Junk Journal Week Five

I am close to catching up with my junk journal and will soon be posting once a week. This slower pace should give me more time to reflect as I compile the artifacts, drawings, and ephemera that become future entries.

I saw that it is possible to buy material just for journals on Amazon and elsewhere. I am trying to include materials that have some personal meaning. I have become interested in collage recently. I checked out a few picture books from the library for inspiration. Today's duck is based on a duck I saw in the late Eric Carle's book The Nonsense Show.

A few words about this week's reading.

Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li is her latest book, a collection of stories. I think this book would appeal to serious people who think grief and suffering are underexplored aspects in contemporary fiction. I really enjoyed her earlier novel The Book of Goose; this book is great.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is a novel about a toxic relationship between a fifty something man and a ninteen year old woman in 1980s East Germany. Certainly one could read the novel as metaphor of the decay and rot of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The language is quite subtle and beautiful especially for a book that goes so deeply into an ugly subject.

In addition, at least in my English translation, Erpenbeck has great prose style. Here is a section I noted:

Beauty as a Trojan horse? That's not enough. And it's a trick. The contents are not cut-and-dried, art is a process, not a product. Beauty needs to be interwoven with truth. What you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same. As for that beauty, the poet said it is only the beginning of terror anyway. The contradictory nature of beauty. The searching that gives beauty its profundity. The joy of digging under the surface. The joy of questioning. The connection, therefore, between artist and working-class public is one that depends on the shared experience of work. At shift's end? One word leads to another. Certainly, art has nothing to do with a happy ending ...

 

I have been interested in Etgar Keret for years because of his many appearances on the radio show This American Life. This book is a collection of short stories set in modern Israel, translated into English. The audiobook features a celebrity narrator, a different one for each story; the first is read by Ira Glass, the final one read by Keret, himself. The stories have a very earthy, sweaty quality. More than one story ends with the protagonist being punched in the face, yet, somehow Keret is funny. I do not enjoy seeing violence in real life, but, when done well, it can be a good subject for fiction writers.  I read his memoir Seven Good Years a couple years and I also recommend it. Keret is an author worth following, at least in my opinion.