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!