Monthly Archives: July 2008

Hitotoki Paris goes live

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Hitotoki - A Narrative Map of Paris

We’re proud to announce the newest addition to Hitotoki’s narrative map of the world: Paris.

What
other city has been as written about and mythologized as Paris? And
yet, how often does the myth reflect the reality? Take it from us: not
very often.  In Paris, the reality is so much better than the myth, and
we hope Hitotoki Paris captures something of the vital spirit of the
place– its cheek, its attitude, its poise, its mystery, its
diversity– by putting you right there in the moment, in a particular
place in Paris where something unique and personal is happening.

Roland Barthes develops the theory of the punctum in his book on photography, Camera Lucida. While the studium
is the general field of a photograph (the subject matter, the thing
that may interest you or attract you to the photograph), the punctum is
the detail that interrupts the scene, the “accidental spark that
reveals the ‘here and now’ of the photograph.”* “[P]iqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure—et aussi coup de dés.”** It is a rupture, a break. The punctum changes everything.

The studium, in this case, is Paris, or the particular setting of a
Hitotoki.  The punctum is that telling detail that yokes together the
writer and this moment in this place in Paris. That turning point, that
point of no return, that crystalline moment that could not occur
anywhere else– that’s a hitotoki.

Many thanks to those who contributed stories, photos, and
illustrations– please send us more. And to those of you who are just
sitting on your submissions, or who have been meaning to sit down and
write one for us– what are you waiting for? Send it in!

*Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography.
**”Sting, speck, cut, little hole– and also a cast of the dice.” Barthes, Camera Lucida.

Woodian footnote

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James Wood has the most amazing footnote spanning pages 52 and 53 in my edition of How Fiction Works:

14. It is from Anna Karenina, and it is a nice example of self-plagiarism.  In that novel, not one but two babies– Levin's and Anna's– are described as looking as if string is tied round their fat little arms. Likewise, in David Copperfield, Dickens likens Uriah Heep's open mouth to a post office, and Wemmick's open mouth, in Great Expectations– to a post office.  Stendhal writes, in The Red and the Black, about how politics ruins a novel in the way a gunshot would spoil a music concert, and then repeats the image in The Charterhouse of Parma.  Henry James wrote that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art was a 'Benedictine of the actual,' a phrase he liked so much he used it later about Flaubert.  Cormac McCarthy writes, in Blood Meridian: 'the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand,' and returns to that lovely verb seven years later in All the Pretty Horses: 'Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.' Why shouldn't he? Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency.  And that a kind of Platonic model has been reached– these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable, words for these subjects. 

Well! When this happens in my writing, I get exasperated and think I need new words. I see it as an example of the limitations of my vernacular, and an indication I need to get out of my little think-box. But if James Wood says it's alright, it must be alright! Consider my style to have achieved self-consistency. Maybe I should have my agent put that in her cover letters.

Nam Le and an Atami story

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Nam Le’s The Boat arrived in the mail today. So far– it’s wonderful. Really. I had to tear myself away from it to say so, and to promise to say more once I’ve finished it.

For now, a short extract:

“If you ask my why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.”

I wish I could see Japan as beautiful simply because it is the answer to my daily question. The question being: do I have to choose between the place I love and the person I love? If the answer is “Japan,” how do you explain how unhappy I am here, being away from Paris? And how unhappy I am in Paris, being away from N?

*

Last night we took the Shinkansen down to Atami Beach, about 45 minutes south of Tokyo on the Izu Peninsula. N’s scuba diving instructor had organized a fireworks, diving, and BBQ weekend, and we went along for the fun– him to dive, me to hang out on the beach.  The fireworks, which were set off over the water, behind a row of palm trees, were incredible– all falling stars and Christmas trees.  The cracking and booming scared us out of our skin at first, the fires looked like they would rain down on our heads– but they didn’t, and we were soon oohing and aahing along with the rest of the crowd.

I was transported, and drinking beer, and in a general state of giddiness, happy to have escaped the big city for this charming coastal town which reminded me, if I squinted, of Nice. When the fireworks ended, we went back to the hotel, gathering on the tatami mats in one of the group rooms, talking of
inconsequential things, when the largest cockroach I have ever seen scuttled across the floor.

Someone caught it and tossed it out the window– but when you are going to stay in a Japanese-style hotel, sleeping on tatami mats, really, the last thing you want is for there to be large insects on the floor with you. My stomach turned. No one else seemed phased.

Luckily the group leader had booked N and I into a private room, which turned out to have a set of twin beds, not tatamis. But my relief was short-lived: the shared toilet in the hallway was also Japanese-style– of a variety also known as “Turkish.” That is, it was a ceramic hole in the ground.

“I’m going back to Tokyo in the morning,” I announced to N. “BBQ + Turkish toilet? That’s not how I roll, sugar.”

“It could be worse,” he protested. “There could be cockroaches.  Oh, wait.”

Yeah. I’m back in Tokyo now, sans roaches, plus magic toilet, reading Nam Le: that’s how I roll. Call me a jap– I don’t care. I’m just sad I had to leave the boy behind with the roaches.

East Coast Native Does Not Find Big Sur Magical

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onepersontrendstories:

In his first year of dating a native Californian, Oliver Goodstein found that there were many perks. When he and his girlfriend, Rachel Offerman-Simms, went to visit her family in Aptos last December, Goodstein was pleased to find out that the temperature was in the seventies, tomatoes grew year-round, and backyard pools were not uncommon. “And, it was so cool, Amy and Jeff”—those would be the first names of parents Amy Offerman and Jeff Simms—“just assumed that Rachel and I would share a bed. We didn’t have to do that whole sleep in separate bedrooms and sneak around at two am thing we had to do at my mom’s house over Thanksgiving.”

The visit was going so well, in fact, that Offerman-Simms planned a trip for the two of them to posh countercultural resort town Big Sur. “You’re going to love it,” she said to him. “The place is just so magical.” Offerman-Simms made reservations at Ventana (Post Ranch, a nearby hotel, she noted was “way too commercial”), appointments for side-by-side couples massages at Esalen, and an afternoon workshop on Zen and the Art of Bread Kneading at Tassajara. She even remembered to pack a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers to, perhaps, recite by candlelight and to make a mix CD of music about the region from the Beach Boys, Beachwood Sparks, and Mason Jennings for the drive down. “I feel like if Oliver gets Big Sur, he will really get me.”

To be sure, Big Sur has long been a destination for the artistically inclined, but for every Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, or Anthony Kiedis who remain forever changed by the rugged terrain, there is a first-time visitor who beholds the fog, hot springs, and cyprus trees and comes away unmoved. Goodstein counts himself as one of the latter. “The views were pretty, I guess,” Goodstein said. “And I had this really good roasted carrot soup at Nepenthe. But I wasn’t talking about how much I want to move to a cabin here when I’m fifty or anything. It was, frankly, kind of boring and hippieish.”

Offerman-Simms is disappointed but undaunted by her boyfriend’s ambivalence. “I told Ollie I would take him to Joshua Tree next year and we could stay in the room where Gram Parsons died,” she said, her eyes lighting up with excitement. “I mean, you know, if we’re still seeing each other next year.”

Word.