And what Artaud meant by CRUAUTE

Jean Baudrillard talks about Artaud's impossible dream:

Artaud rêve d'éliminer la représentation qui fait obstacle au corps, au corps dans sa cruauté. Le corps est là, même s'il n'est pas facile à vivre, il est l'acteur de sa propre dramaturgie. Il s'agissait de trouver un théâtre à la mesure de cela, mais je crois qu'aucun théâtre, à commencer par le sien, ne correspond véritablement à ce dont il rêvait...

(D'un fragment l'autre, 18)

Fear of Having to Mean (Iser on Beckett)

Here is what Wolfgang Iser has to say on Beckett:

However, if statements are made and then instantly rejected, as happens all the time in this trilogy, then we can have nothing more than the beginnings and re-beginnings of a plot. As a result of all this fragmentation, meaning becomes impossible to grasp, and instead there arises a massive blank---partially structured, it is true, by the rudiments of plot---and the reader finds himself almost compelled to produce a filling for this blank. A further stimulus to the reader's imagination is the fact that the first-person narrators (...) are all afraid that what they say or do might mean something; their fear is that some representative value might be extracted out of what they have said and might be taken for the meaning of the whole.

(Prospecting, 146)

Can't quite believe, but it's true...

In the city where I live, people voted as follows:

Ishihara 17613
Asano 12120
Yoshida 4332
Kurokawa 1093

The three combined will reach 17555, and still can't beat the chief. Oh, neighbors. I'd better walk out.

Canto / cuento

Octavio Paz has a taste for a subtle pun. Or is it Joycean play of the signifiants? Here is an example:

Quiero decir: el cuento del canto fue el canto, el tema del poema fue la poesía misma. O como dice el sentencioso Antonio Machado: se CANTA una historia y así se CUENTA une melodía. Contar es, simultáneamente, relatar una historia y escandir el verso: cuento que se vuelve canto y canto que, al contar el cuento, se canta a sí mismo --- al acto de cantar.

(La otra voz, 25)

El sentencioso Antonio! It's a lovely way to call one's master...

Now, listen (Jeanette Winterson)

Here is a quote from Jeanette Winterson's interview:

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening. When we are little kids we learn by listening. Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse---and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way.

Lovely way to talk about one's madness from the best writer of my generation anywhere in the world!

Digital Content Study Group (its 1st meeting)

In preparation for opening a new master's program in Digital Content Studies at Meiji University, we are conducting a study group once every month this academic year. Our first meeting will be on 21st April and the guest speaker will be Hiroyuki Akama, my long-time buddy. He will talk on data mining and corpus linguistics for about 60 minutes and a free discussion will follow. Expected participants are: myself, art historian Shino Kuraishi, and computer scientist Homei Miyashita. If interested, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me! You are (mostly) all invited.

Unpacking my library (once again)

Nietzsche once boasted of his own ability as a philologist to examine about 700 books a day. This I need to seriously work on as my bookshelves are now overflowing with JUNK etc. There are numerous books I haven't really opened pages since I bought them, in some cases two decades ago! As a wandering pseudo-scholar, my books spent most of their physical days in cardboard boxes. They must be very unhappy. Now I pledge myself to browse them all anew to REVIVE them. A major work this year other than writing and translating!

Election

There is a town election. We have three candidates: A, B, and C.

A is the current mayor and I hate his guts. Of B and C, both detestable, I like B less. But most people think that B is the only possible one who at least have a chance to lose by a narrow margin to A.

Not convinced by what B says, I vote for B, detesting him, only to keep a chance of losing by a narrow margin to A.

After the vote I say to myself: "I only wish that C was a better candidate."

A nice review!

Shuzo Saito, of Aoyama Women's College, wrote a very nice book review in Subaru on my "honolulu, braS/Zil." He is absolutely right in pointing out the importance I assign to Wright and Niemayer as typical "nativist" architects of the Americas. Thanks, amigo!

斉藤修三「周縁を境域に変える旅人」、「すばる」５月号、p.327.

Lazy Saturday

I spent a very lazy Saturday today by sleeping in until 10:30am! And then went out for lunch at a nearby pan-Asian restaurant where I had a bowl of soup rice noodle with fried shrimp balls. With a bottle of Indonesian beer... how fattening.

It's been a warm day. In the afternoon we went to buy a car at a local Toyota dealership. My seventh car (and the first in Tokyo). This car will last for a decade, I guess. We'll have to wait about two weeks before its delivery.

The biggest discovery I had today was this: Blaise Cendrars was born on 1 September 1887, at La Chaud-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Le Corbusier was born on 6 October 1887 at the same town! The two make an odd couple, the modernists of the modernists, both POST-CUBISTS, so to speak. One day I will write an essay on them.

Dear Diary (According to Shusaku Endo)

1950. 27 year-old Shusaku Endo leaves Japan for France as one of the first Japanese students to go there after the WW II. Africa gives him a strong impression after a long, stressful sea voyage, then comes France, la douce, with its mild and beautiful landscape. There begins his solitary struggle of two and a half years.

Those days the phrase STUDYING ABROAD had a far greater meaning than today. Leaving his home country still suffering from a great defeat, with an ardent soul impatiently seeking after a fulfillment, he conducts his own inner dialogues with mostly Catholic French writers (bien que Gide était un écrivain protestant) day in, day out. It is interesting to note that his unusual ernestness, without a room for any frivolity, was the immediate matrix to later generate his immense sense of good-natured humor.

Judging from his records of reading, his reading skill in French was awesome! It is only natural that he occasionally slips into French when his favourite mental interlocutors are people like Gide, Charles du Bos and Julien Green, who are known for their very literary and spiritual "journals."

At this stage (in his late twenties) we already encounter his basic attitude toward life. "I am utterly against the idea of reducing mysticism to psychoanalysis. To the contrary, I would rather see everything around from the mystical point of view." Then on the occasion of Gide's death: "André Gide is dead. When I was ill in bed, he too was ill. When I recovered, he died. During my illness I often thought of the parallelism between Gide's world and mine. Then he died."

This is an aspect of a writer who to his end was obcessed with the phenomenon of synchronicity.

Hitachi

My short essay "Tagengo ga odoridasu" (Dancing Multilingualism) appeared in Hitachi's Spring 2007 issue. The background photography is that of Ingo Gunter's "The Globe with Eighty Languages."

「多言語が踊り出す」（「ひたち」２００７年春号、日立評論社、pp.2-3）

On sa(cre)dness

I finished my "Kazetabi" essay at around 2:00am this morning and immediately sent it to the editor.

It's about 6,800 characters long. The title is: If this was not the holy place at all, then. I write about several places from my past trips, including two very special spots in New Mexico (of which I really didn't want to talk), and the general idea of sacredness of the land, about how verticality is relevant to such a sense. And about the city in which I live, where there is no natural symbol for verticality.

Somebody like Mishima desperately sought after the vertical value axis for this mundane, fearless world. He dreamed of establishing a strong Imperial power as his axis mundi. I may be looking for a set of natural, local axis that has nothing to do with historically constituted pouvoir politique. But that's a big talk.

I came across two photographs taken of Omotesando: one with the Dojunkai apartments, the other with the UGLY Omotesando Hills (after 2006, that is). See what we have lost. And forever. The mirror-like wall of the Omotesando Hills is indeed the mirror to reflect our own incurable stupidity.

Well past midnight

I am again struggling to finish an essay for the magazine Kaze no tabibito... It's a week past the deadline and I have finally grasped the picture. I think I can finish it in a couple of hours from now...

When my son was around 3 or 4, every time I mentioned the word "deadline" he screamed and said," Daddy, don't die!" At 16 he doesn't say that anymore and instead is fast asleep. Even my dog is sleeping with her loud, bulldog snoring. And I'll have to wake up at 6:30 again tomorrow morning to go to my office.

Mental images from New Mexico are flickering right in front of me...

Radio UNAM

This afternoon two of my poems were broadcast on the radio. It was a program on Radio UNAM and the poems were translated by Eiko Minami into Spanish. The poems were "Lisboa" and a piece from my on-going "Agendars." The radio guy read the translation and Eiko the Japanese original. I was really happy to hear the two languages alternating, following each other, thus presenting a world to which I contributed more than anyone else in its making. Of course the translator is more-than-half an author in this case! Many thanks to Eiko.

Michael Richardson once told me that the phrase "on-going" was ugly. Sorry, Michael, I used it again!

Yozakura (cherry blossoms at night) and them

Last night at midnight I saw a group of South Asians (India, Pakistan, I can't tell) quietly partying under the cherry blossom. Drinking beer (?) they were talking, not particularly in a low voice, but not so loud as to attract the neighbors' attention. Our area is changing, too, with more and more non-Japanese settling in. To me it's a welcome change; now we have a fine Indian takeaway. Xenophobia is the least admissible of human errors. I want to live in a society at least as varied as that New Zealand!

Polar (Naoki Ishikawa)

Naoki Ishikawa at barely 30 is today Japan's foremost adventurer cum photographer and essayist. An amazing guy! This time his theme is the great north, the northern circumpolar region. Fascinating images that embody Michio Hoshino and Bruce Chatwin in one. I particularly liked an image where a raven flies past the utterly white ground. The image is blurred and you get the purest impression of movement, nothing else. I also liked dogs and the town. Those far places I would never go...

Spiral Life (Yukihiro Yoshiwara, dir.)

Spiral Life: 130 years of the Yoshiwaras. This is the title of an exhibition I saw today at Emon Photo-Gallery in Hiroo.

The family has been running a photo studio in Shibata, Niigata, for six generations. Yukihiro Yoshiwara, the sixth owner-photographer of the studio, compiled rare materials found at his home to reveal the depth of more than a century hidden in this corner of northern Japan. The result is fascinating. It is difficult to precisely point out where the images' charm resides. A moving experience for anyone!

Please read my essay on the relevant subject of "death and photography" in the magazine Kaze no Tabibito's latest issue.

Have fun shopping... in Jinbocho!

I went to Surugadai (our main campus) today to meet my two new colleagues, Shino Kuraishi (art historian and critic) and Homei Miyashita (computer scientist, composer and media artist). We didn't have much time so our talk was done standing, yet it was a fruitful encounter. I met Miyashita for the first time. We have a common goal now to open and direct (cyber-navigate?) a new graduate program in 2008 called digital content studies.

Soon after I am on the street again, roaming. As the Jinbocho area is the world's biggest congregation of the second-hand book trade, I can't help occasionally dropping in at one or more used book shops. And you never fail to find some hidden treasure!

The period 1987-1998 doesn't exist for me, bookwise. I was out of the country. From that period there still are so many Japanese books I've never seen nor noticed, even. I enjoy looking at them, browsing, and buying once in a while. And that's not limited to Japanese-language books. Today I found in a road-side bin really good foreing paperbacks. They are:

Des bateaux dans la nuit (Philippe Labro, Folio).
Des feux mal éteints (Philippe Labro, Folio).
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein, Penguin).
George Orwell (Raymond Williams, Fontana).

They do look old and faded, for sure, but still are in a very good condition, unread. Guess how much they are. 100 yen a piece! I'm all smile.

Ashes and Snow (Gregory Colbert)

I also saw Gregory Colbert's exhibition: Ashes and Snow at the Nomadic Museum at Odaiba. The museum is an interesting portable architecture designed by Shigeru Ban. The show is sponsored by the Rolex Institute.

The whole show looks very nice and interesting. Images are great but incredibly human-centric, although their central theme is interspecies communication, seemingly. The images, beautifully rendered on Japanese paper, belong basically to the circus rather than any miraculous occurence in the nature. They are fascinating and at the same time they have something that put me off. They are in a way by their own essence a thorough denial of nature.

I wanted to buy some postcards or something, however. It was not worth asking the price. A mini-sized accordion book of 16 or so photographs, 1600 yen. A nice flip book, 1600 yen. A DVD, 6000 plus. And a boxed set of prints and catalogue (?), 3,500,000 yen! Nice price. And this belongs to another layer of the world than mine!

FCI Asia International Dog Show

Went to see the biggest dog show in Asia today, at Tokyo Big Sight (this must be a pun on "site") in the Odaiba area. I used to be a junior handler when I was around 10. I went straight to the Ring 5 where a round of French Bulldog breed show was going on. The dogs were so well-built, impeccably manicured. To me a brindle male looked particularly good and it won the junior competition, apparently.

There were some awesome English bulldogs, too. Compared to the French, they were HUGE, with IMMENSE pows! My childhood dog was Toby, the English bull. Oh, how I miss him. Another breed I wanted to see was the Bull Mastiff, but we missed it. Leonbergers were quite nice, too.

Auto-circulating Cherry Blossoms

Cherry trees are in full bloom and I've been making palindromes about them. These sentences are all untranslatable; I'll write them down in Japanese.

桜、楽さ。
桜、気楽さ。
桜、柿、唐草。
さくらもさくからぼくらくらくてもらくさ。

Beware, the final one is not really a palindrome! But when you present them in this order, almost every one believes and buys what you say.

What follows is the best one I wrote today. Made out of 21 Japanese letters.

さくらさくかきいてみなみていきかくさらくさ
（桜咲くか聞いてみな未定企画さ楽さ）

Tonight I took my dog out for a walk to appreciate cherry trees blowing in a stormy wind. White petals in the air like so many snow flakes. Dream-like. The only bearable moment in this season!

Michael Richardson on Breton

I went to Waseda this afternoon for a presentation by my friend Michael Richardson on André Breton's L'art magique. It was held under the aegis of the newly formed Dada-Surrealism study group led by Masachika Tani, Humi Tsukahara and others. Breton gathers various African objects in his own private office and they are nice to look at, really, but what's the use of them when they are totally decontextualized? An object loses its magic once it's taken out of its own milieu.

Over the years I am less and less interested in surrealism, although I still feel strongly connected with them regarding basic sensibility. Breton was my hero when I was twenty. Now I consider Blaise Cendrars much more important and actual than all three representative surrealist poets combined: Breton (whom Blaise considered too pretentious), Aragon (whom Blaise considered to be a really brainy stylist), and Desnos (whom Blaise considered the only authentic poetic genius of the group).

Today was the last day of Michael's three-year appointment at Waseda. He is going back to England in July. Vale, Michael, the world is your oyster!

A Whale of Dinner...

There is a restaurant in Shibuya called Kujira-ya, now totally refurbished. Went there last night with a couple of college buddies for the first time in almost twenty years. It's a very sophisticated restaurant and they gave us the best separate room there was, overooking the busy traffic down on the street. Ah, Shibuya has changed. It's sad to see the street I walked everyday back in the period of 1977-1983 so dirty and crowded.

The dinner was gorgeous. We paid 6000 yen a piece. The courses were:

1. Raw whale meat chopped and mixed with mentaiko (spiced cod roe) and squid.
2. Whale red meat sashimi combined with whale skin.
3. Deep fried whale meat.
4. Harihari nabe: a pot with soup stock in which you cook whale meat, vegetables, and finally some noodles.
5. Ice cream (green powder tea flavor).

It was delicious!

The dinner was to send off Yasushi Ishii, a Latin American lit specialist, to Stanford where he'sll spend two years. Keisuke Dan was with us; he is just finishing his long novel (that has been in the making for several years).

Next time at a dojo restaurant, perhaps! (Look up your dictionary and find out what DOJO is).

Ah, c'est toi JuliA/En...

One of the books I've been browsing here and there is JuliAn Green's Le langage et son double, traduit par JuliEn Green. It's interesting how he thinks of the two languages separated by a thick wall. Somebody like Wallace Stevens, a casual reader, could pretend that English and French were one. Not so for Green, native in both languages.

This book presents his own texts and his own translations side by side; it is a source of infinite illuminations. Just look at his epigram for one of the essays:

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition sent
To be a moment's ornament.
(Wordsworth)

This is rendered as:

C'était le fantôme de la joie
Quand la première fois elle brûla à mes yeux,
Charmante apparition envoyée
Pour embellir un instant.


The difference is striking. In the original English, "she" from the beginning is given with its anthropomorhic resonance. Then it is revealed that she is but a phantom, an apparition. Then in the French, the sentence is lead by a "Ce" and "le fantôme" is given sooner than the human-designating pronoun. Although the time lag is minimum, there is certainly a deep gap, with "elle" appearing late. "To be a moment's ornament" rendered with "embellir" gives a different impression, too.

There is much to be learned from here.

Those were the days

It's March already and my resolution to work FURIOUSLY has been put off because of various obligations... tant pis! But I got to get some work done in three weeks. Essays, translations, as always. And some preparation for the new academic year. Ay, ay, ay.

I can only sing a Papago song at this time of the night:

In the great night my heart will go out;
Toward me the darkness comes rustling.
In the great night my heart will go out.
(American Indian Poetry, xx)

Last friday there was a party to honor my friend Shimada, the editor at Kokusho kankokai. He will quit his company soon to freelance. It's a hard way, but the only way to seek REAL satisfaction. I support him totally.

It was a rare occasion to gather the most prolific of translators actively working. With Motoyuki Shibata, Minami Aoyama, the Numanos, Kan Nozaki, Sachiko Kishimoto, among others, we have (including myself) produced several hundred books combined! The surface of the Japanese language mush have changed a little because of our collective work.

And March continues.

Hello, old friend...

And here is what Alain says today:

Mais il faut dire aussi que l'homme content, s'il est seul, oublie bientôt qu'il est content; toute sa joie est bientôt endormie; il en arrive a une espece de stupidité et presque d'insensibilité. Le sentiment intérieur a besoin de mouvements extérieurs. (...) Tant qu'on est seul on ne peut être soi. Les nigauds de moralistes disent qu'aimer c'est s'oublier; vue trop simple; plus on sort de soi-même et plus on est soi-même; mieux aussi on se sent vivre. (21)

Alain, aujourd'hui

Je me sens de plus en plus proche d'Alain, qui écrit avec une simplicité incroyable. Voici une citation pour aujourd'hui:

Descartes, à mes yeux, est encore plus beau, sortant de son pays, fuyant toutes les preuves de l'example au milieu desquelles il a grandi, s'exilant par volonté. Voyageant et errant par discipline, afin d'effacer une coutume par une autre; et faisant même la guerre sans préférence, pour s'habituer à agir sans croire. (182)

Grace is the word for René!

Alain dit...

Ce qui est total et cosmique y est toujours TEMPÊTE, comme le printemps nordique. (Alain)

(C'est moi qui souligne.)

Senghor

Voici une traduction que j'ai fait de Senghor... pour tuer le temps!

おまえは長いあいだ持っていた（カラムのために）
レオポール・セダール・サンゴール

おまえは長い、長いあいだ持っていた、両手で、戦士の黒い顔を
まるでそれがすでに何か致命的な黄昏によって照らされているかのように。
丘からおれは見た、おまえの両眼の入江に太陽が沈んでゆくのを。
いつまたおれはおれの祖国を見るのだろう、おまえの顔の純粋な地平線を？
いつまたおれはおまえの暗い乳房の食卓に着くことができるのだろう？

そして暗がりに甘美な決意が巣を作る。

おれは他の空たちや他の眼を見るだろう
おれはレモンよりもさわやかな他の唇たちの泉から水を飲むだろう
おれは雷雨を避けて他の髪の屋根の下で眠るだろう。

それでも毎年、春のラム酒が記憶を燃え上がらせるとき
おれがなつかしむのは故郷の大地、乾いたサヴァンナに降るおまえの両眼の雨。

At ABC again

January didn't exist. It's already a week into February, fabulous.　On the 20th this month, I'll hold a joint reading at the Aoyama Book Center with Akiko Otake, a seasoned veteran traveler/writer. You can reserve a seat (limited to 50) only by calling them at the store--for FREE. There will be an autograph session following. I'll be glad to personalize, too.

Talking about autographs, Cioran, one of my all-time favorite thinkers, writes the following:

La séance de la signature chez Gallimard, chaque fois qu'un livre paraît, est une chose qui m'ennuyait et une fois j'ai négligé de signer la moitié de mon contingent de livres. Je n'ai jamais eu d'aussi mauvaises critiques. C'est un rite et une obligation. Même Beckett ne peut pas s'y soustraire. Joyce n'a jamais pu le comprendre. (Entretiens, 7)

Cioran by the way is so quotable! Here is my favorite tonight:

LA PLUPART DU TEMPS JE NE FAIS RIEN. (...) Je ne vois qu'une putain sans client pour en faire moins que moi. (10-11)

An admirable fellow.

2007

Feliz ano novo, bonne année, tout-monde! Ce que je cherche à faire, dès aujourd'hui, c'est écrire--des poèmes. Oui, c'est mon but, ma new year's resolution... On va voir ce que j'aurai fait dans un an. Tout va bien!

On translation

Kommentar und Übersetzung verhalten sich zum Text wie Stil und Mimesis zur Natur: dasselbe Phänomen unter verschiedenen Betrachtungsweisen. Am Baum des heiligen Textes sind beide nur die ewig rauschenden Blätter, am Baume des profanen die rechtzeitig fallenden Früchte.

(Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse, 20)

Just a walk around the corner... in the galaxy!

Last night I saw a documentary program on TV featuring the adventurer Tadashi Nagase. Awesome. He spent 30 years walking around the globe, or 40,000 km, with all his belongings on a wheelcart that he pulled around everywhere he went. He had his last leg to finish from Manaus to Porto Velho in Brazilian Amazonia... amid the lairs of oncas (jaguars) and jacares (alligators). He belongs to the same generation as I (he is 50 this year); all these years that I spent in vain he kept walking, walking, walking, to the other side of the world. I was moved.

Why in fact couldn't I live like that?

At ABC

On Friday the 17th I had an in-store talk with Yoko Tawada on her new book AMERICA at the Aoyama Book Center. There were about fifty people in the audience and it was fun. We talked in front of nice shelves of foreign books. Yoko read three portions from her book and I read two pieces of my border poems (the same ones as I used for the soiree with Aimee Bender).

Reading a text is always easier for me than talking, which honestly is not for me. I am not a good talker, I have never been since my childhood; I tend to digress into a no-human territory. But this is something I have to overcome, I guess. Being a teacher. Being a performer, that is. But then, to sing is easier than to talk.

On Sunday finished proof-reading my new book "honolulu, braS/Zil." Yes, this is the title. A book filled with surprises. Hope you'll like it.

Same old, same old

Here is what Ricœur says about staying the same:

Que signifie en effet rester le même à travers le temps? Je me suis mesuré autrefois à cette énigme, pour laquelle j'ai proposé de distinguer deux sens de l'identique: le même comme idem, same, gleich---le même comme ipse, self, Selbst. Il m'a paru que le maintien de soi dans le temps repose sur un jeu complexe entre mêmeté et ipseité, si l'on ose ces barbarismes; de ce jeu équivoque, les aspects pratiques et pathiques sont plus redoutables que les aspects conceptuels, épistémiques. Je dirais que la traduction identitaire, la "déraison identitaire", comme dit Jacques Le Goff, consiste dans le repli de l'identité ipse sur l'identité idem, ou, si vous préférez, dans le glissement, dans la dérive, conduisant de la souplesse, propre au maintien de sois dans la promesse, à la rigidité inflexible d'un caractère, au sens quasi typographique du terme.

(Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, 98-99)

Tawada's new book

Last evening there was a symposium around Yoko Tawada's new book at the U of Tokyo. The participants were Yoko the author, Motoyuki Shibata, and Masatsugu Ono. The session was organized by Kan Nozaki. Shibata the little giant was as usual very impressive and witty. Ono, himself a novelist, was so refreshing I laughed out aloud a couple of times. Nozaki's moderation was simply impeccable.

Tawada's new novel is called AMERICA: hido no tairiku. The subtitle has a typically Tawada-ish double entendre: "a ruthless continent" and "a continent without roads." It's a continuation of a sort of her previous Yogisha no Yakoressha. Ono brilliantly analyzed the two books to which I had little to add.

After the session I went with some friends to the bistro on campus. The service was terrible, the food acceptable. There I ran into Karen Yamashita who came for a lecture by a UCLA professor. We took the same line going home.

What art is all about

Le Clézio's vision of art is EXTREMELY close to mine. Here is what he says:

Écrire pour agir. L'art est souvent trahi par les artistes. Voici peut-être le phénomène humain le moins individuel, le moins libre qui soit: l'art est expression de tout ce que la société a de pensée commune, de mythe, de réflexe de masse. C'est une mode, au sens le plus large du mot. (L'extase matérielle, 145)

On mimetism

Tout est rythme. Comprendre la beauté, c'est parvenir à faire coïncider son rythme propre avec celui de la nature. Chaque chose, chaque être a une indication particulière. Il porte en lui son chant. Il fait être en accord avec lui jusqu'à se confondre. Et ce ne peut être une démarche de l'intelligence universelle. Atteindre les autres, se précipiter en eux, RETOURNER en eux; il s'agit de mimétisme. D'abord être soi et se connaître soi, puis imiter ce qui vous entoure. (L'extase matérielle, 91)

Bataille on bataille

I casually took up an old copy of The Tears of Eros and read the following: something hard to believe,bien qu'il soit passionant...

Prior to the end of the late Paleolithic period, war seems to have been unknown. It is only after this time--or after the intermediary period known as the Mesolithic--that we find the first accounts of men killing each other in combat. [...] The victors annihilated the vanquished group. In the wake of combat they massacred enemy survivors, prisoners, and women. But young children of both sexes were probably adopted by the victors who must have granted them the same status as their own children after the war was over. As far as we can tell, judging from the practices of modern primitives, the only material gain from war was the ultimate growth of the victorious group. (57-58)

See the starangeness of the latter part of the above! "Probably adopted," "must have granted," "as far as we can tell," (can we at all?). This is not even a theory. Yet, it's fun...

Leiris on auto-ethnography

Evidemment, tu sais que la Règle du jeu a été écrite en grande partie d'après des fiches, eh bien le maniement des fiches m'avait été rendu familier par l'enquête ethnographique. Je crois que si je n'avais pas été ethnographe, je n'aurais pas eu l'idée de faire des fiches. J'aurais pris des notes, mais ça n'aurait pas été la même chose, ça n'aurait pas été ces fiches qu'après je pouvais manipuler, changer de place, etc. Et ce qu'il y a d'ethnographique dans cela se réduit à la manipulation des fiches.

(C'est-à-dire, 49)

Althusser as a young student

Tout ce temps de Marseille, je poursuivais mes exploits scolaires. Nous étions deux à nous disputer la première place en classe: un jeune garçon au visage ingrat, râblé, très fort en maths (où selon le j'étais plutôt médiocre), du nom de Vieilledent. Vieilles dents / vieilles maisons (Althusser: alte-Haüser en patois alsacien), étrange couple. Je me souviens qu'il tenta un jour de m'enrôler dans les jeunesses du colonel de La Roque, mais je ne marchai pas. Certainement pas par la conscience politique, mais par prudence, comme mon père.

(L'avenir dure longtemps, 105)

Janet Frame's Oamaru

On Friday finished writing my essay on Janet Frame's Oamaru; a little over 4200 letters (in Japanese). This is for Coyote magazine, but it turned out to be a little too subtle, I'm afraid. Haven't heard from my editor yet; maybe he didn't like it, and tant pis!

Anyway I owe it to my self to write a longer study on Janet Frame... What I have in mind is a study on three woman writers from different languages and regions of the world: Janet Frame, Clarice Lispector, Simone Shwartz-Bart. When can I begin working on it, is the problem!

10 Books for ABC

Aoyama Book Center, the bookshop, asked me to choose ten books for its new year's sale. I chose the following titles as: 10 books written by women writers that I respect. Of course the list might have been different if I were asked to make it on another day. But for now, it goes like this.

Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine.
Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons.
Janet Frame, The Lagoon.
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky.
Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River.
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony.
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping.
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange.

Adobo

Last evening Karen cooked for us delicious adobo, thus reminding me of the long-forgotten (by me) Filipino national dish. It was really good. Gostoso, mesmo.

I am now trying to remember its recipe. First you cook onion and garlic (chopped or whatever) with soy sauce and vinegar. In this sauce you cook either chicken or pork until the meat is tender. Finish it with a tablespoon-full of paprika for color. This is it. Karen put some coliander to give it a green accent. Peace.

I used to use the adobo mix they sold at the Asian grocery store. This was when I lived in Tucson. But there is no need to use the mix anymore. I can make it any time, any day, with very little effort, and some cooking time. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Para viver uma viagem sem fim

Friday evening gave a talk at Meiji for a very general audience. The average age was probably in the sixties. But it was enjoyable. Attendance was not bad. A little less than a hundred, I think. My talk was titled: To Live a Journey with No End. It was tha last of the weekly series with four speakers around the theme of "Why Do We Go On Travelling?"

Here is the outline of my talk:

1. Introduction
-Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
-Ukiya Tojiro (1942-1965)
-Miyamoto Tsuneichi (1907-1981)

2. Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989)

3. J.M.G. Le Clezio (1940-)

4. On "World Photography"
-Yann-Arthus Bertrand (1946-)
-Sebastiao Salgado (1944-)
-Uwe Ommer (1943-)

5. On My Own "Travel Writing"
-The Chinese Tahiti (1992)
-The Aomori Note (2006)

Time being limited to 120 minutes with 15 minutes of Q & As, I couldn't get to the part 5. But in general it was well organized and I kept time as was expected.

For Chatwin and Le Clezio I owe them both a full-length study, respectively.

Conversion, of a sort

C'est depuis ce jour-là que je n'ai plus de projets... Que je vois ça et là des objets de souci, mais sans me soucier... Et que j'ai renoncé à faire de mon plein gré le moindre bruit sur la terre... Tout va de soi... Mon temps se passe entre ce qui me vient et ce qui m'arrive. (Maurice Clavel)

Bringing Up a Baby

My friend Kan Nozaki's book Akachan Kyoiku (titled after the American film Bringing Up A Baby) received this year's Kodansha Prize for Essays along with Kazuya Fukuda. It's a lovely book telling the days of a middle-aged French lit prof with his new born son... full of joy, laughter, and discovery.

Not knowing how to congratulate him, I wrote three haikus that I sent him by e-mail. Here they are (in the original):

Infant Joy! 躍り秘めたる　土ふまず

この掌に降りておいで　かかとの光

葉脈と指　いのちの脈絡　みどりご力（りょく）

Not bad, eh? Congratulations to Kan! (Whose name literally means JOY.)

Hispania etc.

On Saturday I was on a panel at the Association for Hispania Studies' annual conference, held at Doshisha U in Kyoto. The subject of the panel was multilingualism and literature, for which Tadashi Wakashima (translator of Nabokov's and Cabrera Infante's works in English) and myself.

Prof. Wakashima was a very nice guy exuding with intelligence. He has his B.A. in math and he then turned to the study of American lit after reading Richard Wright's Native Son. He's never been to the mainland US. AWESOME. His talk, largely autobiographical, was so interesting and full of fun. I talked on Edouard Glissant's second novel (1964), Le quatrieme siecle. There were various points that I didn't understand, but I put together ideas around the themes of landscape, naming, and language (including multilingualism).

Fumihiko Takemura (translator of Octavio Paz, among others) and Takaatsu Yanagihara (a specialist of Alejo Carpentier) joined us as commentators. The session was chaired by Kenji Matsumoto, and the conference was organized by Kenji Inamoto. My thanks to all.

The loom of languages, poems

Yesterday I went to Waseda for the first time in some years. I liked its college-town atmosphere. There was an open-air used-book market going on, but didn't have time for that. I went for an open dialogue between two poets, Gozo Yoshimasu and Ryoko Sekiguchi, hosted by Jun'ichi Konuma.

The talk was around their new book of collaboration: Hata (The Loom). It's based on their correspondences around some fundamental issues of poetics. Very stimulating. When you think of the loom the image of the shuttle also comes to mind. It's just like that, that quasi-eternal aller-retour of words, ideas, and images, that make the unexpected surface.

Listening to the two master poets, I was deeply ashamed of my being not serious enough about the business of poetry. WHAT AM I DOING HERE? Konuma also is going to publish his new collection of poetry (his fourth and the first in 12 years or so) .

Got to do something about my writing life.

Kant, 72 times and still

Heard a good bit of story about Eugen Heligel (1884-1955), the German pholosopher who lived and taught in Japan between 1924 and 1929 or so. He taught philosophy at Tohoku U (in Sendai).

When asked by students "How many times have you read Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason?" he answered: 72 times, and I still don't understand. I am now reading it for the 73rd times.

How encouraging! Yes, the only way to break through the shell of older understanding is to keep re-reading a work infinitely.

Keep this in mind.

A Christmas Book

Hear, hear. My new collection of essays will be published as a Christmas book this year. It's called HONOLULU, BRASIL and gathers a little over 30 pieces written for different occasions between 1999 and 2006. I am trying to keep the price as low as possible so that my younger friends can buy them; in the range of 1,500 to 1,800 yen, hopefully. It's fun to read, easy to read, full of kicks, tricks and bites, yet very tender and sweet. Like Honolulu. Like Brasil do meu coração.

The Aimee issue

The literary monthly Subaru will feature in its next issue (out on the 6th Oct) Aimee Bender, our friend and a great writer by any standard. It will run for more than 50 pages; very unusual.

There will be four short stories by Aimee, her travelogue to Japan, a dialogue with psychiatrist Naoko Miyaji, and my own interview with Aimee. Those of you who read Japanese MUST get hold of a copy. It's worth the effort.

There's only one question I forgot to ask Aimee: Do you listen to Aimee Mann?

Banana Yoshimoto kindly wrote paragraphs to begin the feature part. Mahalo, mahalo, mahalo plenny!

Autumn already!

Geez, half a year has passed in a zip. Now I'm hoping to resume quoi que ce soit. Sans blague.

You know, in Japan as in any other parts of the world there are a lot of funny English, para-English, pseudo-English, sentences and phrases written on garments. I found a super one yesterday.

It's a jacket for young women and it goes like this:

You who fell in love are BAD
You are defeated

Lovely, eh?

Death, death, everywhere

Back in Tokyo and I felt so hungry for Joyce, so I reread Dubliners over the past four or five days. To give my reading life a bit of a structure, I think I'll keep reading Joyce poco a poco this year.

His soul approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. (The Dead, 223)

Thus one acquires a regard d'outre-tombes. Yet I wonder: can we ever get away from the spells of the dead and CREATE anew, not just PRO-create in an eternal repetition?

At Tower Records, Shinjuku

For the first time in about 14 or 15 months, I went to Tower Records. The last time I was there to meet with my friend Michael Richardson. I meant to browse only, but ended up by buying many CDs and such. Nothing is more eloquent than the list of what I have bought--a consumerist state of mind. A pure gaspillage:

1~4. Four albums by Bob Dylan (Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Self Portrait, Planet Waves). All in a mood of mourning to a deceased friend.

5. A Paz, by Noriko Ito.

6. Nos Somos o Sucesso, by Trio Esperança.

7. Bossa'n Marley, Bob Marley songs performed in the style of bossa nova.

8. Nos bastidores da bossa nova, a book by Hidenori Sakao.

9. A little booklet called Bossa Nova, which tells about the history of bossa.

What am I doing here?

Back to the basics

Been away from here for a while. After my relocation to Tokyo, I've been sooooooo depressed that I didn't care to write nor read. C'est une ville haïssable, Tokyo. But I'm now back in action. Check it out. Here I am. Les jours s'en vont. Je demeure.

Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1991)

This film is almost a one-woman show by Juliet Stevenson and as such it's powerful and touching. The lesson is that if a person alive has to give up the dead, the dead also has to give up the living one day. And the ultimately universal (so it seems) imagination to posit the dead's realm to somewhere above the clouds presents the only convincing moment of this rather whimsical story.

Ali G Indahouse (Mark Mylod, 2002)

Dahouse here is the House of Parliament, and Ali G is a member of the parliament. Very funny, but it doesn't have that charm of his TV interviews. Jokes are mostly sexual and they are very old fashioned. What makes it so funny, then? The whole film is a parody of a self-parodying, commercialised culture of American hiphop and gangsta rap. What's the point? The success lies in transpositionand nothing else. Occasional references to homosexuality is rather disgusting.

Ali G, innit.

This is a series of interviews conducted by Ali G, a character impersonated by Sacha Baron Cohen. Splendid craziness. Or as he says, Wicked! A series of impossibly stupid questions to a variety of people who seriously answer them; the whole thing is so British. Here lies my future locution. Boyakasha!

The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wes Craven, 1987)

This is at best a second-rate horror and it's quite abominable but it has it's uncomparable merit, too. It's a magnificent Haitian tourism film. The voodoo is there, the notorious Tonton Macoutes is there; the historical backdrop of the fall of the Duvalier regime is authentic. The story is about an American anthropologist's nightmarish experience of being buried alive in his quest for the secret of the zombie. Little if any film has treated this real phenomenon in a more plausible fashion. An interesting film, hence. Cathy Tyson (of Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa) plays an important role here, but not as attractive. The guy who played the role of the anthropologist is simply tepid.

I want to see Haiti in a more realistic way.

The Best of Not the 9 O'clock News Vol. II

I'm drunk. This is the vintage performance of Rowan Atkinson from the early 1980s. Excessively funny. The only thing I can say at this moment is: glad not to have been born in the UK! Their sense of humour is outrageous. Well, but I have to admit that I've missed a lot by not knowing this hysterical BBC program as a young college boy...

Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby (Danny Mulheron, 2005)

This is a TV series: 7 episodes of 25 minute-long. It's about an old teacher at a Cathoric all-boy school somewhere in rural New Zealand. He is highly politically INcorrect and utters every imaginable abominable lines; racist, sexist, no-consideration-for-others, old-fart school. But by and by his remarkable honesty becomes gripping. Students, verbally and physically abused, become very attracted to him through many fatal incidents. My Gomsby now proves himself to be the most memorable teacher for the bottom layer of the student body, which consists largely of island boys (not only the Maoris, but the Samoan, Tongan, and other Pacific islanders). The last five minutes of the final episode is simply moving.

A strange country New Zealand is. It is now on its way to create a truly multicultural society. And in that, somebody like Mr Gomsby can be paradoxically refreshing and can offer a core of crystallization, so to speak!

Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996)

Tornado is an essential component of American imagination. This film follows a team of scientists who try to establish an early (15 minute) warning system when the tornado hits. The film stinks at many occasions, but there are moments of brilliance. We are so accustomed to hold natural phenomena in awe that when the scenes of demolition by the wind is deployed in front of our eyes we stay focused, we marvel at them. An interesting film. But I could have wished for more.

Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

The film depicts a serial-killer whose staging is based on the seven sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, lust. The tension builds up rather slowly, and the artificial nature of the murderer's protting makes everything look forced. Its gruesome scenes are often disgusting. What is lacking from this film is a sense of humour that in Fincher's later work Fight Club occupies a special place. It's a strong stuff, I admit, but if asked if I liked it or not, my answer is very predictable.

The Man Who Wasn't There (The Coen Brothers, 2001)

Another thorough masterpiece from the Coens. Not a dull moment throughout. It's quite amazing how they can sustain the tension from the beginning to the end, with all the unexpected turns at every possible corner. The modern-day Hitchcock they are. The film's white and black imagery is superb. A triumph.

Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)

This is a biography film of Johnny Cash, focusing on his obsessive love toward the fellow singer June Carter. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon are both good, but the story is extremely boring. If we put the name "Johnny Cash" between parenthesis, this would be a downright failure. We never know whence the obsession comes from. And Johnny the singer's charisma is hardly perceptible, although Joaquin is doing a very good job of impersonating. As for Elvis and Roy Orbison, we didn't really know who they were.

I would have appreciated better if the film focused on Johnny's musical tension with Bob Dylan.

The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004)

The whole of Manhattan under the ice. Wow. This is exactly the kind of vision I had when I was fifteen (about Tokyo)... And very well rendered thanks to today's digital image-generating machinery. The story is absurd, of course, and I don't really buy the possibility of minus 150 degree ultra-cold air mass descending within minutes. Can it really happen? Can it? And the wolves are quite dissapointing for somebody who live under the totem of the wolf. Still, this is a fairly enjoyable film and the message comes through very clearly. America, stop wasting the planet's resources! This from a German director. I'm glad.

Stuck on You (The Farrelly brothers, 2003)

How risky it is to produce a film with a pair of conjoined twins as its central characters. But again, the Farrellys made a film that is fun, touching, lovable, and unforgettable. I can't really locate where the charm comes from. But it's there, with a lot of laughter and occasional simple tears. Magical.

A lovely book!

My new book of translation is now published in Tokyo: Aimee Bender's first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000). The cover is adorned with a lovely drawing by Midori Yamada. It fits the novel's story miraculously well, although drawn completely independent of the novel. The book looks really pretty. It's a strong work. The rest is up to you, possible readers!

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

It's funny how we form a certain preconception by a series of hearsays about a film we haven't watched. This is a classic from my junior-high days and surely I have heard talks about it. I knew it was a love story of a peculiar kind; and I thought somehow it was set in the UK.

Watching this for the first time now, soon I find out this is in the States. On the East coast somewhere; but the scenery looks Irish or Scottish. A very good film as long as you don't psychologize or psychoanalyze it. No explanation grasps the rich overtone of the film and its strong undercurrent.

"I should like to change into a sunflower, most of all," says Maude. Approaching eighty and she's vivacious. I can't help but think of a million sunflowers near Oamaru, New Zealand. Cat Stevens' songs are quite nice, too. At one point we learn that she has multi-digit nunmbers tatooed on her forearm and this tells about her past in a Nazi concentration camp. No further explanation is given. Sadness remains.

Just like Being There, this is also a wintry film although filled with moments of laughter. I just learned (I had overlooked) that Sean Penn had dedicated his first film as director, The Indian Runner, to Hal Ashby. This makes me think that living in America, one's heart can only be wintry.

The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996)

Witchcraft is a science of the four elements and the power of nature within. The film begins with this in mind and it's pleasing to a certain point. There are some brilliant scenes: e.g. the beach and Nancy's walking on the water. But the finishing 25 minutes or so are strictly unattractive. The uses of snakes, rats, and bugs all contribute nicely to weaken the film's charm (wow, this is a magic-related word, "charm"!).

One big blunder I think is Sarah's rival Nancy's background. If she comes from such a poor, white trash background, how can she attend a very expensive-looking Cathoric prep school?

All the actresses are too aged to be high-schoolers, too. Rachel True, the black girl, is beautiful, but at the time of this film's production she was 29 or 30. Well. The movie is the ultimate witchcraft, ain't it?

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Gus Van Sant, 1993)

So ambitious, so boring. It could have been a great film, if not for the word-heavy screenplay and the irrelevant narration (by the novel's author). I haven't read the novel but I get a glimpse that it must be fun to read. Then, by trying to follow the novel's development too closely, the film failed to find its own undisturbed pace. It lacks proper percussions, so to speak.

But as in many of Van Sant's films, outdoor sceneries are fascinating. Uma Thurman is also a great material, visually striking, if not exactly pretty. This film contributes well to the myth of the west. Of course, all the land we conceive in our heads are just images mediated to the bottom. And this west has its own charm.

I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004)

Directed by an Egypsian, this film is set in 2035 AD and Chicago is a hyperopolis then. I have never been an SF fan and I don't have any sensibility whatsoever toward things robotic. Starting from the famous Asimov's three laws that govern robots, the story is cebtered around the latest model robots revolution against humans and the struggles against them of a cop (himself a quasi-cyborg) performed by Will Smith. The US us attacked by the robots led by VIKI (the central machinic nervous system) because the US threatens other countries and pollutes the planet more than anybody else; how sensible. VIKI is finally disabled by Will Smith, but the aftertaste of this human triumph is not altogether good.


In fact, the film is somewhat groomy. The main purpose of robotics--to develop someTHING to replace human labout--seems to me to be a very decadent direction.

Hitch (Andy Tennant, 2005)

This is a very well-written story with just what you can expect from Will Smith. I have been a fan of him as much as I am a fan of Eddie Murphy (who is of my own generation) and basically I am trying to learn my English locutions from them more than from anybody else. The fresh prince (whom my son used to respect when he was six) is alive and well, here as a very probable improbable profession of the date doctor.

Eva Mendes (as Sara) is gorgeous and very Cubana.

A matchmaker who is so clumsy about her own affair is basically an Emma story (we have Clueless) but in this the transposition (female to male, white English to black American) is thorough, unexpected and funny. Another good piece from the director of Sweet Home Alabama!

Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)

This is one of the most popular films in my undergraduate years but I haven't had a chance to take it in. Now I watched it. It's very funny. More than Peter Sellers himself, the dying man Ben is an awesome actor. Shirley Mac Laine masturbating is quite funny, too. The film is wintry and tranquil. It's a pure fantasy, isn't it, but I am led to think how in the world did the original author Kosinski want to write such a fantasy and did Peter Sellers want to impersonate the character at the end of his life.

Innocence of a retarded person is a very strong myth. In this Chance is akin to, for example, Sean Penn's Sam in I am Sam, among others. A genealogy of innocence is to be undertaken.

Sweet Home Alabama (Andy Tennant, 2002)

An incredible story of a fat liar Southern belle faithfully loved by two too-good-to-be-true guys and gets away with it. It's silly, of course, but curiously enjoyable.

Apart from the fun this film offers, I am moved by the simple fact that it's about Alabama. Back in the early 1980s I was an exchange student at Troy State University, Troy, Alabama. Nostalgia has a great shaping power for one's sense of identity, and on viewing this film I am constantly taken back to my own Alabama days! C'est larmoyant, à vrai dire!

Reese Witherspoon's accent as Melanie is authentic as she's from Louisiana. The same is true for the husband Jake (Josh Lucas who is from Arkansas).

Geez, it's been a quarter of a century... I wish I could go visit Troy, Montgomery, and other towns I knew!

In the film Southern nationalism is so thick, and the presence of blacks is so limited. That's Alabama, too.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Finally. And e uma beleza! (It's a beauty!). So funny, so well conceived, so well staged, so well performed. And yet, and yet, it can't compete in my mind with the wakening freshness of Bottle Rocket. Whatever. All the characters in RT, including dogs and the falcon, are interesting.

I sensed for the first time in this film an affinity with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, not only for the story telling and the cinematography, but also for a subtle attitude toward life, or toward the depiction of human lives. Will have to think about it.

New York Stories (1989)

This is an omnibus film by three well-established directors, playing out each one's tune to their hearts' content. Nice combination.

Martin Scorsese's Life Lessons shows Rosanna Arquette at her best time (contemporaneous I think with lovely Desparately Seeking Susan).

I heard people criticizing Coppla's Life Without Zoe as child-oriented and damaging to the other two, but no, I think this is a wonderful piece of urban fantasy that captures a certain core feel of New York-ness.

Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks is so crazy and hilarious that makes me want to watch more of his films, when I have been out of touch with his work for such a long time. This apparition of the Jewish mother in the Manhattan sky really kills me.

Jewish sense of humour... what is it? I am even reminded of Aimee Bender's joyful short story "Mazipan" for its absurdity. Will come back to it when time comes.

Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002)

Hilarious, exciting, charming, and touching. I think I'll write an essay comparing this with another fascinating Indian girl movie, Anita & Me. It's filled with vivacity and humour, and it makes us curious about the life that's behind the African-Indian immigrants in the UK.

I enjoy so much the parallel scenes of the wedding and the football match. Such colorful cultural displays on both sides! Then I am brought to think upon it.

I will probably never get to know an Indian family like this and I will probably never attend their wedding. So what I enjoy on the screen (their dances, songs, proxemics, mannerisms, cuisine, etc.) are really all representation of representations. Still I get pleasure out of them. Is this all in vain?

I don't think so. To have a glimpse of a culture, even in a highly mediated form, is not bad at all. It's entertainment in the best sense. It's up to you how you make use of the knowledge you receive from it. To a good cause? If possible. To be lost in oblivion? If inevitable.

But education usually is never free from such and such representations working wholly, in their unarticulated totality, on you. Hmmm. Do we ever learn anything about the actual world from a film?

Good Will Hunting (Gus Van sant, 1997)

A good, beautiful film, but the story is little plausible. I don't feel any traces of insights into math or psychology. It's just every schoolboy's image of what mathematics and psychology are. And a heavy dose of psychologism, too. Explanation is something we need last, preferably out of the screen.

Apart from that this film captures the images (illusions, maybe) of the Boston/Cambridge area nicely and it's a different kind of campus movie. Especially beautiful is the scene when Will sits on the riverside after telling the girl goodbye and the sky is blue and there are a lot of white clouds. This is the kind of shot we need. Very understated. Very nicely done.

The Jerk (Carl Reiner, 1979)

This is Steve Martin's film-starring debut, I am told. It's silly and funny but not so dumb as Dumb and Dumber; in fact, in this strain of non-sensical comedy Steve Martin is mostly surpassed by Jim Carrey. But the beauty of this film lies in its starting point; that the white guy is actually an adopted son in a poor Mississippi black family!

Steve Martin's hair is prematurely gray. (He was barely in his mid-thirties at this moment.) Next time I'll watch this with Bulgarian subtitle (not that I can read and understand it).

Finding Forrester (Gus Van Sant, 2000)

A fine story told with integrity, precision, and elegance. Nothing is more touching than an unlikely friendship; movies have proved this over and over again. This is another triumph of the film that it is a medium destined for friendship.

The song used at the ending, a solo by the late Israel Kawakawiwo'ole (Brudda Iz) is beautiful. This makes me take up the ukulele once again.

Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002)

A great film about the futility of the war. And that set in the most futile of all the futile combats--that in Saipan. How many people got killed there on both sides? The violent depiction of this film can only be realistic. A rare moment of beauty is when one of the Navajo men and a white guy play together an improvised melody; one with the Navajo bamboo (?) flute, that strongly resembles the Japanese shakuhachi, and the harmonica. The Navajo language being one of the subjects is very well represented (probably for the first time in film history) and the Navajo values are rightly featured. Nicolas Cage is great.

Saipan is no joke. Many aspects of the contemporary US foreign policy are determined by the US's trans-Pacific relationship with Japan in the last century. The US, or at least a part thereof, never hesitates to demonize and kill the enemy. They overkill. Overly destroy. And they claim justice. Japan may have done something similar, too. The island of Saipan even today need a work of serious spiritual apaisement. I don't doubt the director's serious anti-war intent, but movies are funny. There must have been those who shouted "Kill the Japs" among the film's innocent spectators.

It's fun to watch that Nicolas Cage speaks fair Japanese in this film. It's strange that this film shows no African American among the marine.

Strange coincidence

If you licked something really cold, your tongue would stick to it. You see it in Dumb and Dumber (on the ski lift). Then again in Slap Her, She's French! when the little Geneviève licks the ice-ass of a cow. Of course there must be many who have watched these two films and remarked this little bit of coincidence. But why in the world should I watch them consecutively? This is a strange coincidence without any meaning in it...

Kingpin (The Farrelly Brothers, 1996)

Another nice comedy from the Farrellys. It makes bowling look so much fun (just like The Big Lebowski) and Amish look so interesting (just like The Eyewitness). Bill Murray has a pattern now about his paternity problems. It's so weird that director after director bring up this association. Deformity, deficiency, and love are the three words to describe what the Farrellys are after.

Shallow Hal (The Farrelly Brothers, 2001)

"Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder," says old wisdom. What if you pushed this logic to the extreme? This film is the result, it's a thought experiment. It's fun and in parts touching. Their recurrent theme of the physically handicapped (either by birth or by life history or by accident) is given a full voice and representation. How far do you go, you wonder. But they know how to wrap it up nicely, too. I liked it. But to say that Gwyneth Paltrow is very pretty already contradicts the story's spirit.

Slap Her, She's French! (Melanie Mayron, 2002)

It's a good comedy around the war of meanness between two high school girls, one Texan, and the other a French foreign student. All possible stereotypes are cleverly exploited to make you laugh. Then by and by you'll notice something's fishy about this "French" girl... She's got a French accent, all right, but she says "sophistique" (sophist-like) for "sophistiqué" and "Entendez-vous" pour "Attendez" (on the phone). And as it turns out, she's... Good enough to spend an hour and a half. It's very convincing, too, that such a story can take place only in Texas! (The only other state I can imagine it happening is Wisconsin...)

Dumb & Dumber (The Farrelly Brothers, 1994)

Finally I watched this classic... Good but a bit primitive compared to the refinement of There's Something About Mary. The parakeet incident--selling a dead parakeet to a blind boy--is downright outrageous to my real-life standard, but then I don't know why I feel such a repulsion against this one point. In their other films the humours they show with handicapped people are not this crude. Well, in other moments in my life I would have taken it otherwise. All I can say for sure is after this the Farrelly brothers get better and better.

Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994)

I like Ben Stiller, I really do. I also like Wynona Ryder (especially in Jarmush's Night on the Planet) and Ethan Hawke (especially in Snow Falling on Cedars). BUT. This is a terrible film. The story stinks. There is no sense at all about the flow of music. It's haphazard at best. Dialogues can be interesting and they may serve as a valuable source of information on how American brats spoke in the 1990s, but they lack in organization. The use of the video is also too tentative. This doesn't have the kind of integrity that a decent film has. Danny de Veto (one of the producers) must have been very UNHAPPY to see this. Of course, Ben Stiller has grown up since then. But, boy, this is a terrible film.

Utu (Geoff Murphy, 1983)

Should there be a justifiable "national" movie anywhere in this world, this is it. In the bloody history of numerous murders between Pakehas and Maoris, this film offers one clear message; that a Maori warrior cannot be sentenced by the military court of law. In the final instance, his execution is retrieved into the realm of traditional ceremonial honouring beyond simple, individualist revenges. It moves you in a strange way by showing how the land of these islands were conquered within the western space of law and how such a space of judgment itself is in contention even today.

I watched this first time at the U of Hawaii in 1987 where I was a graduate student in anthropology. My friend Akihiro Kalama Inoue reminded me of this recently. After almost twenty years, it is my joy to be able to watch this again to commemorate the Waitangi Day, which was yesterday. This is a must for everyone even remotely interested in the history of this country: Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The River Wild (Curtis Hanson, 1994)

At first I thought this was a family-adventure-comedy, but it was not. It was a thriller and the storyline was rather horrendous. As soon as the dog dissapeared, we knew it would appear again, and as soon as the good ranger appeared, we knew he would somehow be eliminated in a brutal way. And the ranger was Native American, too.

Maryl Streep shows a good command of the raft and the breath-taking power of the water makes this an interesting film. Is this the Snake river? I've got to go there.

Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002)

A kidney sells for 10 grands in London. And the sellers are illegal immigrants who yearn for a passport, and the money goes to those who stand in-between. The underground business of human organs preys on the weakest, the invisible, the silent.

This is a love story of two illegal immigrants, a Nigelian man and a Turkish woman, who work at the Baltik Hotel. Audrey Tautou is the Turkish girl and she is rather convincing. Not a bad film and it's doing a good job of focusing on friendship among the weak. "Good at chess usually means bad at life." Rings true.

Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002)

To the extremity of self-referentiality... only some Japanese I-Novelists and Charlie Kaufman can come up with something like this.

I keep wondering, how the author Susan Orlean thinks about all this, with Meryl Streep playing her and all? The final scene with flowers is very strong and fulfills the writing seminar instructor Mckee's theory in the story. I particularly like the way the time is manipulated. You can easily think of it, but it's another story to actually put it into practice.

Awesome in many ways. It can be demanding on the side of the viewers without much reward for it. Still, a very interesting and hilarious work.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Beeban Kidron, 2004)

A reasonablly good and enjoyable film, but the use of Thailand is typically derogating. Renee Zellweger will be remembered as Bridget in our afterlives, but I prefer her in the pre-Bridge days. Sorry to be so frank.

I am more interested in the director's name. Beeban? Where is he from? He seems to have directed a decade ago the TV movie Oranges are Not the Only Fruits, which of course is based on Jeanette Winterson's novel. I have to check it out.

Me, Myself & Irene (The Farrelly brothers, 2000)

This film has got a great tempo and an incredibly good selection of songs. All the possible finesse is put into making the story flow. Jim Carrey is simply incomparable. And Renee Zellweger shows her subtle facial dramaturgy in perfection. Not particularly beautiful, she's so charming. Three kids are fine, too, and the appearance of the black dwarf and the too-white albino (like the Winter brothers) are also an integral part of the directors' will to fight against the general discrimination toward "unusual" looking people. By any standard, this is a great film, if I'm not totally in sync with their sexual jokes! Most of all, this is the first time I took interest in that big small state (or whatever): Rhode Island!

Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993)

Very strong performances from Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. Begins with a slight racial overtone, which is then absorbed into the main character's psychopathology. It makes the story more convincing but less interesting. You feel as if at a certain point the social dissapeared and the individual surfaced, even with that brief description of the pro-nazi shop owner. Finally the man's fall is blamed on the society in a rather tepid way. However, the sequences of the last ten minutes or so are very fine, if a little unnaturally contrived. I didn't know Trevino could be an Italian name. I didn't know that Italians would move to Venice beach!

Loser (Amy Heckerling, 2000)

A cute little love romance at NYU, but a little on the drab side considering this is from Amy Heckerling, the master filmmaker with that incredible Clueless and, much earlier,that lovely Fast time at Ridgemond High on her cv. But some details are so good; like the episode with a new-born kitten or the fight in the library. I mean, these could have been totally different if taken by another filmmaker less thoughtful. On the other hand, the final scene is but a fantasy only a mid-twentieth century American could love.

One Hour Photo (Mark Romanek, 2002)

This is a fear materialized--the kind of fear we all slightly feel toward the shopping mall photo labs. The time of stalkers, indeed. And when they try to be too intimate, we can't but be defensive. But our photos are in their hands, all exposed, vulnerable, defenseless... like a child.

Robin Williams is super again as a psycho (as we have seen in Insomnia), gentle and calm, with hidden violence and weird obsessions. It's very American, very sick. And near the end we learn what is behind the protagonist's personal history; a sexually abused childhood for which photography played a cruel role.

It's well thought, well executed, but this psychological explanation rather puts me off. But then, the director Romanek did have a social message. With more and more family photos taken digitally, the high-speed photo processing is almost a history. We don't know what's taking place behind our social facade. Who's taking advantage of whom, manipulating images.

It's gluesome to think about, but this film is already a kind of testimony to a culture outliving its destiny.

A Room for Romeo Brass (Shane Meadows, 1999)

Set in Nottingham, this is a story of friendship between two 12-year old neighbouring boys. One is Gavin, white, a little crippled, the other is Romeo, of mixed-blood with a white mother, a pretty white elder sister, and an estranged white father. To the end you are left wondering about Romeo's paternity and the reason for the film's title. You get no clues anywhere. The film is equally focused on both Gavin and Romeo.

There is this very strange guy who at first helps the boys then has a crush on Romeo's sister. The guy's got no chance and turns violent. He is a self-contained bully, essentially, and finally gets what he deserves from Romeo's father. You are left wondering again--this time murmuring: So what is this film all about?

It maybe about the kind of violence, physical and metaphysical, a 12 year-old goes through everyday in rural England. But the story is too blurred and the developpment is rather dull. And yet, and yet, the film has a peculiar kind of charm.

I'll have to watch it all over again to know anything about Romeo's position in the family.