Mrs Tsk *

This Marie Calloway interview with Momus in The Rumpus has a lot going on in it, but I want to highlight just one theme: my emerging tendency to see what once might have looked like conflicts as productive dialectics.

I mention, for instance, how a North European Protestant mindset might produce both the UK tabloids and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and later how the Japanese manga industry is capable of producing both the clichés of its most formulaic conventions and the originality of Yuichi Yokoyama. This relates to The Arrow and the Frame, a breakthrough Click Opera entry inspired by — of all things — Google AdWords, but also to what T.S. Eliot called Tradition and the Individual Talent:

“Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.”