De la traite

Two points to remember from Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau's thin pamphlet Nantes & la traite négrière (2007):

1. La mise-hors (ou capital nécessaire à l'armement d'un négrier) était relativement élevée, de l'ordre du prix d'un petit hôtel particulier parisien à la fin du 18e siècle.

2. Au 18e siècle, la noblesse bretonne était à la fois nombreuse et souvent désargentée. On sait que le père de François-René de Chateaubriand fut un négrier.

And maybe another:

3. Il fallait souvent dix à seize mois afin de boucler la totalité du circuit.

Not the best way to spend a year of one's life.

Veiller ensemble

I've been reading French rapper Abd al Malik's autobiography Qu'Allah bénisse la France (2004) and find it très passionante. A young outlaw, brilliant in his school, turns to embrace Islam. Some details are so interesting:

Chaque samedi soir, nous nous réunissons en outre à cinq ou six pour étudier, puis veiller ensemble. Ces veillées étaient ponctuées de cours sur la jurisprudence islamique, sur la vie du Prophète Muhammad (PSL) et d'autres sur l'islam en général. Nous lisions encore jusqu'à l'aube le Coran et des hadiths, le tout entrecoupé de prières et de discussions religieuses. Ces débats traditionnels (MUDAKARA) consistaient à se placer dans une situation fictive et à déterminer quelle était l'"attitude islamique" à adopter en pareil cas. Je me souviens m'être torturé l'esprit sur des questions aussi "fondamentales" que de savoir s'il était licite de serrer la main d'une femme pour la saluer, ou encore si le fait de regarder un film au cinéma ou à la télévision était compatible avec l'"interdit de la représentation". J'ai tellement été imprégné par cette atmosphère où la distinction du licite et de l'illicite (HALAL et HARAM) devient obsessionnelle qu'aujourd'hui encore, je dois l'avouer, il m'arrive d'être pris à l'improviste par ce genre de questions légalistes.

May be this kind of weekly veillée we should adopt (with our graduate students) to seriously talk about what is to be done... in art (in general). Such will be our seminar this year!

Herzog

Films this year:

12. Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005)
13. Werner Herzog, The White Diamond (2004)

Re-watched with some friends two masterpiece documentaries from Herzog. Arresting, heart-breaking, subtle, and beautiful. This is my kind of filmmaker, like no one else in history.

Negrinha

B.D., graphic novel, manga, gekiga, whatever you may call it. This is a genre that's most sophisticated and synthesizing, yet individual and personal (more often than not).

Sometimes I come across an unforgettable work. Today it was Negrinha, written by Jean-Christophe Camus and rendered graphically by Olivier Tallac (Gallimard, 2009).

It's a lovely story of a morena girl (born from a Black mother) in Rio de Janeiro. Camus, himself a comic artist and a child of a Franco-Brazilian marriage, captures the light and atmosphere of the Rio in the 1950s like no one else could.

Some nice lines from Maria, the protagonist, to Joanna, a little white girl with whom she holds a sister-like intimacy:

Joanna, tout ça doit rester entre nous, c'est notre secret, d'accord? S'il est dévoilé, le Christ du Corcovado sera tellement triste que ses bras s'abaisseront.

The charm of Rio returns to me like a wave.

Tractatus, o meu coraçao

Wittgenstein to me is mostly impossible to understand, but he says a lot of interesting things. I only don't want to spend more time with him to grasp what he intends to say. It comes down to the economy of time and your taste, I mean all your intellectual endevour in the humanities. The following are from Tractatus:

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing CAN occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

These two bits match well with the premises of the concept of affordance.

As if I was writing a letter to a friend

Discussing Hans Erich Nossack, W.G.Sebald writes this:

In an essay of 1961 where Nossack speaks of the influence on his literary work, he writes that after reading Stendhal he was anxious to express himself 'as plainly as possible, without well-crafted adjectives, high-flown images or bluff, more like someone writing a letter in almost everyday jargon'. [...] Nossack experiments with the prosaic genre of the report, the documentary account, the investigation, to make room for the historical contingency that breaks the mould of the culture of the novel.

W.G. Sebald, Campo Santo, Anthea Bell trans., 2005


Viva Stendhal.

And each time I die...

You may think and say whatever you like, but to me Philippe Sollers is one of the writers who can really write. Not a dull page in his œuvre.

This sentence from his Carnet de nuit, back in the 1980s (?):

Il se voyait mourir, chaque fois sous une identité différente.

This is the truth about our relationship with a work of literature.

Image according to Proust

Roger Shuttuck explains what "image" meant for Proust:

Like Locke and Condillac (and later Sartre), Proust saw our image-making faculty as a means both for grasping the world and for detaching ourselves from it, the essentially double process of consciousness. Inevitably "image" spawns a large family of photographic terms: photographie, épreuve (proof), cliché (negative), instantané (still or snapshot).

Roger Shuttuck, Proust's Binoculars (1962)

In a reverse effect, so to speak, photography is essentially ambiguous; it mediates us to the reality of the world, and it profoundly separates us from the world as is.

Bowie was not a vampire (not only, at least)

Nicolas Ungemuth's Bowie (Librio Musique, 1999) clarified many points that I wasn't very sure about in the history of rock. Bowie's "vampirism," for one. He quotes Bowie's own words:

"Dès que je trouvais certaines qualités chez des gens que j'aimais, je me les appropriais. Je fais toujours ça aujourd'hui; tout le temps. C'est comme pour une voiture, on remplace les pièces petit à petit."

And people have accused Bowie of his vampirism. But then Ungemuth goes on to say:

Dans les deux cas, Lou Reed/Iggy, les soi-disant victims du vampire, se sont largement repus du talent de leur prétendu bourreau. Bowie, en fin de compte, a plus joué aux infirmiers qu'aux succubes.

An interesting way to put it!

This books describes well the centrality of Bowie in rock music for more than three decades. I loved Bowie as a highschool student in the 1970s; then lost interest in him in the 80s (definitely by the time of "Let's Dance") and moved on to so-called world music. Which was just and unjust at the same time. But rock by that time was mostly DEAD until a serious ressurrection is brought about by Nirvana in the early 1990s, for example.

I'll go back to Space Oddity and begin listening to the various aspects of Bowie's own histoire vécue!

"Je vis, non j'existe."

I live, not I exist, says Le Clézio. This from the top of France Culture's home page. I think this sentence nicely and profoundly describe Le Clézio's attitude. To say that I exist is way too abstract to be true. I live, in, with, within. I and I live. I have always already been we, with the living and the non-living surrounding me alike. A refreshing pause from a dangerous ego-centrism.

Meet you at the corner?

Here is a joke that I really liked about thirty years ago:

--Qu'est-ce qu'un mur dit au mur d'à côté? demanda-t-il d'un ton criard. C'est une devinette!
Je roulais des yeux pensifs vers le plafond et répétai la question tout haut. Puis je regardai Charles d'un air obtus et lui dis que je donnai ma langue au chat.
--Rendez-vous au coin! m'assena-t-il en hurlant.

J.D. Salinger, Nouvelles (tr. Jean-Baptiste Rossi)

But the problem is, why did I find it so hilarious then?

The NRF at 100

I didn't realize that the NRF has been around for a century this year. It was founded in 1909 by Gide, taken over by Jacques Rivière (whom Philippe Sollers regards very highly), then at his death in 1925 succeeded by Jean Paulhan. I read this article by Philippe Lançon in Libération:

A sa [Rivière's] mort, en 1925, Jean Paulhan, radical prince de l'esquive et de l'ironie, lui donne le ton et l'avant-gardisme qu'elle conservera jusque dans les années 60.

And then:

Jamais l'opacité elliptique de Paulhan, dressant un mur de liège entre lui et chacun au profit de tous, n'a mieux révélé sa nécéssité. Il ne sortirait de l'ambiguïté qu'aux dépens des autres. C'est en manipulant par omission leurs talents immenses, capricieux, égoïstes, haineux, capables du pire pour exister, qu'il permet à la littérature qu'il aime d'entretenir ses vices et ses vertus. (Libération, Jeudi 19 février 2009)

Ah, Paulhan. The politics of literature is rife around him. But then, no editor can be totally innocent. Often tactics are mandatory for making things interesting and keeping them alive.

My friend Naoko Kasama has just completed her translation of Paulhan's collection of very short proses. I am hoping to see it materialize, under a book form, this year.

Films

Films this year:

9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher (2008)
10. Musée haut, musée bas, Jean-Michel Ribes (2008)
11. Al otro lado, Gustavo Loza (2005)

I watched 9 at Gaumont, Montparnasse. It's a masterpiece with a lot of stunning moments and another victory from Fincher. What I particularly liked (just like anyone else, it seems) was an episode of a man who was struck seven times by lightning. This alone proves the director's well-established sense of humor. Tilda Swinton is breathtaking, as always.

10 is so silly one could only watch it in the trans-Eurasia stratosphere with less than regular oxigen level. But I watched it twice, thanks to Air France. Quite nonsensical, and not in the Ubuan or Dalian or even Lewis-Carolian sense. By the way I was surprised to find that Air France doesn't serve Stella Artois anymore! All they have is Heinekken. Tant pis!

Keisuke Dan showed me 11 which was not bad at all. Three parallel stories of children's border crossings that happen in Michoacan, La Habana, and Morocco/Maraga. Often melodramatic, deserted wives too beautiful, characters stereotypical. yet one can't help loving the film. It's got some "it." The best actress of the show award goes to the little girl from Morocco.

I am well behind my video days... Will try to catch up!

Paris Dogs

In Paris and off the Seine, I came across a very nice big dog. Magnificent. I said, "C'est un chien superbe que vous avez. J'adore les grands chiens." And the old man responded in English, "Thank you, it's a Scottish Deer Hound." Oh. I thought it was an Irish Wolf Hound.

Strange but these two breeds are identical to my eyes. The same breed given different names in Ireland and Scotland?

I wonder if they have this kind of dog in Wales, and how they call it. But it's unlikely that they have such enormous dogs; Wales is where corgis are from!

In Paris

Just back from Nantes and je me trouve de nouveau a Paris... Nantes was wonderful, much more so than I had expected. But the memory of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is everywhere, when you look at it. Met a very nice Brazilian anthropologist, Denise, and she said she was rather sad about the new Quai Branly museum. I knew what she meant, I guess. Still it's an interesting, one-of-a-kind place and I am planning to go there again tomorrow.

Thanks all for your mail but please wait a couple of more days before I can respond. I am writing this from an internet cafe... my own computer couldn't get connected at the hotel. Maybe it's not compatible with the Wi-Fi protocol. I did't even know that!

On soul

One night in 1979 Derrida was listening to his son Pierre talking with Paul de Man; they were discussing musical instruments after a jazz concert in Chicago. Here is what Jackie recalls:

It was then I realized that Paul had never told me he was an experienced musician and that music had also been a practice with him. The word that let me know this was the word "âme" when, hearing Pierre, my son, and Paul speak with familiarity of the violin's or the bass's soul, I learned that the "soul" is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood--always very exposed, very vulnerable--that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards.

Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (1989); this part trans. by Kevin Newmark

Always a piece on the fringe that attract Derrida's attraction. And generally speaking, soul resides on the edge of things, it seems!

Teaching in grade school

What did Wittgenstein and Derrida have in common? They were both (at one stage of their lives) elementary school teachers!

Wittgenstein between 1922-26 (the years when he was between 33 and 37) famously taught in a primary school before he was forced to quit after hitting a student on his head for the child to lose consciousness. W only had two books published during his life time: the Tractatus and a vocabulary book for elementary school students. What a glorious and muy enloquecido teacher to have.

Derrida, instead of a compulsory military service, taught at a primary school in Algeria for two years when he was 27, 28 or thereabouts. This was around 1957, the hottest years in Algeria before independence. What kind of teacher he was, I can't tell.

I find it quite interesting, for me at this age, to teach in grade school along with my university position, if that's possible at all. A forced circulation of the teaching body among institutions of different age groups can only do good for the educational system in general. Themes out of school would be the only interesting and immediately pertinent in our collective survival.

Cowley on Cary

Sometimes you come across a paragraph (by any author) that's as good as a short story in itself. A minimum story.
One such is this from Malcolm Cowley's splendid And I Worked at the Writer's Trade:


In the case of one story by the late Joyce Cary, the "precious particle" was the wrinkles on a young woman's forehead. He had seen her on the little boat that goes around Manhattan Island, "a girl of about thirty," he says, "wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. i said to my friend, 'I could write about that girl...'" but then he forgot about her. Three weeks later, in San Francisco, Cary woke up at four in the morning with a story in his head---a purely English story with an English heroine. When he came to revise the story he kept wondering, "Why all these wrinkles? That's the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized," he says, "that my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Somehow she had gone down into my subconscious, and came up again with a full-sized story."

Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (1978)

The whole mechanism (of producing such a minimalist story) resides in the function of summarizing through retelling of somebody else's experience. This tells quite a bit about the genesis of the narrative genre.

Benjaminian translation, history, and natural history

Here is what Tom Cohen writes on Benjamin's peculiar "translation":

Walter Benjamin makes reference to a concept of history that breaks with the familiar notions of the term. As we know, he was given to taking familiar terms (allegory, cinema, dialectics, translation) and submitting them to a process of disinvestment. He called this "translation" : a site where the word passes through its own formal properties, emptied of "meaning" or interiority, and is then returned (unmarked) to usage in a sabotaging form void of subjectivity. Allegory becomes the other of the literary historical term; "materialistic historiography" dispels any ECHT Marxian hue; dialectics is unprogressive and anti-narrative, and so on.

And then, the following interesting remark on history:

Typically, "history" survives this procedure--which aims to empty out all interiorist traces--only to re-emerge within a different referential order. Rather than implying historicist echoes, Benjamin invokes a non-human "history" that will be gestured to under the misleading rubric of "natural history"--a history, we may add again, with different, proactive folds of time.

Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription (1998)

This kind of coalition

The name of Alan Liu I only knew as a Wordsworth specialist, and a very good one. Then, today on reading Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature, I learned of his recent interestingly sounding book The Laws of Cool. Here is what Hayles writes:

Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" --designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry--and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the compexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how peope live their everyday lives in developed societies. Whereas the traditional humanities specialize in articulating and preserving a deep knowledge of the past and engage in a broad spectrum of cultural analyses, the "cool" bring to the table expert knowledge about networked and programmable media and intuitive understandings of contemporary digital practices.

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (2008)

This sounds already like a truism, but this is, objectively speaking, exactly what we have been attempting in our Digital Content Studies program, gathering all the fields of the humanities and contemporary media practices alike. No conspicuous output, not yet. But it will surely happen soon. From a desolate corner of Akihabara...

No solidarity with myself, no, no

Here is what Claude Mauriac writes in his "Cocteau" book:

Trente ans après, je retrouve avec la même gêne cet homme qui était moi et dont je me désolidariserais si je m'en reconnaissais le droit. Mais pourquoi serais-je plus moi aujourd'hui qu'alors? Je renie le mauvais écrivain que j'étais. Je m'y sens autorisé, ayant sans doute fait quelques progrès et n'abusant plus ainsi des adjectifs grandiloquents. Mais si je n'ose plus parler de "joie du ciel" ni le "grandeur humaine" c'est probablement une façon autre d'être conditionné. Aussi peu libre maintenant qu'en ce temps-là. Aussi peu moi, à supposer que ce moi existe, mais je n'y crois plus, ne sachant depuis longtemps interchangeable.

Claude Mauriac, Une amitié contrariée (1970)

A post-Gide consciousness, probably, than a post-Mauriac one. But the subject of pronunciation is here functionning as strong as anything... Egotism, to full extent.

What to read (of Celine)?

Casually on rereading Deleuzo-Guattarian Kafka, I was reminded of their opinion on Céline:

Céline's syntactic evolution went from VOYAGES to DEATH ON THE CREDIT PLAN, then from DEATH ON THE CREDIT PLAN to GUIGNOL'S BAND. (After that, Céline had nothing more to talk about except his own misfortunes; in other words, he had no longer any desire to write, only the need to make money. And it always ends like that, language's lines of escape: silence, the interrupted, the interminable, or even worse. But until that point, what a crazy creation, what a writing machine!

Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka (Dana Polan trans. 1986 [original 1975]).

Hey, don't be si méchants, Gilles and Félix, there must be more good works from him. I don't think it's a good idea to limit people's perspective in this way. It's all in the way you talk, you know.

Byron on Shelley

"Shelley lives on outside his verse," writes Isabel Quigly in her masterful introduction to The Penguin Portable Library Shelley. She goes on to quote Byron:

Byron, who was almost entirely uninclined, by nature and habit, for admiration, wrote to Murray: 'You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the BEST and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew anyone who was not a beast in comparison.'

This goodness, this bonté, should be examined. For Romantic poets, it is almost impossible not to take their life into consideration when discussing their works. And this tells about an essential feature of Romanticism.

De Man

Paul de Man also has his moments of bravado, soaring high into the stratosphere of stylistics. No less impressive, and probably with more dexterity, than Bloom is a passage such as:

The erasure or effacement is indeed the loss of a face, in French FIGURE. Rousseau no longer, or hardly (as the tracks are not all gone, but more than half erased), has a face. Like the protagonist in the Hardy story, he is disfigured, défiguré, defaced. And also as in the Hardy story, to be disfigured means primarily the loss of the eyes, turned to "stony orbs" or to empty holes. This trajectory from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration is the trajectory of The Triumph of Life.

"Shelley Disfigured" in Deconstruction & Criticism (1979)

Time to take up Shelley in earnest.

The Yale School revisited

As a beginning graduate student in the early 1980s I encountered the collection since became famous: Deconstruction & Criticism. Famously, for Bloom, "criticism" was he alone, and "deconstruction" the four other gangs. But this is a superb collection that's possible only at a time in history. It is a representative work of five great critics, and at their near-best.

After almost thirty years and I still can't grasp the whole range of its possibility. Yet Bloom is mesmerizing:

A power of evasion may be the belated strong poet's most crucial gift, a psychic and linguistic cunning that energizes what most of us have over-idealized as the imagination. Self-preservation is the labor of the poem's litanies of evasion, of its dance-steps beyond the pleasure principle.

Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form" in Deconstruction & Criticism (1979)

I hold my breath and follow his steps, and again, and again...

Cohn on Richard

This book after all might be the most decisive one in my formation: Robert Greer Cohn's Toward the Poems of Mallarmé. On re-reading it once again I notice this passage he writes on Jean-Pierre Richard's majestic L'Univers imaginaire, and I like it very much. With due respect to Richard, undoubtedly one of the most important literary critics ever, he writes:

Richard's volume is remarkable, but chiefly, as we have come to expect of him, as a study of the man (a sort of inner biography) or, rather, of the "everypoet" in Mallarmé. This is scientific and general pre-criticism, or aesthetics, rather than criticism and does not rise to the full specificity of the individual works. How often an image pinned down by a dozen quotations will change under the impact of neighboring images in a given poem! But, while much space is alloted to juvenilia or repetitious documentation, the poems themselves receive a few lines (or, at most, a couple of pages) each. Richard chooses to ignore, for practical purposes, Mallarmé's biggest single effort at a poetic work, the Coup de Dés. In this way, he, Richard--as he candidly admits to be his aim--becomes the owner of the ambitious syntactical or "totalizing" vision which is properly Mallarmé's. God protect us from our friends!

Rober Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (1965)

Touché, for the "inner biography" part. And the final sentence is GREAT. Thematism has its own metaphysics. Criticism, in the final instance, should be practical criticism. And criticism is neither biography nor some para-philosophical murmuring. Yet IN PRACTICE we can't help but ending up in syncretism, can we?

Self/other, otherly, or otherwise

Leslie Hill in his very lucid book on Blanchot explains Blanchot's third type of self/other relations in the following manner:

In this relation of the third kind, the Other is thought not as another Self, but as radically different, irreducible to the One or to the Same. This type of relation occurs, so to speak, beyond the horizon of world and being; it is relation without ratio, adequation, equality, symmetry, or reciprocity. This is relation without relation, relation in the form of a pure interval belonging neither to being nor non-being, irreducible to all thought of truth, visibility, veiling or unveiling, and figurable only as non-reversible dissymmetry, as a strange space in which the distance from me to the Other is not the same as the distance from the Other to me. Here, all topographical continuity is abolished.

Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1997)

What makes me so uneasy is the phrase above: "a strange space in which the distance from me to the Other is not the same as the distance from the Other to me." The physical reciprocity of distance can't hold. This makes any approach impossible. An eternally parallel world of discommunication?

Get lost!

Norman Brown to me is intensely post-Romantic, and the power of his speech comes, more often than not, from his erudition in the classics, including those key literature of Christianity.

Already in mid-20th c. he writes against those who preach "the crisis of identity" the following little pep-talk kind of passage. I like it very much:

But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it." (Brown, Love's Body)

The only remaining question is this "my sake."

To explore is...

On reading this passage by Norman Brown's Loves Body I bursted out laughing; he states, following Melanie Klein, what follows:

To explore is to penetrate; the world is the inside of mother. "The entry into the world of knowledge and schoolwork seemed to be identified with the entry into the mother's body." (...) Geography is the geography of the mother's body (...) Geography; or geometry, as in FINNEGANS WAKE.

Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (1963)

Well, well. In the geography of dreams, it may be true. But this sounds only like somebody who has never really explored geography OUT THERE.

Yet Brown is interesting, and what interests me most is his being born in El Oro, Mexico, in 1913, as a son of a mining engineer. His view of "geography" may after all be the best illustration of the oedipal situation.

Blanchot's Chroniques

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Blanchot published 173 articles in the Journal des débats. Almost weekly! He was between 33 and going on 37 years of age.

This is probably something I should have done in my Southwest days... Now I am turning more and more reluctant to read new authors. I'd rather get to know better the writers I have already read. The process is definitely that of re-reading. But then, is there such a thing as first-time reading properly speaking, not in any way a re-reading?

Youngish Blanchot's variety of reading is astonishing, and his perspicacity dazzling.

Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques littéraires (2007)

Literature in translation

Translation made Susan Sontag who she is. "Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful," says she. "What--rather, who--would I be without Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?"

Then comes this paragraph:

My sense of what literature can be, my reverence for the practice of literature as a vocation, and my identification of the vocation of the writer with the exercise of freedom--all these constituent elements of my sensibility are inconceivable without the books I read in translation from an early age. Literature was mental travel: travel into the past... and to other countries. (Literature was the vehicle that could take you ANYWHERE.) And literature was criticism of one's own reality, in the light of a better standard.

Susan Sontag, At the Same Time (2007)

Criticism of life by way of others' reflexions. Translation and transformation of the self occuring at the same time. This practice, in its totality, is called literature. But then, the practice of learning foreign languages, in its totality, is also nothing less than literature.

On the Boyasch

[Y]ou run into two breeds of gypsies, the nomad coppersmith and the Boyasch...The Boyasch are what you might call Serbo-Rumanian gypsies... They are small and dark and strange, and if you saw some on the street you'd notice them but it probably wouldn't occur to you they were gypsies. They're cleaner and neater than the nomads, and their women don't dress gypsy style any more, although a few of the real old ones still wear gold-coin necklaces. At the same time, they're tougher-looking. I guess hard is more the word. They look hard. It's something in their eyes. They have curious cold, hard eyes, and they watch you every second, and they rarely ever smile.

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel (1992)

Joseph Mitchell is wondeful, wonderous. The blurb says: "His accounts are like what Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism." I sense in him a precurser of Chatwin's. (Especially Chatwin's earlier, short pieces on strange encounters.) This book was sent me by my friend Q in NYC. She's one of the most interesting philosophers working today. Thank you, Q, for your continuous enlightment of my ignorance!

Avec Keats

Helen Vendler is wonderful, superb. Her remarks about Stevens' debts to Keats have been on my mind:

Stevens had so absorbed Keats that Keats acted in his mind as a perpendicular from which he constructed his own oblique poems: what we see as a secrecy of allusion was for Stevens no secrecy but rather an exfoliation of a continuing inner dialogue with Keats. Stevens' allusions, in his briefer poems, are more often to content than to language. If Keats says "tree," Stevens will say "pinetrees," "junipers," "spruces." If Keats says "the north...with a sleety whistle," Stevens will say "the sound of the wind." And if Keats says "crystal fretting" and "frozen time," of ice, Stevens will say "frost," "snow," "ice." If Keats says "not to feel," Stevens says "not to think."

Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984)

And this passage of astonishing condensation:

Stevens' poetry is a poetry of feeling pressed to an extreme; the pressure itself produces the compression and condensation of the work. The pressure of the imagination pressing back against reality, as Stevens called it, is very great: If you confine Greece, Keats, and Tennessee in the same chamber of your mind for a time, the amalgam solidifies into the famous stoneware jar and its preposterous sulky stanzas-- "Tell me, what form can possibly suit the slovenly wilderness?"

Back in 1989 I was talking to Michael Fischer, then chair in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, about my possible plans for a Ph.D. in American Literature there.I said I'd choose either one of the following three authors as my subject: Stevens, Faulkner, and Kenneth Burke. I didn't know what field to concentrate in: poetry, the novel, or criticism. I could have been an American critic; but it didn't happen. At that time my other plan was to move to Baton Rouge and LSU to write a dissertation on Edouard Glissant under his own supervision (Glissant was there at that time before his relocation to CUNY). And this didn't happen, either. I finally chose Seattle, the first American city I had set my foot on in 1972 and a city that I've been in love to this day. And the twenty years' detour began.

On immediacy

This from Gareth Stedman Jones's introduction to The Communist Manifest (Penguin Classics):

Like Feuerbach, Marx's aim was wholly to remove Hegel's mediations and return to immediacy. According to Feuerbach, the great defect of Hegel's philosophy was that it lacked 'immediate unity, immediate certainty, immediate truth'. In place of Hegel's process of bifurcation, mediation and reunion, what was needed was a philosophy of man as an immediate whole.

This notion of immediacy is utterly incomprehensive to me! To me, every unity, certainty, or truth need mediation of some kind. Man is incapable of grasping such without mediation. Hard to say, but in this respect Hegel seems to be right.

On being funny--in an Irish way?

I am not a good reader of Beckett's, but occasionally I open an earlier work, Murphy, for example, and read a couple of pages. This to taste Sam's crazy style. Any one page contains such a paragraph as:

For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite exceptionally anthropoid. Wylie was not sure that he cared altogether for her mouth, which was a large one. The kissing surface was greater than the rosebud's, but less highly toned. Otherwise she did. It is superfluous to describe her, she was just like any other beautiful Irish girl, except, as noted, more markedly anthropoid. How far this constitutes an advantage is what every man must decide for himself.

Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

An abominable sense of humour!

An earlyriser

Picture this Derrida as an earlyriser, just like Valéry well before him:

Et il a toujours travaillé tôt le matin: levé à quatre, cinq heures, il écrit jusqu'à dix.

Max Genève, Qui a peur de Derrida? (2008)

I should follow his example, too.

A flight from meaning

Bersani and Dutoit write this:

In the modern period, various strategies have been adopted to reduce--ideally, to eliminate--this contamination of literature by the semantic promiscuity of its own materials: Mallarmé's radical reordering of syntax, Joyce's attempted reinvention of English in Finnegans Wake, and the modernist experiments (following the lead of Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés) with the visual representation of meaning in the page's design. These strategies are all intended to block or control the word's signifying power, to impede the otherwise inescapable production of meanings alien to this work of art.

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment

A work of art trying to run away as far as possible from its inevitable meaning... this also is a very strange picture. Because in attempting to reduce meaning it is aiming at MEANING DIFFERENTLY than its original, "naturalistic" semanticity.

Interesting, but does it lead to anything interesting? If boredom is what they want, then I'd go for the Boredoms, rather. I mean, music is always there to avoid literal meanings.Why use language, in the first place?

O, saisons, o, SHADOWS!

Richard Holmes is one author I wanted to be, if I had another life, that is. His Footsteps surely belong to our list for the WALKING exhibition. Here is Holmes on Shelley:

In Act One of Prometheus Unbound, there is a haunting passage in which Shelley describes the "two worlds of life and death." Combining classical ideas of Hades, Platonic notions of the interne dreary spheres of daemons and the Dantean vision of the Christian Inferno, he suggests the existence of a world of "doubles," of "shadows" which repeat or mirror everything on earth, "all forms that think and live". These are not so much ghosts of the dead as ghosts of the living. We all have our doubles in this second world (the idea is most familiar nowadays in science fiction rather than poerty). Only at the moment of death or destruction are the real and the double united, "and they part no more." Thus to meet your double, or to see it attacking someone, signified imminent peril: death perhaps, or the invasion of the real, normal world by the world of shadows.

Richard Holmes, Footsteps (1985)

So that world co-exists with this one, not anywhere else but here, and it repeats everything that's happening here. The two are united only at the time of the former's destruction. Why then does the second exist? Only to show that the frist can never claim unicity. They are identical but for the fact that they are not the same. And this doubleness is the proof that you are alive... when dead, the two merges into one.

A very strange idea, indeed. Our life, being one, abhors its unicity. Or life, by its nature, needs constant differenciation. DIFFERANCE. We know how much Derrida was interested in British Romanticism.

Being inevitable, or as if

Here is what Bloom writes about the sublime:

The ancient idea of the sublime, as set forth by the Hellenistic critic we call "Longinus," seems to me the origin of my expectation that great poetry will possess an inevitability of phrasing. Longinus tells us that in the experience of the sublime we apprehend a greatness to which we respond by a desire for identification, so that we will become what we behold. Loftiness is a quality that emanates from the realm of aspiraion from what Wordsworth called a sense of something evermore ABOUT TO BE.

Harold Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry (2004)

The process of a lingustic arrangement's becoming itself; the reader's identification with the process; the sense of anticipation that's exhilarating; and its postponed fulfillment---hence, the sublime.

Master!

Leonard Cohen

Bought a copy of Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen at Page One, Taipei, last week and read this page and that, without even guessing what this book is about. Some very intriguing passages such as:

It was a lovely day in Canada, a poignant summer day; so brief, so brief. It was 1664, sunny, dragonflies investigating the plash of paddles, porcupines sleeping on their soft noses, black-braided girls in the meadow plaiting grass into aromatic baskets, deer and braves sniffing the pine wind, dreaming of luck, two boys wrestling beside the palisade, embrace after embrace. The world was about two billion years old but the mountains of Canada were very young. Strange doves wheeled over Gandaouagué.

Beautiful Losers (1966)

Why am I attracted to such a passage? Of course I know the reason, and I wouldn't dare tell anybody. Because the mountains of Canada were very young, probably. Or shoud I say this manipulation of chronology?

Further on near the end is this remarkable sentence:

Let it be our skill to create legends out of the disposition of the stars, but let it be our glory to forget the legends and watch the night emptily.

Superb, Leo, superb, superb.

Dragnet Girl

Films this year:

8. Hijosen no onna (Dragnet Girl), Yasujiro Ozu (1933)

This is Ozu's silent masterpiece, set in Yokohama and conceived as a mélange of a gangster movie and a melodrama. Neatly done and thoroughly enjoyable. Ozu was not quite thirty years old, and the scenery depicted is not quite Japan, but not quite US either; a noman's land of cultural migration.

The sister of would-be gangster Hiroshi, Kazuko (?), is very lovely. Interestingly, the actress (name?) who portrayed her retired soon after and not much is known about her anymore but an attempted suicide...

Implicit theodicy

The following bit about the basic theodicy of modernity sounds true:

This implicit theodicy of all social order, of course, antecedes any legitimations, religious or otherwise. It serves, however, as the indispensable substratum on which later legitimating edifices can be constructed. It also expresses a very basic psychological constellation, without which it is hard to imagine later legitimations to be successful. Theodicy proper, then, as the religious legitimation of anomic phenomena, is rooted in certain crucial characteristics of human sociation as such.

Peter Burger, The Sacred Canopy (1967)

Sauf en moi, and yet

Some statements in this world are simply impossible to follow. Especially when it comes to matters of faith. This from the French poet-translator Jean Grosjean:

Dieu est partout sauf en moi et en même temps il me semble qu'il est plus en moi qu'autre part, plus en moi par son austérité et par sa miséricorde. Pourquoi si sévère? Et pourquoi si peu?

Jean Grosjean, Si peu (2001)

God is everywhere but in me. At the same time, one has the impression that God is in one's self than elsewhere. The logic is out of reach. God, as an absolute other, is by His austerity and compassion, also infiltrates me. This is the aldilà of transcendence / immanence question. Very strange. Very intriguing.


Misericordia! C'est ce que j'ai besoin...

On sounding different

Here is an impressive passage from Richard Poirier:

The American writers I have been discussing have made the value of sound explicitly a subject of their work, and explicitly a resource for eccentricity. They suggest that the individual voice has in fact little else to depend on beyond the sounds it makes and, decidedly, those it refuses to make. [...] And yet, it should be apparent by now that in pressing their case the Americans simply SOUND different. They sound altogether less rhetorically embattled, less culturally ambitious than do any of these European cousins.

Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (1992)

So it's all about becoming simple, wild, and... strange.

The Galaxy Train / Atanarjuat

Films this year:

6. Ginga tetsudo no yoru (The Night of the Galaxy Train), Gizaburo Sugii (1985).
7. Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), Zakharias Kunuk (2001)

Last tuesday watched 6 with a couple of second-year students. Based on a hyper-famous story by Kenji Miyazawa, this animation is after Hiroshi Masumura's lovely all-cat characters comics version. Well-made, faithful, and as touching as the original. This term my undergraduate seminar students are expected to write on the story and I have my own theory about the whole structure of it, but will keep my mouth shut for a while.

7 is an EXTREME, TRULY OUTRAGEOUS masterpiece. This is the second time I watch it, but I still can't figure out the pre-history (one generation before, that is) part of the rivalry between Oki and Atanarjuat. All Inuit film based on an Inuit legend that calls for a GA (Eric Gans's generative anthropology, itself a development from René Girard's originary anthropology) kind of reading. Actually, I will write up my analysis one of these days, time permitting.

The war went on

Again from Henry Green's Pack My Bag:

The war went on, more and more people were killed. When our mothers visited us they often had news of relatives who had lost their lives. When they came down they were allowed to take us out to tea in the town and it was a rule we had made between ourselves that each of these times we should take a friend with us. This rule was unbreakable and it so happened that when a friend's father lost his life and his mother came down to read out his last letters home I went out with them and after tea we sat in that park I have described and they both cried over his letters as we sat with our backs against a tree. You would have thought this rule could be relaxed at such a time but there was no question of it. We always had boiled eggs when out for tea.

The passage talks about the unbreakable rules and its last sentence, "We always had boiled eggs when out for tea," is surprisingly efficient and fresh. Such is his power of mind that you are caught breathless. The kind of style I'd love to emulate.

On style

Some people's really got style. It comes so naturally to them, or so it seems. Henry Green is one such person. This from his mid-life autobiography:

They say the fox enjoys the hunt but the sound of the horn as he breaks covert must set great loneliness on him. When he knows by the cry of the pack at his heels that the huntsman has put the hounds on then surely in so far as animals can be expected to have feelings and however cruel they may be by nature fear must enter into it, he must fear for his life.

Henry Green, Pack My Bag (1940)

It's this great loneliness, beyond human loneliness, that sounds so true.

In Taipei

For the first time since 1985 I am in Taipei. Visited National Chengchi University and was impressed by the level of facility and students' work at the School of Communication. A million thanks to Prof. Lu and his assistant Victor for showing me around.

Later I went atop the famous Taipei 101; the view was awesome. Then visited two quite nice bookstores: Eslite and Page One. Their selections of English books are much better than any bookstores in Tokyo, Kinokuniya or Junkudo.

Bought two books, both at Page One, after all:

Bill McKibben, Enough (2003)
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

I guess I will repeat the visit often in the pragmatically near future. Taiwan I think is one of the most interesting areas in the world. Luckily, I have several friends here. I got to be more serious about picking up as much Chinese as I can.

In the evening Martin Su treated me to a nice dinner with his family. Our encounter last time was back in 2004 in Tokyo. Next time I'll go south to Taichun to see Lee Shuen-shin, my friend and novelist. It's so nice that our orbits come across from time to time, if only for at most less than ten times a life.

Hazlitt on Burke

I really don't know what good prose is. But in English and when I think about finesse, Hazlitt comes to mind among the old-timers. For Hazlitt, it was Burke who showed the way. Here is what Hazlitt says on Burke's prose:

It has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose-style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went the nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke's. It has the solidity, and sparkling effect of the diamond: all other fine writing is like French paste or Bristol-stones in the comparison. Burke's style is airy, flighty, adventurous, but it never loses sight of the subject; nay, is always in contact with, and derives its increased or varying impulse from it.

William Hazlitt, On the Prose-Style of Poets (1822)

"Airy, flighty, adventurous",I'd like to say the same for the most perfect prose fiction in American English in the latter half of the twentieth century: Marilynne Robinson's sublime Housekeeping.

Ah, les anglais...

Read pages from Jeremy Paxman's The English. Quite interesting. It gives me a very different picture of the English than I had in mind. I was talking to a friend from London this evening and now that's the city I'd like to visit most of all cities.

Here is Paxman:

Travel to England by the cross-channel train fron Paris to London and you can see the English indifference to the nation state at once. It is a journey from a city that, with its grand boulevards and avenues, proclaims a belief in central planning, to one that has just grown like Topsy. Paris remains a city when the government can still plough ahead with grands projets like La Défense or the Bastille Opera, whereas London can scarcely agree on a new statue.

Jeremy Paxman, The English (1998)

Two old world-cities... I'll see you both again soon, or so I hope.

Simon on Ted

What Simon has to say on Ted:

Hughes's magic was his writing. He made little black marks against clean white pages, marks that somehow detailed the absolute matter and manner of a bird or an eel or a foal or a wolf or a bear. At later dates and in distant locations, when we looked at those marks, when we read the poems, those creatures came to life. Out of nothing. Has any other magician ever pulled off a greater trick?

Simon Armitage's Introduction to Ted Hughes, Poems (2000)

Well put. I was not paying attention to Armitage but for this introduction, but the Japanese translation of his Kid appeared late last year and it read pretty good. An authentic successor to Hughes? Surely. I will read them side by side this year.

Rio Branco/Moriyama

Went to see a very interesting exhibition of photography; Miguel Rio Branco takes Tokyo and Daido Moriyama takes São Paulo. Together, they hold this show called A Quiet Gaze, Echoing Worlds. (But shouldn't the "gaze" be plural?)

Rio Branco's highly bio-chromatic (word? you know what I mean) images are dazzling. Moriyama is his usual self, but no less powerful than his Hawaii collection. Short documentary videos projected near the exit reveals the two photographers at work.

Watching it, I am very initerested in acquiring a GR21.

The chiasm rules!

Here is what Lawler says on the figure of chiasm:

Since the chiasm is a figure of great antiquity, shaping the Hebrew mentality according to N.W. Lund and functioning classically as a device suggesting completeness or closure and, in the Petrarchan tradition, as a convention of variety, it would perhaps be naive to read any intensely personal torment into Marvell's agonizing over his mistress's tyranny.

Celestial Pantomime (1979)

Quant à moi, I love chiasms. Chiasms, oxymorons, paradoxes... give an essential bite to any poetry.

A penchant for failure?

Now I know it; only those artists who tend to fail interest me. Here is Lawler's passage on Stevens:

E.A. Robinson has a sonnet called "Credo" which, like a few of Stevens's poems, seeks almost by an act of will to affirm the capability of the finite imagination's attaining the infinite reality---the very large difference between the two poets is that Stevens usually resigns himself to failure, whereas Robinson, as in the disastrous sestet to this sonnet, blindly and like a mechanical optimist affirms fulfillment.

Justus George Lawler, Celestial Pantomime (1979)

Resigning to fail, choosing to fail, whatever. I need more time to work on Stevens...

Extremely up close

Steven Shaviro talks about Godard's extremely close-up images: a pebble held in a hand in Weekend, and of coffee swirling in a cup in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle.

Here is Shaviro:

The abberant scale and unfamiliar lighting of these images defamilializes their objects---or, better, forces us to stop regarding them AS referential objects. They appear in fixed shots, held for a long time: duration has become an independent dimension of the image, and is no longer a function of the time needed for cognition and action. The pebble and the coffee are neither useful nor significant; they work neither as things nor as signs. They are nothing but images, mutely and fascinating soliciting our attention. The pebble rests, the coffee swirls, filling the screen.

Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (1993)

Shaviro is one person I failed to take a course with in Seattle in early 1990s. My friend Tsu-Chung Su from Taiwan had him as dissertation director. I often saw Shaviro at Eliott Bay (Book Company) in Seattle, but I don't think he remembers me at all. A missed encounter.

Mondo

Films this year

5. Mondo, Tony Gatlif (1995)

Watched with some of my students Gatlif's heartbreaking Mondo, based on a short story by Le Clézio. This is my fourth or fifth viewing; this film is a gem. I like every bit of it. The cinematography is also excellent.

I'd like to review all of Gatlif, my favourite director, in the course of 2009.

The Women's Sutra, The Munekata Sisters

Films this year:

3. Jokyo (The Women's Sutra), Masumura, Ichikawa, Yoshimura (1960).
4. Muneka kyodai (The Munekata Sisters), Yasujiro Ozu (1950).

3 is a very enjoyable omnibus film by three masterful directors, each using a star actress of the day. Yasuzo Masumura with his regular Ayako Wakao, Kon Ichikawa with fox-like Fujiko Yamamoto, and Kozaburo Yoshimura with demoniac Machiko Kyo. Each episode runs for 30 to 40 minutes, all of them very well-made, and occasionally very beautiful with real sceneries of Tokyo, Shonan, and Kyoto.

4 is narrated as a comedy but there is an undercurrent of something sinister. Madness is lurking at unexpected corners. The sisters are portrayed by two great actresses Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine. Takamine with her funny face and essentially comic character is brilliant and lovable. The story is woven around the grave, cats, and chairs. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

Scapegoating Artaud

What exactly was society for Artaud? In his vision of the artist, that culminated in Van Gogh as a suicidee of society, the artist could not but be a scapegoat, whether s/he knew it or not.

L'art a pour devoir social de donner issue aux angoisses de son époque. L'artiste qui n'a pas ausculté le cœur de son époque, l'artiste qui ignore qu'il est un BOUC EMISSAIRE, que son devoir est d'aimanter, d'attirer, de faire tomber sur ses épaules les colères errantes de l'époque pour la décharger de son mal-être psychologique, celui-là n'est pas un artiste.

Antonin Artaud, "L'Anarchie sociale de l'art"

It may be more interesting if we read the verb in the phrase "scapegoating Artaud" both as transitive and intransitive. An artist is scapegoated, but at the same time it is s/he who chooses to become a scapegoat.

On failure

It is interesting how Leo Bersani talks of Beckett's aesthetic of failure. For Bersani, Beckett "has yearned to fail more explicitly and more consistently than any other artists we know."

Here is the beginning of Bersani's essay on Beckett:

Perhaps the most serious reproach we can make against Samuel Beckett is that he has failed to fail. Failure is the ideal of nearly all Beckett's characters, and, in one of his rare theoretical statements, Beckett himself has said that "to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living."

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (1993)

But this quotation from Beckett is hard to grasp. It's from "Three Dialogues" in Disjecta. Let me spend some time pondering on it.

Skin that coon!?

There are some racoons in my neighborhood and it's surprising considering the density of human population in the area. How do they survive, nobody knows. Wild animals. I hope one day they prevail in Tokyo.

Harold Rosenberg is widely considered a founding father of modern art criticism in the US. His seminal The Tradition of the New is dated, undeniablly, and some of the points are rather tedious, yet the style is still pretty funny and fresh. This bit about "coonskinism" is unforgettable:

[...] I call this anti-formal or trans-formal effect Coonskinism. The fellows behind the trees are "men without art," to use Wyndam Lewis' label for Faulkner and Hemingway. This does not mean that they do not know how to fight. They have studied manoeuvers among squirrels and grizzly bears and they trust their knowledge against the tradition of Caesar and Frederick. Their principle is simple: watch the object--if it's red, shoot!

Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (1959)

What we learn from this passage may only be a way to be funny in one's writing. But it's enjoyable. Strange, too.

Kosher/terefah

Anything edible by ritualistic standards is KOSHER, which means literally fit or suitable. Anything forbidden is denominated TEREFAH; a word signifying originally a living thing that had fallen victim to a beast or bird of prey and hence unacceptable as a food, but subsequently extended to cover all unacceptable foods.

Milton Steinberg, Basic Judaism (1947)

How did this originate? To forbid being a scavenger? To avoid possible sickness caused by it? There is no way to tell, but rather intriguing. Is there any kind of psychological anthropomorphism working in all this?

A born outsider

Some people have naturally strong, powerful voices. They can be murmurs and rather ordinary in their explicit contents, yet curiously strong. One such person is Leslie Marmon Silko, undoubtedly one of the greatest American novelists living.

Here is what she says about her childhood:

My earliest memories are of being outside, under the sky. I remember climbing the fence when I was three years old, and heading for the plaza in the center of Laguna village because other children passing by had told me there were KA'TSINAS there dancing with pieces of wood in their mouths. A neighbor, a woman, retrieved me before I ever saw the wood-swallowing ka'tsinas, but from an early age I knew I wanted to be outside: outside walls and fences.

Simon Ortiz ed., Speaking for the Generations (1998)

OUTSIDE is really the keyword. Personally, I would never want to die INSIDE any human-made structure, let alone a hospital. I want to leave this world outside, under the sky, in the immediacy of the elements.

Thus I belong to Leslie's pack.

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa)

Watched two versions consecutively. Ichikawa's popular The Burmese Harp was first released in 1956, when the memory of war was not alien to the Japanese ethos. Then after so many years he self-remade the film in 1985. This, too, was popular enough, suitable to his well-established statue as master film director.

The 1985 version is in color and slightly longer. It's got some good moments of cinematography, yet the 1956 original is infinitely better.

One big blunder of the story (not the director's fault but the novelist's) is that in local buddhism music is prohibited to monks! Tant pis! Yet the framework of the story is convincing enough and it's not hard to imagine that it responded to the collective trauma left by the war.

Not much is depicted about local people, though. Knowing this weakness I think Ichikawa tried to present, although remaining silent, as many local faces as possible in the 1985 version. But the production was supported by a major TV company and it must have lead to some easy mise-en-scène here and there.

Still, it was interesting to watch the two in this fashion.

Films this year
1. Biruma no tategoto (The Burmese Harp), Kon Ichikawa (1956).
2. Biruma no tategoto (The Burmese Harp), Kon Ichikawa (1985).

Chestov according to Bonnefoy

On reading an interview, I found it interesting that Yves Bonnefoy was initially influenced by Léon Chestov (1866-1938). Russian born philosopher who is not read anymore but Chestov was a crucially important figure for those who were interested both in literature and philosophy, or, in short, existentialist reading of texts. He was from Kiev and his real name was Jehuda Schwarzmann. Sounds like Robert Zimmerman turning to Bob Dylan.

Here is what Bonnefoy says:

Chestov, avec Le Pouvoir des clefs, puis Athènes et Jérusalem, m'aida brusquement à voir ce que doit être l'objet, le seul objet de la conscience et de sa parole: un être qui est, là, devant nous, en son instant et son lieu. Mais je lisais aussi Kierkegaad--Les Quatre étapes sur le chemin de la vie--, aidé par les admirables Etude kierkegaardiennes de Jean Wahl, que je puis dire mon maître. Et bientôt j'avais découvert Eros et Agapé, de Nyguen, qui analysa avec une vigueur et une clarté avant lui, me semble-t-il, inconnue la nature complexe et même contradictoire du mouvement qui nous porte vers, justement, ce qui est.

Yves Bonnefoy, Entretiens sur la poèsie (1990)

An aspect of Chestov that's so intriguing is that he was a great traveller. His life was a seris of displacements, especially before he installed in Paris. He also had a passionate interest in Palestina. What would he have said, if he were to see the current state of affairs in the area?

Kenner on McLuhan

In my old copy of Hugh Kenner's Mazes, this paragraph is highlighted. I must have done it in 1992 or thereabouts, in Seattle:

What always saved him was his ability to get interested in something else. Nothing was too trivial. "Let us check on this," he would say, and steer the two of us into a movie house, where we stayed for twenty minutes. "Enough." Out in the light he extemporized an hour of analysis.

Hugh Kenner, Mazes (1989)

This kind of restlessness I surely share, which has caused me a lot of trouble in life. But the skill to extemporize I still need to elaborate, if only to keep these two great, mad Canadians company!

Marshall's got his style, Hugh's got his style. I seek my own in their shadows.

Narrating Julien

Here is what Peter Brooks says about Stendhalian narrators:

The narrator constantly judges Julien in relation to his chosen models, measuring his distance from them, noting his failures to understand them, his false attributions of success to them, and the fictionality of the constructions he builds from them. As Victor Brombert has so well pointed out, the Stendhalian narrator typically uses hypothetical grammatical forms, asserting that if only Julien had understood such and such, he would have done so and so, with results different from those to which he condemns himself.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984)

The narrator's pedagogic desire aimed both at Julien and the readers?

Spinoza & co.

[...] many rabbis kept their distance from the Judaizing Marranos, refusing to recognize them as Jews. It is ironic that while these Marranos were risking their lives in order to be faithful to what they thought was the religion of their forefathers, the official Jewish world refused to welcome them as brethren, at least not without misgivings and thorough examination.

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (1989)

Yovel's book is one that I've been meaning to read in earnest, but haven't been able to find time to do so. Full of dazzling moments. My knowledge of Spinoza is only rudimentary, this will one day be my Spinoza 101 (more than Deleuze's books).

Another very attractive paragraph:

Spinoza was not the first philosopher of immenence; pre-Socratics, Epicureans, and Stoics had preceded him in ancient times. But with Spinoza the idea of immanence, powerfully systematized, re-emerged after having been discredited and repressed by the overpowering weight of medieval Christianity.

Idem.

Spinozism is so different from what we usually picture on hearing the word Judeo-Christian monotheism. Something to be done on its affinity with some aspects of hinduism and buddhism. That, of course, must have been done already, but I, this I, have not. Hence this note.

*Yovel is the founder of the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute and professor (former?) at New School for Social Research in New York.

Reconsidering inhabitation

Happy new year to y'all.

The year 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of my moving to Nuevo Mexico and to my beloved Albuquerque... Time has passed, I got older, but no wiser. It's so nice to start anew anyways, or to pretend to do so, at this beginning of the year. On recommence toujours, and that's (as Stanley Cavell once said) very American. This possiblitiy of renewal is at the core of what is America.

This year I will daily update this blog with notes from my personal library, in view of connecting various strains of thought seemingly unrelated one from the other. This will be an experimental field of the CONNECTIVE HUMANITIES, or so I hope.

"As a result, the philosophers who followed Plato and Aristotle, if they still sought balance and fullness of life, no longer dared to seek it in the city. They betrayed their own creed by dodging their civic responsibilities or by turning to an idealized empire or a purely heavenly polity for confirmation; whereas those who took on the burdens of commerce, politics, and war had no place in their muddy routine for the highest possibilities of personal development. The monuments of Greek art, which we now prize, were valid expressions of this life at its loftiest moments. But in part they were likewise material substitutes for a spirit that, had it known the secret of its own perpetuation, might have made an even more valuable contribution both to urbanism and to human development."

Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961)

Mumford will definitely be a chapter in my future project on American thoughtscape, along with Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder among others. This also has been on my mind for a couple of decades without materializing itself... But I sense that things are beginning to take shape. By 2018 this will see the day (promises, promises...).

Artaud as Super-Proust

[...] Artaud's first mark on the notebook page forms the initiatory gash in language and image upon which he would amass a vast accumulation of interconnected fragments, maintained and recapitulated over the subsequent three years, honed in fury through thousands of pages, far exceeding Proustian dimensions (and violently 'in search of lost anatomy' rather than of lost time). The notebooks simulataneously negate language and image, and build into an immense and intricate corporeal architecuture.

Stephen Barber, Artaud: Terminal Curses (2008)

My two major tasks for the year 2009 are... still kept in secret. But I'll be working a lot on Antonin Artaud. Watch out for what happens.

Feliz ano novo!

Seymour's girl

On rereading RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS, I came to remember the core of Seymour's trouble; the existence of Charlotte and the unending pursuit of a femme-enfant. And interestingly, the anecdotic charm of Charlotte comes mostly from two elements: violence (slight but dangerously menacing) and accent (verbal).

Here is how Buddy our narrator reports about her:

"On certain nights when he was in especially good form, Seymour used to come home with a slight limp. That's really true. Charlotte didn't just step on his foot, she tramped on it. He didn't care. He loved people who stepped on his feet. He loved noisy girls." (81)

And then:

"We were playing stoopball on the side of the building one afternoon after school, Seymour and I, and somebody who turned out to be Charlotte started dropping marbles on us from the twelfth story. That's how we met. We got her on the program that same week. We didn't even know she could sing. We just wanted her because she had such a beautiful New Yorkese accent. She had a Dyckman street accent." (82)

As a self-contained novella, this work doesn't hold well. But Salinger is brilliant in his unexpected move from one sentence to another. The real weakness, then, comes from Seymour's only partially developped (throughout the saga) character.

It has been construed that Seymour stands for "See more." To me, it's "Say amour." And on saying that a dark shade is already ripe in the name.

Scribe labours

Writing on parchment, moreover, was a two-handed operation. As the right hand held the pen, the left held a knife against the springy surface of the page in order to keep it steady. Intermittently, the knife was also used for sharpening the quill and erasing errors. Medieval scribes would sit bolt upright, often on a tall-backed chair, with the manuscript laid before them on a steeply sloping desk or on a board attached to arms projecting at an incline from the chair itself. Theirs was not light work. On the contrary, writing was perceived as an act of endurance in which, as one scribe lamented, "the whole body labours."

Tim Ingold, Lines.

This december I failed to answer the questionnaire from Misuzu Shobo publishers on "The books you read in 2008". You are supposed to pick about 5 titles that impressed you most during the year. I have more than a handful, of course, but I can easily name the BEST.

Tim Ingold's illuminating Lines, which my friend Daniela Kato recommended to me. This work belongs to the same league up there with Elias Canetti, André Leroi-Gourhan or Alphonso Lingis. A book that truly changes your attitude toward LIFE.

Come to think of it I have had a copy of What is an animal? edited by Ingold for a long time! My laziness led to my overlooking his other works. Tant pis.

And thus my personal prize for the year 2008 goes to Tim Ingold. I'd love to come and visit him in Scotland next year.

Taking a walk with John K.

From Ayr they walked north to Glasgow, then headed northwest into the Highlands. [...] The wild country farther west, around Loch Fyne and Loch Awe, was more to their liking. Here they could walk for miles through the heather and hear no sound but mountain streams, or see no living thing but a few sheep on the hills or an eagle soaring overhead. The Highlanders spoke Gaelic, the first foreign language Keats had heard; they were intelligent and friendly, with nothing of the Lowlanders' suspicion of the English, but their living conditions were still more primitive.

Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963)

And this passage makes me want to fly to Scotland even more.

Billy Black

"Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

So says Seymour in his diary, read by Buddy. A very weird novella I've been trying to decipher over years... Salinger may not be the greatest of all novelists, but he is PECULIAR. Peculiar enough to attract my attention for more than half a life.

His quote from Saigyo:

What it is I know not
But with the gratitude
My tears fall

I know not what to say.

Mika Ninagawa/ Light Insight

Went to see Mika Ninagawa's solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

Rather crowded on a Saturday afternoon; this must be one of the most succesful photography exhibitions today anywhere in the world. She is immensely popular among young girls and the demography of the audience was wildly different from usual shows.

The title is "Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors." True to the statement, or the declaration thereof, every room is filled with mad, exhilarating colors. This is her staple. Also she has taken portraits of so many girl/woman icons. Hence part of her popularity. It's so girly. Room after room, it's a wild ride. I ended up laughing.

But my vote goes to her Mexican works. Photographs framed in wooden, hand-made frames. These works are somewhat dated in her career, I know, but the charm is lasting.

Also the goldfish room was fascinating.

After this I went upstairs to ICC for the first time in donkey's bitten-off tail (am I making any sense) to see Light Insight (Light in Sight) exhibition. This is about those multimedia works using light as their major component.

Nam-jun Paik's Candle TV was almost sublime. Ingo Gunthar's Thank You Instrument was very powerful, Yukio Fujimoto's LIGHT was ever-lasting (you'll know when you experience it with your own retina), and Anthony McCall's You and I, Horizontal was VAST.

This "light sculpture" using tiny mists was quite addictive. I could stay there for about ten minutes.

Then Joseph Beuys's Capri Battery's was a cute joke.

All in all, it was a nice stroll at the end of the year. Happy holidays to y'all.

No kidding!

This from AbeBooks' "A year in review":

" Unknown outside France, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature."

No hard feelings, but can it be? UNKNOWN OUTSIDE FRANCE? Most of Le Clézio's works are translated into Japanese and well received. And this for over forty years!

And don't imply he's ONLY a French writer... he's avowedly and factually FRANCO-MAURICIAN; so to call him a French writer is but halfway true.

In other languages, too, J.M.G. has been an imposing presence. And to my eyes he's one of the two most important writers, along with Gary Snyder, actively writing.

English-speaking (reading, rather) world, awake.

Lovely things

I found a piece of paper in the drawer on which is written the sentence:

"Lovely things can be done when you know how to make it happen."

I don't even recall if it's a quotation or not.

On the reverse side is the name: Grand Funk Railroad.

And a Japanese name that I don' t even recognize.

Strange how we accumulate these verbal bric-a-bracs for unknown purposes.

Robert Hurley's intuition

I am hoping now to write an entry every day for the rest of my sojourn...on this planet, quoi. Mostly about the books I lay my hands on.

Today I took up Robert Hurley's translation of Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Phiosophy and liked Hurley's preface immensely.

It's funny, come to think of it, that City Lights publishes this book. But when one hints upon the axis Spinoza-Bateson-Deleuze, it's all too natural that a Frisco house does so. This is such a Californian take on Deleuze!

"The environment is not just a reservoir of information whose circuits await mapping, but also a field of forces whose actions await experiencing."

So Batesonian,eh. I also like Hurley's great sentence: "the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway."

And then, almost maxim-sounding: "Deleuze maximizes Spinoza."

That's exactly what we should aim at when reading; to maximize the author you are dealing with.

I don't know much about Hurley except that he's a translator of Foucault, Bataille, and Donzelot, among others. If anybody knows anything about his writings, pray let me know.

We belong to the invisible non-community of translators of the French texts: Richard Howard, Alphonso Lingis, David Macey, my friend Michael Richardson, and myself alike.

I still got some homeworks to do in this stream of collective-bodily consciousness.

Like Boo Boo says

One thing I regret (already) about the year 2008 is that I couldn't write more entries on this blog. Which I promise to do once the year turns around. I really need to habitually (read, daily) write in English and this is about the only way I can do so. Without being paid or anything. My pleasure is unarguable.

Today I took up Salinger's RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS for the first time in several years and I am instantly hooked!

Take this enchanting enchaînement, for example, from Boo Boo's letter to her brother Buddy (talking about Seymour):

"He weighs about as much as a cat and he has that ecstatic look on his face that you can't talk to. Maybe it's going to be perfectly all right, but I hate 1942. I think I'll hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles."

AWESOME.

4

It seems sleep is his problem. Several ominous signs scattered around.

Here he is facing "la rue des Mutilés," he talks about "le monsieur de Rouen" (charged with regularity, and Flaubertian), then "le tramway 7" is that of "Abattoir-Grands Bassins" (two terms of death, submersion).

He goes on to say "Je vais me coucher. Je suis guéri." But nobody says that when s/he is really cured.

Alas. Now "Journal" begins on the following page.

3

Then comes "Feuillet sans date".

This looks too much, way too much now. Too contrived. But at the time of its publication, probably it looked cool enough.

Something has happened to the narrator. It changed his perception. So much is true.

"Je pense que c'est le danger si l'on tient un journal: on s'exagère tout, on est aux aguets, on force continuellement la vérité."

But this happens even before actually writing a diary. The very moment of writing itself tends to force la vérité, or at least veracity.

Writing is always trop en retard... it's delay is unforgivable! What really bugs Roquentin is the gap between perception and reflexion.

"Et il y a eu aussi cette suite de coïncidences, de quiproquos, que je ne m'explique pas."

Ah, synchronicity. One subject that can turn anybody ENLOQUECIDO!

2

Famously, the work begins with "Avertissement des éditeurs".

A very dirty old trick, indeed. The Mock-author tradition.

"Ces cahiers ont été tourvés parmi les papiers d'Antoine Roquentin."

The name of Roquentin resembles somewhat to Rochefort. Why this name? Quentin? Faulkner?

And then: "A cette époque, Antoine Roquentin, après avoir voyagé en Europe Centrale, en Afrique du Nord et en Extrême-Orient..." Gide, as if?

And this final "le marquis de Rollebon" is only enigmatic.

La nausee: 1

Now I am beginning to take notes on reading La nausee by Sartre. Everyday, if possible. But I don't want to spend more than 15 minutes a day on this. So I'll go page by page.

What a project.

Here is what Sartre quoted at the beginning of La nausee:

"C'est un garçon sans importance collective, c'est tout juste un individu."

And this from Céline's L'Eglise.

In the eyes of a group of which he is a member, the boy has no importance whatsoever. So? But without valorization of some kind does an individuality hold?

And why Céline? Think about the status Céline held around 1938, the year of the publication of this work.


And what Céline meant for Sartre, satyre. Very interesting.

"Importance collective" is a rather interesting phrase I'd love too keep in mind.

The Dam and Us

, Here is roughly what I am going to talk about at a conference in Wuhan, China, the day after tomorrow.

Two recent Chinese films deal with the Three Gorges Dam. I am off to that area tomorrow. I first watched Lee Yifan and Yan Yu’s very interesting documentary film Before the Flood (2004), then Jia Zhang-Ke’s critically acclaimed Still Life (2006). These films called my renewed attention to the colossal project of building a dam and its consequences.

In Japan, there is an interesting case of the Tokuyama Dam in central Japan, completed this year, that produced the largest dam lake in this country. Hidden under the water today is the old, small village called Tokuyama Mura. By the time the village was officially abandoned in 1987, an elderly woman named Tazuko Masuyama had taken 70,000 photographs to record the daily life of her community and their ancestral land. This constitutes an archive of a lifestyle that is now forever lost.

Another example. “The Ship Rides on the Mountain” is a very interesting art project that took more than a decade to complete. When it was decided to submerge a rural area in western Japan under water for the new Haizuka Dam, a group of artists and architects together with the local community united to build a 60-meter long raft using local timbers. When the dam was finally completed, and as the level of water rose, the raft began its move toward the top of a hill and eventually stayed there like an ark on Mt. Ararat. A documentary film of the same title, directed by Takayoshi Honda, was released last year (2007). It invites us once again to think about the dam.

The impact that a dam gives to the water system and environments are variously stated. Photographer Kazutoshi Hieda, for example, talks about the threatening recent change at the bottom of a Hokkaido river where various fishes come up regularly to lay eggs. Now the bottom is covered with a layer of mud because the natural supply of pebble has been hindered by a series of dams. Still keeping a very high quality of clear, uncontaminated water, the river is now turning into a zone not fit for fish. But a new trend is currently being set by the case of partial demolition of a dam in Gunma. Will this open an utterly new way to restore regional biodiversity?

Wow!

It's historical, really. Let's see which direction the US will swerve to.

Decreation

Here is a bit of Simone Weil:

Décréation: faire passer du créé dans l'incréé.
Destruction: faire passer du créé dans le néant.

"La pesanteur et la grâce" was first published in 1947. Derrida must have known it at the time of publication or soon after (when he was still a teenager in Algiers).

Déconstruction, rather than Ab-bau, seems to me to be décréation itself.

Novembering, or remembering de novo

Haven't written on this blog for a while; now I am trying to start anew. With only a couple of more days to prepare for my trip to China, it's hectic all over... . Maybe I'll stick to quotations here.

Here is a nice one from Anthony Kerrigan in his preface to Borges' Ficciones:

"Borges restates, in a few allegorical pages, the circular, ceremonial direction of our curious, groping, thrilling and atrocious ignorance."

Oh, our ATROCIOUS IGNORANCE... how sweet the sound! It is the very source of our quest into the verbal signs left behind by those who have passed before us on the surface of this planet. I don't mean humans, but everything, and all events.

What, what

Today I listened to the Dylan album Selfportrait for the first time in long years... and was ASTOUNDED by The Boxer.

Some of you may recall. It's sung by two Dylans, who in fact are one, yet utterly distinct one from the other. A beautiful-voice Dylan and that dirty coarse sounding Dylan.

It's so uncanny when you really listen to it. It reveals a structure of our voice; always on two levels on the way to go apart.

Autumn?

Can't quite believe it and don't want to believe it, too.
But it seems that AUTUMN is written all over the place!
There's a bitter edge of remorse in every space.
I don't think I can ever keep up the frantic pace.
No district of my mind is slated for the ace.
Whatever I undertake is well out of the race.
A pitbull doesn't hunt for mice.
I better cook and preserve some rice.
For I need to go on a trip abroad.
Nothing soothing awaits me on the road...

After my viewing of the very fine documentary Freestyle I can't help but try some rhyming as if I was also a cipher!

But only another week to go before we lose August with the face of Augustus the reticent.

I have lots of work to finish up. And I am rather nervous for this up-coming, very important trip of my life.

I am off to Nuevo Mexico in a week.

Time is definitely NOT on my side

Time, time. So much to be done, so little space-time to take them in.

Now we are happily approaching the end of the term, but I got quite a few to finish up before I can EVER hit the road. But the tickets are there and I have to manage my schedule wisely so as not to cause unnecessary troubles.

My summer plans:

Trips to the Cook Islands, then to Nuevo Mexico.
Finish the Artaud translation.
Move on to the Glissant translation.
Make editorial plans of the Saroyan collection.
Prepare for the speech on Asian American lit.
Begin painting (inspired by Emily Kngwarreye)

Let's see what happens...

I am giving a lecture tomorrow at Waseda. You are all invited.

Use the mirror

"If the world and its cares are a 200-lb. weight, the mind can be a mirror reflecting the weight without carrying the poundage." (Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the Karmapa, quoted by David Van Biema in Time magazine)

Fringe Frenzy

Fringe Frenzy is the name of our newly established give-away paper issued by the members of my graduate seminar. Our regular attendees are:

Masaki Unozawa, an art activist and critic
Francisco "Paco" Garcia, from Montréal, a subtitle translator for Japanese anmimation films
Takahiro Ito, a would-be photographer
Koyo Kitamura, an experimental filmmaker

Our first issue is actually the issue number ZERO. In which I interviewed my friend Shuhei Hosokawa (musicologist) and wrote an article on painter Takako Hojo, as well as a travel diary from my trip to Lisbon in 2003.

This we will publish monthly, hopefully. Keep an eye on it!

And Artaud says

Time to resume my writing this blog. Here is what Artaud says, and it's very true.

"...pas de pensée si le corps ne se meut."

Exactly. And no écriture if we don't die one day...sooner or later.

It's between myself and death that I negociate this infra-space of writing.

No longer listed

The list of books is discontinued because of its futility. There is no reason that I shouldn't list library books. And with that the list would become too cumbersome.

Now I am going back to occasional bits of thoughts, etc. Aux armes, etc. Tu restras hyène, etc.

This from Leiris:

...parce que rares sont les livres qui parviennent à fixer longtemps mon attention: j'en prends un, qui répond à mes préoccupations du moment, et j'en lis un certain nombre de pages... Partie paresse, partie instabilité, c'est ainsi que j'en viens à laisser s'accumuler les lectures inachevées... (Biffures)

A bunch

A box of mixed crops arrived, and then some.

354. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (Routledge)
355. Bertrand Russel, Sceptical Essays (Routledge)
356. Bertrand Russel, In Praise of Idleness (Routledge)
357. Thomas Sotinel, Pedro Almodóvar (Cahier du Cinéma)
358. Tom Zaniello, The Cinema of Globalization (ILR Press)
359. Christopher Bracken, Magical Criticism (Chicago)
360. Nick Browne ed., The Godfather Trilogy (Cambridge Film Handbooks)
361. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness (Columbia)
362. Lorraine Daston ed., Things that Talk (Zone Books)
363. James Chapman, Cinemas of the World (Reaktion Books)
364. Yvonne Tasker ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (Routledge)
365. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (Verso)
366. Christian Metz, Film Language (Chicago)
367. Isabelle Vanderschelden, Amélie (Illinois)
368. Kyoko Okazaki, River's Edge (Casterman)
369. Godard et Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma (Farrago)
370. Mike Davis, In Praise of Barbarians (Haymarket Books)
371. Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog (Routledge)
372. Burgett & Hendler eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU)
373. James Welch, Fools Crow (Penguin)
374. Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence (Jonathan Cape)
375. Jean-Joseph Julaud, L'Histoire de France pour les nuls (First Editions)
376. Shaffer & Wong eds., Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (Mississippi)
377. Mary Litch, Philosophy Through Film (Routledge)
378. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality (Chicago)
379. William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics (Toronto)
380. 西村頼男『草が生い茂り、川が流れる限り』（開文社出版）
381. 清水孝純『ルネサンスの文学』（講談社学術文庫）
382. 桜井満『花の民俗学』（講談社学術文庫）
383. メルヴィン・ブラッグ『英語の冒険』（三川基好訳、講談社学術文庫）
384. 松岡正剛『フラジャイル』（ちくま学芸文庫）
385. 五十嵐太郎『現代建築に関する１６章』（講談社現代新書）
386. ジョン・マーハ『チョムスキー入門』（明石書店）

380 may be the fisrt full-length study in Japanese of American Indian literature by a realiable Americanist. 384 is my second copy; I will use this book as a reading assignment for one of the graduate seminars. 386 I bought on impulse because of the association from a conversation I had with a person from an institute that invited Chomsky to Japan around 1970.

It's a raining-in-the-head day

Starting my seminar at 13:00, finishing at 18:00, then went to Digital Hollywood, all under the cold spring rain. But it was fun. Found a short time dropping in at the Librairie française at Shinjuku.

352. Jean-François Sabouret, La dynamique du Japon (CNRS)
353. Paul Veyne, Foucault (Albin Michel)

How soothing.

New Semester

Tomorrow begins our new semester. We gave a guidance session yesterday and its addendum cum reunion today. All set for a new adventure!

344. 村山匡一郎編『映画史を学ぶクリティカル・ワーズ』（フィルムアート社）
345. ナタリー・ゼーモン・デイヴィス『歴史叙述としての映画』（中條訳、岩波書店）
346. エルンスト・ブロッホ『ルネサンスの哲学』（古川＋原訳、白水社）
347. ナドー＋バーロウ『フランス語のはなし』（中尾ゆかり訳、大修館書店）
348. ***『日本列島驚異の自然現象』（昭文社）
349. 柳沼重剛『地中海世界を彩った人たち』（岩波現代文庫）
350. 赤瀬川原平『芸術原論』（岩波現代文庫）
351. ***『アキバが地球を飲み込む日』（角川ＳＳＣ新書）

346 is a book I've been reading for some time (with a library copy) and finally decided to purchase one. This year my graduate seminar will be on documentary films. No clues on this subject. A lightless walk in the cave continues.

Is this free? Wow.

341. *** The Best Books Ever Written (Penguin Classics)
342. Rufus Butler Seder, Gallop! (Workman)
343. カペラーヌス『現代ラテン語会話』（有川ほか訳、大学書林）

Dropped in at Kinokuniya and picked up a free copy of 341. It makes a lovely reading and I want more of this kind in every imaginable field... this kind of gift (from language itself to readers?) only saves the book and its culture!

343 is pretty funny and I can pick up a lot of locutions, etc.

We are holding an orientation session tomorrow.

C'est la vitesse qui domine...

Geez, nothing going. Nothing whatsoever is going as was planned. And it's getting quite warm, too.

332. 青柳いづみこ『ドビュッシー』（中公文庫）
333. 谷口ジロー『冬の動物園』（小学館）
334. Ramuz, La Grande peur dans la montagne (Poche)
335. Ramuz, La Beauté sur la terre (Poche)
336. Ramuz, Si le soleil ne revenait pas (Poche)
337. Hagerman, Maria Eladia, Babel: A Film by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (Photo Books)
338. 鈴木カツ『こだわりアメリカン・ルーツ・ミュージック事典』（NHK出版生活人新書）
339. 増田義郎『図説・海賊』（河出書房新社）
340. 東京外国語大学アジア・アフリカ言語文化研究所『図説・アジア文字入門』（河出書房新社）

It's time to seriously catch up with my own LIFE.

And the answer is...

325. 北道邦彦『アイヌ語地名で旅する北海道』（朝日新書）
326. 手塚治虫『手塚治虫傑作選＜家族＞』（祥伝社新書）
327. 吉田秀和『ソロモンの歌／一本の木』（講談社文芸文庫）
328. 山下聖美『賢治文学＜呪い＞の構造』（三修社）
329. エマニュエル・トッド＋ユセフ・クルバージュ『文明の接近』（藤原書店）
330. 吉川恵美子『接続法を使って話そうスペイン語』（NHK出版）
331. 生田・村上・結城編『＜場所＞の詩学』（藤原書店）

Oh how the wind blows. It blows down bicycles near the station. It makes dogs happy. And it blows away the sakura petals.

331 is a collection of essays from our symposium last summer in Kanazawa, with Ko Un and Gary Snyder as special guests. My intervention (as the French calls it) is also included in the publication.

April

321. 宮澤淳一『マクルーハンの光景』（みすず書房）
322. 本田勝一『俺が子どもだったころ』（朝日新聞社）
323. 鈴木孝夫＋田中克彦『言語学が輝いていた時代』（岩波書店）
324. 海津ゆりえ『日本エコツアー・ガイドブック』（岩波書店）

Our new academic year began today and our brand new graduate program is now taking off. Let's make it a really exciting collective enterprise! In a decade we'll see. See what? See WHAT.