The Sorrows of Young Goethe

So, there's something odd that happens to my brain when I plug poetry into it; somehow, I delude myself into believing that I too could say something to the effect of "what ho" or "alas, poor Elsibeth" with a straight face. Of course, Culler has already covered the dimension of embarrassment that results from saying the absurdly silly sorts of things one finds in lyric poetry, so I'm not going to dwell on that. Instead, behold the product of Nicholas' brain and Goethe's Roman Elegies (and Kelly Clarkson... don't ask).

Oedipus after Goethe

what I saw I couldn’t even see, the pain
had swollen my eyeballs shut. I rubbed
them rawer than fresh fish slices ele-
gantly laid out on his shoes:

so the legend goes

the bruises I saw crawling over my ankles
I rubbed them rawer than the freshest fish
market she dragged me to ta date it out;
my feet never gave up hating her,

so the legend goes

the elegant slices of fresh fish we bought
with absent money made us sick, sicker
than a plague of angry bees and C’s I gave
a class of brainy hoboes,

so the legend goes

but when baldy, snide, most likely blind
Tiresias saw me waiting for him to tell
me what my problem was, he blew over
his coffee to cool it and stared,

so the legend goes

Immediately after which I got up with the intention of making some tea, walked into the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, took it back to my desk, cracked it open, took a sip and spat out, "this isn't tea!" The following resulted from that:

frogger

the first of my idol thoughts said the frog
was lying (to me) like that, because he
wanted something more, wanted me to
ravish him till I was Donne; but I stuck

four small pins in pie slices of skin to
the four cardinal directions and took
my first good look at his guts, shiny,
and relatively smooth to the touch.

the girls who gagged and the pants that
sagged went about their business with
unnecessary patience: at any moment
the pickled frogs might leap across the

table to the window, where, the traffic
willing, they’d see their ponds again.
the second of my idyll thoughts lept
from butt to boob careful to avoid the

the saggy pants that caught stray stares
in a handful of bloody knuckles.
the third caught a bird twittering in the
corner a song of dictation to the fetal

pig whose organs she claimed for God
and country with tiny white flags.
I asked my frog if he’d like me to do
the same, but… he was ambivalent.

I was thinking about high school, because I recently got an email about a class reunion. At first, I was dead set against the idea, but after writing the above, I have to say the idea of seeing people whose names and faces I barely remember intrigues me. I'm wondering whether it will be some sort of persistent, creepy deja vu.

Doch man horcht nun Dialekten
Wie sich Mensch und Engel kosen,
Der Grammatik, der versteckten,
Deklinierend Mohn und Rosen.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

I suppose, normally, you're supposed to do these sorts of things just before actually leaving, but I bought my ticket to return on the 4th of July (in fact didn't dawn on me that I had done that till I got home from Nagoya) and after watching the above video on Youtube and reading Masao Miyamoto, I began to get a bit sentimental about my time in DaiNippon.

Ringo-chan sums it up pretty well, when she says in the song: "sayonara, hajimemashite." Even a retarded monkey would recognize that as the most basic of Japanese, amounting, roughly, to what you say when greeting someone: "so long, nice to meet you." Yet, that's not really what you say when greeting someone; perhaps that's what one would say at the end of the world (the title of the song).

Normally, we don't even think about the weirdness that comes out of our mouths in formal situations. Rarely do we ponder much on the meaning of banal pleasantries like "the pleasure's all mine" or "my, these tarts are to die for!" yet they escape our lips with frightening regularity. I do like to think about it, in my idle moments, which are many more than few; I even bothered to look up sayonara in my electronic dictionary. Apparently, it's the protasis of an old formality that amounts to "so, what's been said is all I have to say." By itself, the phrase could mean something like "so, that's it," which would explain why you normally wouldn't say sayonara to someone unless you were going to part for a significant amount of time, perhaps forever. It certainly implies that there is no expectation of seeing them anytime soon.

The phrase that follows, hajimemashite, which also reeks of formality with morphemes present only to express politeness, literally means "starting," as in, "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or, less Casablanca-y, "I'm meeting you for the first time." This is how one usually begins their introduction to another person in Japanese society, yet it seems an oddly appropriate thing to say at the end of the world: "so, that's it. first time, eh?"

All I really have to say to Japan is:
然様なら、初めまして。
or, in the words of Douglas Adams:
"So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Vanilla, but certainly not plain

When you're watching old movies, and I mean really old movies, especially in a modern, or perhaps not so modern, theater, there's a tendency to treat them with a kind of reverential awe. I remember clearly how when Colleen and I went to see the restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, we were shushed by a woman whose silent movie experience was obviously being ruined by our muffled conversation. If the historinos are correct, this is the polar opposite of what the silent movie experience used to be, namely a rather raucous affair.

Though this practice never existed in the US, in Japan (and, I have it on good account, Poland as well) there is to this day a tradition of performing a silent film as it's being projected. This is to say the katsu benshi would tell a story of what is happening in the film not merely supply dialogue to the beat of the actors' mandibular gesticulation. The benshi is literally reading the movie to the audience as they watch.

But now that movies have blow your ass off digital sound, you can imagine there isn't much need for the benshi anymore. As a result, they tend to be quite the character. The young woman pictured above is Yamazaki Vanilla--yes, her name is Vanilla--who, despite having majored in Spanish literature at university, became a benshi and voice actor (and recently a beginner's rank professional shogi player) after graduating. Each benshi generally has a specialization, and Vanilla's is Buster Keaton films, though she has performed Chaplin as well as numerous early animated shorts. She plays taisho to accompany many of her performances and speaks surprisingly good English (live in Japan for awhile and you will know what that means).

She's most well known for her extremely high pitched voice. Most think it an affectation; benshi tend to do odd things to stand out (like change their name to vanilla and wear nothing but brightly colored kimono). On a talk show, once the host finally stopped giggling, she was asked what her normal speaking voice is like. Her response: this is my normal voice.