Only a Blockhead

The History of Literature has Slowed Down

Reading Writing

Julien Gracq

The past fifteen years, which apparently will not count for much in the history of our literature, have brought more changes in the publishing industry and bookstore business than these have known since Gutenberg.  The history of literature, at least momentarily, has slowed down; the history of the book has taken its place.  Yet what seems to us today to be a new development in literature in fact fills the history of painting, rich with periods when importance was placed not on names and schools but on changes in technique, materials, media, and markets: the invention of oil painting, the passage from fresco to easel painting and its clientele, etc.

Julien Gracq, "Literature and Painting," collected in Reading Writing

I'm not sure when this essay was first published, but I believe it was written long before the "changes in technique, materials, media, and markets" to which the Internet has given rise.

--David

Jazz taxi

Jazz, swing, boogie-woogie was the music of the US occupation of Japan after World War II. Its sound and attitude blasted and seduced its way into the fabric of a defeated society that was both fiercely proud and deeply ashamed, its people physically and mentally exhausted and hungry. The spontaneity and joy that was jazz wiped the slate clean. Think of the scenes in Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru where the hero first tastes freedom and new life in the underworld of jazz joints, dance floors and striptease. Or watch Shizuko Kazagi cut loose with Tokyo Boogie in 1947.

It isn't surprising that the Japanese stars of that era--Frank Nagai, Yujiro Ishihara, Hibari Misora--took the plunge and recorded the jazz standards in the original English. It was an act of homage, but there was a pride, in artist and listener alike, that they could take on and equal the masters at their own game.  

Tokyo skyline with Rainbow Bridge and Tokyo Tower (Photo: Gussisaurio, Wikimedia Commons)

Toshiyuki Anzai, a Tokyo taxi driver, grew up during the postwar occupation and the music stuck. Last Saturday night I was his paying guest as he drove us around the glittering Tokyo superimposed on the ruins of World War II, to an eclectic musical accompaniment that included a generous helping of 50s Japanese jazz. Anzai is proud of his city and clearly relished showing it off with an apt soundtrack. We took in the high and low city, the waterfront and of course Tokyo Tower, that culminating statement that postwar Japan had come of age and was back on the world stage.
 
As the ride was ending, I requested Hibari Misora's Stardust again. Jazz standards like Stardust were only familiar melodies to me, but listening to Misora I realized that of course they are about something, and of course it's love, in this case with the ache of nostalgia.

And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago....
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by

As she sang, we happened to be passing behind Hibiya Park. It's one of the handful of places in Tokyo with corners that retain a flavor of the immediate postwar years. The dim park lights and shifting shadows in the trees added one more sweetly painful layer to the timeworn melody and lyrics.
 
Japan's love affair with jazz is woven into its modern resurgence. Anzai is of the last generation to live through the transformation. His jazz taxi cruise, with its cityscapes and the music of the years gone by, keeps the bittersweet memories alive. 

--Julian
This post is dedicated to Corky Alexander and Donald Richie.

A 90-minute jazz taxi ride for two costs 13,500 yen, plus 1,500 for champagne should you be celebrating. Request your music or leave it to driver's choice. jazztaxianzai(atmark)gmail.com  Write in Japanese, but Anzai will do his best to cope with English emails.

Three cliches on an early morning walk

(Note: There is currently no daylight saving time in Japan.)

Dawn at four-thirty;
Sun up at five:
Light on and no one in the room

Ducks landing in a flooded paddy;
Not pretty but it does the job

Behind the wary glare of an alley cat
the eyes of a tiger

--Julian

American

American

--NC Tate

Hydrangeas

(Photo: M)

                                                                Last year lost to caterpillars,
                                                                hydrangeas bloom again
                                                                outside my window

                                                                 --Julian

The Simple Life: A Dissenting View

A mutual friend of Julian's and mine has posted, at his blog, Hepzibah, a typically thoughtful and intelligent response to the Pico Iyer article mentioned here and here.  I respect Hepzibah's proprietor a great deal, so I hesitate to dissent from his dissent, but my sense from reading his post is that he's using Iyer's article as a convenient peg on which to hang an argument that's been rolling around in his head for a while, waiting for an opportunity to burst into words.  We all do this all the time, and when we do it's often unfair to the authors whose texts we appropriate for our own purposes.

What Alan writes is worth pondering, but it seems to me he's reacting to things that Iyer didn't actually say.  I don't, for example, find Iyer as overbearingly prescriptive as Alan seems to; my impression was that, rather than trying to tell others how to live, Iyer was merely describing his own mildly unconventional choices simply because they seem to have worked for him.  Yes, Iyer found his simple (a relative term, of course)  life in a suburb of Kyoto, but he's certainly not, in his article, suggesting that the only place one can find a satisfyingly simple life is in his neighborhood.  He would, I think, agree with Alan that "you would not have to look too hard to find someone who has found a simple life in New York over a complex life in Kyoto."

If this reaction to Alan's reaction serves no other purpose than to alert you to the existence of Hepzibah then it's been worth writing.

—David

"...but thinking makes it so"

Thanks so much, David, for your last post with the link to Pico Iyer's version of the simple life. I hadn't seen Iyer's article The Joy of Less, and was really glad to read it. I'm writing my thanks here, rather than in a comment to your post, because I also found a lot more interesting stuff that people might want to know about.

Iyer's description of his life is on a New York Times blog called Happy Days, subtitled The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times. Happy Days, it tells us, is a blog born of the current economic turmoil that has "forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives," and "is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms -- economic, emotional, physical, spiritual." I've enjoyed reading other posts and comments there.    

Pico Iyer's beautifully written account seems to have struck a special nerve, perhaps because its themes are relevant and accessible to so many of us. It's attracted about 700 comments since publication less than a week ago. Some of the most interesting earlier ones were chosen and posted by the editors the next day as Simplicity at a Price.

My mother once told me that she thought World War II had brought out the best in the British. Having lost a husband to that war, she'd earned the right to such an opinion. The current worldwide economic collapse has also brought tragedy. By jolting us to think about what's really important, will it also bring out the best in all of us?

--Julian

Some Versions of Simplicity

I admire PIco Iyer's version of the simple life, and also his willingness to allow that his version may not be for everyone.  Mine would include a lot more media than his does—certainly newspapers, which I will relish until, in the not too distant future, they disappear—but would, therefore, also entail getting rid of a lot of the distractions that make it difficult to find the time to consume the media—newspapers, but also books and music—for which I have an unslakable thirst.

—David

A perfect movie

A friend (for those of you who know me and him, it was John A) once suggested that, on the principle that we can't know what we'll enjoy until we do it, we should shatter the self-imposed narrow confines of our life by once a week doing something we've never done before. Or wouldn't normally choose to do. I've since found that this potentially painful exercise in self-abnegation is amply taken care of in the process of sharing life with a partner.

Terminator Salvation poster

And so it was that I found myself filing into a packed movie theater for a preview of Terminator 4. There's no way I would have done this of my own volition--the opposite in fact. The previous weekend, I'd given an unprecedented zero stars to Star Trek, the highly-regarded action flick (95% fresh on the Rotten Tomatometer for goodness sakes: "action, humor, a strong story and brilliant visuals") that rubbed my anti-war sensibilities the wrong way. And here I was, by all accounts, going back for more.

So here's the amazing thing. Terminator Salvation (the English-language title) was for me a perfect action movie. It was thrills from start to finish. This is what movies have been striving for since the first flickering images of a tightrope walker defying death over the Niagara Falls, or the Keystone Cops' car narrowly missing the express train. Somehow this film sustains the excitement without lulls for back story, without sating us, without failing to top itself, without labored jokes to ease the tension. Story and visuals? I don't know, I was too busy being entertained. You go in, have your heart rate elevated for 110 minutes, and are delivered out with nothing but a warm glow of satisfaction.

At least I was. There are problems in praising a movie. First, other people will have different reactions. And they overwhelmingly did, as this one managed a rotten 33% on the Tomatometer. Second, my comments--"perfect"?!--can't help but send you in with high expectations, and every time I've taken high expectations into a movie, they've ruined it for me. How much of my enjoyment, I wonder, came from entering T4 with below-zero expectations?

T4. As for this being a Terminator movie, you don't need to be a fan: anything you need to you already know as it's now a part of contemporary culture. What else. Actor Sam Worthington has a breakout role--note the name; he'll be back. Star Christian Bale is a fine lead: I enjoyed him as much as in Batman Begins, whereas I thoroughly disliked the gloomy, endless (critically acclaimed, 94% fresh) Dark Knight. There! I hope that destroys my credibility as a judge of movies in your eyes. Along with any expectations of Terminator Salvation I might have given you.       

And what of my sensitivity to promoting war, you ask? I surprised myself. Perhaps I wasn't repulsed by the T4 mayhem because I'm already forgetting the article that aroused my disgust. Or because man-on-machine violence is far enough away from reality, and almost the only human-on-human violence was a horrible mistake, with the hero pursuing misunderstood allies.

Or because I was too busy being entertained? Perhaps the movie is perfect on another count. Is it the very best (because entirely disguised) propaganda for war? I'll set that question aside for the moment, though, and just say bravo and thanks to Hollywood and its century-old mission to excite us with thrilling moments on the silver screen.

Houdini in The Man from Beyond (1922) (Wikimedia Commons)

--Julian

Full moon and fireflies

The festival of fireflies has begun in a nearby town. Yugawara is a faded hot spring resort, mentioned in a 7th Century poetry collection ("Yugawara's seething springs surge upward day and night") and which became a thriving destination at the end of the 1800s. It is situated on the coast and across the mountains from Hakone, another resort that has better managed to revive its century-old cache. Yugawara is still a backwater, its old wooden ryokans closing one by one; its 20th Century concrete hotels replaced by weed-filled lots. What remains is, to me, an intensely attractive Taisho time warp.

At the top of the town, the Fudo-taki waterfall is mostly forgotten. It used to be a place to view fireflies, but, deprived of their food source because of pollution, they have long since disappeared. Luckily, we can still experience this natural wonder thanks to artificial breeding. A short walk down from the waterfall brought us to Manyo Park, where fireflies are released in early summer. As night fell, a frog croaked as the tiny lights floated through the air, pulsing on and off in unison. There was a Japanese belief that the lights of fireflies were the souls of the dead, and we can feel why as we watch the silent spectacle.

Fireflies in Manyo-koen (Photo: M)

Because the firefly festival was in Yugawara, it wasn't unduly crowded, and had the relaxed, informal atmosphere of the countryside. Beside the road below the park, a few stalls served beer and festival food like yakitori grilled chicken and yakisoba noodles. There was plenty of seating at trestle tables, and we ate and drank listening to a local flutist, followed by a tape of a haunting enka song that played over and over:

Ho, ho, hotaru, ho (Come fireflies, come)
Kochi no mizu wa umai zo (The water here is pure and sweet)

By nine, the fireflies had stopped flashing, the stalls closed up and we walked the almost deserted street toward the station. The misty halo of the full moon above was echoed in the summer lanterns that lined the route. A handful of taverns remained open for those not satisfied by festival food. Yugawara might have seen better days, but for me it's at the height of its charm.

Yugawara 06.06.09 (Photo: M)

--Julian

Yugawara is on the JR Tokaido Line between Odawara and Atami. The firefly festival is every evening until June 21 from 7:30 to 9PM in Manyo-koen Park. From No. 2 stop outside Yugawara Station, take a bus to Fudotaki or Oku-yugawara and get off at Ochiaibashi (Manyo-koen is also mentioned in the announcement).