In March of 2006, it was pretty much irrefutably determined by freedarko that BASKETBALL IS NOT JAZZ, with a few exceptions.In a brilliant essay in yesterday's New York Times, Haruki Murakami convinced me that WRITING IS JAZZ, or at least it's music. My favorite part:
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.Now if I could only get through one of his books.
2 comments:
I love murakami. I even read part of one of his kid's books in Japanese. I'm waiting to read Kafka until I am plum out of things to read and need a big one.
As for And Then We Came to The End, that was a book I couldn't get through. I kept waiting for it to start. Uhg. I'm glad you like it though.
I like "And Then We Came To The End." Maybe because I long for the intra-office interactions tht are lacking at my job in which I am holed up alone in a small (soon to be bigger) office. Of course I'm only at page 100
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