#these essays would be much more interesting and polished if Joseph was here and you asked him about this stuff

[ran-orimoto]

You're an only on many who talks about J.P on this site. I can ask you what you think on Junpei becoming a singer for Izumi? Doesn't it make you angry?

Hi, Anon. Thank you for the ask. You kinda… Touched a delicate topic here, because I have got mixed feelings about this Serena from Pokemon situation, but, surprisingly, I’m not totally condemning this choice from the writers like some have. I…Can look at it more brightly than people expect me to and I can also say I don’t think the opera singer thing came out of blue.

For starters, there’s a part of me who wants to believe he was embarassed about Izumi teasing him. It’s an audio drama and we have no idea about his expression there. If you ask me, Izumi mentioning the ice skater and Tourin Olympics is way too specific to be a random anecdote that hasn’t had an impact on Junpei’s past self. I think that “Junpei, you’re really a fanboy” kinda made him awkward on the spot. On another hand, it’s obvious his crush is still there and his “I’m studying opera to be closer to you” hasn’t been thrown there for a nonsense reason, either, which means there might be a pinch of truth in what he says.

It…Sucks? It…Disgusts you because it shows Junpei is stuck at the same point, which is also something he was aware about in the original series? Remember the library scene with Tomoki, where he admits he hasn’t changed at all? It makes you wince because Junpei was supposed to be an engineer or a magician? I understand these feelings very well, but I also want to see, indeed, try seeing a sense in whatever they have done in that drama (which is my favourite one from Frontier, mind you).

Taking in consideration the job choice, I believe there have been two reasons behind it:

• Junpei’s skill at entertaining people that has been shown in the whole anime.

• The necessity of connecting characters with Italy.

Listen, as an opera fan, I want to underline sometimes I find myself wishing he had taken on some other kind of career as well. Junpei is a very colourful character, showing to be good at the most disparate activities: he is good with kids and you think he would be a great teacher like Juri and Hikari (Digimon, we need a man teacher among your characters, just saying); he likes drawing on freaking blue prints and you think he could give engineering or architecture a chance; there are some scenes in which he seems to interact with Trailmon so often and you think he could turn driving trains in a future job; he’s interested in magical tricks and, like many would have liked, you can imagine him going professional in the field.

All of these observations are valid and true but the point in his character is that Junpei is just interested in so much different stuff. Profiles describe him as a “kid who is bad at school but has got an academic knowledge thanks to his interest in miscellaneous stuff”. And you can notice this trait of his scattered in the show in the smallest and silliest frames too, like, for example, when he mentions elephants’ graves, or when he raises his hands up to the Sun and mentions UV rays, or when he quotes horror tropes. In the most recent drama he also reveals himself to be a fan of detective stories??🤣 He has got a lot of interests and I can kinda see this as something he does to deal with loneliness. Always staying alone, maybe he reads a lot or watches ton of documentaries.

Headcanons aside, Junpei could have been all these things but their attention ended up falling on his most entertaining side, pushing them to pick the opera singing career.

Now. Unlike Takuya, Junpei has always had an interest in Italy thanks to Izumi. In the anime it’s never shown except when he joins her while she’s yelling “Buono! Buono!” before eating at the island restaurant. Yet, it’s a characteristic of his that surfaces in “Izumi’s Love letters”, or whatever it is called. It’s basically the part of the 2002 drama where she sends imaginary letters to the boys, Junpei included. In the one she addresses him, she talks about the fact Junpei makes her happy when he seems interested in her tales about Italy, especially when it comes to food, and she proposes him (+ the others, she specifies at the end XD) to visit Italy together.

It has always been there and even if that curiosity was born in him thanks to Izumi, I’m so sure he is cultivating his interest on his own as well. You…Can’t absolutely take on opera if you don’t feel it in your heart🤣. It’s a suicide, okay, and ,most of all, you have to own that gift to pursue that dream. It’s not like you will start studying opera and you just need to study to go forward. It’s not enough at all. Thus, Izumi saying Junpei has entered an honour university after some opera exam makes you understand he’s seriously giving his best in what he’s doing and is also rather great at it.

“But he’s doing it to get closer to Izumi whwhwhwhwhhwhwhwwwwwweewe”

Not only ,in my opinion. He’s also taken that path thanks to Izumi, because that’s how their relationship has always worked, -excluding times in which the writing was trash-.

It’s not like I want to say the others have got no role in Junpei’s and Izumi’s growth, but looking back at Frontier for a nth time with a dear friend is making me realize how their friendship was based on improving thanks to the other’s presence. Izumi faced her issues for the first time in a serious way thanks to Junpei in the Tsunomon episode. Her collaboration with him and her opening herself to him without prejudices helped her move forward and take a first step towards her improvement. Junpei learnt how to be more genuine around her, starting from being such a spoiled a$$ to understanding he could build a good relationship with her if he was himself. Compare the Floramon ep with the Tsunomon ep to notice how he became a totally different person in her regards after having got the spirit, whereas he keeps on being tough to Takuya and Co. If we exclude the sexist philosophy behind the Bolgmon episode, we can take in consideration that the affection he had towards Izumi also pushed him to go over his limits even when he felt so unsure about doing it. He wanted to get her spirit back and it was enough for him to give a glance at her sadness to get courage, get his beast spirit and maintain a partial control on it: actually, Bolgmon managed to hit Grottemon only when he remembered he was attacking him for Izumi’s sake.

There’s…Nothing wrong in getting inspired from a person and letting that person shape us; in seeing them as a sort Muse of light in a world that’s probably too dark to allow us to see where we should put our feet. What matters, though, is to go over that phase eventually and build our person on the precious lessons our Muse has given us. “Train of Hope”introduces us to a still immature Junpei who has got a lot to learn, a very flawed Junpei who can both be himself around his crush but can also make the mistakes he used to make as a kid, and, again, guys, it’s fine??? Digiworld doesn’t mark the end of these kids’ development. Every kid seems to still be flawed at its worst in that drama, not only Junpei.

Still, we are talking about him now, and what I can tell you is that the infamous tenor role they have given him has got a lot of potential behind its frivolous appearance. It could give Junpei the opportunity to live new experiences outside Japan, grow further, plunge in a world of entertainment aiming at making people both laugh and cry, and that’s also perfect for a character like him. A grey one who could hold both comedy and tragedy in himself; a lightning that can both bring but also rob the world of light. In a nutshell, he wouldn’t only be a perfect tenor because of his knight fantasies and his unrequited crush XD.

And if these experiences will help him grow out of his crush on Izumi, may it happen. Somehow, even if I could spend ages talking about Junzumi and spreading love for them, I would find it a very good ending for him: him eventually finding happiness first of all in himself and, possibly, in another person as well. By then, he will have become a much better person and ,you never know, sometimes he might remember how everything started and might thank Digiworld and Izumi for everything.

PSA Just a question: do you use J.P as a nickname for him?🤣💕

#junzumi #junpei shibayama #digimon frontier #izumi orimoto #these essays would be much more interesting and polished if Joseph was here and you asked him about this stuff #I love Junzumi and I hope this didn’t send the wrong message #it’s like when it comes to loving Amourshipping #you love them but you also want to see Serena grow up like it happened #IF YOU ASK ME best kinds of shippings #Junzumi has got too much potential from Junpei’s perspective but the writers prefer making him an object of comparison with Tk and KJ #it’s not like they can be themselves and Junpei can be himself #no he always has to be compared with them because they are cooler stronger more clever more intelligent #PSA Takuya in an italian football team in D series has got no sense but whatever #in defence of my boy #asks

[joestories]

Joe Gould’s Secret

So, I just finished Joe Gould's Secret, and I loved it. And before I start polluting my mind with all sorts of other media, I think perhaps I should take a break and reflect on what I just read, because I found it especially meaningful.

First, it's two excellent contrasting profiles of an interesting character. The kind of character I am both intrigued by, and slightly wary of. I was immediately reminded of my friend Mark.

He had a voice that could bellow, he had no problem being the center of attention, he was bold and committed to seemingly ridiculous quests for no discernible reason. I found being around him both completely energizing and scary. I would leave with stories, and I never regretted hanging out with him, but I always had anxiety when I knew I was going to see him. And thinking back, I wonder what he was getting from me? I certainly couldn't keep up with him, but I was a willing participant in his chaos, and a willing audience, and I suppose he was always looking for an audience. And I was an old friend, a high school friend, one of the few who maintained an occasional correspondence with him after high school, via email. He would occasionally send me poems. I didn't like poetry, but I liked his.

I started to dig for this poem, and found some of our old correspondence. I talk about working on a script for my next film, something that I am hoping will get into a festival. He talks about trying K, becoming a minister, and making wine in someone's basement.

Then I found what I was looking for.

I glanced in the mirror before I left the house to make sure I looked alright....

Everything was fine so I went for a walk down to the beach. I sat for a while wondering about the way electrical outlets differ from country to country. It really is interesting that they couldnt devise a universal system... Almost as inpractacle as foriegn sign language. I mean think about it, here you have a chance to do it right but do we take the opportunity to make something simple NO! we set up 50 different versions. Well that got me angry so I decided to get up and take the streetcar home. After 20 minutes of sitting on the cement smoking cigarette after cigarette the tram came screetching in.

I entered and handed the driver a dollar

"lovely night" he said

I said to the man "sure is, did you see that horse fall in the bay?"

"well no sir i didnt"

"good thing, it was pretty sad"

I sat down next to her, she was wearing a black skirt and a plastic safeway bag with a hole cut out in the bottom, It looked just like a plastic tank top. I said to her

"Nice night for a bath"

"I already ate she said"

I could see right away she wasnt one to be outsmarted, I grabbed a handful of grapes from the waiter and ate them while staring into her eyes.

"this is my stop coming up here"

"So"

"I just figured you might want to get ready"

"for what"

"to get off"

"oh"

I pulled the stop request cord and we got off.

We walked a block or two and then I saw a look in her eyes, one that I cant even begin to explain.... So I did the only thing I could. I punched her in the eye and threw her into a pile of garbage. I kicked her for about 5 minutes then I sat down next to her. She looked at me and understood. She picked up the umbrella from the garbage and proceeded to pound me with it. When my nose started to bleed and I couldnt see straight she stopped.

We looked at each other and shouted in unison

"YOUVE READ BAUDELAIRE!!!!!"

We both got up and walked to the corner diner where I ordered us both burgers and 2 bowls of water so we could clean our bloody faces.

We talked for hours,

I told her all about my experiences during the war and she told me about her brief stint as a clown.

Then she got up and said she had to go to the bathroom... It was then that I knew what I had to do.

I quickly put both burgers in my pockets and ran out the door so she could pay the bill.

I thought about her for hours that night.

How she smiled, how she cried, how she made balloon animals.

she was amazing.

Even when I went and set the Bank Of America building on fire I could only think of her.

The next day when I was running after a kid on a big wheel I thought for an instant that I saw her but I knew that could not be, the Germans took her away... I think she's dead now.

Mark wasn't a tortured artist, but he was most certainly a bohemian. He didn't have a great work, but I think Joe Gould helped me to clarify our friendship a little bit.

I also think of Andrew, another weirdo artist. I was blessed to have so many weirdo artists in my orbit early in life. Why am I not a weirdo? Did I think I would always be blessed with weirdos around me? Because I'm not sure where they've all gone.

I think I need to get a little weirder.

But I digress. Joseph Mitchell certainly sees something in Joe Gould. Mitchell is the straight man, the artist seeking inspiration from the fringes of society, and Joe Gould seems to embody that perfectly.

After reading the first essay, the worst word that might be used to describe Gould is irascible. He is someone proudly occupying the fringes of society. These are qualities that you root for because you're a frumpy old sod if you don't. You want to support him because if you don't you're not cool.

The first essay left me a little sad about New York in its current incarnation. Where are the opinionated poets and painters? Are they in Bushwick?

I loved the story immediately. It was familiar and it wasn't. It was New York, and I love New York stories. It was about an artist on an impossible quest, which is the thing I love so much in Paul Auster's stories.

It's also about life on the fringes, in Bowery flophouses, in the now gone diners and dive bars of the Village. And as sort of a straight man, I can relate to Joseph Mitchell's fascination (and later annoyance) with Gould.

So, we have this character who is a larger than life character writing a larger than life book in a past New York. Struggling artist, old New York, and an author who is himself a bit of a tortured artist. And the writing is so sharp and flows so easily. Mitchell is an incredible wordsmith, and Gould is such a fantastic subject. I found myself highlighting so many sections. Here's how the founder of a poetry event described Joe Gould:

“He isn’t serious about poetry. We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason he attends. He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our Religious Poetry Night he demanded permission to recite a poem he had written entitled ‘My Religion.’ I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited: ‘In winter I’m a Buddhist, And in summer I’m a nudist.’

He seems to rankle all the right people. Knock down the people who are a little too self important. He's some weird patron saint of the intellectual underworld. He embodies the spirit of some sort of troubled yet resilient artist we want to believe exists.

But he's more of a symbol than a reality. The more reality intrudes, the less fun the story is. And this is where the much longer follow-up essay picks up.

The first story feels like it's a polished little gem. The doubts we have about Gould are "good" doubts. He's a character, he's rubbed many the wrong way.

But in the second essay, written years after Gould's death in 1957, the ugly truth is told. Mitchell becomes a character in the story, and through his relationship with Gould, you start to see cracks in Gould's facade.

Gould's presentation of himself seems rehearsed. He seems to have routines that he draws on and reuses, like a standup comedian who doesn't ever develop new material. People that interact with him regularly, such as the counter man at a diner, seem to hate him.

At one point, he describes how a poem he created may have turned a lot of people against him. It was a poem against the anti-capitalists, who were having a moment in the 1930s, and he felt like it was a trend, so he wrote a poem called The Barricades and took to reciting it at parties whenever possible. It would always make some laugh and others upset. Gould goes on and on about this poem. I kept wondering if we'd get the poem, and we finally do, and it's only a few lines with a cheap gag payoff. About the death of comrades (behind the barricades at a fancy restaurant) by over-eating. It's funny in a throwaway sort of way, but in Gould's mind it was this was a large, impactful work that hardened hearts against him.

More revealing is what happens when Mitchell starts to read his notebooks. He finds that they are all the same couple of stories, written over and over again.

Ah, I haven't even talked about The Oral History of the World. This is Gould's master work, introduced in the first essay, and it does seem to ignite the imagination when described. He wants to give voice to the underprivileged on New York, to share the lives and the words of everyday New Yorkers, so that in the (apocalyptic?) future, we might see in them hints of what was to come. And supposedly, his manuscript is over 8 million words. Doing some quick math, at novel size that's 32,000 pages. It's something fantastically long. 14 publishing houses have rejected it for being obscene or unreadable. He is working on it constantly. It is at the core of his identity. And when he cadges (what a great word, bring it back!) money from acquaintances and strangers alike, he says it's for the Joe Gould fund, which will allow him to keep working on it.

So, as part of his research, Joe Mitchell wants to read it. He is able to scrounge some notebooks entrusted to a friend, and is dismayed to find a discursive essay about his father's death, a tongue-in-cheek story (with lots of bogus and unconvincing statistics) about how tomatoes are ruining railroad conductors, a memoir about measuring the heads of Native Americans as part of a eugenics experiment, and an essay about his mother's death. These all take long journeys away from their source material, but as Mitchell turns up more notebooks, he finds only these four stories, told with different discursions, over and over again.

Gould explains that this is the essay part of the Oral History, there are also the interviews, but they are locked away safely in a basement in Long Island, since America is at war (it's 1942) and he doesn't want them to be destroyed. Mitchell wants to see them, and there's a story about how the owner of the house where they are kept is away in Floria, possibly for years, and won't allow access to them. Mitchell is about to kill the story, so Gould tells me that he has a fantastic recall of them, and they start meeting, night after night, in Gould's local dive bar, and Gould imparts more and more of the contents to him, until, after several of these 8+ hour sessions, Mitchell is satisfied. Wasn't this the framing narrative of Arabian Nights? The protagonist must keep telling stories so she is allowed to live another day.

Now, I've certainly had doubts about the existence of Gould's text for most of the essay, but it becomes clear what's what when Mitchell, in hopes of finding someone else to receive Gould's constant, exhausting visits, tries to fix him up with a publisher. This person is willing to go the extra mile in every way possible to clear all obstacles in the way of Gould having his manuscripts ready for publishing. Gould has nothing but excuses, with his final one being "I'd rather it be published posthumously." Which angers Mitchell, rightfully so, who has worked to get a publisher to meet with Gould (Gould skipped out on the last one Mitchell set up).

And in the end, it's clear there's no manuscript. But Mitchell doesn't want to shatter this thing that is so intrinsic to Gould's identity. So he keeps his mouth shut.

And it's too bad it wasn't real. It makes me think of the things that have come since that sound similar. There's Overheard in New York. And Humans of New York. Joe Gould was on to something, but he was incapable of following through.

In the end, I think I side with the author. While Joe Gould's would-be book sounds like it could be incredible, the real thing would likely fall short of everyone's imagined version. Even so, I want a world with more Joe Goulds in it. He invented a personality that worked for him and seemed to inspire outsiders to some degree. He put on a show. And I guess when you start to really know someone, the reality will always be disappointing.

Is this a cautionary tale? No, I don't think so. But learning that this was the last thing Mitchell ever wrote was sort of eerie. He was such a talent. Maybe that's the real story here; Joe Gould's undoing was also Joseph Mitchell's undoing.

Josh reminded me when we spoke on the phone today, he sees me as having a high level of talent. I'm not doing much with it either.

I did just uninstall Clash Royale from the last device that still had it, we'll see if that helps. Feels like kicking a heroin habit. I just threw it all down the toilet and flushed it.

"Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translates perfectly into sea gull," he said. "On the whole, to tell you the truth, I think he sounds better in sea gull than he does in English."

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Not Settled: An Interview with Adam Zagajewski

“All systems are finally a mental poison, the rotten apples of the mind’s life,” writes the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski in his most recently translated book of prose, Slight Exaggeration. Zagajewski’s emphatic rejection of any system is reflected in the book’s flexible form, which consists of a scrolling stream of fragments, often brief and not unlike those of a journal, though he also permits himself more extended considerations. Written between late 2008 and 2010, Slight Exaggeration offers a bracingly proximate encounter with Zagajewski’s thinking as he moves among various speculative preoccupations. There’s a nearly peripatetic sense of the poet’s mind as it searchingly makes its way, never haphazardly but without ever showing a desire to resolve the existential tensions made manifest in his consciousness. “We must live in doubleness, in difficult, impossible doubleness,” he observes.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, Zagajewski consistently writes with lightness, wit, and a dry sense of irony that never shades into cynicism or self-satisfaction. Among the book’s virtues is its account of the poet as an incisive and eclectic reader, especially of what some might deem mere ancillary works — diaries, notebooks, correspondence, and biographies, which, he writes in praise, “end peacefully, quietly, unexpectedly, they end in December or April, without proving a thesis, making a point.” Many of his insights derive from a nearly lifelong engagement with certain books — such as with the notebooks of Emil Cioran and Simone Weil, who with her uncompromising spiritual strictures “still tortures us” — but we also witness his excitement, as it were, in making discoveries, as when he first encounters the Austrian writer Walter Kappacher (unavailable, alas, in English translation) or writes at greater length about the letters of D. H. Lawrence, which testify to a “yearning for another life, for a pure intense existence, although we’re more cautious than he, since we’ve now seen— even experienced — so many false faiths and prophecies.” His enthusiasm for Lawrence emerges out of longstanding concerns: both the spiritual yearning and the burden of lived history cited here are ever-present themes in Zagajewski’s writing, a ground bass always audible in the music of his poetry and prose.

Interspersed among the dance of ideas and readings in Slight Exaggeration are the makings of a different sort of book, a memoir that encompasses not only the poet’s autobiography (including twenty years spent in Paris, and friendships with poets of the stature of Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky) but also much of his family’s history. Their displacement from the Galician city of Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine) to Gliwice in Poland, part of the massive resettlement of the city’s Poles that took place after World War II, was a defining cataclysm for the family — a kind of year zero that forever oriented their self-understanding as exiles. Born in 1945, Zagajewski was made keenly aware by the adult emigrants in Gliwice that he could not feel their longing for Lvov. Yet their forced migration “pierced” him: “I might never have taken up writing if not for the unhappy exiles who didn’t know if they were living in the real world or in some bizarre propaganda film shot by the Allies to demonstrate the joys of daily existence beneath the dictates of the Potsdam Treaty. […] I’m not an exile. But I’m not settled either.”

In passing on his family’s stories and lore, Zagajewski provides glimpses into a remote, now utterly historical world, relating how his grandfather insisted before the First World War that his children learn the purportedly essential skills of swimming, stenography, and German, or how his mother’s right-wing family would rarely speak of her sister, who died young of tuberculosis, because she ran in Communist circles. But the core of the family material in Slight Exaggeration concerns his father, who was in his nineties and suffering from severe mental impairment while Zagajewski was writing the book. (He died in 2010, his passing announced toward the book’s end.) An engineer and professor, the elder Zagajewski was a taciturn presence with a strong moral sense, who loved the serenity of mountains and was given to terse pronouncements, though he also possessed a “marvelous sense of humor.” Although the portrait in the book is admiring (he was “honesty personified” and “a very good father”; “we were on the best of terms”), Zagajewski also considers his father’s anti-poetic worldview, and tells of his own grappling with the engineer’s empiricist outlook and the implications of this ongoing debate for his poetry. The book’s very title is taken from a characteristically laconic remark the elder Zagajewski gave an interviewer when asked to comment on a passage in his son’s essay Two Cities; to the reader’s surprise and perhaps even his own, Zagajewski comes to consider it “actually a good definition of poetry.”

I spoke to Zagajewski about Slight Exaggeration via phone at his home in Krakow.

*   *   *

James Gibbons: Slight Exaggeration often reads like a diary. Does it have its origins in an actual journal you kept?

Adam Zagajewski: Part of the book goes back to my notebooks, but I’m not a very regular diary writer, so it’s not that the entire book corresponds one-to-one to a diary. There are some short essays which don’t have this diaristic character at all. I used the form in [the previous book] Another Beauty, so it’s not really new, but a continuation of the form I was using there.

JG: It’s evident that as a reader, you’re drawn to the diary, the notebook, and other more personal modes of writing. What are the virtues of such a form, as opposed to, say, the essay or even the novel?

AZ: For me a good diary, a diary which also comprises intellectual elements, is one of the most interesting forms of literature because you have both life and ideas. I’m not a philosopher. Reading ideas in their pure shape — reading Kant is pretty difficult for me. But reading diaries which limit themselves to “I drank a coffee and it was raining” is very boring. So the ideal form for me, not in poetry but outside poetry, is this combination of some empirical life-facts and ideas, literary ideas or observations about history, etc. I see it as a source of life in the writing, to have both — not only life and not only ideas — and to see how they meet, the line where they come together.

JG: Did you follow any particular models?

AZ: There’s a long list of great diarists, it’s hard to say which ones…. Kafka’s diary was a model — well, maybe not a model, but a summit of the form. Among Polish writers, there’s Gombrowicz. Having said that, I think my model is slightly different because I have these short essays, which don’t hide the fact that they are essays. There’s this mix between more diaristic elements and purely essayistic elements. Still, to have the two in vicinity is important to me.

JG: I wanted to ask about the autobiographical material in Slight Exaggeration. From the very first sentence — “I won’t tell all regardless” — you show a certain reticence toward full self-disclosure. In the United States we have something of a memoir industry, and I imagine if you were an American writer pitching this book to an American publisher, you might well be encouraged to be more forthright or even to write in a different manner. Could you talk about your approach to the memoiristic material in the book?

AZ: Partly it’s inherited. You know, there’s this expression “the Polish school of poetry,” but you could also say there’s a Polish school of essay writing, of diary writing, which shies away from divorces, from illnesses, from very personal matters. There’s something stoic, the aesthetic is that you don’t tell…. I start the book with this proclamation: there’ll not be much in terms of intimate disclosures. So it’s inherited. I feel a part of this larger group of writers and I don’t want to abandon this model. It’s also quite personal — I divorced once, but I’d hate telling my reader how it happened, it has no aesthetic interest for me.

JG: I found the material about your father quite moving. Was difficult to write about your father because of his condition?

AZ: By that time, as I mention in the book, he had really lost his memory, in a way he was mentally almost dead, so it was very painful, but it didn’t create any problems from the point of view of the writing. It was personally painful, but at the same time I knew by writing about him I was doing something good for his memory, for his nonexistent memory.

JG: It struck me how you take him seriously as an intellectual partner, in a way. You mention engaging in “polemics” with him and his sense of things. Now that several years have passed, do you still find yourself having this polemical relationship with him — he being the engineer, the taciturn one, and you being the poet, who perhaps have your own silences, but of a different sort?

AZ: Yes. I feel that in a way, a part of him exists in my mind, so I have this dialogue. Sometimes I feel like some voice in me is against poetry, against exaggeration, against metaphors — for the sake of sobriety, of realism. I think I’ve internalized the voice of my father.

JG: You also write about his strong sense of morality. Do you feel you’ve inherited that as well? I must say that from this book I can’t definitively decide whether you should properly be called a moralist.

AZ: Well, no one should be bragging about his or her moral attitudes. I followed his model: in Communist Poland, joining the Communist Party was something that some people would never do, not for the sake of their careers. And my father never did. I never did. My family radiated this conviction. You know, he had his career, which was not so bad, he was the dean of a college, etc. But he never went beyond this. He never spoke — I write about this — he was a silent moralist, he never deemed it OK to be pronouncing himself in moral matters. It was something to do and not to talk about. So the main difference is that I talk, I’m a talker — but I’m a silent talker, because I’m rather taciturn as well. Well, not always…

JG: You recall how later in life he wrote an unpublished memoir, on yellowed typewriter paper, that he called From One Accident to the Next. It’s a title that suggests a kind of randomness in life. Whereas in your writing, there are all these patterns, there’s an associative logic at work that takes care to connect things, pieces of music, for example, with writing (I’m thinking of the passage where you link the openings of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rilke’s Duino Elegies), even if there may not be direct influence.

AZ: It’s like the structure of a poem, it’s the same thing you do in a poem, right? You have this intuitive feeling for which things fit together and which don’t, but there’s no rational way to explain it, it’s a matter of taste, of feeling.

JG: One thing that connects your father to literary writers is his compressed style of speaking. You call him an aphorist. Elsewhere in Slight Exaggeration you consider the aphorism as a literary mode — in particular you take up Emil Cioran and his pitiless aphorisms. The perspective varies. At one point you write that “poetry is defenseless against ironists, aphorisms are like sharp scissors, they can’t function without points.” But you also recommend that poets study Cioran’s Notebooks. The reader can find well-turned aphorisms of your own throughout the book. You seem at once attracted to aphorisms and suspicious of them.

AZ: Simone Weil used to say that atheism is necessarily the new religion because it purifies religion. For me, Cioran is like an atheist, not just in a strictly religious sense, but as a kind of nihilist. I don’t share this, but I can see its purifying power. I hate rhetoric, we poets hate rhetoric — but we don’t actually know how to define rhetoric in poetry. We know that it’s an artificial voice, a voice which comes too easily, which can be ascribed to the crowd. But writers like Cioran are totally anti-rhetorical. This acerbic irony helps to kill rhetoric, I think.

JG: In the book you write a lot about music, which you take very seriously. How does music fit in to your practice as a writer?

AZ: There are different levels. On a basic level, like many writers I have my periods of silence. And I notice that music doesn’t speak to me during these periods, or it does but in a very diminished way. When I have my good periods of writing it’s like an opening of everything — also of music. I feel like music is a cousin in the world of imagination, and it’s also for me a proof that I’m alive again. I have this mystical notion that there’s this kind of energy in music and poetry and painting, and while this energy has totally different ramifications and methods of expressions, at bottom there’s something common. I’m not a philosopher so I don’t need to have a name for it, but there’s this commonality of art, this common denominator, this energy. You know, painting is very important too, but in my everyday work music is more important because it’s there, it’s in my room.

JG: You mention Mahler and Mozart. Are there other composers especially significant for you?

AZ: There’s a long list. Many years ago I wrote the poem “Self-Portrait,” where I mention four composers: Bach, Chopin, Mahler, and Shostakovich. Of course, this is not to exclude Beethoven and Mozart but in a poem you can’t have a list of fifteen names. I chose four names which are still quite representative, I think, of what I need in music. Two days ago there was a very moving concert: an alto singer who has MS and cannot move but still can sing. She sang the second movement of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, and it was so moving, this woman who is so sick and still has her voice. This symphony is very dear to me as well.

JG: You talk about your “conservatism,” and since it’s such a fraught and easily misunderstood term, could you explain what you mean by it?

AZ: It’s not really political conservatism — in terms of political divisions I’m more on the left than on the right. My ideal is to be in the very center, but that’s very difficult. Right now we have this stupid national government in Poland, right-wing, and when I look at them, I’m a leftist. And I hate them. My conservatism is more aesthetic. I don’t share this enthusiasm for the avant-garde, which was so overwhelming one hundred years ago. So it’s not so much about social life, it’s more a defense of something we can call “the spiritual,” although I don’t know how to define it. It’s more in the mental sphere, the intellectual sphere.

JG: You write about “metaphysical feelings” or spiritual yearnings. One question is how one responds to such feelings or yearnings outside of traditional religious practice. How does one have a sense of the spiritual outside of formal religious tradition?

AZ: It’s hard to explain. One of the central notions for me is the seriousness of writing, which doesn’t exclude a sense of humor or irony well-applied. This seriousness is a kind of awe in front of the world, and the mystery that’s there. I also notice that my poems attract some religious people, who take me as one of theirs, and I don’t protest (unless they’re fundamentalists, I don’t like fundamentalists). There’s no church to which I go: my church is in my work and my ideas, there’s no building in Krakow which would be my church.

JG: It wasn’t entirely clear to me from the account of your boyhood in Slight Exaggeration: were you raised Catholic?

AZ: My family was lukewarm Catholic, like the majority of the Polish intelligentsia, whose families on the surface were Catholic, but not really. They were rather anti-clerical, which is not a contradiction: you can be religious and anticlerical, of course.

JG: Let me return to politics in a broad sense. You write about the dangers facing any writer: “the greatest misfortune is — was — embracing some fashionable or dominant ideology.” But you immediately add: “But we can’t escape at least partial asphyxiation.” How does a writer become inoculated, at least partially, against ideology?

AZ: Remember that when I was very young, I lived in a Marxist state, where ideology was on every fence, on every newspaper. It was a very good lesson about what ideology is, this way of thinking not controlled by the individual mind. As a teenager, I was not strong enough to resist inwardly. But then, and this is something I don’t actually write about, there’s a kind of education that helps you go outside of it: in my case it was not entirely individual, a big part of my generation underwent this process of leaving behind the ideological positions and being much more critical. This is what was happening in Poland in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a rejection of ideology, and I can say that now I have my defenses, I can see ideology not only in Marxism but in the right-wing thinkers (well, not thinkers, because it’s hard to call this “thinking”), like in the present government in Poland. Building these big schemes instead of going from case to case: these are ideological positions. So this makes me an individualist. Not rejecting society, of course, but rejecting these huge simplifications.

JG: Allow me a mischievous question. Toward the end of the book, you write that a new book of essays “should begin with the author’s admission that he made errors in the earlier book, the conclusions he drew were premature, mistaken, and only now — so he thinks — is he on the right track.” Is there anything in Slight Exaggeration you now feel distance from, that you’d like to revise or qualify?

AZ: It’s a good question. There’s this paradox, when you write a new book, especially if it’s an essay, you think, Oh, now I’ll have a new tone, or, I’ll do something new, and you work under this conviction, and then you finish the book and you find that it’s actually like the other books. You have your voice, and it’s very hard to avoid speaking in this voice. But the simpler answer is no, I don’t revoke anything. It’s more like a feeling of accretion, in the sense of growing. I hope so. You never know if you’re growing or shrinking.

Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration (2017) is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is available from Amazon and other booksellers.

The post Not Settled: An Interview with Adam Zagajewski appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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