Dear Marukami san,
I love you, but … WHAT HAPPENED WITH KAFKA ON THE SHORE?
True, Mr Nakata has an excellent character, and his first conversation with Otsuka, the “elderly black tomcat,” is very enjoyable. And the episode with the school teacher having an erotic dream of her husband and it all getting mixed up in her mind with her period starting, the young boy finding the bloodied towels she’s hidden in the woods and her subsequent shock and shame is masterful.
But Marukami san, what about the rest? That you, the author of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart, should have had anything to do with this tottering wreck … well, it pains me.
Marukami san, I know how much you are fascinated by time, just like me. And yet, Marukami san, you let me spend a week of my life with this dunce of a boy, Kafka Tamura, and both of us know it’s a week I’m never getting back!!!
Please, Marukami san, ease off on the marathons and buckle under when you write your next.
Respectfully yours,
Ms Solid Gold
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He wrote like a radical in favour of the moderate.
– David Kaufmann writing in Tablet, Jan 20, 2010, about Jacques Derrida.
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“Meanjin” is an Aboriginal word meaning “rejected by The New Yorker.”
– Susan Johnson writing in The Age about the Australian literary journal.
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And finally this month, I read Elena Vosnaki writing in her excellent blog, Perfume Shrine.
‘One day soon you may be able to capture a fragrance snapshot of your environment and send it attached to a text message or email.’ Thus begins the fantasy of digitalised scents, the elusive captured into pixels that can be stored and transmitted, a concept that up till very recently seemed as wild as colonising Alpha Centaur with men.
Yes, that’s right. It’s “teleolfaction.” Move over iPad and iPod; soon, there’s going to be iSmell.
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First, Bravely spoken re Murakami-san. But don’t talk that way at the local Starbucks unless you want to be branded as a hopeless boor.
Second, Kaufmann quote about Derrida–as ambiguous as Derrida. (‘ambiguous’ being a euphemism in this case.)
Third. Teleolfaction. As I’ve said before, just because technology lets you do something, doesn’t mean you should!
ha ha, good thing I don’t visit Starbucks. Yes, teleolfaction sounds deeply, deeply wrong :) SGx
“…..teleolfaction sounds deeply, deeply wrong…..”
Why?
When you read of coffee bubbling in a pot, wouldn’t you like to smell roasting coffee? When you read of sea crashing on to a beach, wouldn’t you like to smell salty sea spray?
Have you ever smelled a smell which you associate with an experience in your childhood, and when you smell it as a grown-up you are immediately propelled back to that childhood experience? And don’t you find that experience cathartic?
As sight and sound can be pleasant or unpleasant, so can smell. But unlike with sight and sound, smell, in our contemporary society, is by default unpleasant.
So when we say someone smells, or an animal smells, what we mean is that the smell is bad, and our listeners assume this. If we meant to portray that the smell is pleasant, we specifically say this.
Think also that, through applying deodorants, we have proscribed the natural smell emanating from the human body. Is this is not as bizarre as applying something so that humans can neither be seen nor heard by any others?
Bring on teleolfaction, is what I say.
The biggest objection I have is that it is one more example of a technology application which will make humanity even more mentally passive. Movies and TV (not to mention video games) have had a measured adverse impact on young peoples’ imaginations. Reading is boring because it is too much work. Now we won’t even have to imagine how “the new mown grass” smells.
A secondary objection, but by no means the last, is that it is another way to deliver manipulative advertising.
As SGC says, deeply, deeply wrong.
Exactly. The prospect of even more passivity is frightening. Plus, it’s the elusiveness and evanescence of odour that is part of its very being. Odour wouldn’t be odour if it was permanent and on-demand.
I want to smell salty sea spray when the sea is spraying, and when I’m reading, the odour of paper.
smell the sense most closely linked to memories. have you picked up “Remembrance of Things Past” yet?
i wonder what that book would be like if ismell existed at the time of its writing?
Ha ha, yes, what a thought. Smell of tea cakes on page one, yeh? It’s next on my list.