Only a Blockhead

Found Poem

—David

A Naturalist Manga

I write about Osamu Tezuka's Ayako in today's Japan Times.

By entwining Japanese history with the decay of the Tenge clan Tezuka suggests that the rot is not limited to the family, but permeates the nation as well.

Read the rest here.

—David

Why I Like Faulkner

Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing ever wonders.  Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence, like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting  chimneys streaked like black tears.

        from Light in August

—David

The Faulknerathon Just Keeps Rolling Along

—David

The Summer Faulknerathon Continues

—David

The Summer Faulknerathon has begun.

In preparation for a trip through Dixie later this summer.

—David

How to Live on the Planet Earth

I write about Nanao Sakaki's poetry in today's Japan Times.

In considering the collected poems of Nanao Sakaki, one has to deal with a problem: his life. That life, by all accounts a marvelous adventure, threatens even now, more than four years after the adventure’s end, to overshadow his work.

Read the rest here.

—David

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

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.

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