Lose your selves

With our cosmopolitanism panel in Osaka approaching (within two months) I am beginning to feel uncomfortable... and I take up Wylie Sypher's Loss of the Self (1964). At well past midnight.

A seminal work. Within only only a page appear names such as Bowles, Hemingway, and Durrell. Then on the next here comes Gide, the perennial, and this is what I note down tonight:

The whole question of sincerity vexed Gide, since he was inclined to revise himself every moment, and nothing was more different from himself than himself. This is Montaigne's old renaissance theme of the diversity of the self; but Gide was interested in nothing except what was irregular. (64)

Voices from Afar

I received my copy of the collection of essays on Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere (Doug Slaymaker, ed., Lexington Books, 2007). It looks very nice! And I am happy to see my own essay (Translation, Exophony, Omniphony) quoted by Marjorie Perloff, who wrote the foreword to this volume. She is of course one of the greatest critics writing on poetry today.

Here is from the back of the book (quoted from the foreword) by Prof. Perloff:

"In the decade to come--and here this distinguished collection of essays will surely be instrumental--Tawada's poetry, plays, and her remarkable essays on language and literature, especially her Tübingen lectures called Verwandlungen, are poised for wide dissemination in the English-speaking world. For Tawada is not just another accomplished 'foreign' author; she is perhaps the leading practitioner today of what we might call...exophonic writing--which is to say, writing in a second language, a language always other from one's own."

Thank you Doug for your editing efforts!

Only once it serves...

La poésie écrite vaut une fois et ensuite qu'on la détruise.

---Antonin Artaud