strongest person in the room among men and in addition as a lesbian she spoke out for gay rights as well.The play stands the test of time for better or worse as the same problems exist and found Amiri Baraka's reevaluation of the play to exemplify this, "We missed the essence of the work - that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people...The Younger family is part of the black majority and the concerns I once dismissed as 'middle class'- buying a home and moving into 'white folks' neighborhood's - are actually reflective of the essence if black people's striving and the will to defeat segregation, discrimination, and national oppression. There is no such thing as a 'white folks' neighborhood except to racists and to those submitting to racism."

[imnothinginparticular]

+collage on paper, 2021

"Joni Mitchell Never Lie" 210mm x 297mm.

[imnothinginparticular]