Only a Blockhead

Jay

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: More than forty years on since my last reading, this classic novel is remarkable not so much for its romantic longings as for its emphasis on American violence, its depiction of a country in which California hardly matters and its meeting of the Mid West and East Coast. Plus its succinct nine chapters, its elegant prose and its almost noirish tone: Tom breaking Myrtle's nose would seem to foreshadow Lee Marvin throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat - and the use of flashbacks helps too. I'd like to thank the publicity for the recent film version and my current cold for sending me back to the novel (and my young self). 

-NC Tate

Me on King on Film

Most readers encountering a book called “Under Foreign Eyes: Western Cinematic Adaptations of Postwar Japan” will expect it to contain an interesting claim or claims about these Western representations of Japan, and that the claim or claims will be buttressed by sophisticated analysis of the films.

What we get instead in James King’s book is one plot summary after another for each of the 60-plus films he writes about.

Read the whole thing here.

--David

"I am moved by praise of the world."

Now that I’m in my 60s and realize my time is finite, I’ve started to seek out a genre of book I haven’t read until now: the death memoir. After reading Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality, I’m beginning Tom Lubbock’s Until Further Notice, I’m Alive. I read the following passage just now while lying in the sunshine after lunch, and it’s going in my commonplace book.

I thought fear at the idea of my non-existence would seize me. I find it’s sadness at the idea of loss, parting, those I love, the world, that pierces me. I am moved by praise of the world…. I have no desire for the lifeboat of immortality. The goodness of the world is all I know or can imagine or wish for.

I hope that’s what I’ll feel if I have the chance to anticipate my own death. But isn’t writing a death memoir (or this blog post) a kind of immortality lifeboat?

Lubbock goes on to talk of a “heightened awareness of being a body.” If we had more of that, rather than experiencing ourselves as a consciousness floating on the earth (“my time is finite”), we’d take better care of our world, ourselves.

--Julian

1 Review of 101 Modern Japanese Poems

When a new anthology of American poetry appears — The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove is just one of the recent examples — voices are inevitably raised over the editor’s selections and rejections, and sometimes over whether a new anthology of poetry from a period already well-surveyed is necessary at all. These arguments inspire some fiery polemics, and one can see why. Such questions — whether poet A is deserving of space when poet B gets none; whether the collection as a whole tells a story about the work surveyed that is compelling and new — are eminently worth debating, and one imagines that such discussions took place when Makoto Ooka edited the Japanese version of this anthology in the late 1990s.

That's from my review of 101 Modern Japanese Poems, translated by Paul McCarthy.  Read the rest here.

Speculative Japan 3

One pleasing quality of the third volume of Kurodahan Press's "Speculative Japan" series of anthologies is that it exists at all.

That's from my review of the third entry in Kurodahan's Speculative Japan series of anthologies.  Read it all here.

--David

Midwinter morning

Heavy frost; white Fuji

 Christopher Grant La Farge (1862-1938) (Wikimedia Commons)

Waking up to the house one degree above freezing, I realize that the refrigerator is keeping my orange juice warm.

 *   *   *

As fellow Blockhead David once suggested, letters make excellent reading in bed before falling asleep. I’m now on Volume III of The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. Last night (p. 126) found H-D busy editing Oscar Wilde’s letters, and sharing some of the wit of Wilde’s book reviews for Pall Mall Gazette:

"Andiatorocte" is the title of a volume of poems by the Rev. Clarence Walworth, of Albany, N.Y. It is a word borrowed from the Indians, and should, we think, be returned to them as soon as possible.  

--Julian

Best Asia-Related Books

My three best Asia-related books of the year appeared in today's Japan Times.  There are links to my colleagues' choices there, too.

—David

Superflat

It may once have been radical to note that an artist's work is, in significant part, determined by the society and time into which he or she is born. Now it is commonplace. Thus, one is happy to learn that Favell is a sociologist and that he has given us "a sociologist's account of the contemporary Japanese art world today."

That's from my review of Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011 by Adrian Favell.  Read the rest here.

—David

A moon so beautiful

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / beth woodrum

Tonight a moon so beautiful

it explains why

James Attlee wrote Nocturne

 

--Julian

Throw out the baby (Jesus) but keep the bathwater

In a recent Guardian book review, Richard Holloway considers Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Holloway notes that the picture of the universe that science presents “leaves some of us with a kind of resonant absence” (what Buddhist philosopher David Loy terms “lack”).

 Spufford, feeling an existential need for forgiveness, decides that (Holloway’s summary), “Christianity, with its doctrine of unconditional acceptance, makes emotional sense.” He doesn’t know if there is a god, but sometimes “can feel that there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if he’s there.”

 One reason for Spufford’s gut-feeling flight to religion seems to be modern atheism’s tendency, in Holloway’s words, “to bundle up all expressions of religion in the same ugly blanket before throwing it off a cliff.” Spufford’s wish for forgiveness can’t be denied, but does it have to lead to “he,” she, or a chorus line of elephants with pink toenails?

 No, says Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists. de Botton poses the question--blindingly obvious once asked--of why humans invented religions in the first place. He answers,

we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

 Taking many of his examples from Judaism and Christianity, de Botton shows how religion has skillfully scratched humanity’s itch for tenderness, kindness and forgiveness, while encouraging our better natures, through myth, ritual, prayer, architecture, art and education. He then—and this is the brilliance of the book--goes on suggest ways that we might satisfy these needs through often similar secular initiatives.

 de Botton thinks that current education is failing us by not teaching us how to live. He is one of the founders of The School of Life, a UK institution designed to fill that gap. Another founding faculty member, Roman Krznaric recently gave an interview in which he discusses the school.  

--Julian