Fen Bischoff

Doctoral Candidate, Teacher, Artist

Recent Ramblings

  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold

    This book makes me want to write fanfiction (derogatory).

    It is uncommon, honestly, for me to hate something that someone has made with earnest effort, even if I find it unpleasant, grotesque, or even insensitive. In fact, if it isn’t virulently hateful or supremacist, or utterly thoughtless, I find most of the art that humans make is wonderful in some way. But beyond a sprinkling of misogyny and a very standard universalist supremacism—both of which I shall get into—this book is uncommon in that it doesn’t fall in my usual wheelhouse of detestable media.

    I do think this book perhaps shouldn’t exist, but it’s with the oddly gentle sense of wishing that that fly hadn’t got in my apartment, or that I hadn’t broken that glass, or that the city hadn’t removed that stop sign at that one intersection. It’s almost bewilderingly inoffensive, which makes my own ire feel bewilderingly aggressive.

    The premise is that one may go back in time and have a conversation with someone they choose, but they can only talk for as long as it takes for a cup of coffee to get cold. There are more rules, which Kawaguchi explores quite exhaustively, but I don’t care about those. The premise is a bit twee, but I tend to eat that shit up. I love cute and cheesy and saccharine things. The chapters are titled accordingly, centered around the people having the conversations: the lovers, the husband and wife, the sisters, the mother and child.

    I assumed, mistakenly, that the chapters would center around those conversations, but they didn’t. Most of the book seemed to be explaining the rules of the time-travel, a tad repetitively. It was like the book equivalent of being “on a second-screen,” as if the writer did not trust me to be paying total attention to the story he was writing. In a similar vein: the other chunk of each chapter was dedicated to explaining what the relationships of each of the chapters’ characters looked like in very expository, even simplistic, ways.

    A skillful writer, I think, might be able to convey the matter of the characters’ relationships through the conversations themselves. After all, the 20 or so minutes that one has before one’s coffee gets cold is limited, but somehow is much longer than Kawaguchi seems to think. 20 minutes gives one a lot of space with which to talk, and gives the writer in turn a lot of room to explore voice, communication, pride and love in tandem. If I think of writing as art-craft, it seems like an exciting challenge, in a way—like writing an aubade, or a sonnet.

    Alas, that was not Kawaguchi’s style, I suppose. He seemed to wish to convey a rushedness, a panic at not using one’s limited time well. This could be quite poignant; the restrictions, the rules, of life are transformed through this premise to clearly reveal the wasteful ways that we treat our present moments—our chance at meaningful moments and conversations dwindle to nothing as we see time as an endless resource, until it is jarringly brought to our attention. But, if that were the book’s aim, I wish it had been quite a bit shorter; it also doesn’t hold with the texture of the writing, which was otherwise quite chipper. The dissolution of a meaningful conversation into panic did not, in other words, feel intentional—it felt instead that Kawaguchi wrote without thinking much at all.

    The conversations between the lovers, the spouses, the sisters, the mother & child, would extend about three to four very, very short pages, and I found myself begging at least one of the conversation partners to please sit down! Please talk with one another! I ought to be more careful about what I wish for, however, because the conversations were all quite bare of voice, of unique expression. This isn’t to say that Mrs. Fusagi isn’t conscientious, and Kei isn’t bubbly, and Kazu isn’t restrained; we know these women are these things, because the writer so kindly tells us in prose. Dialogue veers into arenas of stock-response, with very little friction or love lost between the characters.

    I begged for wisdom, for connectedness, for the writer to show me something. Conversations can be wandering and wonderful and strange, but there was so bewilderingly little that was strange in BtCGC. I think Kawaguchi was aiming for universalism before anything, which diminished the possibility of anything delightful or even wise into nothing. Every sister should see herself in this book, which means that the characters are so very flat, the relationship so simply devoted, that there’s not a thread of color to either sister, despite one of them dressing garishly.

    I’m not entirely sure the writer trusts women to be capable of showing something to anyone, despite a plethora of women characters in his text. There’s a kind of prescriptiveness to the relationships that I find a bit disturbing; wives act this way, mothers act this way, sisters act this way, a girl in love acts this way. They are all a bit stupid.

    The three men of the novel are afforded a depth that the women are not—they get anecdotes, you see. Goro is passionate, intense, committed to his work, and promises to return to his lover (who keens after him, sobbing at the cafe in a skirt and shirt that reveals her nice figure [17]). We know this because we read about a time when he worked without sleep for days to fix a bug in a code that needed repairing. Nagare, the coffee shop manager, is somewhat quiet, is committed to his craft, and is deeply caring and is strong. We know this because once he was hit by a truck, careened through a window and got covered in wounds, but the first thing he did was get up and ask if the driver was ok. Mr. Fusagi has Alzheimer’s, and is polite, a bit closed off, and had a bit of a grouchy exterior outside a heart of gold when he was well. We know this because he loves gardens, and would caretake them. He would even take his wife travelling with him to see gardens, because he wanted to show her the things he loves.

    Women, alas, don’t get anecdotes that aren’t directly related to their relationships; it was like watching a story fail the Bechdel test despite men being so outnumbered, and not even being the center of two of the conversations. Every time-travel is initiated by women, you see—because women, it seems, live for relationships, and men live.

    —

    One woman in this novel, remarkably, has a hobby. It’s Kazu, a server at the cafe. She makes pencil drawings in a hyperrealistic style, keeping her gaze unobtrusive, impartial, her voice shushed through objectivity.

    …her own feelings didn’t form part of the filter through which she interacted with the world. Whatever happened, she tried not to influence it by keeping herself at a safe distance. That was Kazu’s place—it was her way of life. (242)

    It is not lost on me that her art is perhaps the most inoffensive thing possible. It is also somehow without voice, without any friction that would avail interpretation. Preceding this passage is a discussion of Picasso’s artistic evolution from realism into abstraction, which gives the reader a sense that Kazu has the psyche of a very gifted child, failing to understand that artists inherently have a perspective and an influence on their surrounding world.

    I think this is a universalist error, human in the ways that human is a supremacist category. Women are not full adult persons, even when they are talented and intelligent. We can learn from them as we learn from children, simple and errant but revealing in their errors. Conversations are human and so are universal and so are generic, because all that colors the perspective of the novel itself is universalist in its structure. The human, without insanity or queerness or feeling beyond affection, meddles with time, sips her coffee, and waits. The men fail to connect, to desire—they will never learn from her.

  • I saw NAZA last Wednesday

    It was dreadful to watch, and was excellently made.

    Visually: the footage of homes, of rooftops and parks in Tel Aviv—the strange nationalistic rhetoric everywhere, inundating the imagery. Through windows, we see people lounging in their apartments, watching TV, keeping the “normal” possible— at one point the camera catches a pair of hands gently brushing crumbs off a table into cupped palms, the mundane actions of home. Slouched, supine, with little dogs in the lap, barefoot sole slapping the floor as one pads from living room to kitchen.

    We witness Israeli homes to be distinct, however, in their imbrication of nationalism, of hatred, of fascism, in their comfy spaces. It glows on their news-aganda screens. They sprawl like big cats on their soft couches, despite Israelis being told incessantly that they are the unsafe ones. They can thus turn every Palestinian home into a node of wartime. The vulnerability and safety of resting, forcing one to think of the ways that Palestinian home is never a place to rest, to be safe, to be privately one’s own. The open hypocrisy of going home on stolen land and having a normal evening inundates every trace, every comment and atrocity, punctuating the rooftops. (I think I ought remember this as a white American, too.)

    The journalist’s questions were unflinching. When discussing those who could not evacuate in Gaza, he asked after disabled people, asked if the interviewees felt—if they knew—they’d participated in a genocide.

    An unexpected evil that this film revealed: the artificial intelligence called “Lavender”. When discussing the information model that decided which Palestinians to target and strike, it was called a tool—an oddly frustrating misnomer. Most people understand a hammer, or a saw, or a lathe. That could not be said for Lavender. The “algorithms”are  not understood by the people that made them, eschewing everyone of accountability as it selects lists of people “tied” to Hamas in some way, somehow. It was specified to be nonspecific.

    The thing that enrages me, that made me want to rip my hair out and leave blood on my poor Alamo seat, was the realization that the list will always be posthumously justified. Their categorization, their militaristic affiliation, their guilt, will always be determined after a person’s selection, not before. The model was given loose parameters—whoever’s phone has been in “contact” with something something something Hamas related—and so phone numbers are selected, with the assumption that the computer is a magic box, selecting through something of a higher order, a higher understanding, the guilt attributed not through evidence but through something worse than stochasm, worse than staticism. Through the barest thread of connection, a network that works in seven degrees of separation, making every phone interaction suspicious, rendering EVERY LAST PALESTINIAN GUILTY.

    The most prolific killers in Israel are cosmopolitan, “leftist”—according to an interviewee—and elite, in ultra-modern Tel Aviv. They feel distant from the “war,” a whole 40ish miles from Gaza and atop the homes of others, and they believe in their distance. “We’re not Arab-haters,” said one; “But you’re responsible for the most deaths out of any Israeli,” said the journalist. Isn’t that fascinating, and nauseating. The leftist, the liberal, the cosmopolitan, using the blameless and sleek algorithms, & treating Palestinian deaths like a video game.

    I wonder why these people would agree to be interviewed. One admitted he knew it was a genocide, and he had no moment of realization about that fact. While in the IDF, he merely took simple joy in “getting the job done,” in it “being like a video game.” He described the destruction of homes, the killing of families, as “enjoyable, very enjoyable.”

    They would estimate the numbers they’d killed and, I suspect, wildly underestimate. One man realized he was killing people after seeing footage of 3- and 6-year-old daughters that he snuffed out. An accident of seeing too much, too closely, an abnormality slipped into the cracks of a normal day. Israeli normal, we see, is a nationalistic, empty, supremacist screed. A nothingness accompanied by mindlessness, by a divorce from accountability of all kinds. It is from a white supremacist playbook. It is the flattening of Palestinian humanity, language, into a demonization of PEACE itself, of shared humanity. Supremacists, not sane, will stop their cars in the middle of the road to salute people, for the purpose of annihilating others. Then they’ll get back in their cars and go home to watch more bullshit about how Israel has a right to exist.

    It was a good choice, I feel, to end Naza with a Palestinian father and husband, calling for his entire family, dead in the rubble. And it was the worst choice possible. “My love,” he cried. “Salma. My love, I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. My son, my son, where are you? Where are you? I can’t hear you. I told you to look after your sister. I told you to look after your sister.” I thought my eyes would fall out.

  • On Making a Website

    I think everything I live for and do is anathema to professionalization. A website was something I was told to make years ago–and I knew it was a good idea at the time. It is still a good idea. I’m almost certain.  

    Yet, I’m unsure about the public-facing-ness, the advertising, of it all. My latest article rejection named my writing as “unconventional”, as “wandering,” as unclear. Not exactly the most marketable of styles, even among academics. Granted, I wanted the piece to question the hierarchies of knowledge and genres of knowledge-making, particularly when scholars write about disability. It continues a trend of mine wherein I tend to question—or clumsily challenge—the premises of the journals, websites, publications in my works. (I recall a job rejection from a medical humanities journal after my cover letter stated all the ways I find medical humanities disquieting but promising.) 

    I fear I might be a bit stupid. I worry this website will defeat the purpose of web-life, of interconnectedness and clarity and networks, because…as with my latest attempted article, as with my misguided job application, I don’t know if I can accept this as a sole repository of my works, my professional accomplishments. I want to update these ramblings, a professional diary. Something a bit embarrassing in its earnestness. A bit strange in its mechanisms.