This book is RRRREALLY good!

The ABC bookstore has compiled a booklet for its annual book festival. This year, the general theme is "Waterscape."

I was asked to recommend a title along with a little more than 150 others. You can pick up a copy of it this week, for free (sure).

My pick was Josephy Brodsky's Watermark. There is another person, Jun Aoki, who has chosen this same book.

The booklet reminds me of many titles that I haven't had a chance to lay my hands on. It's good, occasionally, to join such a project! Thanks to my friend Hiroe Ogawa...

「水景」ABC Bookfes 2007, konohonhahontouniii

Recently

Some of my recent writings of no importance: reading journals in Subaru and an essay in Gengo.

「読書日録」　（「すばる」２００７年８月号、pp.322-323）
「読書日録」　（「すばる」２００７年９月号、pp.320-321)
「クレオールな存在、ピジンな生き方」　（「言語」２００７年９月号、pp.60-67）

Already half of August has passed. No goal in sight. With the temperature constantly rising to 37 degrees, nothing much can be expected. But alas, un montón de trabajo...

Cioran

How much I love Cioran, you'll never know. And then Cioran, he simply doesn't care. (He's dead, too.)

After another semester of feeling my inaptitude for the profession of TEACHING, I go back to Cioran and I am consoled. Here are only two fragments from De l'inconvénient d'être né:

Toute ma vie j'aurai vécu avec le sentiment d'avoir été éloigné de mon véritable lieu. Si l'expression "exil métaphysique" n'avait aucun sens, mon existence à elle seule lui en prêterait un. (98)

Le paradis était l'endroit où l'on savait tout mais où l'on n'expliquait rien. L'univers d'avant le péché, d'avant le COMMENTAIRE... (193)

Becoming

Tonight I saw a cicada coming out of her former self into a full-grown body, white in the dark, naked, and almost luminous. Into the wild.

This is in the city, in our dirty old neighborhood, where nothing sings, nothing shines, nothing seems to be alive. But then the cicada, purely alive, trying to get out of the shell, trying to be born, at 23 o'clock, alll alone, desperately serious, frighteningly joyful.

As if to designate me as her sole spectator.

The Yoshiharas

My short piece on the Yoshihara family's six-generation saga appeared on a Niigata newspaper. Based in Shibata, they have been running a photography studio for well over a century--the epoch that covers the whole of Japan's modernity.

Now the studio is run by Yukihiro. Formerly very active as a media artist on the Tokyo-NYC axis, he decides to take over his family business after September 11, 2001. Going back to his terre natale and to the work of collective, anonymous memory.
The first result is s series of old photographs compiled from the studio's familial archive.

「吉原家の１３０年」（「新潟日報」２００７年７月２日）

Il y a cent ans...

July already. Good grief. The first half of the year 2007 has passed. Hard to believe.

Here is what Gide wrote in his journal on 2 Feb 1907:

Ce matin, lettre de Claudel; lettre pleine d'une colère sacrée, contre l'époque, contre Gourmont, Rousseau, Kant, Renan... Colère sainte sans doute, mais colère tout de même, et douleureusement à mon esprit autant que l'aboiement d'un chien à mon oreille. Je ne puis supporter cela et me bouche aussitôt l'oreille. Mais j'entends tout de même et j'ai peine ensuite à me remettre au travail.

Claudel, Gide. It would be interesting to see two forms of sensibility (catholic, protestant) in them, but without generalizing too much. Claudel always seems to me to be Spanish, so to speak. Totalisant, passionant, ardent, épuisant.

When dogs come together

I had a moment of hallucination today walking my puppy (well, no more, as she is almost 10 months old). All the dogs from my boyhood came back to me, running, trying to join us, with a sheer look of delight on their faces. Toby, my bulldog, Lou, my dalmatian, but also Rock the German Shepard and Bonnie the Akita (to me they were simply too big)... I was struck.

Mometarily I was filled with a sense of reliance, confidence, and I was totally in tune with the world around me.

That's what keeping a dog is all about. A dog is a messenger, Hermes-like, between your miserable SELF and the world-as-it-is. It can save you. It always stands on your side.

Happy Bloomsday

And again it's Bloomsday... 103th since 1904, the original.

I remember vividly our event in Okinawa in 2003, when we read aloud Ulysses in more than a dozen different languages... Today it seems they are holding a similar event in Sapporo. I wish I could go!

Instead I'll be drinking a pint of Guiness, chez moi, sozinho com o meu cachorrinho.

Saying: Here's to you, Jim, Jimmy, James, my master impeccable!

Herzog/Chatwin

Here is what Werner Herzog remembers about Chatwin (from Nicholas Shakespeare's biography):

"He said: 'Werner, I'm dying.' And I said, 'Yes, I am aware of that.' And then he said: 'You must carry my rucksack, you are the one who must carry it.' And I said: 'Yes, I will proudly do that.' And I have his rucksack and it's such a dear thing to me. Let's say if my house was on fire, I would throw my children out of the window, but of all my belongings it would be the rucksack that I would save." (558)

We are discussing Herzog's COBRA VERDE (d'apres Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah) tomorrow at the first meeting of the World Cinema Study Group.

Brodsky Revisited

The ABC bookstore has again asked me to name a title for its summer book festival. Thank you very much. The topic this year is "water scenery".

Without much hesitation, I chose Joseph Brodsky' s Watermark. The book is translated into Japanese by the late Hisao Kanaseki. The translator of Gertrude Stein, Gary Snyder, and Native Amnerican poetry, Kanaseki must have made a great interlocutor for me... but alas, without our meeting each other, he left this planet.

Brodsky is as good as ever. What a prose.

There is something in me, I suppose, that always respects the physical side of human utterance, regardless of the content; the very movement of someone's lips is more essential than what moves them. (72-73)

I have always admired his prose written (from the scratch) in English.

But then, this is the first time I noticed that his family name reflects a "sky", a broad sky, as if the name itself was the surface of the water... and both the water and the sky curiously resembling the quiet graveyard.

The Master is Always Elsewhere.

Voici ce que Sylvie Germain écrit en matière de maître:

Le Maître est toujours ailleurs.
(Les échos du silence, 40)

Quelle phrase complète! Il n'y a rien à ajouter. On cherche, on se déplace, on est en mouvement perpetuel pour trouver ce qu'on cherche via une figure incertaine du maître... qu'on ne peut jamais rencontrer. Par définition. Il n'est pas là qu'on croit qu'il est. Cette inaccessibilité est constituante d'un maître.

My reading journal

Starting with the latest issue, I am writing my reading journal in Subaru for three months. The first installment will be in store in a couple of days.

「読書日録」、「すばる」２００７年７月号、pp. 318-319.

This month I am discussing three following books:
港千尋『文字の母たち』（インスクリプト）
松田行正『はじまりの物語ーーデザインの視線』（紀伊國屋書店）
前田英樹『言葉と在るものの声』（青土社）

Neighboring the aboriginals

Nahoko Uehashi is an anthropologist-novelist whose fantasy novels are very popular in Japan. The literary journal Eureka dedicated its June issue to her work; I contributed an essay on her anthropologist side.

「ユリイカ」２００７年６月号・「上橋菜穂子」特集
「『隣のアボリジニ』の隣へ」pp.150-157.

La France et les poetes japonais modernes

Il y aura une soirée de débat (?) sur l'oeuvre de Nakahara Chuya et autres poètes modernes du Japon. Ryoko Sekiguchi, notre amie poétesse qui écrit en français ( et qui habite à Paris), va participer. C'est dommage que c'est un mardi... il faut trouver un "way out" pour y aller!

http://www.institut.jp/agenda/evenement-fr.php?evt_id=540

La Pleurante

Sometimes a fragment of a work makes a good enough reading for the day; here is what Sylvie Germain writes in La Pleurante des rues de Prague:

Ce sont ces larmes d'inconsolés qui bruissent dans le grand corps immatériel de la pleurante des rues de Pragues, et ces inconsolés sont aussi bien des vivants que des morts.
Cette pleurante boite sans fin entre deux mondes, celui du visible et celui de l'invisible, celui du présent et celui de passé, celui de la chair et du souffle et celui de la poussière et du silence. Elle louvoie d'un monde à l'autre, --passeuse clandestine de larmes mêlées, celles des disparus et celles des vivants. (39)

Gayatri Spivak in Japan

Gayatri Spivak is coming to Japan in July and her official schedule is now published:

http://www.i-house.or.jp/en/ProgramActivities/ushiba/index.htm

See you at one of the occasions!

If not here, where on earth is sacred?

My new essay is now published in Kazeno tabibito, no. 26. For the first time I revealed my personal two most sacred places...

「ここがもし聖地でなければどこが」
「風の旅人」２６号、２００７年６月、pp.19-22.

Homo scribens (according to Malcolm Cowley)

Here is what Cowley says a propos of Caldwell:

Such is the image of HOMO SCRIBENS, the writing man, that Caldwell presents to the world, and to himself as an ideal. It is a radically simplified picture that omits the problems encountered by others who follow the trade. Caldwell's idealized writer has no problems except material ones; no doubts of himself, no hesitations, no fears of losing contact with his subliminal wealth. He is impelled to write by a physical need that makes him forget the need for sleep; turning back the clock, he goes on working without being disturbed by hunger or sexual desire. His only aim is to set down, in the simplest words, a true unplotted record of people without yesterdays. Past literature does not exist for him, and he is scarcely aware of having rivals in the present. As with Adam in the garden, every statement he makes is new. His only mentor is WEBSTER'S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY; his only acknowledged judge and critic is the inner ear.

(And I Worked at the Writer's Trade)

Kind of cool, ain't it?

Steven Yao's talk

My friend Steve Yao (Hamilton College) gave his talk on Asian American literature at Yoshiaki Koshikawa's Meiji seminar today. This is the first time for Steve to come to Japan. With Kyoko Omori, Shuzo Saito, and Keita Hatooka, it was a very enjoyable afternoon of serious "causerie litteraire."

Then when we were done for the class, we had an announcement. Meiji University would be closed for a week to prevent the spread of measles! How very strange, indeed. Most of the major universities in Tokyo are now hit by this desease. Biological terrorism of a sutble kind? I don't know.

La folie de Francoise Dolto

I am baffled to read a passage by Françoise Dolto. She must be one of the most mystique of thinkers. "It's so important to remember what is said at the time of birth," she says. Here is her admirable and enigmatic statement:

Nous sommes parole densifiée, une parole absente, pas dite, qui est au-delà des sentiments qui font s'étreindre deux êtres. (...) Un être humain IN UTERO est "parlé" par ses parents, il entend la voix -- ce que nous savons maintenant et qu'on ne savait pas. Je vais même jusqu'à dire qu'un enfant--je vais dire une bêtise pour beaucoup d'accoucheurs--, un enfant qui est un peu trop pressé de naître, on dirait que c'est un enfant qui veut aller du côté où ça parle, plus vite que les autres. En tout cas, ces enfants qui naissent prématurément ont besoin de beaucoup de paroles au moment de leur naissance pour leur expliquer ce que c'est tout d'un coup d'être venu un peu trop tôt et d'avoir besoin de soins qui vont les séparer de leur parents.

(Parler juste aux enfants, 14)

Do you understand this? Do you REALLY understand this? And do you REALLY agree?