"NICHE: A Memoir in Pastiche" by Momus (FSG)

"NICHE: A Memoir in Pastiche" by Momus (FSG)

I'm a massive fan of the memoir, due that the writer usually has to be interesting, good writer, or know how to lie interestingly.  As a reader, I never cared if what I'm reading is the truth or not.  I only care how the narrator tells (writes) the tale.  Momus (Nick Currie) is such a writer that I enjoy going on the journey with him. As a reader, he's the driver, and I'm sitting on the passenger side of the vehicle—the precise reason why I love memoirs.  And Mr. Currie wrote an excellent book. 

Momus has 217 narrators witnessing and telling the tale. All of them are dead and all divine.  What sounds like from a distance just a cute idea, actually works in writing.  Momus uses the voices of writers/artists like Franz Kafka to David Bowie, and beyond.  I counted the narrators and, I didn't know 37 at all.  One of the fun things about "Niche" is that you can google the ones you don't, and it's no extra work, it's a learning experience.  Momus writes through his narrators about his musical career, but even more interesting to me is that he's exceptionally a superb travel writer.  His status as an outsider makes him a voyeur of different cultures, and his writings about Japan I found thrilling.  Mostly due that I lived and visited Japan many times, and I believe we were in the country around the same time.  So I understand what he went through, and it's a game to compare my experiences of Japan with his time there. 

"Niche" reads like a fast-moving Literary Critique, due to the way he sets up the narrative through other voices. The writing is smart, but not over-done.  Like Serge Gainsbourg, in that he is both a masterful writer/lyricist and a composer, he's a jack-of-all-trades and wears all clothing equally well. 

January 17, 2017 (Tosh's Diary)

January 17, 2017

Good news!  My Trump loving friend hooked me up with Stephen Bannon.  I wrote an email to my pal, and he promised to forward it to Bannon.  What I wrote to him was that I'm interested in having him be part of my Board of Directors to sponsor and support my writing.  And as an additional goal of the foundation will be to build a Trump statue in the Sliver Lake Meadows.  He wrote back to me, writing that he would be interested in meeting me, and if it's possible, could I come to the Inauguration this coming Friday.  As a guest of course, but I will have to pay for my flight, hotel bill, food and stuff like that.  But he said that I would be invited to the ball and one of the dinners that will take place that evening.   

I looked at my calendar for January 20, and I see I have nothing planned for that day, except to visit the Glendale Galleria to buy some much-needed socks at UNIQLO.  I checked the 19, and that can be the day for sock shopping, so I wrote back to Bannon and told him yes, I would love to attend.  At this point, my imagination is going beyond excited.  I imagine that over this weekend, I can arrange to have Bannon as part of my board, but also maybe even meet President Trump and perhaps get some funding for the statue.  One of the things I have learned through life is that things can go up and down.  For me, it's mostly down.  But when an 'up' comes or arrives, one has to ride that wild wave that is called life. 

July 4, 2014

July 4, 2014

I can imagine what that boat trip with little Alice Liddell was like.  It seemed innocent enough, but that one little trip probably changed her life forever.  I remember Billy Gray telling me stories as a small child, of episodes from The Twilight Zone.  I saw the actual shows, but the way he told stories was way more effective, which means scary.  The thing is, I think Billy taught me lessons in narration.   Even though I knew how the story ended, it was the journey to the end of that narrative that was the most important to me.  So as I mentioned, I can understand why Alice was so entertained by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson story, but what amazes me is the manner in which Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll came up with such a tale in such short notice. 

When Dodgson told the story to the three little girls on the boat - Alice and her two sisters, he was just trying to amuse them, perhaps out of their boredom of taking this specific boat trip from Folly Bridge near Oxford to the village of Godstow.  In fact, the story is about a bored young girl by the name of Alice.  I always felt that boredom have a role in creating and doing art.  Speaking for myself I find boredom as a great source of inspiration. When Alice requested Dodgson to write down the story, so she can have it, clearly gave him the idea of making a book.  Eventually Dodgson gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of “Alice’s Adventure Under Ground, ” with him doing the illustrations himself.  He inscribed to her “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day.” The version he gave to her was 15,500 words, but he went on to do another version of the narration that’s 27,500 words, where he added the Cheshire Cat and the Mad-Tea Party scene.  

The beauty of Dodgson’s work is how he mixed up the world of pure fantasy. Yet it was inspired by natural science.   In a way he must have been like Sherlock Holmes in figuring out the narrative by what was around him at the time.  Nature usually brings me nothing but dread, but here is a story that is based on a certain type of nature, that to my taste, is a perfect cocktail of a book.  The book works like a great Rube Goldberg machine, which is always elaborate machinery or system to do very simple things.  As a writer, I want to explore my world in such a fashion where I tear up my room and then put it back together again.  But of course, all under my power of observation, which is entirely subjective. 

The TV show “Twilight Zone” had a huge effect on me as a child.  It was the first time that I realized that there may be another sort of world out there, besides the one I’m living in or on.  Billy’s telling me of the stories from the TV show had a profound influence in how I perceived the landscape that lay in front of me.  If you dig around, or look at that world in a certain light, you may find another form of life or perhaps an entrance to another world.  I’m fascinated that the ‘other’ world of “Alice” was all underground.  I think here of the sky or above the sky as being endless, but how far down does the core of the earth go?  Surely it can’t be endless.  In my generation, it comes above, but perhaps in the era that Lewis Carroll lived in, the answer was placed under the ground.  I’m also intrigued by the thought that people when they die, are buried under the ground.  Does death and mad-Tea parties go hand-in-hand?

Alice Liddell appeared to have a long and rather normal life. Yet what must it have been like to be the model for one of the most eminent literary character of all time?  The only thing I can compare what I imagine is her oddness of seeing copies of those books in a bookstore, is seeing my father’s face on the Sgt. Pepper cover in gift shops.  It is part of me, but at the same time it has nothing to do with me.  It is the property of someone else.  Clearly I have an emotional sense of ownership of that image, and Alice was the spark that lead Dodgson to create his masterpiece.  Inspiration comes from all places, and once we know where it comes from, our lives are and will always be affected by the attention one gets that is not from us specifically, but being the son of the artist, and her being on that boat trip, changes everything.