Only a Blockhead

Climbing Fuji

August saw our greatest adventure: climbing Mount Fuji. Fuji's perfect cone towers over the Kanto area and the sensibilities of Japan. It is impossibly tall, a volcanic absurdity on a different scale to anything else on the archipelago. So tall is it that while its foot swelters in summer, its 3776-meter summit remains winterbound.

We planned the climb: trail, clothing, timing, food and drink. Drove to the 5th Station at dusk and began the ascent in high spirits with the forest trail to ourselves. We were soon on the bare mountain, sharing the trail with other animated climbers. 300 years after its last eruption, the upper reaches are still an arid waste of ash and rocks.

We climbed steadily with frequent short stops to rest, and longer pauses at the mountain huts on the way. The moon rose and the dark world below was a shimmering river of lights. Exhausted climbers fell to silence. The trail clogged. Finally we were inching our way up with the crowd, each step won from fatigue. At the top, the wind blew a few degrees above freezing. Climbers poured onto the summit as the sky lightened on the horizon. Red, orange, yellow, purple were added to the palette for a sunrise of such beauty it drew gasps, sighs and applause.

Huts on the summit served a breakfast of noodles, rice and curry. In the morning light, we looked down on an ocean of clouds, sun reflecting off lakes, the curve of a glistening Sagami Bay, and Enoshima Island. The climb down the steep ash trail was painful, dangerous, hellish, endless. We were passed by enormous trucks grinding their way up to the top with supplies.

For the next few days we walked funny. With each step, our muscles gave us a sharp reminder of the adventure.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, we hope. And we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

--Julian 

Audubon, Keats-in-America, Dr. Knox, and the Phoenix

Avram Davidson makes some "conjectures on the factual foundations of several ancient legends," and in doing so gives us essays that are so packed with learning and wit that we haven't seen their like since the death of his friend (they corresponded, but never met) Guy Davenport.  Davidson's prose style we haven't seen since, well, ever. 

In support of those claims I'll offer just one paragraph of Davidson's essay "Who Fired the Phoenix," his investigation into that seldom seen bird:

Everybody know the name of Audubon.  Not everybody knows, however, that he once planned to go into the steamboat business on the Ohio River with a young English immigrant named Keats—a brother, as a matter of fact, of the poet Keats.  The steamboats, however, so to speak never got off the ground; Audubon probably lost his money, Keats-in-America certainly lost his money, and Keats-in-England wrote to him, "I am afraid Mr. Audubon is not a very honest man."  Winona McClintock, another and later poet, wrote, "Keats had TB, Shelley drowned, Shakespeare lies in the cold, cold ground."  Audubon, meanwhile, not knowing what else to do, began to paint birds.  Before long he had enough for a book, but before long, too, he realized that there weren't enough customers for it in America; he went to England (we may suppose he did not bother to call upon the Keats family for a subscription); he went to Scotland.  In Edinburgh he called on, among other people, a prominent local surgeon.  I quote from memory: "He came to me directly from his dissecting-room, with blood still wet upon his hands.  His manner was most gentlemanly and agreeable and he promised to help me in my endeavors as most he could."  The surgeon, I will now reveal, was a Dr. Knox; in fact he was the Dr. Knox, and the source of the bodies in the dissecting-room (whose blood was still wet upon his hands) will not bear examination; so let us examine it.  As bodies were essential to the study of medicine and surgery and as the only bodies legally available for the purpose were those of criminals who had been hanged, a supply which had begun to dry up anyway, a professional corps (shall we say) had grown up, of graverobbers.  They sold their robbed bodies to the medical profession.  And they were known, not as Dickens's Jerry Cruncher preferred to be known as, to wit, Agricultural Character, but as "resurrection men!"—shades of the phoenix!  Eh?

Avram Davidson in Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends

---David

What I Like About the Twenty-First Century

Suar Agung in Chigasaki, Japan.

Once upon a time if one wanted to hear music one would have to make it oneself, find someone around who was making it, or head off to the church / temple / synagogue where, if one was lucky, there would be a joyful noise in praise of the local sky-god—and it would be the local sky-god.  One was unlikely to encounter music from other places and other times.  Now, with the ubiquity and affordability of recording and playback equipment one can hear music of just about any type just about any time. 

Relative ease of movement, too, comes into it.  Just a couple of days ago, here in a smallish Japanese city, I was privileged to hear Suar Agung, a gamelan ensemble all the way from Bali.  The music they produced, using a variety of percussion instruments, mostly bamboo xylophones, is so different from Western music that I hardly know how to describe it, except to say that it was tremendous.

That I could also, in the space of the same weekend, read an Italian novel published in the 1940s, watch an American movie released in the 1980s, and round it all out with some music from the eighteenth century, suggests that in our time even working schleps can live better, in the ways that count, than did princes and potentates in the past.

(The photograph was taken by ll_browneyes_ll and some rights are reserved under a Creative Commons license.)

—David

Late summer ecstasy

The Obon holidays are over and summer is on the wane. Discarded cicada shells, brown and brittle, stud the outside walls of the house. When the sun burns down, as it does most of the time, the buzz of cicadas cascades from the tree tops, filling the valley with sound. All the species have emerged now to join the frenzied cacophony.

The wispy heads of the rice plants are filling out and beginning to droop. Nights are a degree or two cooler. Bitter green fruit appears on the persimmon tree. The farmers' vegetable stands feature nutty, sweet pumpkins and glossy eggplants, more black than purple. The first fall spiders sit in the center of webs woven under the eaves and between branches.

Last night, clouds gathered at dusk, lit up from behind by bursts of light. Thunder rolled, then fat drops of rain began to fall. A great arc of lightning crossed the sky and thunder crashed. Rain fell in torrents. The peals and flashes continued, then gradually retreated, leaving only the drumming of the rain.

This morning began cool and fresh and quiet, with rain on the leaves.

When the sun comes out, the cicadas wind up to ear-splitting ecstasy.

--Julian

David Lynch on the iPhone

Get Real.

—David

The Opening Kitsch

This was part of an email I sent to a friend.  Rants, however, deserve a wider audience (at least when they're mine), so:

He probably regrets breaking it.

It just happened that I was scheduled to dine with two friends of mine, a Japanese guy and his Chinese wife, the night of the Olympic ceremony.  She almost canceled, so eager was she to watch the festivities.  Instead we were able to reserve a room with a tube at the restaurant (Korean), so although I gave her the seat facing the TV, I did see the odd bit of it.  The words "vulgar" and "kitsch" spring to mind.  Not that it was necessarily more vulgar or kitschy than other Olympic events have been, but it did remind me why I really can't stand the Olympics--not unconnected to my aversion to nationalism in all its forms.  The only positive news I could find out of the whole things is the Togolese kayaker who got a bronze.  You figure athletes from the rich countries basically do nothing but their sport from the time they are little, and it's all handsomely subsidized (it's at least honest that they don't even pretend to be amateurs any more).  The guy from Togo probably had to scrape to get enough money to buy a paddle, let alone the special diets, personal trainers, and performance enhancing drugs athletes from the first world depend on.

And I don't get me started on synchronized swimming!

—David

Hull, 1.25

Hull, 1.25

—NC Tate

Uchimizu

Uchimizu is the sprinkling of water to cool the surroundings of your house. The pleasure is both mental and physical. The mental satisfaction is in recycling, for uchimizu is a way to reuse bath water. The Japanese bath is for steeping, not washing in, and so the water stays soap-free. Instead of pulling the plug after the last person has used the water, leave the bath full as a water source for the next day's uchimizu.

The sensual pleasure of uchimizu is the simple joy of pouring and using water. Some prefer the bracing vigor of splashing it from a bucket with a ladle, or dashing it out with the hand. I prefer a watering can with a rose on the spout for its silent, gentle and even spread of water. At the hottest time of the day, cover the sun-baked asphalt, walls, gravel and flagstones with water, and the breeze that blows across them is immediately a degree or two cooler. Sprinkling the earth lays the dust and releases the sharp aroma of rain. If you have flowers or vegetables, give the beds and pots in the garden a good soaking.

It's a joy to meet relentless sunshine with your own rain. Afterwards, enjoy the sight of the pools and puddles that resist immediate evaporation--and the butterflies that dance over them. Uchimizu: a simple pleasure at the height of summer in Japan.

--Julian

Men

Men

—NC Tate

Who Knew?

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami

Geoff Dyer writing about Haruki Murakami's new book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in today's International Herald Tribune:

Aspects of his training involve such extremes of self-torture that even the most tolerant reader will find them questionable, for the unpalatable truth is that Murakami listens to Eric Clapton while running.

Readers of the IHT and the New York Times will ardently hope that we will be seeing a lot more of Dyer, and a lot less of Michiko Kakutani.  Enjoy the rest of Dyer's piece here.

—David