Twee Magazine

"The Pillow Book" by Sei Shōnagon.

I realize that by including Sei Shōnagon's "The Pillow Book," I am expanding the definition of twee and pushing it back by about a thousand years (the book was published in 1002). But I have said before that I think the sensibility we now call twee has existed for a long time, in a variety of forms, and the contemporary idea of tweeness is just the newest iteration. "The Pillow Book," which mostly consists of a series of lists of the author's aesthetic reactions to her world, nowadays reads as twee.

Sei Shōnagon had her own word, and she uses it throughout the book, relentlessly, so much so that modern translators choose to use a variety of synonyms so as not to sound repetitive. That word is okashi, which translates as "amusing" or "delightful." Translator Meredith McKinney describes the words as follows;

Okasi is much more than a matter of merely  private and transient responsiveness. It is in essence a kind of aesthetic response, one that can be cultivated and honed, which delights itself by its awareness of the frisson of pleasure that an object or moment produces, and whose pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that it would be shared by others of cultured sensibility.

It should be noted that contemporary American twee sensibilities already borrows from Japanese sensibilities, particularly kawaii, which represents a sort of squealing delight in cuteness that finds its purest expression in America in Zooey Deschanel's character on "The New Girl."

But okashi is an older sensibility, and deliberately refined. Sei Shōnagon liked poetry -- a lot. "The Pillow Book" repeatedly offers stories of spontaneously composed poems, often by the author, and how delighted people were to hear them. Sometimes these poems are challenges, intended to be answered by another poem, which Sei Shōnagon has a particular talent for.

She also likes clothes, and talks about them frequently, and sometimes likes and sometimes doesn't like fine art (she tells a story of hiding from an especially graphic collection of images of hell). Sei Shōnagon was part of the court culture in 11th century Japan, acting as a court lady to the empress, and much of her writing is about the activities in the palace.

But okashi encompasses much more than a cloistered world of fine arts, fashion, and court politics. Just about anything can produce a reaction of delight from the author: the way a group of women lean out of a carriage, the voice of a priest reading out a prayer, birds rising from a pond. Sei Shōnagon seems to go through her life looking for experiences that give her a little ripple of pleasure, and then documents them in lists, which then expand to stories. Her tastes can be strange and contradictory, and, when her pleasure is interrupted, she can be hilariously irritable. She is as bothered by a sleepy exorcist as she is by someone who disturbs a sleepy exorcist, and she cannot abide the sounds of barking dogs or crying children.

The Japanese court seems especially prankish in Sei Shōnagon's telling, sometimes alarmingly (the book starts by describing a puckish tendency of courtiers to just smack each other, which was treated as hilarious by everyone except whoever got smacked), sometimes filled with whimsey. There is a long sequence dedicated to the members of court betting how long a mountain of snow will last, and Sei Shōnagon offers a suggestion that seems absurdly long, but then the mountain just lasts and lasts and lasts, and everyone grows slightly hysterical about the subject.

Okashi seems to have been considered to be as shallow and inconsequential in Sei Shōnagon's era as twee is today: "Tales of the Geni" author Murasaki Shikibu called Sei Shōnagon "ridiculous and superficial," and the books was parodied in the Edo Period in a book titled "The Dog Pillow," which borrowed Sei Shōnagon's tendency to list things, but with a sharp comic sensibility, such as:

Things One Would Like to Send Away

An old wife.
Someone who appears in the middle of a conversation.
A beggar standing at the gate.
The officious parent of one's boy favorite.
A woman who falls asleep after making love.

Even though the "Dog Pillow" is making fun of Sei Shōnagon's sensibilities, the parody somehow manages to be equally twee. The parody, after all, fulfills on of Sei Shōnagon's main requirements: It is delightful.

"Twee," by Marc Spitz.

Marc Spitz's "Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film" wasn't that well received when it came out, and I think the criticisms of the book were fair. Spitz argues that twee (which he always capitalizes) is a legitimate youth movement, a sort of softer version of punk (also capitalized). He places its spiritual center in Brooklyn and creates a cultural narrative for its creation, as Greil Marcus did for punk rock in "Lipstick Traces." Spitz sees twee as originating with a number of artists in response to the horrors of World War II, including Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and J.D. Salinger.

Critics have accused Spitz of overreaching, in part because he includes such unlikely characters in his story of twee as Anne Frank and Kurt Cobain. He early on points out that while everything twee is indie, not everything indie is twee, and then proceeds to ignore his own warning. It all reads as sort of wrong to me, but, then, it may be that we're defining the word twee differently. The Brooklyn hipster scene doesn't strike me as essentially twee, and of every name on the list above, I think only Salinger really fits my definition, although Disney, Seuss, and Cobain had twee moments. (Anne Frank, in the meanwhile? No.)

But, then, I don't think twee is a movement. Not yet, at least, and it may never be. Twee seems more like we have taste buds for aesthetic taste, and some flavors of art and culture just sort of taste twee to us, if you will. There's never really been an overarching movement called "cool," either, but there's a sort of loose consensus around the idea of coolness, and there are artists who are self-consciously cool.

There was cool art before we had the word cool --  Gene Sculatti's 1982 book "The Catalog of Cool" included decadent literature and the philosopher Heraclitus. But "cool" is sufficiently loose an aesthetic to include things that predated the word, because they influenced the modern idea of cool, or they strike modern observers as cool. It's the same way with twee, and so, if one criticism of Spitz's book is that he overreached, I think it is fair to say he underreached as well. His history of twee extensively details the post punk and indie world -- competently, I would say -- but virtually never touches on the arty rock music of the 60s, or children's music from the 40s, or singing cowboys, or any of the myriad other musical forms that seem twee nowadays.

His placing the origin of twee at the end of World War II feels like an invented history to me. Yes, Salinger saw action, and Dr. Seuss ran the animation department for the US Air Force, and Walt Disney likewise made animated movies for the war effort. But only Salinger seemed strongly influenced by his military experiences, and, as I have said before, while Disney and Seuss may have influenced modern twee art, their influence hardly feels dominant. The work of Charles Schulz -- especially the splendid animated television shorts based on Peanuts -- is far more locked into the DNA of modern twee art, and while Schulz was in World War II, he barely experienced combat, never fired a gun, and mostly oversaw surrendering German forces. His work is far more influenced by his childhood and young adulthood in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(While I may simply feel this way because I am a native Minneapolitan, Minnesota's Twin Cities strike me as being more essentially twee than Brooklyn. I mean, our minor league baseball team is owned by twee godfather Bill Murray, for Pete's sakes.)

But this may be a product of differing definitions. Spitz may, in fact, have done a bang-up job breaking down the influences that go into the making of a sort of Brooklyn hipster. If you think Lena Dunham is inherently twee, then, yes, this book may offer some insights into the world of people like her. Even still, it feels lacking. I'll note that crafting has exploded in Brooklyn, and while the book occasionally mentions Etsy, it fails to offer a history of the growth of this hobby, or that it was largely instigated by women in the Pacific Northwest.

Although Spitz recognizes that some of the criticisms of twee come from people who consider it somehow unmanly, he nonetheless focuses on the sort of arts that have largely been dominated by men and neglects those primarily associated with women. So not only does crafting get short-shrifted, but fan art, online cartooning, Tumble-blogging, the rise of the confessional journal, and other examples of creative spaces claimed by women go unexplored, despite the fact that there is as much twee to be found here as anywhere else. Admittedly, any book on a single subject will leave something out just for the sake of space, but, honestly, if you write a chapter on Kurt Cobain and neglect to even mention Kate Beacon's "Hark a Vagrant," you're working with a definition of twee I don't understand. And there's no Lynda Barry at all. I just, I really don't, it just doesn't.

To Spitz's credit, however, he seems to be the first to notice a sea change and to attempt to capitalize on it: It does feel as though we are exiting a time when artists were accidentally twee and entering a time when they are self-consciously twee. The building blocks of twee art are established enough that somebody can create a new assemblage from them, making, as an example, a film about unhappy but precious children and unhappy and childlike adults featuring an indie soundtrack of music made by wistful nerds, arch dialogue, and stylized camerawork borrowed from the French New Wave by way of Wes Anderson, and there you have it: A film that perfectly mimics twee affectations and ignores content. There are a lot of movies like this nowadays, and they're not often good. For every genuinely great film, like "Submarine," there are five passable films, like "Juno" and a hundred mediocre ones, like "100 Days of Summer."

That's generally how it goes in art, especially when art has a signature quality that is easy to ape but hard to duplicate. Sometimes art doesn't survive this sort of transition, moving from a fringe aesthetic to a popular one to a marketing ploy. I don't know how twee will fare -- at its worst, it can be mindlessly cutesy poo, and at its best it can be aestheticized in a way that many find irritating or alienating.

Nonetheless, it has been correctly identified as a genuine taste, and that sort of thing tends to have legs. After all, we didn't really recognize umami until 1985, even if we were nonetheless tasting it (and fearing that taste, as demonstrated by the hysteria over monosodium glutamate). Now it's hard to imagine cooking without factoring in this decidedly savory flavor.

In the same way, twee has been around for a long time, even if we have just given it a name. It may be that it falls on the dustbin of aesthetics, like kitsch or schmaltz, but I find that unlikely -- too many artists have found twee useful in interesting ways for it to be completely disregarded. But the history of twee is still being written, and its prehistory is still being discovered, despite what Marc Spitz might think.