Only a Blockhead

So You Want to Be a Writer . . .

Gary Snyder:

I always told my students at Davis that they should read all the major poets in the English language from the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English on - it's not that huge a body of work. Just do it. And then become acquainted with continental poetry in translation and in one or more languages that you have learned to read. Look at the great poetic traditions of India and East Asia. And look at the songs and poems that pre-date the invention of writing. That's for starters.

(From an interview with Snyder conducted by Pam Jung and posted here.)

Kenzaburo Oe:

When I was in my twenties, my mentor Jazuo Watanabe told me that because I was not going to be a teacher or a professor of literature, I would need to study by myself. I have two cycles: a five-year rotation, which centers on a specific writer or thinker; and a three-year rotation on a particular theme. I have been doing that since I was twenty-five. I have had more than a dozen of the three-year periods. When I am working on a single theme, I often spend from morning to evening reading. I read everything written by that writer and all of the scholarship on that writer’s work.

If I am reading something in another language, say Eliot’s Four Quartets, I spend the first three months reading a section such as “East Coker” over and over again in English until I have it memorized. Then I find a good translation in Japanese and memorize that. Then I go back and forth between the two — the original in English and the Japanese translation — until I feel I am in a spiral that consists of the English text, the Japanese text, and myself. From there Eliot emerges.

(From a Paris Review interview with Oe, a snippet of which I found here.)

--David

Jinja (Shrine)

Throughout Japan in spots felt to be sacred, or in spots made sacred by their presence, there are Shinto shrines. Some are large with magnificent buildings, and busy with acolytes and priests. These are places to visit at New Year and festival times. But what does "sacred" mean in a religion that has no object of worship? Perhaps it means the quintessence of nature, and this is more easily experienced away from the bustle of organized religion. Indeed, most shrines are solitary, seemingly forgotten on a mountain, hillside, cliff top or in a grove of trees: an unpainted wooden room on stilts, often just large enough to house guardian foxes, a dais and a mirror. A place on the margins of civilized life. A place where children go to play.

Large or small, a shrine is often approached by stone steps and always through a characteristic, often vermilion, torii archway gate. In front of all but the smallest there is an offertory box and a thick rope hanging above it to grasp and shake and rattle the bells and rouse the invisible gods (and they are invisible, as Philip Pullman points out, because they don't exist). We approach to ask for what we need to sustain life: a bountiful harvest, a good catch, a thriving business.

To move from one place to another in Japan is to encounter a shrine. Passing the gateway, or passing through it, is a pleasure both gentle and profound, perhaps because it calls us to forget our self-obsession for a moment and to experience—Pullman again--"awe and mystery" in the face of nature that we are a part of and which we depend upon. To pray in such a place and in such a way is to submit ourselves to the natural world.

Forgotten shrine
Alive with the shouts of children
Vine climbs the red gate

--Julian

Hope

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

David Harvey

The widening gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all) and realization (the benefit of a small ruling class) is now all too visible.  The idea that the market is about competition and fairness is increasingly negated by the fact of the extraordinary monopolization, centralization, and internationalization of corporate and financial power.  The startling increase in class and regional inequalities both within states (such as China, Russia, India, and Southern Africa) and internationally between states poses a serious political problem that can no longer be swept under the rug as something 'transitional' on the way to a perfected neoliberal world.  The more neoliberalism is recognized as a failed utopian rhetoric masking a successful project for the restoration of ruling-class power, the more the basis is laid for a resurgence of mass movements voicing egalitarian political demands and seeking economic justice, fair trade, and greater economic security.

—David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism

One can only hope.

See my brief review of Harvey's brief history here, and read a short interview with Harvey here.

—David

Islam from the Bus

Islam from the Bus

—NC Tate

The first day of spring

Snow blanketed most of Kanto last Sunday. After shoveling the driveway, I put on a paper devil's mask and was driven out of the house by a shower of beans.

On cue for the official first day of spring, the earliest red plum blossoms have opened, bringing a sudden shock of scent to the air nearby.

At sunrise earlier this week, the last of the moon brushed the horizon.

Crescent low in the dawn sky
Without glasses, I mail my sweetheart:
"moom"

--Julian

Thinking the Unthinkable

In an ongoing attempt to educate myself (and to resist an ingrained tendency to spend every reading minute immersed in fiction, essays, and poetry) I've recently been tackling, with a surprising amount of pleasure, books like David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.  Consider, to offer just a couple of examples gleaned from this morning's reading, these snippets:

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

David Harvey

  . . . the lack [in explanations of why neoliberalism develops differently in different places] of any examination of the class forces that might be at work is quite startling.  The possibility, for example, that the ruling ideas might be those of some ruling class is not even considered, even though there is overwhelming evidence for massive interventions on the part of business elites and financial interests in the production of ideas and ideologies: through investments in think-tanks, in the training of technocrats, and in the command of the media.

or this:

But one persistent fact within this complex history of uneven neoliberalization has been the universal tendency to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in any society--be it in Indonesia, Mexico, or Britain--to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization.  While such a trend has been ameliorated here and there by social policies, the effects at the other end of the social spectrum have been quite spectacular.  The incredible concentrations of wealth and power that now exist in the upper echelons of capitalism have not been seen since the 1920s.  The flows of tribute to the world's major financial centers have been astonishing.  What, however, is even more astonishing is the habit of treating all of this as a mere and in some instances even unfortunate byproduct of neoliberalization.  The very idea that this might be--just might be--the fundamental core of what neoliberalization has been about all along appears unthinkable.  It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centers of global capitalism.

Bracing!

--David

Imagine That!

Many Americans Living Within Their Means

It didn't quite make it above the fold, but this startling headline appeared on the front page of today's International Herald Tribune.

"What we have is what we have," one woman complains. "We have to rely on the money that we're bringing in."

Shocking!

More on this unprecedented phenomenon here.

--David

Guitar

Guitar

—NC Tate

Steven Runciman

Yes, as David mentioned in the previous post, Steven Runciman was a relative on my mother's side. I never met him, and so wish I had. When he died in 2000, he was rewarded with an obituary in The Times as colorful as he apparently was. Of his time at Cambridge,

His rooms in Nevile's Court were famous for their French 1820s grisaille wallpaper, depicting Cupid and Psyche, and his exquisite bric-a-brac. He kept a green parakeet called Benedict, which he use to spank with a pencil for misdemeanours. He was already immensely grand, and loved socialising. As well as books and pictures... he collected anecdotes and people, and the names in his gossip did not so much drop as float diaphanously. He was a broad-gauge gossip, ranging across the academic, literary, social and royal spheres with tales and tittle-tattle about many generations in many countries. A typical example was his story of the Queen of the Belgians who had one of the first facelifts, and was left with a permanent smile, so that when the King died she had to return to the clinic to have it let down again.

My mother told us of visiting her cousin in his rooms in the 1930s. She didn't remember the parrot but vividly recalled that incense burned and Steven wore a kimono. To an impressionable young woman it was very strange, very exotic.

In the Independent obit (above link then scroll down), Philip Mansel quotes Runciman as saying, "I think a book isn't well written unless it can be read aloud." That's definitely something to aspire to.  

--Julian