The Idiolects

In Avoidance of Things Present

2010-04-28T21:27:00.001-04:00

A little something to keep me from going insane while editing an article due Saturday.

I caught her dispersing a rain of sparks
from a freight train passing overhead,
and I began to think, “there will never be
black and white photographs of my face,
at least none to make any sense of me,
who I am, where we are, how we came
to find ourselves beneath these tracks.”

she will be as much a romantic vision
as the warts crusting my dry, left foot.

as the sun melting the large, wax seals
Allah has placed on my eyes and ears.

as the bills of sale for cranky donkeys
in the rubbish piles of Oxyrhynchus.

as Love that reels the planetary bodies.

Tyranny of Intentions pt. 2: Hisses and Kisses

2009-10-05T15:35:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, my cursive h's look remarkably like my cursive k's, both of which are not all that distinct from my cursive l's. This meant, in my childhood, that I spent several hours of "free time" writing out cursive k's and h's to the satisfaction of my 3rd and 4th grade teachers. This was not the origin of my ongoing distrust of the motives of elementary school teachers, though it was a significant contributing factor.

So I was writing today another insipid bit of verse, which contained the phrase "were [ ]isses," where the double bracket marks the aforementioned indeterminate l/h/k. Of course, I still know what I meant at the time of writing, but it occurred to me on a second read that 1) I often take for granted that one besides myself can determine whether I have written an h or k (or l) and that 2) the context (a snake nipping at one's heel), to my mind, does not favor one reading over another, be it "hisses" or "kisses." Certainly, "lisses" is out of the question; it isn't even a word (I don't think). But even the question of what word is secondary to an orthographic problem.

Both print and its bastard child markup would deal very inappropriately with my graphic "slip of the tongue." Neither typesets nor unicode contain a character that sort of looks like a k but also looks somewhat like an h or an l. This problem could be rectified, I suppose, by enlisting the services of any of a number of companies that transform samples of one's handwriting into a truetype font. They would only need to replicate my own similar characters for this graphic problem to be represented, right? Wrong, as, you see, only sometimes are my h's like my k's. Sometimes, they are quite clearly distinct. This difficulty could be dealt with by using a macro in any of the various text editors to use one character (the indistinct one) at times and another (more distinct) at other times. The irony, though, is that this seems to be a ridiculous amount of effort to go through just to represent digitally (or in print) what otherwise is very simply and obviously manifest in the handwritten document.

This gets at something that has been milling in my noodle for quite some time: it seems the intent of print (and markup), if it can be said to have intentions at all, is to regularize orthography in a way that handwriting does not and to restrict the degree by which one can actually subvert the goals of standardized print. Regularities in print exist to facilitate reading (i.e. make reading facile), to move interpretation from a primarily graphic to a primarily semantic level. This shift is largely an illusion, as anyone with an OCR scanner can show, because text still has to be read on a graphic level first. All standardized print (and markup) has done is invisibilize the visual interpretation of text and the fundamental role it plays in "higher" orders of semantic interpretation. It permits one to disregard the textuality of the document at hand and render it merely an information carrying medium. But in this case the medium is the message, part of it at least, in not only what it does say but also in what it leaves up in the air.

The Tyranny of Intentions

2009-09-21T15:37:00.003-04:00

This afternoon I wrote a poem; not a good poem, not a bad poem, but a mediocre expression of a certain lyric impulse. It runs as follows.

this is what the world needs: an abscess to lance
on a hobby-horse dragon, the puss of which will
ooze along the thigh-meat, past the scaly knee
of cedar-wood shingles, upon the shaving talons.

to slay the boil, they say, is to slay the dragon;
to see the white blood erupt, to calm its wooden
breath, forged of fantasies of fire and poison
as thick as puss oozing on down the thigh-meat.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I had no real design in mind as I was writing this. Granted, that design was, at best, vague and ill thought out, but a particular intention did compel me to say particular things in particular ways. I can't honestly say what prompted the faux 6 beat alliterative line (with caesurae), but it led to a certain mock heroic style that did not in any way displease me.

Upon finishing the above, I read through the poem from the top and realized it could be read in a way I hadn't intended at all. Normally, the corrective impulse would intervene, reword certain lines so as to obscure the incipient reading, and thereby erase all knowledge that such a reading had ever existed. Instead, I decided the alternative reading wasn't so bad, if a bit creepy, and appended the following title in order better to hint at it.

drag‘nslayher

As I was composing those two verses, I had no title in mind, which isn't to say I had no particular title but rather intended not to title them at all. After all, they were merely an exercise, an attempt to filter out of my noodle a set of loosely connected lines that had, as Ray Stantz would say, "just popped in there." Now, my moment of submission to fancy didn't mean the wholesale destruction of Manhattan at the behest of a giant marshmallow man, but it did imply something I am still not entirely comfortable with: that the poetic force of my minor poem had very little to do with myself and my intentions and that it had a great deal to do with chance.

And it occurred to me, as I sat feeling very smug and self-satisfied about how I had anticipated what other people might think, that, in reality, all my title had done was obscure my original intentions. Try as I might, I could not recall what it was that I had been thinking or why it was so important it needed to be written down. I wasn't vexed for long, though, as the timer dinged, and I got up to retrieve my shredded beef tamales from the microwave.

feat. Mummy-D et al.

2009-08-20T14:59:00.004-04:00

I was more than happy to see the return to my ken of Mummy-D lately of the hip hop trio Rhymester, due in no small part to our girl Ringo-han. J-hop or J-hip-hop or whatever you want to call it has always been something of a mystery to me, much like its American counterpart, if only because it seems the more groups I listen to the less I seem to know what's going on.

Rhymester often beg comparisons to Jurassic 5, a comparison that while sometimes apt fails to account for the fact that J5's style is much more a throwback to classic b-boy styling. Most of their tracks can be reduced to lyric flow over clever mixes. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but it isn't very much like the much more melodic and occasionally instrumentalized music Mummy-D and company put out. If hard pressed for a point of comparison, I'd say they mostly resemble the Roots, but even that isn't quite right.

A song like "The Great Amateurism" is indicative of what I find infinitely more difficult to grapple with in J-hop both visuallly and musically than in our homespun variety. The video doesn't seem to quite understand the aggressive dynamics of the underground freestyle battle it portrays, as Mummy (on the left) and Utamaru (on the right) move in and out of solo and unison flows with relative ease. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps subtly parody) the hyper-aggressive individualism the rap battle is meant to manifest; at one point Jin (the DJ) even breaks in with a few rhymes. Obviously, American hip hop is as much a culture as it is a(n extremely broad) musical genre, and that this culture wouldn't precisely translate is understandable. Japan doesn't have the semi-segregated, urban often poor communities where hip hop was born and certain doesn't have a history of competitive freestyle. It begs the question then whether this transplantation of hip hop is a corruption (a misunderstanding) or an adaptation (an understood-all-too-well). Are the unison choruses prior to each individual flow a beckon to J5 style group efforts or a play to homegrown trends in J-pop where unison singing (especially amongst all-boy/all-girl groups) is the norm and harmony all but nonexistent?

The obvious answer is J-hop is a hybrid, but to what extent and in what ways remains a mystery, as disparate elements of the lyric performance seem to hail to both sides of the pond. Maybe, just maybe, boys and girls, it's meant to.

Spenser, Taxed

2009-08-04T14:25:00.002-04:00

My love of Edmund Spenser is somewhat obvious; I find him a much maligned poet (even though, because of his treatment of the Irish, much of that malignance is deserved), often read very poorly or against some arcane scheme (like the apposition of each of the Amoretti to a particular verse reading from the Book of Common Prayer) likely to make ones head spin. And it is well known that Spenser adapted his Italian models, as most English Renaissance poets did, but that word, "adapted," does a great deal to conceal how a poet like Torquato Tasso is adapted in Spenser's sonnets and whether "adapt" is even the proper characterization.

The Norton edition of the Amoretti has a note to sonnet 43 that reads as follows: "The first and third quatrains adapt Tasso's 'Se taccio, il duol s'avanza.'" What follows are those first and third quatrains along with their correspondences in Tasso's rima (#166 in Bruno Maier's edition) and my own somewhat more literal translation thereof. Note, I come to Italian mostly through Dante, through whose verse I generally have to puzzle for hours, so forgive any gross oddities in my own rendition.

Qu. 1 -

Shall I then silent be or shall I speake?
And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall:
And if I silent be, my hart will breake,
Or chokèd be with overflowing gall.

Se taccio, il duol s'avanza;
se parlo, accresco l'ira,
donna bella e crudel, che mi martira.

If I am silent, my grief advances;
If I speak, I increase her ire,
lady beautiful and cruel, who martyrs me.

Qu. 3 -

Yet I my hart with silence secretly
Will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
And eke mine eies with meeke humility,
Love-learnèd letters to her eyes to read.

E prego Amor che spieghi
nel mio doglioso aspetto
con lettre di pietà l'occulto affetto.

And I pray Love would show
in my painful aspect
with letters of piety the hidden affection.

Of course, a sonnet is more than just two quatrains, and it is in the second qu. of sonnet 43 that Spenser shows he is more in conversation with Tasso than merely adapting him.

What tyranny is this both my hart to thrall,
And eke my toung with proud restraint to tie;
That nether I may speake nor thinke at all,
But like a stupid stock in silence die?

Spenser has appropriated Tasso's double bind and applied it not only to his amorous situation but also to the problem of the poet adapting his contemporary. For Spenser's tounge is not only enthralled to his lady but to Tasso as well, and if this poem were to remain a simple translation or adaptation of "Se taccio," Spenser's poetic voice and subjectivity would be all but eviscerated. Thus, to maintain the presence of Spenser's voice and Tasso's, the sonnet engages in a kind of poetic correspondence whose mode happens partially to be translation. Of course, the presence of Tasso' "Se taccio" is not obvious in Spenser's poem; I never would have known if it weren't for the textual note. So, a third person is invited into this conversation, a figure whose silence in the poem is genuine and not a mere figure of discourse, i.e. the reader. The poem's concluding couplet casts the reader as the always absent yet ever present lady.

Which her deep wit, that true harts thought can spel,
Wil soone conceive, and learne to construe well.

Tasso's "l'occulto affetto" and Spenser's silent speech can only be revealed through the efforts of their absent Loves, the readers whose task it is decipher the "hidden affection" in pious letters, the speech in silence, and the presence of one poet in another. So while we readers are invited into the discourse of the poem, it expects us all the while to play its game: to be as crafty in reading as it is in writing.

Of Music Reviews

2009-06-08T21:25:00.002-04:00

I suppose it's easy to bag on music reviewers; there are all sorts of horrible nasty things that could be said about how practically and, for my purposes, intellectually useless a music review really is. I get the sense that these things are written by people who don't even understand how a song works, how it's constructed, what notes are, what an arpeggio is, or how simply things like melodies and harmonies are composed. I'm not saying a marked lack of musical knowledge should disqualify you from ever writing about music, but at least be honest about what you can say. In the past three days I've come across ponderously vague phrases like "vocal caress," "minor synths," and "so moving it paralyzes." What exactly is "vocal caress?" The reviewer in question chose to use it in what appears to be an assumed way (i.e. "the vocal caress"), but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. The review certainly doesn't make it any clearer.

But I understand what these people go through. Despite years of writing about music, we still lack a critical vocabulary to describe it, and often the more highbrow the discussion becomes the more likely you are to be dismissed by the academes you talk up to and ignored by the four or five people who actually read reviews. Then there's the fact that what makes perfect sense in a song (or whose earnestness is taken for granted) sounds almost silly when you sit down to write about it. How exactly do you represent in writing what may simply be tonal variations on a single syllable? By way of example, the lyrics to the bridge of Regina Spektor's "Folding Chair" run as follows.

Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo
Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo

And in that form, a purely literal form, they are incomprehensible. It would be easy to write off such "nonsense" syllables as nothing but an empty form on which the important play is the note or tone. This speaks to me of the way we regularly invisibilize sound, even in songs. When there are "words," we ignore the sounds and talk about the language. But when there are no "words," what do we talk about? The simple answer is, we don't.

Hirate Masahide

2009-05-30T19:21:00.001-04:00

masahide

there is a something in words, an unnecessary
overabundance of thoughts and afterthoughts,
such that, as you afterthink your way through
the thousands of delicate, diplomatic gestures;
kind words to fathers of adolescent daughters;
how he preps the hot water; whether he cares;
and every message tutored from wearily living
out the silences that say more than they ought—
you

take no solace in knowing that killing yourself
is the last thing he will neglect to comprehend.

A Portrait of St. Vincent

2009-05-07T09:21:00.006-04:00

I.

While looking for a particular photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay on Google, I came across the following.

I was more than a little befuddled but also amused enough to find out why this photo has been associated with an early twentieth century, now relatively unknown poet like Millay. It appears that someone quoted the last six lines of "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" in her blog.

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon--his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Because we, in the academy, have largely conspired to decide that Modernism is what happened in literature in the first half of the twentieth century, Millay's sonnets nowadays go largely unread, even though I think their grappling with the unknown and intractable speaks to the somewhat more macabre tastes of contemporary readers. I suppose then (20s-40s) it was considered as silly to write sonnets as it is now. Fatal Interview 9:

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
No more as now their stormy lashes lift
To lance me through...as in the morning skies
One moment, plainly visible in a rift
Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear
And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,
What time the watcher in desire and fear
Leans from this chilly window in the dawn...
Shall I be free, shall I be once again
As others are, and count your loss no care?
Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain
Be powerless to evoke you out of air,
Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright
Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

II.

I fancy myself a rather sophisticated reader of poetry with sophisticated tastes in music and a sophisticated approach to the interpretation of both "kinds" of verse. I'd reaffirmed this fact with my recent discovery of St. Vincent (better known to her birth certificate as Annie Clark) and counted it a great triumph. This morning the New York Times stepped in to remind me how bourgeois my tastes really are.

Stink-foot, or A Statue of Philoctetes

2009-04-29T14:13:00.002-04:00

This poem(s) and diatribe is dedicated to the still smoke-free Michael Andrew Kicey, who shares my name but only in the middle. It comes, of late, from an as yet unfinished sequence entitled, for the moment, "sonnets then." It's number 9:

9. stink-foot

his stinking foot, his festering wound—-ed pride
gets him into troubling shipwreck armies;
mythology and martyrdom he’s writ-
ing on his face and on his pedestal
of Doubtless-Carved-by-Good-Praxiteles
sometime in the second century B.C.

this statued Philoctetes’ tragedy
has one performance, never-ending, played
upon the harpies’ chord—-the harpsichord?
no: played on iridescent surfaces
of people’s eyes, like oil on puddles fract
among the sev’ral sequences of sun,
while all the eyes and noses mumble that
stink-foot reeks of antiseptic cleansers.

This poem has a companion piece, re: Diogenes of Sinope, that, given its clunkiness and persistent imperfection, I won't impose on you. But the poem that follows, a (very) loose adaptation of the Heart Sutra, I will. I have of late, as a means of avoiding "real" hermeneutic traditions like, say, the Christian one after Augustine or the philosophical one after dudes like Schleiermacher and Dilthey, become interested in various "esoteric" hermeneutic traditions: Mahayana, Waite's symbological method of tarot divination, Bacon's inductive "interpretationes," etc. What these less and more mystic traditions have in common is a certain faith in chance, that in the process of living with objects of interpretation in a disciplined but somewhat haphazard way, eventually something will "click" in the mind and lead one toward some general principle that unites disparate elements. The poem, "perficting," isn't really about that.

10. perficting

no wisdom, no attainment of—-because
no wisdom no attainment of, Guanyin
preferred perfiction’s total Wisdomness,
obstruction not of incidental Mind:

obstruction not, no fear of Mind—-because
obstruction not no fear of Mind, Guanyin
should pass imagination mystified
for misty Heart and heartier deceit:

this trap me in imagination conned
of self in solipsism, to arrogate
my ignorance as absolution of
my sinning error signs its namelessness

on pride, on beauty, on beatitude
so shallow it will long to kill itself.

There's something self-destructive about the allusive and the esoteric; it seems ill-defended against the ignorance (read "tendency to ignore") of others and their often persistent capability to see past what it is you want them to see. Perhaps that is the virtue of the esoteric and allusive: they don't have to be there if you don't want them to be.

Nicholaus Doctissimus

2009-04-20T23:25:00.001-04:00

this day I would’ve preferred:
raindrops hazing a thin
mist on the surfaced grounds
beside the grass and cars,
so perfect to obscure
my clarity of vision.

preferred to this day: sun
and shine and studded lawns
of undergraduates
squinting in the daylight
unable to make out
when I become a doctor.

Homer, burlesqued

2009-04-07T23:51:00.002-04:00

From the preface of the 1770 edition of Thomas Bridges' A Burlesque Translation of Homer, which came into existence, because "our author is of the opinion that the dignity of the Greek language has perverted the original design of Homer's Iliad." Having been privy of late to what passes for "scholarship" on Plato's Phaedrus, I couldn't agree more: the "dignity" of the Greek language generally seems to get in the way of people's reading it.

GOOD people, would you know the reason,
I write at this unlucky season,
When the whole nation is so poor,
That few can keep above one whore,
Except court-pimps and their employers,
With secretary's clerks and lawyers,
Whose d---d unconscionable fees
Maintain as many as they please;
Pope, we all know, to please the nation,
Publish'd an elegant translation,
But for all that, his lines mayn't please
The jocund tribe, so well as these;
For all capacities can't climb
To comprehend the true sublime;
And he that's reading now may be
Almost as dull a dog as me.

from a late Alexandrian

2009-03-28T12:53:00.002-04:00

I don't really have much to say about today's entry beyond what follows being inspired in part by Cavafy's "Dareios" and a conversation I had with a moron (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent) about trans-Pacific influences in American poetry and pop culture. Cavafy is a-whole-nother can-o-worms, so I'll leave him be for now.

from a late Alexandrian scholiast in the Roman period, [Diogenes]

on the second burial of Polyneikes

we don’t like to admit that what Antigone was burying
was the ground. we’d rather call it something else:
her politics, her brother, the latter of which belies our faith
in the immortality of the human subject. Antigone believed
this too: it was her brother, was Kreon’s politics.
but the genuine tragedy of the human subject is that it was
neither, that its immortality has nothing to do with us.

on the argument of Oidipous and Kreon

Kreon does not know precisely what Oidipous
too knows not, and his willful failure to speak
about that which he does not know syncopates
Oidipous’ earnest and dire ramblings. Kreon
is the silence to perceive all melodic rhythms
nascent in the cacophony of the poetic line.

on a famous quotation from Emperor Shun in 文心雕龍

詩言志、poetry speaks not so much intention as
the will, the will to create and make, which is why
歌永言、the song composes the words, those words
by which lyric announces itself and not the poet.

of a line quoted by Zigong for sake of clarification

如切如磋、“as cut, as filed;” not belabored by numerous
strokes of anxious care, the beauty of the simple cutting
into living wood comes from unintended revelations;
如琢如磨、“as chiseled, as polished;” stone, then, too,
its surface not smeared with brushing powders, shines
easily having suffered the pain of but a single strike.

自問自答 - Answering Your Own Questions

2009-03-16T15:56:00.002-04:00

It's occurred to me that, in my rallying against the vast sea of craptasticness that is J-pop since the 80s, I have rallied many to my cause that do not fit this totalizing view of contemporary Japanese pop music, but never Mukai Shutoku 向井秀徳. Sure, if you step outside of the purview of Music Station, there are plenty of acts like Midori in the "hardcore" scenes that are worth paying attention to, but I focus on pop in my persistent belief that popular art doesn't have to necessarily equate with bad art.

I warn you in advance, the following is quite long, quite dense, and likely to incur a TLDR.

Mukai is not well-known outside of Japan but there is relatively infamous as the head of the now defunct band Number Girl (yeah, I know that looks like a penis on that dude's face, but it's actually a tengu mask), a prolific solo artist and producer, and currently as the "brains" behind the Zazen Boys. I bring jimon-jito to your attention in part because it poses an interesting problem. I know most of you don't understand the Japanese, and honestly it moves so fast I have a hard time keeping up. I don't really think comprehension is all that necessary to understand what Mukai is trying to do in this song. The way he seamlessly moves in and out of rhythm with what he's playing, between what I will call verse phrasing and prose phrasing, creates interesting tensions between the ease with which you can listen when his verse phrasing acquiesces to your rhythmic expectations and the ill-at-ease from having to experience his prosaic rambling over the top of a relatively straightforward chord structure on the guitar.

This song was once described to me as Japanese hip-hop to the extreme. I have to disagree; rap, freestyle or not, doesn't sound like this. There the primary concern is flow, the ease and deftness with which the mc moves from one phrase to another by constructing patterns of syncopated but related sounds and meanings. Mukai's song is about disrupting flow, the prosaic phrasings serving as a kind of vocal dissonance that actually intensifies the easy effect of the verse phrasing, the flow.

I think it's brilliant. It's rare you'd ever hear me openly praising someone, but there you have it. It's pop, and it's brilliant.

Hektor and Andromache

2009-03-12T21:04:00.002-04:00

I think I'm just gonna let this one speak for itself, such as it is.

bold Hektor heckled her. within the walls.
her tears his baby beckoned forth.
within the hallowed walls. within and without.
the tempered fighters raged. with iron and
with bronze. between her tears the baby
wailed. what Hektor hurried on.
what Hektor. what spektor of doubt
haunted the hollow of the walls.
in the hollows of her wailing. hope.
she hopes to know despair. how Hektor
shocked. how wholly her dismissal.
of Hektor's valor. of baby's value.
how whole her resignation. wailing
within the walls. the wales within
her brow. without his helm. the babel-ing
displaced. from baby back to bride.
Andromache is bride. who wars
with men. in silence. men's cry
what tempers ironed bronze. what
Andromache. within the whollow walls.
would say. if she were war with men.
Andromache indifferent as the sunset
shone a pulsing star upon his helm.
the march of bold Andromache.
without the walls. from temples
to the waling men. he brow
enwrit with anger. know Andromache
to die complete. in else's arms.

Instruments

2009-02-23T15:22:00.002-05:00

For my birthday, my brother got me an ocarina, which, despite having very little experience playing a flute, beyond the recorder, I have of late become quite adept at playing. Certainly, the Dorkmuffin probably didn't appreciate my atonal fumbling at all hours of the night, but that is neither here nor there.

I've had an idea of late, because the wbriting of my dissertation has led me to something of an intellectual impasse, of writing a narrative. I say "narrative" and not "novel" 1) because it seems to me there's nothing much new about novels anymore and 2) because I want to write a work of criticism that is neither straightforwardly historicist in the manner I know my committee wants but can't quite manage to say nor yet another masturbatory exercise in self discovery like so much of this PoMo lit-crit crap I read on a daily basis. This act of criticism/narrative is likely yet another in a long line of elaborate projects I will abandon the moment I realize it will require actual work and discipline, but even so, I like one of the fragments the idea has produced so far. Here it is, completely without context.

"The whole examination room was dark, a living history exhibit you see at one of those themed parks on the East Coast, except I have the sense no one visits this place much not even the sun. Everything is dusted, meaning there isn't much dust for such an old place, but nothing really looks clean: solid metal instruments of examination from an era somewhere between blood-letting and MRIs covered in discoloring blotches of tarnish and in some cases rust. Aunt's old koto leaned into the corner next to the medicine cabinet, and if I hadn't known better I'd assume it was like every other instrument in the room, outdated, without purpose, and without any use beyond anachronism and decoration. As I tiptoed around the room, a stray thread from the hem of my jacket got caught on a protruding nail head, and when Aunt saw it, she grabbed a forceps from a nearby desk, pulled the string taut, and severed it at the hemline with a pair of ancient snips. She grunt-sighed in her usual way, obviously put out for having to exert herself in any way whatsoever. So she went back into the parlor to listen to her programs, noiselessly shutting the door and leaving me to my own devices."

The whole thing is likely to be about music and poetry, but you may have guessed that already.

Ode of a Dying Winter

2009-02-09T18:21:00.002-05:00

It's getting to that point where the temperature has risen high enough above zero that I feel guilty for taking the bus instead of my bike. The other day driving on the way to a movie I rolled down my window to happy couples and fattening nubiles thinning their fleshes with pounded pavement; I rolled it down cuz the car was getting hot. I thought it was the imminent spring. Turns out it was the heater left on from the night before.

I have pleasant memories of the winters I have left behind and great hopes for those to come. The awesome puddles that are day by day turning the plains of grass into midday marshes have rendered even my awesome steel-toed boots all but useless. The water gets into everything like a humid Japanese winter. I make my way through these dripping, thawing late winter days with thoughts of massive icicles,

six and a half boys tempted the four-foot icicles with rocks:
one proven immortal when it shattered in his head,
another mortal when it pinned him to the rotting earth

and with the books of poetry, philosophy, and comics I read on the toilet for which Colleen went out of her way to procure a wicker basket, because, let's be honest, I'm slowly but steadily moving every book I own into the bathroom. There, I recall, with a little help from Edna,

There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three--
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead.

Hunting Expedition

2009-01-13T10:55:00.002-05:00

It worries me that the beast we hunt in a poem (whereby we hunt ourselves) once caught, and butchered, and roasted, will never seem as savory to the tongue as it did hissing on the spit, where, as the fat melted and fell into the coals it shot up solar flares--the slow turning of the hours were marked by the small transformations from red to grey to black. Once dressed, once sliced and arranged on a platter with a juicy apple stuffed in its face, everyone will say it's such a boar, it's all been done before, the guts and flesh and gore, everyone will make us believe we're boars, that we've all been done before (which we have), that similar feasts have been served in similar ways at different times and perhaps will be till the ends of time. And when the revelers have put away their desire for bitch and moan, they plant their faces in the trough, nibble as much at the tender as at the stringy bits, lick their fingers and retire.

It worries me not because it will happen but because it has: there is nothing to learn from. The past has already learned from the past and has concluded: there is nothing to learn.

there is no coincidence
that burning rhymes with learning
or lime with rime and time.
rime with time, thyme with rhyme:
therein the universe self-contained.

The Quoter's Privilege

2008-12-02T21:57:00.002-05:00

Honestly, I don't remember much about Cao Xueqin's 18th century novel, Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢), beyond not liking it very much. I suppose that's not entirely true; I did like Jia Tanchun, but that probably has to do with the fact that she's an asshole like me. Anyway, I was sifting thru my crit. ed. of Yosano Akiko's Midaregami this afternoon, and I found a most conspicuous note on the back of a single page of a Yotsuba! tear-away daily calendar:

Cao Xueqin

"I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as will suit my purposes," said Tanchun. "If I told you how it went on, I should end up by contradicting myself!"

I can't really recall if that's what the quote actually said, or even if it's representative of Tanchun. However, it is the kind of thing I think Tanchun would say, even if she hadn't, in fact, done so. It's this principle that seems, to me at least (others as a rule tend not to share my view - others meaning "my committee members"), to underly the vast majority of textual criticism: to make an author say, if not what you want them to, what you think they should have said. Some have accused me of being unfair in pointing this out (again and again and again), either because it's somewhat obvious and really doesn't bear repeating or because it damns the earnestness on the part of critics who reconstruct texts that are incomprehensible absent emendation. I really don't think it's either of these. It's not obvious, because we still talk about such silly things as the text's "corruption" and its truth lying (note the pun, please - okay, move along) somewhere in the unknowable (yet grossly surmise-able) past, and it's not damning, because honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with making a text say what you want it to. Sure, taken to an extreme, an individual could do real violence to a text but never without risk. You see, it's just as likely that someone will be as wreck-less with what you say, so generally, I think, people will police their own opinions. An illustrative example (paraphrased) from a recent meeting about my third chapter:

He: I don't think you're being very fair to Thomson in quoting him the way you do.
Me: Well, Thomson isn't very fair to Catullus in quoting him the way he does.

I'm not trying to get "revenge" for one of my favorite poets; I merely want to remind the (five or six) people who will read my dissertation that these cycles of reading and re-reading (or in the odd jargon of my diss, "reding") are a kind of invigorating trap: invigorating, because they allow the critic certain poetic exuberances, and a trap, because they may very well undergo the same treatment to which they submit their object of study. This is the game a literary critic plays. Perhaps this is why students from a recent class of mine continue to refer to this grad school "ending" exercise in pointlessness, whenever I bump into them, as my "distortion."*

*Although the real reason is a not entirely insignificant slip of the tongue when I was introducing myself at the beginning of the semester.

Gesang ist Dasein

2008-11-03T10:27:00.002-05:00

Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind Wir?

Song, as you teach it, is not desire, not
a wooing of something that's finally attained;
song is existence. Easy for the god. But
when do we exist?

(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1.3.5-8, trans. David Young)

Rilke's consideration of Dasein ("existence") here is, implicitly, almost Heideggerean: I say "almost," because even though the two are roughly contemporary--Rilke was much older and aesthetically speaking from a different time, one from which, ironically, emerged one of Heidegger's poetic heroes, Georg Trakl--the two men had very little awareness of each other. That Rilke parses Dasein, just like Heidegger, as da and sein (common enough in German as the word is obviously a combination of "there" and "being") is revealed in the following line where he asks wann aber sind Wir? ("but when are we?") The verb sein ("to be") is separated out from "there," rendering it placeless and emphasizing that fact. Readers of Heidegger are certainly aware that being for him is not merely a locative matter (being some-where) but a historical (being some-when) and poetic (being some-how) matter as well. The Dasein that Rilke defines matter-of-factly as song (Gesang), a thing of ease for the god, is, in our case as human beings, somehow lacking. Deepak Chopra, metaphysician to the stars, is fond of formulating being as independent of history, action, even psychology, with gnomic statements like "I am a human being, not a human doing, nor a human thinking." I'm certain that someone like Rilke or Heidegger (meaning me) would find this naïve and philosophically backwards. Thus the great, and continuing, lack of fundamental communication between the East and West, whatever they are.

What Rilke implies here is that such an abstraction of being as song is easy enough for the divine, as it has very little, if any, attachment to physical (and historical) reality. But for humanity what does this reality mean? The early Buddhists theorized Nirvana, the state of great awakening or enlightenment, as an escape from the cycle of reincarnation that ultimately dooms us all to suffering. For them, breaking the cycle of reincarnation is synonymous with understanding the true nature of being, is synonymous with independent being. Independent being can only be attained when one eradicates the will and desire, as will and desire are symptomatic of attachment to the world. This line of thought seems somewhat in tandem with what Rilke says, but his own answer to the question of reality is a bit more perplexing.

In Wahreit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

In truth singing, is an other Breath.
A breath for nothing. A ripple in God. A Wind.

(ll. 13-14, trans. yours truly)

Man may seek after the divine, but, in the end, the divine is very little, if anything at all.

Chicken Soup for the Unsoul

2008-10-21T14:35:00.002-04:00

woman butchering a half-frozen chicken

this pome accompanies a photograph still
in the negative, still lounging in the
wet paper bath all photos must undergo.

for thirty-six hours it sat outside the
freezer in the fridge it sat cold, still
frozen as it thawed to renewed hardness.

every crack it speaks ice fractured bone
rips the teletype din of her olding son
tapping out half-moons of celery & carrot

a vat of boiling water would bleed of
color, vapor and slowly rot out the slow
perfection of their halfly round shapes.

a photo accompanies this too et cetera

it freezes the vapor or will et cetera

everything comes into focus and out in
the steam that radiates, cools, waters
the hollow dome of the massive vat's lid.

while apple-tasting pie awaits in packages
of frozen dough, thawing berries, fresh
stalks of rhubarb growing out of control.

an appletasting of pie, because it does
not taste of apples: it represents what
thing it only fails to represent at all.

these things: pies, soups, photoned graphs,
and the several states of water (some three)
are all lost in the moment we find them.

for water is dense when it flows et cetera

& meaning is lost when it knows et cetera

For those of you who care about silly things like biography, this poem has its origins in a Saturday my mother and I spent preparing a chicken (this one "fresh" not frozen) for an early evening meal of chicken and noodle soup. I play sous chef in my mother's kitchen (and honestly that's the best anyone can hope for), so I am there, as much as I often am not, in this poem in the form of the olding son cutting up carrots and stalks of celery. Both of us are incidental, of course; butchering, cleaning, cooking, and dismantling a chicken is not the point. An initial draft of the above was typed on an old portable typewriter, a Smith Corona Silent if you must know, but maybe that isn't relevant either.

I was given a camera over the weekend, a redesign by Promaster of a standard Canon SLR body from the 80s. I wanted it 1) because I have a secret and weird love of photography and 2) because it's fully manual aside from the light reader. In other words, it is capable of taking photographs completely absent electricity. My affinity for this camera seems (tangentially) related in my mind to a conversation I was having with the savage last night: we were discussing the effects of living in the abject pollution of early 20th century Chicago on the poet's "voice," both figurative and literal. I, and most classical poetic theorists of all racial categories, tend to valorize the aesthetic possibilities of constraints, yet there is also something much more sinister at play. That more sinister side points to something I often don't consider: part of any poetic effect is what is held back, left unsaid, whatever, despite the poet's intention to do so. The poet struggles against the constraint but inevitably the constraint compels her not to say, not to do. And in so (not) doing, there is created in the poet's "voice" a kind of real genius of which she would otherwise not be capable. The irony, though, is in this process that "voice" becomes something wholly alien to her.

The Death of Apollo

2008-09-30T23:29:00.002-04:00

thus far shining Phoebus Apollo standing
at the gates of death let out a shout, just as
a singer cuts the dull hum of a feast
with a single word whipped against the lyre,
the prized possession of some long forgotten
fabled king or of some poor hermit
living alone in a deep mountain hovel;
the Muse infects him, and the music stains
the bare walls of festive minds with dumb
horror, so Apollo met death and lived.

At times, avant-garde poetry more than makes my head spin: sometimes it comes off as downright tedious. Self-reflexivity is all well and good, but in the end so many of these new poetic experiments take lyricism even beyond the most wildly nihilistic tendencies of poetics. I'm willing to acknowledge that cutting up generated text and re-arranging it is interesting, but that doesn't mean I want to read it.

The Songs I Already Know

2008-09-12T17:27:00.003-04:00

you write the songs I record
on a tape-deck as ancient as me:

its lovers and loves and loveliness
hiss and spit with the magnetic tape
spinning side to side like a chinese scroll.

hour love and the pithy songs thereof
fill a whole side; the other, a muddle
of the Beatles, of Buson, and Battus
mixed like bad wine to taste.

and as we listen to our love replay
we fail to notice how it degrades
and how one day, out of the blue,
the machine is about to eat it.

yet, I put it in to hear
the songs I already know.

This is not related (though with me you always have to question whether it really is related), but as I lay in the tub this morning soaking my skin and tortured sinuses with the liquid and vaporized states of hot water, I began to think about my first few days living in Mito, Japan that is; I remember having a conversation with the lady who ran the bakery near my apartment--the very same bakery to which I always ran whenever I was pressed for lunch--about "American-ness." I was new to the area (and white as the sun is hot), so she, being naturally curious, asked me where I was from, when I arrived... the usual lot of questions. She asked me what I thought was different between Japan and the US; I said, "not much," to which she insisted the two countries must be very different. I responded there are certain superficial differences but at their core, Japanese and Americans are just people, with all the wonderful and frustrating oddities being human entails. Needless to say, after three years and numerous examples of my behavior, she's convinced I'm dead wrong.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a novella about gaijin life in Japan but told, and here's the kicker, from the perspective of a Japanese, particularly one of a growing minority of Japanese who are singled out for their "foreign-ness." It's hard for a whiteys living in the 'Pan, who are generally unnecessarily praised for their exotic beauty, to have a good sense of what life is like for the vast majority of foreigners, who are overwhelmingly Brazilian, Korean, or Chinese. I think it would be interesting to delve into this feeling of foreign-ness from an outcast Japanese perspective (simultaneously inside and outside) to look at how some foreigners both perpetuate and exacerbate Japanese notions of exoticism. For a "Johnny teaches English in the countryside" his position of privilege is entirely predicated upon maintaining others' beliefs in his peculiarity. So oftentimes said Johnny will reinforce and embolden such notions even when a particular notion of cultural uniqueness is absolutely absurd. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes the number of nihonjinron books written by westerners for the consumption of westerners. Hell, Gregory Clark makes his living traveling around Japan telling them how special they are.

Of course, all of this will likely disappear beneath another thousand books on Catullus and Yosano Akiko I have yet to read, but it is nice to muse about wonderful projects that will never come to be.

Reading as Boredom and Paranoia

2008-09-02T22:06:00.004-04:00

A new (academic) year, a new blog, a whole new slough of reasons to bitch about the [absolute nothings] that plague my daily intellectual existence. The Fall is a time at the American university where everyone is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and grossly overfed on grandiose notions of self-importance designed largely to distract students, graduate and under, from the reality that we train them to be perfect little cogs in the machine. Prelude to this new semester and epilogue to a summer that seemed to linger like the walking dead, two conversations:

Conversation 1

This weekend, the Dorkmuffin and I attended the wedding of a longtime friend of hers. We were seated, thankfully, with other twenty/thirty-somethings, that is people "our age," in my case specifically next to the DM and an oceanography Ph.D. candidate from LSU... I think. Honestly, it's difficult to pay attention to the usual grad student banter: what do you study, what's your program like, how far along are you, blah blah blah. This "conversation" was particularly nausea inducing due to oceanographer's nigh unwillingness to pay attention to a single thing I said. "What do you study again?" Comparative literature. "What's English like at Michigan?" Comparative literature. "A friend of mine was in English at [who gives a fuck] and she was always saying how great it was to feel like she was on equal terms with the faculty..." Comp--actually, my program often feels like an elaborate hazing ritual. "[Something about working in a lab]" . I was more fascinated by the silent man trinket she carried about with her. Le sigh.

Conversation 2

I'm sitting in the lobby at the reception reading, because I was bored, and an eleven year old autistic girl sits don't next to me and starts to blather about books. Note: this is the beginning of a classic "Nicholas says something inappropriate and ends up offending a little girl, her parents, and at least three bystanders" scenario, so pay attention to how it actually turns out. Autistic girl asks me what kind of fantasy books I like (she had been blabbing about some teen fantasy series), I say: um, I like Don Quixote, do you know it? "What's it about?" It's about this old guy who's been reading fantasy books all his life, and as a result he goes crazy. He thinks he's a famous wandering knight, sets off on all sorts of funny and strange adventures, is eventually cured of his insanity, and dies. She pauses for a moment, a rarity with this girl, and responds, "reading really makes you crazy."

Reading really makes you crazy.

I was honestly phased; I was expecting the classic "offend a little girl" scenario. But, I manage to fire back: sure, he's crazy, but in the novel it's clear his madness was the only thing keeping him alive. Autistic girl didn't say anything else. She merely stood up and walked away lost in thought.

Epic Diction

2008-05-26T01:08:00.002-04:00

I said to the man with his tongue stuck to a post-it-note that
when the world ends and all the Alexandrians and Alexandrines
measure up to little more than a chapbook no one wanted to buy,
people will continue to sing the songs they knew before language
was a word, songs that say what speech cannot and should not,
how the world is made of us and us of it like a geometric
figure with two sides but only one surface: we’ll be the worse
off for only having songs, repetitive and catchy, moody,
as fickle as the passions that order our regimented brains.

It occurs to me, sometimes, while running or engaged in some other relatively mindless activity that certain languages have nothing really comparable to epic, even some whose literary history is quite extensive. English has two epic traditions: one homebrew (think Beowulf) and one adaptation (think Faerie Queene), neither of which sound even remotely like the other. Old English epic is jerky, with regular stops and starts, verbal turns reminiscent of modern day freestyle, whereas the rump-dee-rump, or whatever Chaucer called it, has a tendency to flow on and on for several lines with little to break up the thought into manageable units. I don't think there is a modern corollary for this, and if there is one, I'm not sure I'd want to put it on my Meizu. But some languages, Japanese is one of them, don't have this "seven lines before you encounter and independent verb" style of speech or composition one generally uses to make language seem, well, epic.

So what would you do, if, say, you wanted to translate Homer into Japanese? It has been done (I'm not looking to be another greater Westernizer of the Orient [such things need capital letters, don't you think?]) but always in prose. The Japanese, for whatever reason, are loath to translate poetry into verse, perhaps "because Japanese culture is, like, so super special and unique." Yet, even this has been done. I'm currently writing about a poet whose revolutionary move, apparently, was to translate a Japanese poet into modern Japanese verse. Gasp! Be still my beating heart. However, Tawara Machi's efforts were of lyric to lyric. The form she was translating is largely unchanged in its modern incarnation; only the "meanings" needed updating.

So, to translate "epic" into "epic Japanese" one would have to invent a wholly new diction, one which the Japanese language hasn't managed to produce on its own. To use Homer as a test case, one could easily use a 5-7-5 syllabic line (which is, strangely, a haiku/hokku) for heavily dactyllic lines and a 7-7 for the ponderously spondaic. Metrically, I think that would work; it's akin to how the early Meiji writers created a 5-7 line to mimic the English pentameter. In fact it's not uncommon to see quatrains or stichic poems using this 5-7 line. I wonder whether it would "sound" right, though. The 5 and 7 syllable units that basically make up the totality of traditional Japanese poetry carry with them a lot of lyric baggage. Inevitably, I'm left with the question, "can you sound 'epic' in Japanese?"

The Axe Hitting the Koto

2008-05-04T16:50:00.003-04:00

The following comes from what currently amounts to the very end of my second chapter on Yosano Akiko and Tawara Machi; I say "currently," because shortly I will append a brief discussion of Shiina Ringo's "Kono yo no kagiri," about which I've had a few things to say in the past. Those of you who have read my first chapter (or heard me go on about it ad nauseam) will recognize some striking similarities to the way that ends. At first, this was not intentional, but after realizing what I had done, I'm now going back to make the parallel more clear.

kami no sadame inochi no hibiki tsui no wayo (?)
koto ni ono utsu oto ni kikitamae

the gods decree, life takes its toll at the end of our world--
listen to the sound of the axe hitting the koto

"the axe hitting the koto" (a kind of long, plucked zither played on the floor) is even more gruesome in the Japanese than my translation allows. The verb utsu here is written without a chinese character to indicate which of three homophonic verbs it might be. Given the presence of an axe (ono), it is most likely "to hit" but "to take revenge" is equally plausible. "To hit" utsu and "to take revenge" utsu are, though they are written differently in modern Japanese (打つ and 討つ respectively), historically the same verb. Satake [super famous Japanese literary critic] is unwilling to take this doubled meaning into account, so I find his rendering of the final command, "listen with disconcern" (heinetsu toshite okiki ni natte kudasai), wholly unsatisfactory. He would have the poem be an act of consolation, as if to say, "everything has its ends, so this too will have its end," yet this approach fails to accept the violence inherent in the destruction of the koto. Machi's translation is as disturbing as I assume Akiko's poem to be, but for a different reason.

koi ga owaru inochi ga owaru ware ga owaru
koto ni ono utsu hibiki nokoshite

love ends, life ends, I end--
peals of the axe hitting the koto remain

You can take "remain" nokoshite two ways, I think, either as a simple present indicative or as a command. As an indicative, Machi's translation is an expression of melancholy that does not eviscerate the violence of the destruction of song--dare I say--as Satake would have it, but retains his sense of acceptance. As a command, it becomes something more than melancholy; it is an attempt on the part of the poet to remind herself by means of this unusually striking image not to take herself and her poetry too seriously. If anything it is a precursor to joy not melancholy, and it opens up a space for humor in the poem(s) that follows.

hito futari busai no niji o uta ni eminu
koi niman-nen nagaki-mijikaki

the two of us smile at the word "inept" in the poem;
twenty thousand years of love--so long, so short

"futari tomo sainou nai ne" to warai ori
uta yori omoki koi to iu mono no

I smile saying, "neither of us has any talent"--
deeper than song, this thing called love

This is how the first section of Akiko's, and thus Machi's [this chapter is about Machi's translation of Akiko into modern Japanese], Midaregami ends, likewise the world and likewise lyric itself, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a smile.

Ebb and Flow

2008-03-23T22:56:00.002-04:00

m.c.

I see you’ve opened your eyes
to see a white bitch playing white witch
playing your tune, so soon she tickles
your pickle and you wake up
to wonder bread and shake-n-bake
fake as press-on nails she wails
you bail, you playa, you gangsta, you hard
you fat fuck tub-o-lard, what makes you think
she want you? she haunt you, bitch,
she switches up your rhymes and times
3/4 to 6/8 she bait you and you bite
each night she rides you. imagine
all the people you drop with skills
and pornographic metrical thrills,
how they laugh
ha-ha-ha
how they laugh

I have yet to find a lyrical voice I can't imitate; even hip-hop (be it freestyle or written), when you consider that I am a fundamentally arhythmic human being in many ways, was a quick study. I wish I could say I was happy about this, but I've found recently that I've been imitating the voice of other writers even unconsciously: when I was inside Anne Carson's head, I sounded like Anne Carson (and my first dissertation chapter is an embarrassing testament to that fact); when listening to The Streets (props to Mike for recommending), I started mumbling to myself in that awkwardly syncopated flow; and now that I'm immersed in Heidegger's language games (which, as was pointed out to me at a recent manuscript workshop, were invented by Derrida), I can't help but play versus.

What Disturbs Me

2008-03-13T02:24:00.002-04:00

to find the music in poetry
i put my ear to the page
and waited

waited

the buzzer let me know
my wife wanted in,
so I let her in and waited

waited

while wisps of air walking
thru the window whipped
away the page I was on;
I waited

waited

too long for poetry to sing,
so I whistled some cheap tune
with words the radio
couldn't remember.

Normally, I blather on about the meaningless minutiae of pop culture before dropping some completely unrelated poem like a bomb on my ersatz dissertation. The Gimlet has even gone so far as to name this turn the "typical Nicholas move," but to be honest, I likely learned it, or at least the appeal of the sudden turn in a text, from Montaigne or Anne Carson. I honestly can't remember which.

I was reading Glass, Irony and God just now not paying particular attention to what was being said but more to something that became clear to me at a recent workshop (guess whose!): the idolization of Anne Carson goes beyond your average wide-eyed student and extends well into the ranks of seasoned academics, many of whom I have a deep respect for. I find myself questioning whether that respect was rationally given, because I just don't get it. Generally, I'm not one to dismiss even the poets I don't like, but I have to say, I find her poetry thoroughly soulless. It's like staring into a kaleidoscope: I'm dazzled by the deftness she wields in moving from one image to the next with near surgical precision, but I just don't feel anything. When ODB says, "ooh baby I like it raw; ooh baby I like it RAW!" I feel something, even if that something is mingled with more than a little disgust. Hell, I get more out of "Papa Don't Preach" than I get out of

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.

It doesn't help that as I read I can hear Anne crooning in that nigh monotone of hers that strikes me as the lyric equivalent of Dean Martin. Even if I couldn't, there's no lust in this poetry, not even something like Emily Dickinson's brutally restrained desire. Anne Carson doesn't know how to wield the brutality of words, and her poetry is the only thing that suffers for it. I may be the only one who sees it this way, but I don't care. This poetry is worse than the fluffiest pop music--at least pop songs seem to genuinely value their banalities. This is just banal:

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

And the Poem is but a Fragment...

2008-03-08T19:51:00.002-05:00

Yosano Akiko continues to surprise me; it's a shame that her literary reputation was tarnished so thoroughly by the likes of Saito Mokichi (another poet whom I admire greatly) and the various Araragi circles in an attempt to further move poetic composition toward contemplation of the sublime. Something was lost, though, a glimmer of a new romanticism in Japanese verse that essentially died with Akiko, a romanticism coupled with a brief and (as far as the Taisho government was concerned) deeply subversive call for the rights of woman, and both her passing and her aesthetic ideal's went largely unnoticed due to Japan being completely embroiled in the Pacific War in 1942. I argue, somewhat over-simplistically, in my dissertation that Masaoka Shiki's (and his disciples' in Saito and the Araragi) poetry of the mind supplanted Akiko's sensual poetics, for better or for worse, but I think Akiko would argue, from the grave (mwahahaha!!), that her verse is sensual and intellectual, that the sensual is intellectual.

思（おもひ）は長し

思（おもひ）は長し、尽き難（がた）し、
歌は何（いづ）れも断章（フラグマン）。
たとひ万年生きばとて
飽くこと知らぬ我なれば、
恋の初めのここちせん。

Thoughts are long

Thoughts are long, hard to use up,
and the song is but a fragment.
But even if I were to live 10,000 years
and never to know losing interest,
I'd never feel that first love.

Funny story, when I was browsing through Akiko's free verse poetry, of which the above is a mere fragment, I thought the katakana after 断章 (tanshou), i.e. furaguman, was meant to read "flagman." After all, "fragment" would be transliterated as furagumento, so I wondered, "how is a poem a flagman? Is Akiko saying that the poem merely points the way? gives only a rough indication of the vastness of her thoughts?" It would be a strange statement to make and yet is perfectly in keeping with the tone of the poem. As it turns out, though, furaguman is just a transliteration of fragment... isn't it?

The omoi in line one, translated here as "thoughts," encompasses feelings as well. My difficulty in translating omoi in that line is echoed by equal difficulty in dealing with kokochi, here part of a verb meaning "think/feel," in the final line. These thought-emotions pervade classical Japanese poetry, making it difficult for a Westerner such as myself, whose language and world view are predicated on the distinction between thoughts and emotions, to render that poetry as elegantly as I would like. Akiko's poem is brilliant, because it plays off the preconception of the aforementioned distinction while refusing to let it play out in the poem's diction. The middle section is basically one long adversative, but I wonder, what exactly is being opposed here? Are thoughts long and hard to get rid of? Are feelings? Will she never think about first love again or never feel it?

Perhaps the irony of the poem is that its logic cannot be resolved. You can't just "think" the poem, you have to feel it too. I'm sure that sentiment wouldn't sit too well with the vast majority of my colleagues. Feel a poem?! Ha!

One Day You're In...

2008-03-02T21:06:00.003-05:00

I'm a little ashamed of the fact that I follow a show like Project Runway so closely, though I like to think that my interest is almost entirely in commenting (largely to myself) on how utterly ridiculous the fashion industry is. I know the argument is out there (re: The Devil Wears Prada, the film, mind you; a book about the fashion world is a bit of an anachronism, don't you think?) that what goes on in the highest peaks of high fashion has a bearing on what you see in your local Kohl's or Target. This argument reeks suspiciously of trickle down economics. Taking the metaphor to its logical conclusion, would that make for trickle down style?

Academia has its fashions too, its trends that seem at times to dictate (for all literary scholars, I think, in the end wish they were a kind of autocrat) what one should not and should not talk about, what one should and should not be reading. For example, in my "field" (of poppies) it's very hip to know Baudelaire, Dickinson, [national poet of choice, preferably writing in a non-Roman orthography], Wordsworth, Blake, Sappho, Anne Carson, etc. It's not so cool to be into, say, Edmund Spenser, Edgar Allan Poe, Robbie Burns, [any Modernist], and so forth. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, as neglected poets will come into fashion as overworked corpses, i.e. corpora, fall into disfavor. But some things and some poets always seem to stay in the limelight while others persistently elude it. Lyric has its "little black dress" in a poet like Dickinson or Sappho, two poets about whom biographically we know quite little, so their unusual lyrics lend themselves to, let's say, creative interpretation often bordering on the absurd. I generally place myself in that category.

One topic that always seems to elude the academic is the sensual. Sure, you may have someone as prestigious as Susan Stewart tackle the senses, but even then the senses are generally little more than an intellectual construct. Sometimes, I feel like Hugh MacDiarmid, but being myself a bad descendant of the Gaels, it doesn't keep me up at night.

"The Sense of Smell"

Smell they say is a decaying sense
In civilized man,
And literature that pays much attention to it
As decadent comes under the ban.

So they say who not knowing even themselves
Think to know all else.
It’s a different story of smell altogether
That modern science tells.

Its monopoly of direct access to the cortex demands
From disparagers of this sense
Who yet rely on cortical knowledge good grounds
For their different preference.

Scandal to have no fit vocabulary even
For this mighty power,
—Empyreumatic, alliaceous, hircine;
Blind windows in a magic tower!

But reason unconcerned with what is of such
Overwhelming concern to the mind
Is only a false face the nature of consciousness
Continues to hide behind.

Like mo comrádaí Crìsdean ("my comrade Christian," the name not the religious orientation), I too have chafed at the inadequacy of our language to treat the non-visual senses with any degree of precision. With smell, in particular, we must generally resort to simile to get our point across: "it smells like a bag of farts in here." This is particularly trying when you have to try and write about a poet whose primary aesthetic modes are based in scent and taste.

La Canzone di "Bitches Ain't Shit"

2008-02-19T20:54:00.003-05:00

I've been spending my off hours from dissertation writing (and there have been many) working on my "translation" of Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" into an Italian canzone; well, it's not in Italian, but the principles underlying the metric structure are the same. The canzone is derived from a troubadour song form representative of the elaborate games they were fond of playing in their lyric compositions. It's five verses of twelve lines all of which must end in one of five words and finishes in a five line envoi that uses each of the words once. If you compare my lyric to Dre's, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how faithful the translation is given the absolutely absurd constraints. Bon Apetit!

Canzone di “Bitches Ain’t Shit”

one Eric Wright, a well-known whetted tart,
a boon companion who’d with ladies play,
made turns of verse the lubricant of tarts’
weak thighs—oh how we loved to taste that tart
and wicked fame! so long my purse was fat,
I cared not where proceeded she, the tart
who with the paler ladies dined—that tart!—
on sausages she’d tickle off to trick
them of their coin. no profit her the trick,
so suing me she’d have her due, the tart,
because she cannot bide the cruel streets:
this truer tale for you, ye friendly streets.

seducing girls too coy to leave the street
be, needing minted dough for juicy tarts
we slip in and sloppily out the streets
(I, Dre, And Eastwood traveling the streets)
in games of slapping jack the boys will play
but loving not the ladies of the street.
the whores who like it wandering the streets
will give it up with coin to spare your fat
belly; your wick wet and wallet fat,
you leave her to the malice of the streets
and entertain companions with the tricks
you satisfied yourselves to have and trick.

have got my tipple—Snoop Dogg summons—tricks
that means—to Longplage head I down the street
to meet a wet and fête-for-fondling trick;
so here I am and ready for the trick
with naught but sausages to stuff the tart
and strumpets on my loins like coats, thus tricks—
I, kennel bred and loving not those tricks,
how could I trust a lady for to play?
(wherefore a trick’s a whore) I seldom play
with my own heart on ladies touted tricks
(wherefore a whore is mean); my sausage fat
she’ll gobble up and bolt, her clam now fat.

one Mandy May, whose belly I stuffed fat
each day, her kitty playing purring tricks
on my weak lap such that the cat went fat—
my fellows said for anyone would fat
the lap. I never would have thought the streets
to claim her—six months gone, the bailiff fat
with me, Herr D.O.C. and Dre in fat-
ted carriage hail me, “Snoop, your furry tart’s
been bobbing gents blue while you went tart
and soured;” I seize my sword to trim the fat,
beat down the door to find on the floor at play
my kindred Daz, who with my tart would play!

with wined-up tarts I wouldn’t even play:
both they and I do know the jellied fat
won’t flow through Death Row; the fellows play
on swings and ring-ting-tings, the bellows play
out loud unruly things, the truest tricks
we sing in tongues whet numb with dinner plays.
when fiddling with the sausages, I play
quite mean, I scrub my shrub on washboard streets,
I comb fur coats with tender boys the street
grinds down—I wouldn’t say that I would play
with any ring-ding-dong, but any tart
with tongue out long would make a man go tart.

Envoi:

amounting to but naught the saucy tart
on meat would suckle and with balls would play
until with satisfaction I’d be fat:
she’d find her way to yet another trick,
and I’d find fresh conveyance thru the streets.

The (Not Quite) New into the Old

2008-02-10T02:22:00.000-05:00

My first encounter with Dr. Dre's 1992 effort The Chronic was in my brother's car, back in the days when "your first car" generally meant no air conditioning, in the middle of summer, windows rolled down, an old school Sony Discman slightly larger than my Wii connected to a cigarette lighter for power and an odd tape adapter designed to interface the digital with the hopelessly analog. A melancholic bit of verse I wrote while watching the wonderfully awful Dead Poets Society (whose only useful truth is that A Midsummer Night's Dream leads to suicide) reminded me of how sweaty I felt.

I wanted to rid my happiness of hap
and happenstance – what sweeps me
into piles of dirt and wasted skin –
I was made of what others had left
behind. I knew and tried to be hip,
but the hipper I felt the more I saw
dust and ash the substance of myself:
ash, for I was burned and sooted well,
to dust,

That's all the further I got. My most recent encounter with The Chronic, where Ben Folds actually got a bunch of folk-loving Ann Arborites to chant "bitches can't hang with the streets," led to a quizzical moment with the Gimlet before a snooze of a job talk, where we hypothesized Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" as a 14th century canzone. Our initial efforts were giggle worthy (as are most of our earnest efforts), so I decided to take up the task. The work is still in progress, but my first offerings (the first stanza and envoi) show promise, I think.

Canzone di “Bitches Ain’t Shit”

one Eric Wright, a well-known whetted tart,
a boon companion who’d with ladies play,
made turns of verse the lubricant of tarts’
weak thighs—oh how he loved to taste that tart
and wicked fame! so long my purse was fat,
I cared not where proceeded she, the tart
who with the paler ladies dined—that tart!—
on sausages she’d tickle off to trick
them of their coin. no profit her the trick,
so suing me she’d have her due, the tart,
because she cannot bide the cruel streets:
this truer tale for you, ye friendly streets.

Envoi:

amounting to but naught the saucy tart
on meat would suckle and with balls would play
until with satisfaction I’d be fat:
she’d find her way to yet another trick,
and I’d find fresh conveyance thru the streets.

I wonder how a song of Dre's would measure on the infamous J. Evans Pritchard scale. What would its total area be?

Getting Where You Want to Go

2008-01-21T13:10:00.000-05:00

Mozart's birthday approaches, so I'm in full on personal funk mode; it doesn't help that I just spent a ton of cash on a veritable mound of 78's and have nothing really to play them on. I had to settle for humming "Collegiate, collegiate, yes we are collegiate" while holding the record in my hand. It didn't help.

A couple of weeks ago, I just barely missed the bus. Normally, this wouldn't be much of an event: I'd wander into the basement of the Union (cuz it's too fucking cold to be standing outside for a half hour) and pick at the crusty necrotic skin on the tip of my slowing healing finger as I sit gazing at the legions of sweaties not studying a god damn thing. But I got it in my mind to walk home. Mind you, this is not a decision to be made lightly, as I live more than a half hours walk from campus. I'd get back to my apartment just as the next bus would be pulling up nearby.

the bus stop

it has escaped me that I must walk
several blocks in the wrong direction
in order to get where I want to go

I was trying to explain to my students the weird circular logic Plato employs in the Symposium to make the simple point that to a certain extent eros is philia. They couldn't fathom why he'd need to pile hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay just to say that A is B. Well, when A and B are generally thought to be opposed, thus more A and Z, you've gotta do a bit of leg work in order to equate one with the other. You've gotta walk people through step by step, so that when you realize that you're at Z, it seems perfectly natural that you got there. The rhetorical landscape changes ever so slowly that you hardly realize you've gone anywhere at all. Of course, once you wake up from your sycophantic stupor (yes, Socrates - of course, Socrates - sure is, Socrates), you might realize that everything you've been fed is a load of crap.

It's amazing how by merely changing the mode of transportation, you enter an altered state of consciousness. You begin to notice things, generally little things, that in speeding past to your destination, you'd never give a second thought. I'm not trying to propound something as trite as "the road less traveled by" Cavafy's notion that the journey's the thing, but rather that how you get to what you want to know is just as important in producing meaning as the things you discover along the way. Socrates helps us get to know eros: in deconstructing eros bit by bit we become intimate with it in the way philia would demand, i.e. slowly getting closer and closer. By enacting the demands of philia rather than simply stating them and performing some pate comparison, we come to eros without ever quite blowing our load in the way we would if we simply lept to conclusions. The irony of the Symposium is that Plato would have us assume a philic (is that even a word?) relationship with eros and deny the opposition. That brings a whole new meaning to "getting to know" someone.

Two Nouns

2007-12-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

It was a bit of an experiment to occupy my mind as it refused to sleep: a pair of quatrains in iambic pentameter (not strictly so, obviously - I'd rather say what I have to say than be a slave to meter) on a pair of images I'd had floating around in my brain during the car ride from my parents' house to Colleen's mother's; one a fantasy (an Alexandrian library abuzz with men reading [aloud] and as such performing books) and the other a familiar reality. I'd written [sic] two perfect quatrains (as perfect goes) in my head, rehearsed them for a few hours (or so it seemed), and eventually went to sleep.

The next day, Christmas, I spent the last leg of a twelve hour car ride with Colleen and her mother to North Dakota tossing about the two quatrains, or at least what I could remember of them.

two nouns

a finest tomb for books and brains on the verge
of calling each other minds in the clear light
of a quiet beam lying still against
[

the old, Alexandrian chatterbox
kicking up dusty clouds of noisome bodies
sweating out[
]silent tongues.

The square bracket thing I stole from Anne Carson (who stole it from editors of classical texts) to represent a lack, specifically what I couldn't remember despite repeating it back to myself off and on for a few hours. Once I finally gave up, I noticed something about the flow of these two quatrains - rather their new flow, the happy result of artifice and chance. I hadn't intended it, but the accidental result of "lying still against... the old, Alexandrian chatterbox" both cements the juxtaposition of these two visions of libraries and elides them. This is how flow is supposed to work, I think it says something about the machinations of my brain that I only stumbled upon it. A more studied example of how I would approach flow came to me as Colleen's Aunt Tracy's cat was busy shedding all over me, and her Uncle Bob waited in the backyard for a buck to come along so he could shoot it in the head.

in minds
entombed
in books
encrypted--
in books
entombed
in bricks
envisioned--
in minds
enslaved
to books
imprinted--
two books
enslaved
to brains
implanted--

I intended this as a round or a series of lines whose "end" could flow grammatically back into the beginning like a verbal Möebius strip. This isn't quite how flow generally works in hip-hop, but it was at least an attempt at a kind of poetry whose embedded sound patterns are a bit more comprehensible than the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets'.

shiawase na goro ni kiiteta ongaku o
pokke ni irete
chikatetsu ni noru

the music I listened to when I was happy
I put in my pocket
and get on the subway

In the past, I've referred to Sato Mayumi's poetry as, well, shallow, perhaps because I didn't exactly get it at first. Unlike, say, Tawara Machi, oft praised for revolutionizing waka diction, who largely adheres to the conventions of classical versification, Mayumi has found a place for lines in a poetic form that has been by and large line-less. More than that, her language is thoroughly mundane, whose lack of profundity I originally took for banality, and seeks to find in the mundane something sublime. By breaking up the single line form she manages to effect a series of semantic turns not unlike what I remember Mike mentioning in relation to the choruses of the Oedipus Tyrannos.

shinu koto no
kimatta hito no
sewa o suru you ni
waratte bakari ita
koi

a love
where you can but smile
as if caring for
someone who's decided
to die

The problem inherent in translating this poem is a matter of the diametrically opposed syntaxes of Japanese and English. Where my translation moves from love to death, Mayumi's moves from death to love: shinu koto no (to die) kimatta hito no (person who's decided) sewa o suru you ni (as if caring for) waratte bakari ita (do nothing but smile) koi (love). Thus the semantic progression becomes, according to the sequence of lines, "to die - a person who's decided to die - as if caring for someone who's decided to die - doing nothing but laugh as if caring for someone who's decided to die" and all that ends up modifying the simple word "love." The move from death to love is synonymous with, in my mind, the emergence of hope, making my move from love to death synonymous with despair. I'd get pretty down about translation, then, if I didn't occasionally remind myself--accidentally--that something is gained, even in loss.

Two Short Essays on Nausea

2007-12-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

the best songs are dyspeptic, you see,
or do not, should you be blinded
by afterthoughts of nausea the lyric
posits in your stomach's brain;
the best songs are the worst you feel
dripping into your weak bowel--
the best you can do with songing it
is, in feeding your throat soundthoughts,
fail to say what you mean and let
them chew on the uncooked notion that
the best songs survive the acids
and the squeeze and find themselves
embedded in the warm, brown folds
of wet, discarded nutriment.

***

Upon examining the constitution of my diarrhetic leavings in the toilet, before sending them on their way to flushland, I was able to make out a few kernels of corn and a roasted mushroom: my stomach flu must have made them pass through my system too quickly. That was when I remembered reading - maybe in high school - how the prisoners at Auschwitz, Dachau, and those other German horrors would be so starved at times they would pick through their own feces in order to find any undigested bits of food. I can't imagine what kind of happiness there is in finding a golden kernel of corn wrapped in a warm, brown turd. And happiness it is, or at least joy, a kind of joy we'd never entertain outside of a purely intellectual exercise; we might try to simulate such happiness but inevitably fail due to our unwillingness to admit that profound joy demands profound suffering. In this unwillingness we (pace our savage friends) are quintessentially American.

Of saying something (or nothing)

2007-11-07T14:39:00.000-05:00

It struck me, sitting among a smallish group of poetry nerds, whose workshops I regularly attend, though I bitch about it endlessly, up to my ears in "organic" pizza, that (you were probably wondering when I'd get to the point and stop blathering on about pointless mood setting) poets and those of us who condescend to write about them, these days at least, are terrified of saying anything about music, especially if it happens to be particularly germane to some metrical or phrasal concern in a poem. It's not that they lack the education to speak of such things in at least a rudimentary fashion: most edumacated types know how time works in music, the difference between measure and phrase, the effect of certain rhythms and intervals, etc. But any obvious analogy between poem and song, perhaps as a result of our resentment of Victorian and Modernist obsessions with music and verse--after all, we write about Victorians and Modernists these days; we'd never emulate them--or our innate fear of true interdisciplinarity, is demurred or ignored or outright dismissed. Of course, by we I mean we nervous hand-wringing whitey types; our savage friends need not apply.

Analogous to this fear of music, rather of saying something about music, as if music were porn and, even though we all listen to it, no one really wants to admit owning any, is a fear of media; scholars of poetry (well, the more ancient the poetry the more unavoidable this concern is) are generally not held to account for failing to interrogate the materiality of their texts, and those who do attempt to hold them accountable are typically dismissed or treated in an excruciatingly condescending manner. The danger is that we as scholars will become ever increasingly alienated from poetry. Poetry isn't just also aural anymore, it's visual as well. Images, not just descriptions of them, in motion are now just as germane to the study of poetry as music always was.

I'm a whisper in water
a secret for you to hear
you're the one who grows distant
when I beckon you near

No one could ever accuse Bjork of being banal, occasionally incomprehensible and hard to listen to, but never banal. At the moment she sings this verse, if you were merely listening to the song, say, on a bus on your way to teach yet another class on the Antigone to a group of fresh-persons who barely understand the plot much less the complexities of the imagery, you might think this yet another in the series of perplexing existential statements Bjork lays before you. But in the context of the video, it is precisely at this moment that the staged version of "My Story" has arrived at the point where "My Story" is staged. Not only does the play alienate "My Story" from its audience by adding this extra medial layer, it becomes alienated from itself. As the lyric says, "you're the one who grows distant / when I beckon you near." Any attempt to to create greater intimacy through art (thru artifice?) is futile or merely perhaps complicated by the manner in which it reinforces the distinction between "you" and "me." The very act of beckoning, calling one towards yourself, a kind of desperate invocation, implies distance and reminds us of the separation that is almost synonymous with the manner in which numerous iterations of a message, a poem, a song, will ultimately call attention to their respective medium.

I'm a fountain of blood
in the shape of a girl
you're the bird on the brim
hypnotized by the whirl

It is possible, isn't it, that our media are so new (not all that new, though) that we have yet to form the vocabulary that will eventually alienate us from them, so that we may discuss them and dissertate as we do with those Victorians and Modernists. There is a moment now in which our silence permits us to enjoy music and the lyric cinema that accompanies them, just like porn. For the moment, perhaps it is okay for us to say nothing.

Equus

2007-09-19T00:23:00.000-04:00

I'll start at the end, I suppose. Tonight I watched "Equus," the film of the play starring Richard Burton. I've seen and read the play; I hadn't seen the movie. What struck me, and Colleen as well, is how what is a mere undercurrent in the play, the boy's substitution of horse worship for an eviscerated Christianity, is made almost egregiously explicit. Now, I'm not one to throw out platitudes about how I like things to be left to the imagination, but the movie said too much. In being explicit it really took away from the psychiatrist's desire to know. In the play, Dysart's drive to probe this boy in session is spurred by the enigmatic nature of what he has to say. He is accustomed to being so far removed from the kind of passion the boy has, he is entirely ignorant of the stirring his own fervor when it comes upon him.

This morning, entirely coincidentally, I penciled the following, much to the chagrin of a neighboring student who genuinely thought I should be paying attention to a lecture I was hearing for the fourth time.

achilles

at least your horses were immortal, boy,
enough to eat the grass whose generations’
coming and leaving you would never see,
whose forgetting winter reminds you that
you are the undead caught somewhere
between the choices of life and the unchoices
of death, arching your neck to catch a glimpse
of uncorpses whinnying and shaking
their hoarse-hair plumes, that brush against the sun
and clear away the dust of prior sunsets,
the dust disguised among the talling weeds
whose shallow roots barely scratch the earth;
your neck a crane, an insufficient bird

At the time, I couldn't come up with a final line. I had in my mind the image I wanted, a neck craning up in a futile attempt to see past to the sun beyond. Even now I can visualize it so perfectly. I threw so many words at it to plumb its depths. None of them stuck. It wasn't until I gave up that image that I was able to pen a final final line.

to overcome the mounds of tombing dirt.

Sometimes in order to speak, to at least say something, we must bury what we can truly only see or feel. That's not necessarily in the movie, but there were horses.

Ad hominem

2007-09-09T20:21:00.000-04:00

It is a shame that one of the greatest works of contemporary Western literature, partially because it is a comic and partially because its author is a raving egomaniac, may simply disappear from the radar and merge with nothingness. It is a shame, because comics struggle so hard to be taken seriously by our lot, most of whom are in fact at their least tolerant when it comes to judging the relative merits of a work of literary art, and fail largely due to the gleaming appeal of commercial viability. A comic, for the most part, is quite expensive to produce on the same scale as a 10,000 run new novel. Thus, the economic concern is ever more pressing, and even slight financial loss considered the death knell of a burgeoning career.

Let's not mince words: Dave Sim is an asshole. So, it should come as no surprise that his character, Cerebus, whose whole life Sim chronicled in the 300 issue eponymous opus that recently found its permanent end (Cerebus dies in the final issue) in March 2004, is also an asshole. Sim has managed to alienate most of his friends in comics, many of whose careers he practically made, due in no small part to his well-articulated but not always logically grounded anti-feminism. I refrain from saying misogyny, like so many do, in part because that word conjures the image of a liquor pickled troglodyte who assumes women ought to be in a position of subjection for no real good reason. Sim, however, is a celibate, who openly deplores the materialism of modern society, intends to let his work go into the public domain upon his death, has engaged productively if indirectly with prominent feminist and psychoanalytic critics, and mostly avoids women entirely, seeing "them" as beyond hope. Sim's "problem," which interestingly always seems to be Cerebus's problem as well, is a complete idiosyncrasy mixed with harsh iconoclasm. He is a bridge-burner par excellence, whose overreaction to an argument usually ends up finding him more alone than before.

Cerebus is a compelling character not simply because he has been thoroughly fleshed out--6,000 pages dedicated to one character will tend to do that--but also because his nigh pure selfishness permits him to slip into any social role. He begins his literary life as a barbarian mercenary, later becomes prime minister of a wealthy city state, later pope, later a transcendent mystic, later an introspective bohemian, later an adventuresome nomad, later a sports hero, later a rabid comic book (which in the Cerebus universe are called "reads") fan, later a textual critic, later the ruler of the known world, but always a complete drunk. Cerebus's life view is brutally consistent, which is perhaps what made him initially so compelling and later wholly repulsive to any but the most ardent fan.

Cerebus demands precisely the kind of critical work I abhor: the unified monograph. It's hard to approach the work at this point, for there is no shared critical vocabulary upon which a community of scholars could build. It doesn't help that the work itself says so much and invites the reader to say so much more, rendering it a veritable hermeneutic black hole. A monograph could do for Cerebus what Kaufmann did for Nietzsche in the U.S.; it could provide both the imprimatur literary texts unfortunately need in this cacophonous critical environment and the groundwork later critics both wittingly and unwittingly trope.

Oh, and did I mention Cerebus is an aardvark?

Puns

2007-09-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd take a different tack this time, as I've been becoming increasingly unwilling to explain myself in English, I figure if I throw out something in Japanese, I have no choice but give some account of it.

All poetry for me is occasional, I rarely, if ever sit down with a prescribed idea to work through it and edit it until it shines. This is why so many of my recent sonnets have something of an unpolished feel: they're all off the top of my head. Even the "pet epic" I wrote as an undergrad was a surprisingly coherent mish-mash. Anyway, I was bored with Sappho and Catullus one day, so I penciled the following in one of my tiny notebooks:

神の苦に天の白花を見に行って
　霜の句がよめなくなると馬鹿

kami no ku ni ama no shirobana o mi ni itte
shimo no ku ga yomenaku naru to baka

it's so stupid that I see the white flower of heaven
in the gods' sorrow while failing to read the frost's verse.

Of course, it's not that simple. The two halves of this tanka turn on the paired phrases kami no ku and shimo no ku, "gods' sorrow" and "frost's verse" respectively. Those phrases are homophonous with the technical terms for the "upper verse" and "lower verse" of a traditional Japanese poem, due to the fact that the two halves of a tanka were generally written as a single vertical line. So, alternatively,

it's stupid that I watch the white flower of an upper verse
while failing to read the verse below.

The "upper verse" of a tanka is what was historically called a hokku, what we and our Japanese contemporaries would probably call a haiku. Part of the conceit of the poem is not only the failure of considering the divine absent its worldly counterpart but also the failure to see in a derived form, that so often is mistaken by we Anglo types as complete and perfect, its historical companion. Part of what authorized poets like Masaoka Shiki and the Americans who idolized him to say such superbly wacky things about the composition of haiku was the erasure of its historical condition as one of a pair in linked verses.

Which brings me to the verb yomu, inflected here as yomenaku ("unable to yomu"), which generally means to read, but often in the context of poetry means "to compose" or "to recite," because etymologically they share a common origin in an 8th century verb, also yomu, which meant to count aloud rhythmically in much the same way we as children recite the alphabet. What I mean to say with this cascade of odd puns, which I can only do prosaically, is "it's stupid to look for some kind of divine pathos in the seemingly lotus/haiku, all the while ignoring the rich tradition of suffering and sensation here on earth." It's not one over the other, just as the tanka contains both.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

2007-09-04T18:48:00.000-04:00

If I were to retitle this poem, and I wouldn't, I'd call it "daydreaming." I was thinking of Eisenhower as I wrote it, because I've been reading a lot about him recently, but the poem isn't about him. If it's representative of anything, it's memory, not the kind of remembering where we all long for some idyllic past, but the kind of disorienting memories that while entirely vivid, make no easy sense, even to the one who experiences them.

ike

I got in the car and drove until it broke down
crying; his mother and father were gutted by
the color of the changing leaves in spring.

I got out of the army on a technicality; my arm
was gone fishing, said he’d be back for supper,
but no matter how long we waited, through the
sun and the moon and the deaths of white stars,
no one came home with a rack of meals in hand.

The message I got granting me my discharge
your firearm only after confirming hostile
intent: “how do I know he wants to kill me?
does he have the same orders? will our rifles
stare at each other until the sun breaks down,
and the earth’s complaints against us are mute?”

At some point, I decided for myself that I would write in a manner that's even a bit hard for me to grasp. I'd prefer concrete, often silly images whose sinister undercurrents (i.e. left turns) are meant to be deeply disconcerting. From just last night,

I’m writing to you from a desk in a computer
in a mind made up: it won’t die, won’t lie

and

a-musing

a little and a lotta love alone
in the brief tickle of light to trickle
through the canopy: he can’t
make can-o-pees outta canapés
or the sun from a ruddy sunburn.

the first of which still doesn't make much sense to me, yet I keep rereading it for some reason. And the second, with its oddball reworking of the word "canopy," is precisely how I feel sometimes when trying to rework one idea into another: sometimes, they are wholly incompatible. So, if words and things never come home to roost, well, it's because you really don't have a clue what words and things are, and that's perfectly fine.

My (metrical) Misogyny

2007-08-29T23:51:00.000-04:00

Horace, in his strangely Aristotelian (yet not) letter to the Pisoes on the art of poetry, wraps things up by saying that poets are basically nuts. He weaves a yarn of a fictitious poet who wants to throw himself into a well all the while wondering, "should I intervene? Should I deprive him of a remarkable death?" The question just hangs there as he immediately shifts to the apocryphal story of how the Sicilian poet Empedocles threw himself into an erupting volcano. The moral of this lengthy diatribe?

quem vero arripuit, tenet occiditque legendo,
non missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirudo.

whom he (the poet) grabs, he holds and drags down with reading,
a leech that, if not filled with blood, won't let go.

A current in lyric poetry that always seems to go blissfully unnoticed is the violence poets attend to their own writing. Let's not forget, Horace himself is a poet, so what does it mean that his final say on his own profession is that poetry turns you into a kind of parasitically cruel lunatic? And he's not the only one. I'm reminded of Brecht's poem on the muses where he envisions them as chorus girls who basically become sexually aroused (well, it's a pun actually, as Scham in German can mean both "shame" and "vagina") as they are beaten into shape by the director. Even Verlaine in his "Art poetique":

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!

Grab Eloquence and snap his neck!

Horace, who, as far as I know, has written the longest explication of how poets go crazy, never actually gets into why they lose their marbles. Why is this lunacy projected back onto their art as extreme violence? This is not a matter of little concern for me; just this morning I found myself perfectly satisfied with having written

to beat it out with verse the punching bag
unable to complain about the bruises,
to ignore Muses more concerned with weight
loss than flesh far too desiccant to weep.

I think he provides a clue in the form of that little gerund at the end of the penultimate line: legendo. The poet doesn't drag his reader down by writing but by reading. The poet is so obsessed with his own interiority, with his own poetic vision, he becomes entirely paranoid of what a reader might do. He latches on, sucks him dry, beats him to a pulp, desperately hoping to enslave his perceptions. To no avail. The poet is almost justified in his madness, because lyric readers are generally the ones to rub against the grain, to say back to the poet, whose morbid immortality has been assured by the fact of being read over and over, "no, that's not what you meant. This is what you mean, and there's nothing you can say or do about it."

Another Water Philosophy

2007-08-25T15:30:00.000-04:00

I decided as a sort of counterpoint to my previous, more academicky consideration of Lao Zi, I'd submit this sonnet as well, as not merely a poetic reading of the water philosophy but a rendering in poetry. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by the following, but I guess poetry is better (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) when its intentions are neither obvious nor clear. Another sonnet:

I found myself drowning in a lake and,
unable to dive in and commit the daring
rescue, began to drink the lake dry—

enough to survive, at least. I found that
despite my thirst and the parching grip of
the hot sun, I couldn’t stop my drowning.

I bruised my arms in mauves whipping the water
into a foaming frenzy that beasts and seaweed
watched as it fled in terror from my hands;

but with time and sunshine my eyes and white foam
dissolved back into the ripples where
the white light was tickled into sparkling.

and so I asked the lake to comfort me
as it laid me down gently on the surface.

Just to add something, I wrote this today, in one go, as I usually do. The order of composition was basically the first two strophes, the last couplet, then the rest of the middle, so if it seems a bit wonky (and on a second read it does sound a bit clumsy), that may be why. I still think the (non-) point is sound, though.

EDIT: The following feels a little less wonky to me. I also removed some of the words that were obviously superfluous.

I found myself drowning in a lake when,
unable to dive in and commit the daring
rescue, I began to drink the lake dry—

enough to survive, at least. I found that
despite my thirst for the parching grip of
the hot sun, I couldn’t stop my drowning:

I’d bruised my arms in mauves whipping the water
into a foaming frenzy that beasts and seaweed
watched as it fled in terror from my hands;

but in time that desperate white foam
would dissolve back into the ripples where
the white light was tickled into sparkling.

so, I asked the lake to comfort me
as it laid me down gently on the surface.

With a Line and an Idea

2007-08-18T22:50:00.000-04:00

I always begin to write from a bifurcated place; I begin, generally, both with an idea and a line, that is something to say and something said. While watching a documentary on the LDS church, whose founder, Joseph Smith, strikes me as one of the world’s truly wacky translators, I began to think about immortality, when a line (and a half) came to me.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed

Immortality seems to me to be one of the truly horrific things that could befall a person; I’m not really a suicidal person—I do not ever want to die—but I think that what I do is meaningless if it doesn’t end. I would have no sense of urgency, because immortality means I will exhaust the possibilities of my existence, making those possibilities meaningless. Nothing is of greater or lesser value, because, inevitably, if only out of sheer boredom, I will accomplish everything.

I felt the beginning of another sonnet, a form whose outline I’ve been pushing of late, I felt the need to add, to expand this growing, inexplicable disdain for the eternal. So I wrote

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed between the dirt
and afterlife

at which point I stopped, because I realized that what had begun as a moment of mourning for what will become of me physically, that at the moment of the dissolution of my will, the constituent pieces of my body will be passed about, never knowing the relief of simply being allowed to rest, to end. To be honest, the obvious spiritual component had never occurred to me. Do I also mourn for the immortality of my soul? Am I the only one to mourn, because it would bring such pleasure to those who love me [sic] to know that I have not entirely ended? I found out tonight that Mormons believe in and actively practice baptism of the dead. The pure sense of revulsion I felt as a Jewish man described the day he found out his brother, whom he had watched die in a concentration camp, had been baptized posthumously by the LDS church inspired in me a kind of hatred I don’t normally feel. I understood why Augustine was such a proponent of the freedom of the human will, because I saw how disgusting it would be to have one’s salvation, no matter how beneficent, imposed.

I understand now, that my line (and a half) had a kind of will of its own, that I ought not have tried to tack on a sonnet. I should have had the courage to let it end where it did, and say what it said.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed

So Much for Sameness

2007-08-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

It's odd how I can manage to write something with me own noodle that I acknowledge as good and yet still do not like. Case in point is my sonnet from yesterday. Sonnets, something with which I'm very familiar in both my critical and writing practice, come easy to me; I generally feel quite comfortable playing around in their formal constraints. So, I've found myself writing sonnets of late, if only to take my mind off Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger, both of whom, let's admit, can be a real downer in his/her own way.

The first two lines I'm okay with:

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;

Where it becomes problematic for me is in the third line, where, in an attempt to form a parallel of the concrete to the abstract, I reuse the phrase "I have," except this time in a much more literal sense. N.B. that the line originally read

I have a wet pile of pebbles in hand

but upon revision reads

I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles

Neither is really ideal, as far as I'm concerned. The former is vocally smoother, but I like the way the phrase "hand full" deconstructs the idea behind "handful," though I'm not sure the latter noun is evoked in the way I intend. Also, the clumsiness of the chosen line does quite a disservice to my intended parallel, making it seem as if it weren't one at all. The parallel is needed, I think, to give the false expectation that this sonnet will progress in a very formulaic fashion: quatrain-quatrain-quatrain-couplet. If that sense persists, then the enjambment in the 5th line will throw the reader off a bit, preparing her for the long, choking sentence to follow. All of this is tidied up with a nice regular quatrain, a return to normalcy that doesn't quite fit.

all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

I see this sonnet as indicative, whatever its flaws, of how I used to write, say, before I came to graduate school, when generally speaking, I was focused on trying to take complex ideas and distill them into very simple terms. Compare this with what I wrote the day before that, to my mind, says something similar in an infinitely more obtuse way.

finally, something of length to make the long worthwhile

three feet and five and two add up to ten,
but so do six and four. fourteen, un-eunuch
by his manhood, would take four again
a pedophile by his teen age only
interested in eights and six and sometimes
a twat of four and four and four and two.

some times are correct, measured by measure
of sounds singing the outer walls to dust.

this city had the highest walls, the longest
routes to lovers peared and apple bottomed
markets and mark thats and mark this: one day
this all will be a desert to the sight
where Egypt fell – in love with its own paper
maché cones stoned the deafened silence.

This one has faults of its own, namely the way in which the last six lines just kind of hang there, but despite it not being better--in fact, I'm convinced it's worse--I still like it more.

One Day's Reading

2007-08-14T23:38:00.000-04:00

I started out by writing a lot of fluff, when all I really wanted was to post the following, so here it is, sans fluff.

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;
I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles
whose jagged sins were washed away in
the river. I mistake them for little
minds raining brains on the wet pavement,
while other brains on legs and hands pass
mistaking me and my minds for offerings
to deities the concrete buried when
the world was made anew in visions of steel.
all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

Of Another Sameness

2007-08-13T00:54:00.001-04:00

When I say everything is the same here in the States, I mean in an entirely disconcerting way. You'd expect that given a certain amount of time away from something that it would change, if only in marginally perceptible ways. You'd perhaps not expect but certainly not be surprised by, say, the Gimlet's having shed the sum total of a human being in one year of absence. But when I returned to this land, for good, as they no doubt say with more than a little irony, all the little things that should reasonably have changed, have not. The dollar has inflated with frightening regularity, yet the cost of daily goods and services has not appreciably increased to coincide. Sure, people bitch about gas prices, but they are still within the limits of fluctuation from before I left. Food costs are roughly the same, and an American media, the Finest Free Press in the Free World, continues to balk at a glut of meaningless information they refuse to digest before their next deadline.

So, I find comfort when something that really has stayed the same suddenly becomes something else to me. I take comfort in the fact I largely manufacture my own truth and reality, because, well, I'm not an analytical philosopher. I probably could have been one, could have learned the ropes of their subsistence, could have been a damn good one, but I'd likely have even less hair up top than I do now. With this in mind, I took another look at this poem I recently wrote, one of the incomprehensibles.

an ode on a CD cover of a woman named Apple

WHAT I WANTED from you was an essay
on matter of fact, I would like to stay, hearing
your ear over cocaine and a beer-stained
mustache—I listened—four hours—two—the
dull pain of the evening silences, whose lenses
I WOULD SEDUCE, they’d click and fall in love
with the suicides treating lovered wounds
with pesticides inside the bottom left cabinet,
behind the Drano. Oh, black and or white, you
simple woman, death’s first maiden of songing
the life from the evening silences we made
love to by candle-blight, oh lips too tight to
kiss too slit to miss, I’d heal the wound in your
face two face unloved each other we last.

I'm a fan of free writing; it's one of those lame MFA tricks I think actually does help you distill your thoughts into something coherent, but only if you go back and read it. I hate how the general tack with free writing is that it is a simple mechanism that will lead you into coherence, narrative, and other such boring things. On a read, not a write/read, I was stopped up by that first line and what it said back to me: I'd been plowing through all this lyric material, hoping that something would stand out as The Perfect Essay of the Marriage of Form and Thought, and I was having trouble just letting songs be songs; what I wanted from them was that perfect dictum that would sum up everything I want to say about poetry, so I could go home and read a trashy sci-fi novel. Then I noticed what I had capitalized (I'm still not sure why I did that) and made the two statements into one: what I wanted I would seduce. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some Neo-Freudian claiming my subconscious will speaks in the poem. I make meaning, and what I find here now is a co-incidence of me reading a fragment of myself.

I come upon a thorough piece of gibberish like "death's first maiden of songing" and see how seduced I am by the desire to read into its overwrought layers of verbosity. I seek out those moments in texts, most likely perfectly benign, that are a trap laid for the overzealous; which is a long-winded way of saying I do not merely overdo it, I want to overdo it. I yearn to make too much of things.

I see in my own writing an unsettling mix of hope and fear, rather my hope and fear are the same thing, but I don't have a word for that. I should probably make one up. When I see myself having written, "face two face unloved each other we last," I get goose bumps, not because I'm in awe of my own verbal judo but because it scares me that I could say something like that. Unloved, the two faces (it doesn't matter what they represent, as they only represent what I tell them to) wear each other out. Last is not a transitive verb, but by force of syntax I've made it one. The two faces, opposed, endure each other, which is really two statements: the easier, "I suffer what I've already said," the harder, "what I've already said suffers what will become of me." This is one of the lessons,then, I think, of Heidegger's life.

To four the Road

2007-08-11T01:36:00.000-04:00

Yes, back, here--I'm not sure what else to say. It's the same, frighteningly the same. It's so damn same it makes your eyes bleed would if you were stabbing them. Another bit of light, occasional verse:

much ado about a park bench and Jane Austen

I’d taken her more serious if series
of events as sense and dimes rhyme
and ice on the limestone huts we
what for tat and tits too fit to stare
I hold her

two bold and the underlines waiting
out subway car bars made of cages
to stage or not to page my dealer to
heal the line in my cracks about
who held her

welder sparking white whines who
despite the cries of the weather bats
had on sunnier haze made plays
for the suburbans thumping what
will hold her

hand me down clowns’ balloons
big-eyed toons a-makin whoopee
cushions sing the bluebells wells
of sonnets and planetary bonnets
to hold her

back home when the South rises
WE BEAT IT DOWN
with doughy will it goes on risin’
WE BEAT IT DOWN

This is, I suppose, what my brain looks like on sleeplessness and Heidegger. While in content it is largely incomprehensible, it does, as I like it to, display certain obvious formal characteristics. I had the idea of setting down a few verses and a chorus while also trying to make use of a few hiphop tricks that I am obviously not adept at. It became obvious in writing this that my strengths lie in the long phrase and not in the quick turns that someone like Del the Funkee Homosapien might employ. And then,

an ode on a CD cover of a woman named Apple

WHAT I WANTED from you was an essay
on matter of fact, I would like to stay, hearing
your ear over cocaine and a beer-stained
mustache—I listened—four hours—two—the
dull pain of the evening silences, whose lenses
I WOULD SEDUCE, they’d click and fall in love
with suicides treating lovered wounds
with pesticides inside the bottom left cabinet,
behind the Drano. Oh, black and or white, you
simple woman, death’s first maiden of songing
the life from the evening silences we made
love to by candle-blight, oh lips too tight to
kiss too slit to miss, I’d heal the wound in your
face two face unloved each other we last.

It'd be easy to read Fiona Apple into that title, but in fact I had in mind a particular Shiina Ringo album whose intricate folds rival many a state map. It's a sonnet, sort of, roughly in three parts. There's no rhyme [sic] or reason to the tripartite division, that's just the way it worked out.

I'll try to have something more insightful to say in the future, but for now, this is all I got.

Another Kind of Goodbye

2007-06-29T13:20:00.000-04:00

I've been musing a bit recently on my stint as a Japanese homemaker, N.B. 主夫 not 主婦, and the idea came to me to write something, most likely in Japanese, about my rather odd experience of failing to get across to people what it is I do for a living and simply resorting to saying I'm a housewife. Funny conversations typically ensue, and I am dragged further into the world that is the daily life of a married, middle-aged Japanese woman. With that in mind, I started with the following, in Japanese but don't worry, I'll translate it too.

今日、七月七日、日本のどこかで誰か七夕を祝うかもしれないが、俺は名古屋からどことも知れない場所まで東海道線の普通電車に乗る予定しかない。車両の外、側面図が我と別れて消えてしまう。各街は同じ街みたいだし、俺の各場所の思い出も消えてしまう。その思い出を逆方向に行く電車に置いて他の忘れやすいながめに入る。

　蒲郡と豊橋の間にどこかで特定の名前も知らないタロウという若者も三人同級生も乗ってくる。タロウと彼の仲間があっちこっちにある空席に座らないままに立っている。「何でかな…」と自分に言ってタロウ組にじっと見つめる。しんしんと彼らはなんか笑い話と語りかける。その四人仲間は何と話してるかよく分からなくて、俺が分かれるのは「バラバラバラバラバラバラ外人バラバラバラバラだろう？」って、血も燃えるようになって怒れていく。「何でそんなにすっごく怒れるような気分しとるか、お前は」と聞くとしてタロウは自分の眼に見る。答えは「ワカンナイ」

Today, the 7th of July, somewhere in Japan someone must be celebrating Tanabata, but the only thing I have on my agenda is to take a train from Nagoya to God-knows-where on the Tokaido line. The view outside the car splits off and disappears; each town looks to be the same town, and as such my memory of each place disappears. I put those memories on a train going the opposite direction on which they enter yet another entirely forgettable scene [a really bad translation of nagame, which is used to describe particularly breathtaking views of the countryside].

Somewhere between Gamagori and Toyohashi some teenager for whom I don't have a particular name but will call "Taro" gets on the train with three of his classmates. He and his friends refuse to sit separately in seats scattered here and remain standing. "Why?" I muse to myself and stare transfixed at the group of them. Quietly, "Taro" starts to tell them some kind of anecdote; I can't really understand what the four of them are saying, but what I do catch, "yada yada yada yada gaijin yada yada yada," makes my blood boil. "Taro" looks into my eyes as if to say, "what's got you so bent outta shape?" My answer: "I dunno."

I should probably add that the town I live in, Mito, is roughly half way between Gamagori and Toyohashi. Everytime I come back here, I feel this intense weight of unwelcome that makes me think I'm arriving for the first time, even though I've lived here for years. I constantly have to shake off the locals' "astonishment" that a whitey is getting off at Aichi-Mito station, a reaction that is initially quaint but after three years becomes patently ridiculous. That and the oppressive humidity have rendered me all too willing to let my memories of this place pass as I head somewhere else.

Weather Patterns

2007-06-24T10:48:00.000-04:00

To ask a Japanese, which is to say the common opinion fed by no-nothing news broadcasters, this rainy season has been unnaturally dry. Never having lived in a country that suffers genuine droughts, they don't really get how insignificant the difference is between 9 inches of rain in a month and 10. Anyway, the rain and too much Harold Bloom have been making me think about childhood, not so much my childhood as the abstract. The result is as follows.

sweat

I'd baked my brain in the sunlight
before I'd even let it rise;
I'd let water cool my throat
until it became ice

tinkling in a glass of lemonade
as bright as the sunshine I'd baked
with my thoughts had risen up
like cold steam from the ice

wrinkling in the uneven heat
of the crystal air shatters
the sun into perfect hazy
pieces of hexagonal ice.

sweet

lemons drops of rain sounding somewhere
beyond a frosted pane of glass coat
the road in a thinnest film of mirror.

somethere tickling the puddles with her
shoes the reflection of a girl is tasting
the water that someday rots her teeth.

the wet icicles dangling from the clouds
somehow reek of peppermint the whole
way she wanders to the end of the block.

sleet

I'd wanted to believe the myths of nana
tucking in the lads, telling them stories
of how she'd lived her life in hail.

You'll forgive me if my thoughts are a bit cloudy at the moment. I've been using idle train time, of which I have an endless supply, to muse on what Mike had said about me becoming [insert name here], which I found funny because, admittedly, I haven't read a word of Marx aside from the teasy bits of the Communist Manifesto I needed to get by in an undergrad "great books" type class, have only the faintest notion of what Heidegger thinks about anything, and not a wit of Deleuze. That on top of something I read in Freakonomics that I'm deathly afraid is how others see me:

"If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you'd be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them."

False Etymologies

2007-06-20T01:21:00.000-04:00

Today's little ditty, which I promise to be somewhat brief, comes in two parts: part 1, a rant, and part 2, a poem. They need even less introduction than that.

I.

I realized last night, as I failed to drift off into sleepy land, that there is a gross difference between something being right and something making sense. For example, me quoting myself, "I'd like to consider the ignorant together with the innocent, as we tend to let them overlap. The innocent are, etymologically speaking, innocuous, they are innocens, which is to say they do no harm, innocent being an adjective derived from the present participle of the verb noceo ('to do harm') modified by the negative prefix in-. The funny thing about the prefix in- in die Lingua Latina is that it often serves as an intensifier as well, thus inflammo does not have the ridiculous meaning of 'not to set on fire' but rather 'to inflame.' Perhaps the innocent are not, in fact, innocuous. Perhaps the innocent, and as such the ignorant, do not 'do no harm' but rather 'do great harm.' They do great harm to us all with their stupidity." It is less important that in- and noceo as "do great harm" is etymologically incorrect as the fact it makes a kind of sense, i.e. it manufactures sense, is ultimately more useful than its truth value.

II.

letter to an anarchist

please don't kill me; I've only
just met you. it'd be a shame
if I were to bloody your suip.

suip, as you know, needs
broth, the kind you make of
meets simmering in a pot.

the vegetables and the meets
and the bundles of fresh verbs
and the well water fat puddles--

please don't kill my brother;
he's just a baby and wont to
babble as bibble babies do.

please spare him his life in
solitude wondering the halls
of dusty tome-pocked walls;

he won't forget you, as you
will have already forgotten him.
please don't leaf your life alone.

Spektors of Doubt

2007-06-15T02:30:00.000-04:00

I warn you in advance that this is a long one, so if you're gonna be of the tldr set, just go fuck off... with love. Anyway, here it is, but one thing: yes, I did mean to spell it "reder;" why would take a post even longer than this one, so make of it what you will for now.

A verbal experiment need not be merely that; common sense seems to say there's nothing that restricts a clever turn of phrase to being merely that. bleh, that's a load of crap--what Spektor means by "the consequence of sounds" is not entirely clear: if the apposition holds, then it would be "the consonants and vowels" - if it even is an apposition. the principle by which Spektor moves from one thought to the next in "the consequence of sounds" (the song, not the line) is more an appropriation of hip hop flow than it is strictly logical or narratological. in a flow, the mc uses any of numerous phonological links more reminiscent of music to enjoin thoughts into sequence. rhyme, assonance, consonance, caesura, theme and variation, all are tools by which the mc moves from one thought to another, often joining logically unrelated images thru a mere affinity of sound. the success of a flow is marked less by the degree to which it makes sense and more by the seeming ease with which the mc enjambs various phrases. of course, the flow is anything but easy: the poet puts every word where she wants it, and the seemingly illogical relations that may result are anything but unintentional.

The phonological affinity that exists between "consonants" and "consequence" could lead a reder to believe that Spektor could have put these two lines together merely for this reason, but its use as a refrain would argue against that. what should I make of it, though, as an apposition. one possibility: that language is a consequence of the exist of sound. the human mind has a need to make language of seemingly random stimuli. at the heart of our experience of sound is a persistent desire for it to mean something, and when such meaning is not obvious, we take what sounds we have and turn them into voices. as Basho said:

静かさや岩にしみいる蝉の声
ah, the quiet... penetrating the rock, the voice of the cicada

Cicadas are insects, of course, and as such do not have voices per se (though, to be fair, the word koe is used in Japanese both for human voice and the various sounds of animals); they make sound by shaking their butts, or, in science speak, vigorously vibrating certain loose sections of their abdomens.

What Spektor's apposition (if it is one) says is the human brain cannot just let sound be. "the consonants and vowels" are what go along with sounds, to use a more etymological sense of "consequence." consonants and vowels (by my reding the most basic units of language) are not so much the natural result of sound as something coeval. Spektor is not necessarily saying something we don't already know - that sound does not exist meaningfully outside of human perception - but she does so lyrically. in this lyric mode meaning is not obvious and is subject to the machinations of the reder. ironically, then, this is also part of what she is saying.

taken a step further, the lyric flow can be used to produce words that, lexically speaking, are not, in fact, there, much in the same way a skilled musician can produce polytones on an instrument like the bassoon. the extra notes aren't technically there, which is to say the musician is not using the finger position by which they are normally played, but because of the way in which a particular note is played, the listener hears those additional notes. according to the liner notes, two lines of "Edit" should read:

you don't even have good credit
you can write but you can't edit

Which seems simple enough, if incomprehensible, but when Spektor sings the last of those two lines, she holds the nasal in "can't" and lets the terminal stop fall on top of the word "edit." upon first and subsequent listens, the lines rede to me as "you can write but you can't debt it," which makes much more (logical) sense given the preceding line. the whole song is merely a repetition of the following.

white lines on your mind
keep it steady
you were never ready
for the lies
you don't have no Dr. Robert
you don't have no Uncle Albert
you don't even have good credit
you can write but you can't edit

Once again, I've used the word mere a bit too easily, because the repetition of these lines is precisely what produces the verbal polytones to which I alluded earlier. as the song reaches its end and becomes increasingly frantic, the line "for the lies" merges back into the beginning of the song producing the string "for the white lines on your mind." that the common idiom "white lie" already exists in English only helps to buttress the overlap Spektor creates here between white lines and white lies. the phrase "white lies" is not actually in the song, but to an extent the reder can be forgiven for putting it there.

White lines = blank lines? what does it mean to have empty lines on your mind? what is an empt line to begin with? I think it's obvious Spektor doesn't think "your" mind is blank. a white line is a possibility, a something in a nascent state. it may have form, it may have rhythm, but it doesn't say anything meaningful. a white line is a persistent possibility that relies less on itself to produce meaning than it does on "you." the funny thing is Spektor doesn't have much faith in "your" ability to turn that possibility into something: "you can write but you can't edit." the logic that underlies this judgment seems to be the same as Virginia Woolf's; without a certain degree of financial stability, "you're" in no position to effectively edit anything.

"All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems."

-Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own

While I may not have any idea to whom Dr. Robert alludes - nor am I going to bother to look - anyone who spent their childhood in comic books knows who Uncle Albert is--wait, that's Uncle Alfred... nevermind. the point is the names have the aroma of patronage: "you don't have a rich uncle to borrow from, even the bank won't lend to 'you.'"

Without anyone to borrow from, what exactly can "you" make? Spektor still believes "you" can make something ("you can write") but she doesn't believe "you" can remake anything ("but you can't edit"). "you" can read, but "you" can't rede.

The lies, then, white or not, for which you were never ready, the remains of those who came before "you," stay forever beyond your grasp, remain a mere possibility just as the "white lies" somehow remain forever beyond the song.

Simple Human Kindness

2007-06-14T01:09:00.000-04:00

I bought a book today; it's not the first thing I did nor the most important, but it is at least a place to start. I wanted something to read on the bus and the train back home, so after the movie--I went to see a movie, 300 if it matters, early in the morning. I suppose 10 isn't that early, but I had to get up relatively early in order to get there on time. The only reason to go see a movie that early in the morning is because it's half price. You'll have to plow your way through legions of old people who were awake before you fell asleep, but the savings is worth it to someone as cheap as me.

Yes, I bought a book, Murakami's Portraits in Jazz, a kind of compendium of his impressions of various renowned musicians, some of which are witty and insightful and some downright dull. I gave the woman my 781 yen, and she gave me a book I proceeded to read over 234 yen in donuts I ate in the mall food court. The movie had ended just after a bus had left for the station--there's only one an hour--so I had time to kill. I was up to Chet Baker, when I realized that I had about 5 minutes to walk over to the bus stop. I knew in my head that the bus is usually late, and my desire not to stand in the pouring rain held me back for a moment. But, I had an umbrella, it woudn't be so bad if I had to wait a few extra minutes.

I step outside, open my umbrella, and the force of the wind and rain flips it inside out, nearly snapping the thing in half and certainly rendering it useless. A young man and woman walking by giggled nervously at my misfortune. Between them they carried 3 umbrellas, only one of which was in use. Where was the simple human kindness in laughing at someone whose misery you could alleviate with minimal inconvenience?

In a split second, you have to make decisions that affect your happiness in the here and now. Hindsight always dictates your error in such matters but never takes into account the time in which you have to avoid such error. Ahead of me lay a hundred yen shop, where, I was fairly certain I could buy a replacement umbrella. I still had about 800 yen on me, which would leave me with plenty of money for the bus, the train, and a small snack to stave off the hunger that lunch was intended to iradicate... for a time. I decided against it: if the bus were on schedule, I wouldn't have enough time to buy the umbrella and get to the bus stop. I'd have to wait an hour for the next.

The bus was late. I stood for a good fifteen minutes in the pouring rain. I reconsidered my decision to buy an umbrella, but the inertia of my fear of missing the bus kept my feet firmly planted. I could have stood beneath the eave of a nearby shop, as some who arrived after me--I was the first--were doing, but if I were to do so, the bus wouldn't stop. Someone had to suffer for the good of everyone. I thought, perhaps, I could move under the eave myself and hope someone else would decide to take the good of the group to heart and stand at the sign. Why did I stay? Was it simple human kindness? No, if no one were to give in to my social gambit, it'd be my own selfishness that caused me to miss the bus.

Eventually, it showed up. We all got on.

On the way back to the station, I thought I might've taken a taxi; a few had passed as I was standing there. It would've been a lovely way to screw the eavesdroppers but not me in the process. Though, a taxi would've been at least 600 yen, probably more, and I would've been faced with the possibility of not being able to pay the fare, and even if I could, perhaps not having enough left over for the train home. At the station, I bought my ticket, and had a single 500 yen coin left over. I thought, "what luck! I have enough to buy a proper lunch." I had enough time and money to buy an umbrella instead, but by that point I was soaked anyway, so I might as well get something to eat. I bought 2 tekka maki from a sushi vendor for 180 yen each, which left me with 140 yen to buy something to drink.

The combini had this Itoen jasmine tea I love. I'd never seen it there before, and felt as if even this shitty day could be somewhat redeemed. One bottle of Itoen brand jasmine tea at the Family Mart by the station: 147 yen. Fuck. I bought a small bottle of regular Itoen green tea, because, well, it literally was all I could afford. It was with more than a little melancholy that I read the haiku on the side of the bottle, as I always do, on the train back to Mito. The last of the four drew out in me a kind of anger I hadn't really felt before, not particularly strong, but very bitter:

the knob that opens the door is a warm spring breeze

I plodded the way back to my apartment doing my best to protect my bag from the driving rain that sought to penetrate my very skin. I rethought all my decisions as people in misery do. Did I really need that book? Without it, I might have had enough for the taxi or the tea or a new umbrella. Why did I need to be on that bus? With an hour to spare, I could've gone to the atm, bought a new umbrella, gotten a proper lunch in the food court, etc. The irony is I have money, and have done my best to make it inaccessible... But my inherent pessimism defended my actions: a new umbrella could break just as easily in that wind, and besides, I was already soaked, so the point would be moot. I wanted to blame someone for how miserable I felt, but my analytical mind revealed to me the horrible truth: what I suffered was the direct result of every little decision I had made.

The Sorrows of Young Goethe

2007-05-30T07:32:00.001-04:00

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

2007-05-28T10:02:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-20T07:12:00.000-04:00

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.

The Advent of Lurko

2007-04-30T09:15:00.000-04:00

So, Sharon is going to be around for a few days, meaning I'll be busy ferrying her around the country so that legions of school children can treat her to those gaping maws that I have come to love so much. To keep you all busy for awhile, I leave you with a bit of Poesie in my absence. First, a nugget from me own noodle, what I'm calling a sonnet, becuase, um, it has 14 lines.

a pair of socks

we, being the laziest of animals,
tend to launder only the top of the pile--
or maybe it's just me--I wear
the same clothes over and over again

though own far more. a black pair,
a pair of black Christmas socks
belong to my wife and I resent them.

we keep an old wicker basket by
the patio door full of lone socks,
mostly mine; now, having discovered
the other black sock, entirely mine.

meanwhile the army of cicadas beyond
the patio giggle in their way,
and I continue to lie awake.

Reading over it again, I realize that's a bit clunky at first, but it comes into its own, so I've left it as is. The next Poeme comes from my reminiscences of college as I listened to NPR over the Internets while washing dishes. It's got fifteen lines, so it's a bit much for a sonnet.

the other day or every T/R
from 11 am to 1 pm
I listened to Gwendolyn Brooks
read "Ode on a Nightingale" on 8-track
at the behest of Prof. Helmut Heir.

I could never tell - so deeply moved
was I - if my bowels cried out
for the banana in my bag
or for Ms. [r]ivers to chant shout
UZUUUUUUUUUURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

the other day I ate the banana,
an un-fucking-believably huge
Diet Coke, and a bag of chips
as I left my headphones in
from 11 am to 1 pm.

Lastly but certainlies not leastly, a Poemu not so much mine, though I am translating it, that gets to ride shotgun more often than you'd think. It's funny, to me at least, and hurts a little too much. Sato Mayumi from her latest collection of waka, Private:

the letter
"I'm writing to you
from Denpasar Airport"
I write at Mister Donuts

Digging in the Mud and Sand

2007-04-24T11:04:00.000-04:00

Thru some strange happenstance, I found myself in Gamagori at a small beach hanging out with other whiteys on Saturday. Shef had rented a boat and was periodically taking people out into the bay; I opted to stay behind with the grill and work on my sunburn.

After awhile, we got bored, and started digging through the silt for clams and mussels to grill. As the tide went out, the ancient locals were busy tearing up the beach looking for shellfish, yet finding very little. I couldn't for the life of me reason why as most of the clams and mussels we found we simply plucked out of the water. As it turns out, pretty much all of the Japanese present were digging for oysters and not really finding any. It seemed a shame as there were delicious mussels aplenty.

In an effort to piece together what I think about things, lately I've been reading Lao Zi in considerable depth (and thus ignoring most of the useless commentaries people have written) and searching for videos on Youtube of all those bands I listened to in high school (think bland Seattle alt rock and Midwest industrial and you pretty much will have conjured my 9th grade mixed tapes). Lao Zi, I hate to admit, seems much more relevant.

道可道，
非常道。
名可名，
非常名。

It's the very first thing he says, so simple yet completely incomprehensible: "the way you can way is not the real way; the name you can name is not the real name." I choose this (meaningless) translation as a foil to what I've come to realize is the predominant stream in English translations of classical Chinese texts, which would render the above as "the Tao that can be defined, is not the Eternal Tao" (yes, even with the lame, random capitalization) "the Name that can be named, is not the Eternal Name." What the foo-foo translation misses is that 道 is being used as both a noun and a verb, which is perfectly normal, thus ruining the force of the repetition of those syllables. Lao zi takes what is a perfectly normal word and makes it seem peculiar by rehearsal. Say the word melon over and over to yourself and after awhile it takes on a kind of surreal yet meaningless aura, for lack of a better word.

But let's take the mundane reading one step farther. In modern Chinese--and Japanese as well--the phrase 非常 simply means "unusual" (though in Japanese it also means "emergency" as in 非常口, an "emergency exit") or "peculiar." If we superimpose that meaning back on our translation, we get something like "the way you can way, is a peculiar way; the name you can name, is a peculiar name." Which is to say, the way you go is the only option open to you; like an emergency exit, you're pretty much stuck with what you've got, lest you die in a fire like a moron. And because peculiarity in this language is also associated with greatness, it's tempting to see the one way, the one name you've chosen for yourself as the ideal.

This is the trap the old ladies fell into. In the grand scheme of shellfish, oysters > mussels, oysters become the one path, thus they walk away from a beach teaming with edible life, empty handed.

My friends and I, with our varying degrees of fluency, stepped into the water with little intention but to wet our feet and splash each other. We came back to the grill with a frisbee piled high with mussels that everyone agreed were the tastiest of all the foods we'd cooked.

Getting Wet

2007-04-12T23:07:00.000-04:00

So, for the benefit of our beloved great white filter-feeder, I present my take on the 78th chapter of the 道德經 (dao de jing), the so-called water philosophy. I should note that what I have to say is not canonical, merely my own opinion filtered thru a mostly Western educational upbringing. Even so, I think the Gimlet would prefer that to the kind of aum aum mysticism a discussion of it usually entails. Anyway, the text:

天下莫柔弱於水，
而攻堅強者莫之能勝，
以其無以易之。

In the world, there is nothing as soft and weak as water,
and yet in assaulting the rigid and strong nothing can overcome it,
for they have nothing suitable to replace it.

弱之勝強，
柔之勝剛，
天下莫不知，
莫能行。

The weak overcomes the strong,
the soft overcomes the rigid,
in the world no one doesn't know this,
yet no one can follow it.

[...]

[a pointless maxim]

正言若反。

True words seem a paradox.

Lao Zi's system, if you can even call it that, operates on a cascade of paradoxes; true to what he's saying, he never explicitly enumerates anything (which is why I think Bai Juyi's critical poem largely misses the point). You will find no statements of what the Dao is that aren't immediately contradicted. This idea of speaking indirectly, subversively, pervades the entire work; it is the means by which the "wise" act in the world without struggling against it. For, as Lao Zi sees it, the very act of competing is what causes one to become frustrated and unfulfilled. By a kind of dedicated nonchalance, one achieves ones goals. The idea, as I tried to explain it to the whale in a previous conversation, is to harmonize with the way things are (to use Lao Zi's terminology, to reside beneath), and in so doing, if you permit me to stretch the metaphor a bit, completely change the tune.

This chapter can have a sort of queasy mysticism to it, but only if not read in the context of the whole work. It frustrates me that we the great White Western Way try to make these things seem more foofooey than they actually are. In light of the final chapter, I think that water crap makes perfect sense:

信言不美，
美言不信。

What one says believably is not beautiful,
what he says beautifully not believable.

善者不辯，
辯者不善。
知者不博，
博者不知。

Good men don't argue,
Men who argue aren't good.
Those who know aren't learned,
Learned men do not know.

聖人不積，
既以為人己愈有，
既以與人己愈多。

Wise men do not hoard;
the more they do for others, the more is done for them;
the more they give to others, the more they have in kind.

If there's a lesson to be learned from all this it is that one should be in the world but not let it get to him. Yielding to the world and its concerns does not have to mean being overcome by them. This is a false assumption that we all too often make: to yield is to lose. However, for Lao Zi's wise man, winning and losing are entirely irrelevant, thus submission becomes an entirely useful tactic with which to engage but not be overcome by the world and its concerns. Of course, all of this will be subject to the savage's quibbling over my translation of 善 as "good."

But in response to your comment, Mike, I think the problem with Benjamin, and incidentally why he blew his brains out, is that like Bai Juyi he just didn't get it. Brecht maintained a sense of humor toward life that I don't think Benjamin ever had, which is why he managed to survive for so long.

The Soundtrack to Our Lives

2007-04-04T21:43:00.000-04:00

About 5 years ago now, I'd gone to Iowa City with Colleen to see Ben Folds, who, despite or because of having been the leader of a sweaty band par excellence, puts on a fantastic live show. But this post isn't about Ben Folds. We arrived way too early, as 1) it was open seating and 2) when born in the Midwest they inject you with some sort of hormone that causes you to become anxious if you leave for something less than a half hour in advance. I was there to see Ben, but someone else showed up as well.

I didn't pay much attention to Neil Hannon at the time. His songs were pleasant enough, though I felt his voice was almost too sonorous and at times a bit monotone. He played a few songs, people clapped as if they had all just gotten back from a lite lunch on the Riviera with Miffy and Alfred, and Hannon quietly took his exit through the thunderous applause that greated Mr. Folds.

I thought about Neil for a moment last night while drinking a delicious Belgian ale (Hoegaarden, if you must ask) at dinner with the Kobayashis. I had picked up my first The Divine Comedy album (Fin de Siecle) during a brief to do back in the States, namely when I taught Great books and was accused, along with everyone's beloved filter-feeder, of helping students cheat on a test. Ah, the memories! It became my constant companion on trips to the gym, and the songs were generally always in my head.

I was also reading in Catullus quite heavily at the time, and as a result, my brain always seems to pair the two. They are not dissimilar, but what binds them for me is a certain melancholic view of the world that while quite depressing on one hand is capable of the most wonderfully witty irony as well, often at the same time. One never knows whether what's being said is quite funny or in fact profoundly sad.

Farewell, milady. now Catullus is resolved.
he won't seek you or ask for you unwilling.
and you will ache, when no one is asking.
ah, you poor skank! what life is there for you?
whom will you go to? to whom will you be beautiful?
who will love you? whose name will you be called?

And that right there is the crux of the matter: exactly whom is Catullus talking to? It makes all the difference.

Alas, Shizuoka...

2007-03-25T22:09:00.000-04:00

Or, the other title I came up with, "If you're ever in Hamamatsu..." just get back on the train and return to wherever it is you came from.

The Hamamatsu of my youth, which is to say a couple of years ago, is an idyllic place, full of long walks on the beach, while enormous kites fight it out overhead. I had extrapolated somewhere in my noodle that if Hamamatsu can have such a kick ass festival then it must be an altogether groovy place. With this in mind, Colleen and I set out on her birthday to explore this mystic wonderland just across the border in Shizuoka.

The station, a combo train station/shopping mall as most are here, was abuzz with people scurrying about scooping up everything from designer handbags to pickled vegetables. It bode well for our journey; it seemed that Hams was really the kind of place our imaginations had whipped it up to be, full of life and fantastically weird shit.

But,

The moment you step outside the station you realize two things: 1) Hams is full of gigantic fuck off buildings and 2) these buildings are largely empty. Empty? Yes, hollow shells of day to day commerce. Aside from the post office and yet another shopping mall attached to yet another train station, Hams beyond the eki is largely devoid of what one would call urban life. It was rather creepy walking thru the immaculate desert that is Act City, a monument to cultural pointlessness, whose vast confines were uninhabited by the kinds of shops I suppose the city government wanted to attract. On paper, the place is quite nice: a concert hall, an exhibition hall, an art gallery, a musical instrument museum, a small park situated above the concert hall, an observatory atop the main tower from which on a good day one can see Mt. Fuji, and so forth. The one thing this place didn't have - something these reports never seem to take into account - is people. A pristine paradise ostensibly for no one.

So what is Hamamatsu full of (besides shit)? Foreigners. Shizuoka has the largest population of foreigners (by percentage) of any prefecture in the country, even including Osaka and Tokyo, due in large part to its massive shipping industry. Everywhere you go are signs in Portugeuse, Korean, Tagalog, and Chinese, though not, interestingly, in English. If Hamamatsu is anything, it's representative of what the foreign population truly is here: not white, not well-to-do, not English speaking. I suppose that's why the Japanese are nowhere to be found.

The Horror of Being Read

2007-03-12T01:05:00.000-04:00

So, our mutual savage has requested I actually give a little taste of that which I always hint at, namely that pop music figures prominently in my academic work on lyric. Normally, I try to refrain from dealing too openly with the artist below (as I'm a huge fan and it's quite embarassing), but for Liansu I'll make an exception.

This song, "Superstar," performed above by Shiina Ringo and her band Tokyo Jihen (cuz when you write and sing all the songs it really is your band), was written, according to an episode of Bokura no Ongaku [I know most of you don't speak the J-go, but it's worth a watch], with the baseball player Suzuki Ichiro in mind. On that same episode, Ichiro confessed something about this song, a confession that left Ringo nearly speechless. But first, a few lines.

"mirai wa shirankao sa, jibun de tsukutte iku"
tabun anata wa sou iu to wakatte iru no ni
honno chotto zawameita asa ni koe o nakusu no

"the future is indifferent... it makes itself"
even though I know that's probably what you say
I lose your voice in the light hum of the morning

atashi wa anata no tsuyoku hikaru manako omoidasu keredo
moshimo aeta toshite yorokobenai yo
kayowai kyou no watashi de wa, kore de wa mada... iya da

I remember how brightly your eyes shine
but even if I've seen you I can't get excited;
today I'm fragile, here I'm still... no good

The switch from atashi (the more feminine "I") to watashi (more gender neutral) in the second verse is a bit perplexing. It may not mean anything, but it seems that atashi is allowed to get caught up in the (submissive) act of adoration where as watashi is subject to a harsh critical gaze. In this way, the subjectivity is doubled, or rather subject and object are drawn from the same source in a way that is difficult to get across in English. Is atashi judging watashi? or is the gender neutral pronoun more indicative of breaking out of that position of submission that should be pleasurable and yet cannot be.

The song begins somberly, from a place of melancholy. There's more than a touch of anguish in Ringo's voice when she sings "tabun anata wa sou iu to," but as the song progresses, it becomes more manic, to the point where Ringo is practically screaming the words.

ashita ha anata o moyoasu honoo ni mukiau kokoro ga hoshii yo
moshimo aeta toki wa hororeru you ni
terebi no naka no anata
watashi no superstar

tomorrow, I want the heart to face the flame that burns in you
so that when I've seen you I can boast
that you, on the T.V.,
are my superstar

Of course, for the sake of parallelism and brevity, I've skipped the middle verses that make this song genuinely perplexing (and perhaps more about the I's relationship to itself than to an other). Ringo interviewed Ichiro on that episode of Bokura no Ongaku, and he confessed that he hates the word "superstar" so much that when he listens to the album it's on (Otona - Adult, the title of this album is an issue in itself), no matter what he's doing he always skips that track. For emphasis, he repeats he hates it 3 times (like Peter, I imagine), making Ringo's already awkward demeanor (practically the opposite of her stage persona) even more so. The strange advantage the poet enjoys in the absence of her apostrophic other is not only a masturbatory space in which she might say as she pleases but also a reprieve from the horror of knowing that the other can just as easily have opinions of her.

As Ichiro says, it's embarrassing to be fawned over in that way, to know that, even though the song may be more generally applicable (more "you" than "thou"), someone - especially when the poet is that someone - would easily substitute your name for "you."

Tokyo's Coolest Combo!

2007-02-27T19:45:00.000-05:00

As most people know, my taste in music is questionable at best, having no real allegiance to a particular genre, as a music snob ought to. I may write about the lyrical stylings of a Shiina Ringo (the link is to her most recent single) or Regina Spektor in my academic work, but my Meizu is just as likely to be playing the occasional Pantera or Otsuka Ai.

But P5 (Pizzicato Five, above), are different somehow, though I suppose a lax writer, i.e. he who wields the verbal laxatives, would call them kitsch (is our language so impoverished we have to resort to German to describe these things?). Even so, there is a certain comfort in kitsch similar to the way scifi movies make it seem as if the future will be breathtakingly homogenous, though we know in our hearts that we carry the specters of our technological past with us wherever we go. The pure kitsch (smeared like the fluffiest, whitest frosting over everything crumby) seeks to do the same thing to the past. Oddly, then, what appeals to me about this gaudy trash is its seeming incongruity with the reality before our very eyes.

In Japan, the vanguard of kitsch is called, ironically, Village Vanguard, not the famous New York jazz club that spawned the careers of so many musicians and poets alike, but a trendy chain "culture store" selling the trappings of by gone eras: magic eightballs, mod furniture, spiked chokers, etc. I know it as one of the few places to get a proper Dr. Pepper when I want one, and I guess the Engrish stickers are pretty amusing too.

P5 are a thing of the past now, having broken up in 2001, but I still like to carry them along with me on my walks through that other Japan, where everything isn't either blazing neon or idyllic mountainous countrysides covered in mist. More often than not, it's a rusty honda someone left on their lawn, because it's too expensive to pay all the [bribes] needed to operate a used car for an indefinite amount of time.

Translating Sappho into Breakfast

2007-02-21T19:32:00.000-05:00

Inspired by our man in Madrid, who, because he's far more rigorous (and thus virile, I suppose) than I, regularly (like a bran-laden bowel movement) posts about crap that isn't completely inane, I have decided to give a little insight into the kinds of things that actually make it into my dissertation. So, straight out of my notebook from yesterday, I begin, as always, in medias res:

Shit, I just lost my train of thought, because an (uptight) attractive woman walked into the donut shop, and for a moment I was intoxicated with the line of her legs. Where was I?

Translators of ancient poetry, my (elitist) shorthand for poetry that exists in numerous often inconsistent iterations, who usually have a critical tradition to rely on, typically ally themselves (or refuse to) with one of various pedantic positions regarding textual transmission before rendering the text into a target language. Where Sappho invokes none other than Aphrodite to be her ally (Aphrodita yada yada yada su d' auta / summakhos esso), translators are dependent upon certain minor deities ("if this reading [Diehl's 1923 conjecture] is correct, Sappho may be pursuing her own night thoughts... or else participating in a nocturnal ritual." {all quotes are from Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, If not, winter}).

When rendering a text there are always two kinds of remainder: the grease in the pan and the crispy fat left on the bacon. After all, it's not really bacon if you melt it all off. That fat is part of the its flavor:

of gold arms [
]
]
doom
]

I suppose nowadays most people throw away the grease in the pan, but I, being very much an old-fashioned guy and very much my father's son [at which point I genuinely started to cry in the middle of a Mister Donuts, much to my embarrassment], see that shimmering pool of artery-clogging death and feel compelled to make it part of my French toast or eggs or even the occasional plate of hash browns. Nothing (and certainly no one) is harmed by throwing it away, but it seems like such a waste.

I don't fault Carson for leaving anm [in the Greek of the fragment there's a barely legible alpha-nu-mu in the line just above the one she translates "doom."] as it is; there are so many things it could be, which makes these three letters truly untranslatable, even back into Greek. Besides, some random conjecture would ruin the poetic force of that single word "doom" and turn the bacon into burnt, inedible crud.

Benzie goes solo

2007-02-15T03:44:00.000-05:00

So, I've had that video up for a few days now; seems I have a little splainin' to do. Most of what follows comes as a result of some conversations with Pacchan and Gimlet in P's ongoing battle to counter "the jazzy," as she puts it.

Asai Kenichi, the titular Benzie, recently went solo after years of drifting around his and other people's bands. It's difficult to get across exactly what kind of rock god he is here (and why he has gone mostly unnoticed by the whitey expats who call this "land" home). One part of my brain says he's like a Japanese Bowie, but his music is nothing like Bowie's, another part of my noodle would characterize him as the musician all the critically acclaimed artists adore.

I'm something of a recent convert to the cult of Benzie and his best known band, Blankey Jet City, but one of my favorite artists, Shiina Ringo, has long been an acolyte in his church.

Imagine me, a wide-eyed undergrad, impossibly thick Greek text in hand, walking across what, from the benefit of hindsight, was in fact a beautiful brick laden quad in the "center" of the University of Missouri campus. In my other hand, I'm carrying a dispenser of my then semi-secret love, an electric blue CD player. The Innocence Mission's "Snow," a song that to this day I can listen to on repeat for hours because it immediately takes me back to those cross campus treks to my Geology class (another secret love), is coming to an end, and AJICO's "Hadou" fades in. I'd downloaded it, because one of my favorite jazz/r&b singers UA had recently joined the band and released this single. It's the kind of song that I stop everything for and listen to in its entirety.

Both Karen Peris and UA have the kind of voice that grates on some peoples' nerves, but I get hypnotized every time. It's almost as if their voice is a mood, independent of happiness or sadness or hate or love, a mood that always carries with it a kind of poignant melancholia. Theirs is the kind of music the youngins ignore, because their brains are used to being overloaded on the sugary pop or speedy death metal whose only virtue is how the excessively distorted chords hide how god awful the lyrics are. The urgency that UA and Karen have is what Benzie has too. Whether you like it or not, you can't help but listen.

In my recent spat of paying obeisance to Benzie, I discovered he was part of AJICO and had written "Hadou."

It seems I've been a fan for a long time.

Benzie

2007-02-12T06:17:00.000-05:00

a-Whoooo arrrrre ha-Yooo?

2007-02-05T13:02:00.000-05:00

So, methinks it best, having impressed myself on dear friends of most infinite patience, to compose, as it seemed suited to the occasion, a few lines of verse, by which my dears might know the degree of my gratitude. In other words, one last morning dookie:

mike's hookah

he bought it the other day; we told
him to keep the noise down, but
his greasy tobacco's in the fridge,
the ceramic top with the mugs.

the metal pan is with the pots;
the hose is by the vacuum.
just yesterday I put fresh cut
flowers in seemingly a vase.

he smokes the damn thing for hours -
each day - he does - we all
tag along: everything impenetrable
to light but not to smoke.

And the following I managed to put together while Pacchan was grunting intermittantly over a conference abstract, Gimlet was FLYING THRU THE UNIVERSE WAHOO!!!!, and I was staring at the VCR while chugging a Diet Coke.

her hair was Hi-Fi silver
draping the VCR;
a bluescreen with hashmarks told me
she'd been playing me and would
againagain - beginagain;
the tape keeps winding and un-
doing her blouse, buttoning mine
one at a time to rewind our trist:

her skirt is a coaster to her waist,
and my hand reaches for the handle.

That last one's not so great, I know, but we can't all be cheeky MFAs in poetry slowing me down as I'm just trying to catch my fucking bus, dammit!

Of Being a Happy Misanthrope

2006-12-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

Alceste, a man of near excessive virtue, finds himself falling in love with a woman who embodies all the things he despises in humanity. He even realizes that his love for her is patently absurd but is helpless in overcoming his desire for her. Trite critics have taken this as a sign of the impossible reconciliation of the heart and head; I refuse to believe that characters are billboards for a particular lay philosophical position.

Alceste finds himself beset by the very system of justice (unjustly, mind you) he unreasonably put so much faith in. I won't get into the details, but he decides to impose a kind of self-exile, if only to preserve what little sanity he has left. And the play ends. That's it.

I've also always been disturbed by how Strepsiades goes apeshit at the end of Aristophanes' Clouds, burning down the very Thinkery to which he had sent his son to learn how to get Strepsiades out of his debts. As a result, he estranges his son, in a fashion not unlike my estrangement from my own father exacted by a similarly unnecessary, overvalued collegiate education.

Christmas in Japan has the capacity to turn one into an incredibly cynical human being: they hype every commercial aspect of the holiday to the same excessive degrees Americans do, but the day itself is like any other. People go to work, and the material trappings of Christmas entirely disappear from the face of the country. Without the cathartic release from hyper-commercialism the actual holiday provides, one is easily left hollow and bitter.

I wonder--sometimes sitting in the bath, sometimes on a train staring at a teenager staring at me--whether Alceste ever found his little piece of nowhere to rule over justly, to uphold his high moral standards. I wonder if he's happy now--or was--if he's content musing to himself about how ethical he is. Does he ever come back for a brief visit to remind us all just how vile we are?

2006-12-18T23:16:00.000-05:00

Some Thoughts Over Lunch

Over a plate of mediocre pasta at a mediocre Italian restaurant in mediocre Kanayama in even more mediocre Nagoya, I couldn't help but muse, as my food certainly wasn't holding my interest, over the tiny little details of the seating. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why there were these smallish blankets hanging from the backs of chairs and small, rectangular wiker baskets beneath the seats. Normally, I would spin some wild fantasy about space pirates and intergalactic espionage, but instead I decided to break out of my doldrum by asking the waitress what they were for. Her cryptic answer: 女性に (for the ladies).

My mind drifted to pickled ginger--not the pale rose crap they serve in the US with sushi--but the bright red/hot pink variety so commonly served here with Chinese food. the inevitable result of my brain fart:

pickled ginger

normally, I'd just pick it off,
no matter the variety: sliced,
julienned or whatever have you.

I'd hope, in expectation of seeing
it heaped off to the side, the hot
pink hadn't contaminated
my pork fried rice.

I started by degrees to nibble it--
it left an adulterous smear
my girlfriend has yet to forgive or forget:

a trashy girl in Nagoya
one night drank herself silly
to the karaoke tones
of my acculturation.

After reading that over again, I realize that not everyone is familiar with what a trashy Nagoya girl looks like, so I add this in supplement.

2006-12-03T20:41:00.000-05:00

And Then the 80s Happened...

So now several Japanese friends and acquaintances agree that popular music here used to be something more than a superficial parade of increasingly younger girls and boys who prostitute themselves on stage in order to make up for how horribly off key they all are. Japanese music used to have something to offer other than the six word vocabulary that seems so common these days.

Consensus seems to be that the cult of cute that emerged here in the 80s (which was largely ridiculed, mind you, when it first appeared) is largely responsible for transforming the aesthetic of popular music from something which was equally good and bad to something that is overall shallow. Off course the niche markets still put out some amazing groups; I'm thinking here of bands like PE'Z and the tragically named Soil and "Pimp" Sessions who have made the pop jazz scene something of a standout in terms of quality acts. Sure in the US we had our own vomit in the 80s but we eventually got over it (and later made it retro, as the disease of American culture has always been kitsch). Japan has been stuck in the 80s ever since.

Those who used to be popular are still around, though, still making music, like the enka singer Yashiro Aki (who figures prominently in an hilarious Boss coffee commercial with Tommy Lee Jones) or the folk singer Tomobe Masato (pictured above). His songs are occasionally cute, but at least they're amusing:

in the Shinkansen dining car
I ran into Cyndi Lauper
she wanted to order a mineral water
but the waitress didn't get her English
speak Japanese, Cyndi

The song is more than amusing, though, as it's largely in Japanese with the exception of the speak Japanese lines, and as the final line makes clear (Speak Japanese, Japanese), it's just as much for a native audience as it is for we barbaric Western types. The other substantial difference between Tomobe and Morning Musume is he can deliver the goods:

Morning Calls (asa no denwa)

ever since I heard you'd passed
morning calls give me the chills
in morning calls I find no comfort
in morning calls I find no comfort

12 days after you passed away
I got the news you had died
in fact it was a morning call
in fact it was a morning call

after you died
day and night the phone rang
those days I thought
one day you'd come back to me

shortly thereafter, day of the funeral,
you'd yet to come back to me
so I said my goodbyes
so I said my goodbyes

when the casket was loaded into the hearse
no one applauded
you are still there
you are still there

2006-11-23T22:54:00.000-05:00

Telling Time

So, a few weeks ago I took a trip to Hiroshima or rather more specifically to the largest island in the bay Hiroshima overlooks, Miyajima. Suffice it to say, after dining on an exquisite array of ryokan food (which along with public bathing seems to always be a mandatory part of your stay), avoiding molestation by sacred deer permitted to roam willy-nilly about the town, and perusing such wonderful oddities as the world's largest rice paddle and poetry written on liquor bottles, we headed into Hiroshima proper to go to the Peace Park and museum.

I'm not going to comment on the experience of the park, because my comments are largely cynical and colored by my frustration with Japan's weird anxiety over what happened in August of 1945. Suffice it to say, I spent a very long time looking at the following:

The peace museum is largely a photographic exhibit; sure there is the occasional mangled piece of metal or human body part (not kidding there), but the exhibit mostly contains some of the most breathtaking photography ever produced including an amazing panoramic view of the city which I'm convinced must be a composite and yet shows none of the signs it is.

But I spent most of my time staring at this photo, which Colleen continues to insist is not a big deal. It probably isn't, but it has for me what Barthes referred to in Camera Lucida as a punctum, though in reality I think it has 2 puncta: one a feature of the digital photo and the other of the photo in the photo. The former is the video camera looking down over the glass case which contains... I really don't remember what. It's odd to me that I care more about its gazing than the object thereof.

The second punctum is the time on the watch. The museum itself is saturated with precise dates and times, and featured prominently therein is the collection of watches the musueum has whose works were all stopped at the moment of the blast, 8:15 AM.

The watch in the photo reads 8:14 right on the button.

Much farther away lies Nagasaki, that other target, which peculiarly never seems to enter any Japanese rhetoric about the bomb. It was a secondary target chosen instead of the munitions depots at Kokura, because cloud cover there precluded the American command's insistence on a visual attack. Why the visual attack? So the surveillance aircraft accompanying the bomber could get better pictures.

And just one little postscript:

The target committee of The Manhattan Project unanimously agreed that Kyoto should be the first primary target so as to maximize the psychological impact of the weapon. But, as we all know, Kyoto basically escaped destruction of any kind, even though most Japanese cities were leveled or suffered significant losses. Then Secretary of War Henry Stimson had vacationed there on his honeymoon.

2006-11-01T09:40:00.000-05:00

I don't know what emo means.

So, generally one of two things happens when I retreat into my Catullus to break a bit from the pressures of producing semi-coherent academic prose: 1) I get back to work because "fuck it's been weeks and I haven't done jack shit" or 2) I write poetry. The following should make it clear which of the 2 has occurred.

reading Sappho is eating a cheseburger -
it's a burger - like the rest - with
a little something extra you like
or clumsily try to peal off.

everyone likes their Sappho different ways -
some with mustard - some hold the onion -
some get rid of the bun entirely for
fear of too many carbs.

everyone loves Sappho even if not -
their skin sloughs, and they proclaim
a thin flame is seen to lap the miles -
tongues numb hum-drum

everyone knows Sappho is the best,
still you wouldn't eat her every day.
her snatch is kinda nasty.

If that's not quite to your taste - it certainly isn't much to mine - occasionally I do actually approach the lyrical.

when I told him to fuck off,
he beat me bloody;
when I said he could suck - my - dick,
he kindly obliged.

And every so often, I happen to put together words into phrases I'd actually admit to another human being that I wrote them. It's rare, but it does happen.

love is dumb because you are;
it's blind because you played Lear
too many times at the Globe.
love's dumb because you won't say
how much you need him to touch you.

2006-10-21T01:07:00.000-04:00

the closest I come to a PROSPECTUS pt. 1

This little ditty goes out to Sharon, who is probably more than a little pissed at me for disappearing from AA without much of a trace and who, to her credit, is the only person to have yet to recommend me a read I haven't enjoyed.

To my mind the most interesting thing ever said of a poem of Emily Dickinson’s is actually quite prosaic; Franklin, from the Variorum edition, of the poem sometimes called “Sic transit gloria mundi” but also sometimes (unfortunately) just 2:

MANUSCRIPTS: Two or more (lost), possibly variant, about 1852. Eudocia Converse, a first cousin of ED’s mother, living in Monson, copied the poem into her 1848-53 commonplace book (lost; Jones) with the notation “Valentine by Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst” (transcript by Jay Leyda, Harvard). An error in the Latin of line 3, unemended here, may have been Converse’s, Leyda’s, or ED’s. It is unknown to whom the manuscript had been sent.

The Latin in question is “dum vivamus vivamus,” which, if it is in fact supposed to be the Epicurean motto, should read “dum vivimus vivamus” or “while we live let us live.” The original, if in fact intentional, does not make much sense as Latin, but could mean something to the effect of “while we may live let us live,” which is, fittingly, not good English. Two things strike me and strike me because they are related: 1) that the initial claim of two manuscripts, which Franklin almost whispers in parentheses, are lost (incidentally copied into another lost text) and 2) that the error in the Latin may have been Converse’s, Leyda’s, or ED’s (or to the paranoid Franklin’s). Certainly Emily Dickinson’s is not the only corpse riddled with such difficulties of manuscript transmission and not the only one whose condition raises real questions as to how we as readers and editors compose texts. She is not the first, not the last, and I in no way mean to argue hers is paradigmatic or important (because she is an important poet[ess]). It’s there, it’s something to deal with, and I will deal with it, because a conspiracy of coincidence and interest has taken me to a place where I can. I leave the issue of significance to those who actually give a crap about such things.

This poem, longish, certainly long by Dickinsonian standards, I read with keen interest not because I like it[1] but because its condition concerns me, and by it I wonder what precisely it is a poetic reader does and what other readers have wrought before me. Reading, because human language developed in a preliterate environment, interestingly is always affixed to some older verb, some much more ancient act. Normally this is where the quodam classicist informs everyone of how the Latin lectio comes from the verb lego, which, though commonly used to mean “read,” in its oldest sense meant “choose,” or, if one is even snootier, something about Greek in which the verb anagignosko is likely to make an appearance. But, as we are talking about English, let’s presume to speak in English for a bit.

The earliest sense of the verb read is to govern, to rule, and in affinity to its Teutonic cognates to control. This is what rædan means in the Beowulf. As a result it comes to mean “to advise” or “to give counsel,” a sense which is preserved in the archaic spelling rede. The temptation, upon first glance with no knowledge of the word’s history, is to see them as distinct, a mere homophonic coincidence, when in fact they are one and the same separated at some time in childhood with little memory of each other. With this knowledge, I’m tempted to see the poetic reader as the one who controls the text, advises it, tells it what to do.

I was a little hard on the classicists. I was only recently defrocked myself and, because of a lingering bitterness that my name will never been seen in the context of Wolf’s or Housman’s, tend to paint them all with the same brush. But if you are willing to indulge their arbitrary flights to other languages, indulge mine as well.

to be continued...

[1] An irony to be sure, as it contains one of my favorite lines in all of English literature, “Mortality is fatal.” (an aside: I, in my dyslexic inability to type with any degree of accuracy, initially quoted the line as “morality is fatal” before noticing the mistake and emending it.)

2006-08-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

Japan, from here on out (Nihon no, kore kara)

From one of my favorite Japanese political cartoonists (though a bit too traditionalist for my tastes) who goes by the pen name High Moon. The left bubble reads, "country that makes things," and the right bubble, "country that makes trash." The question bottom left asks in a Chinese-ish way (meaning it would make sense, sort of, in the language of our favorite savage), "division of roles?" or more loosely "division of labor?"

I'm somewhat glad, because here on the most nationalistic of all Japanese holidays, Obon, and incidentally also the anniversary of the end of the second world war, I'm watching a show about the future of Japan in Asia and in the world where the current Japanese foreign minister Tarou Asou was basically accused of being a racist, which I'm fairly certain he is. In Japan, he's treated to a certain extent like Dubya, like "one of the guys," despite the possibility he may be ruining the country's international relations. Here's hoping he and our president hang by their feet in the Void.

For those who may need it, the tldr version of Asian geopolitics: everybody hates Japan, and the government's typical reaction to the statement of this fact is, "c'mon, guys!"

I look at this from a position of aloof amusement: for example, several of my friends believe they have a horse in the race, including a Korean (American actually, sorry Deanne) who hates Japan despite knowing absolutely nothing about it. But this is of the problems in associating people with their government. Example: the South Korean goverment strongly condemned Koizumi's visit to Yasukuni Shrine. Interestingly enough, a majority of Japanese disapprove as well.

I suppose I have the luxury of being amused here, whereas in my homeland the truth would sting too much to laugh at it. Think about it, replace Japan in that cartoon with the US, and has the meaning changed at all?

2006-08-06T11:12:00.000-04:00

Eikaiwa

There are times when I think I've gotten such a grip on living in Japan that what would shock and stun you're average whitey just bounces off me. This is not to inflate my own ego but to stay this is the state of mind you need to reach so as to keep from seizing and going comatose.

Then...

Interestingly, Youtube accounts for nearly 10% of all Japanese internet traffic, according to an article in the Mainichi Shimbun.

2006-07-26T08:20:00.000-04:00

Companio

The word company--and incidentally all of it's etymological cousins--is pretty easy to break down: con - with, pan - bread, which is to say company is the people you break bread with. In its original Latin usage, it referred to the first subvision of an army, who all ate together, a usage that is to this day preserved in military terminology.

In America, companies, in the business sense, don't do much to preserve this original notion. Most people feel little or no loyalty to their place of business, and as such tend to separate their work lives from their private lives. In Japan, it once was common for someone (male) to devote their entire life to a company, even going so far as to spend all of their leisure time with work associates. Anymore, this is not as true, but it definitely feels much more palpable here than in the land of my birth.

Scholars of Homeric literature always assume that the strong bonds between men in the Iliad and Odyssey come as a result of certain pressures and shared experiences in battle. Frankly, this is the kind of shit that old school Hellenistics liked to blather on about in Oxbridge and is still to this day carried on among the oral tradition geeks like Lord and Perry, and more recently Foley. The Homeric guy types spend realtively little time fighting together, even in the Iliad where the majority of the narrative is an actual war. What binds these fighters together is that they spend even their "free time" amongst each other. The modern military still abides by this practice, though perhaps without the overt homosexual intercourse.

People do not bond because they share their moments of greatest strength but because they share their moments of weakness and banality. Even the banal seems to me to be more important for determining who are ones true companions, as others always want to bask in the highs and lows but rarely stick around for the truly mundane.

Incidentally, this is my way of saying I'm going to be in AA in September and need a place to stay. I'm perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor (I live in Japan for Chrissake) and merely need someone to tolerate my presence for about a month. Normally, I'd just impose on Sylwia, but she's too kind to refuse me even when I'm a bother. So, I thought I'd spread the love around. Let me be boring with you.

2006-07-17T10:15:00.000-04:00

No, You're Still Outside

I went to a puppet theater performance of an adaptation of Miyazawa Kenji's Ginga tetsudou no yoru and afterwards found myself explaining it to a group of Japanese people who had no idea what was going on.

2006-07-03T01:18:00.000-04:00

Go!Go!7188 "Ukifune"

My committee is convinced that what distinguishes written lyric from song is a certain complexity of performed thought. I beg to differ.

haru no nioi mo mebuku hana mo
neither the scent of spring nor budding flowers
tachisukumu atashi ni kimi wo tsurete wa konai
will bring you back to me as I am petrified

natsu ga kuru goro wa akegata no ame
there's rain at daybreak when summer comes
shizuka ni yorisotte kakera hiroiatsumeru
silently drawing closer I pick up the pieces

aki ga sugitara kitto atashi wa
once autumn has passed for certain will I
nobita kuroi kami wo kiriotoshite shimau
completely lop off the black hair I let go long

itoshii hito yo hanare-kao nante mikka mosurya sugu ni wasurete shimatta
my beloved, I completely forgot your face after just three days parting
tada shimitsuite kienai no wa tabako no nioi
but I've been indelibly stained by the smell of your cigarettes

kimi wo matsu hibi wa tarinai setsunai nari yamanai
the days I pine for you-insufficient-painful-ceaselessly calling
fukyoiwaon ga hibiki-atte
dissonces ring in harmony
sore ga atashi no karenai tokenai nari yamanai
that is my undying, undissolving, ceaselessly calling
kodoku no uta
song of solitude
rai rai rai...

kasuka na wakare wo tadayowasu koto mo naku
without even floating about the least little bit
ashioto wa totsuzen togireta
the sound of your feet suddenly cut off
aa kanashiku mo utsushiki shiroi fuyu
ah, this sad, beautiful, white winter...

aeru mono naraba hoka ni nanimo nozomanai
if only I could see you, I'd wish for nothing else
furitsumoru wa ano hi mo yuki
what blanketed that day was snow as well

kimi wo matsu hibi...

*the rai Yuu repeats in the chorus is a morphological unit meaning "coming" or "next" that normally expects a period of time, e.g. raigetsu "next month," rainen "next year," etc.

The song alludes to an episode in the Tale of Genji when Nio (repeating the mistakes of his father) sneaks in the night to the country apartments of his friend and seduces the young woman Kaoru (the friend) keeps there. The woman, called Ukifune ("floating boat," also a euphemism for "adrift"), is caught between her desire for Nio and loyalty to Kaoru, so she tries to kill herself by drowning in the river. Ironically, she floats downstream where she is rescued by a bishop. When Nio discovers she is still alive, he tries to win her back, but before he can do so, Ukifune cuts her hair and becomes a Buddhist nun, thus cutting herself off spiritually from Nio in a way she was unable to do physically.

2006-06-29T21:33:00.000-04:00

電車男 Densha Otoko

The only thing really guaranteed to chill me to my very marrow is complete and utter silence--rather the absence of human noise, be it talking or laughing or farting or whatever. So I'm standing on a crowded train leaving Kanayama and reading a Wittgenstein memoir (don't ask), and the only thing the train car is full of besides people is silence, absolute silence. At one point as I'm reading I come across something that made me chuckle, and as a result everyone in my immediate vicinity twitched as if startled. Fascinated by this reaction, I started whistling softly "On the Street Where You Live," and noticed the invisible barrier that surrounds all gaijin begin to widen and push people back.

I stopped whistling, and after time the gaijin barrier began to recede. I waited a few minutes, let everyone get comfortable with the silence again, and let out a huge guffaw the likes of which even I have yet to see. The gaijin barrier exploded. One guy nearly had a heart attack, a woman further down the car jerked as if buffeted by the explosion, and two people in the seat behind me actually got up to move further away. All of which didn't help the situation, because it just turned my fake laughter into real laughter.

And my notebooks are no better; sometimes I get so caught up in my digressions that I wind up in places from which there is seemingly no escape:

"some say witty; some say shitty. still others only marvel at the size of her titties. of the witties, shitties, and titties, I most readily side with the witties but reserve my strongest sympathies for the labor of the titties. cities - titties - these are the best of Man's capabilities. however, in other news, some prefer Harvard, and some prefer Yale, but most could throw up in a bucket or pail. whether awake or you snooze, either is suited to 'cademy blues. and if you lose what you had in Nantucket, remember, at least, to learn when you fail."

and the word games ended up with me writing

"never wonder why a lonel[ly] spider tears her - weaving -
elaborate maps of indigenous fruit flies.

at a nightclub buzz chittering queens like bees to - honey -
'the kids have to be at soccer practice by five.'

love is not love which alters when it alteration - finds -
that made him wonder why he ever shopped retail.

sev'ral hunnerd packs of Sudafed and min'ral - spirits -
her away to a land with the sweetest hazes."

And in the margins next to those little ditties: "for want of fatter joints."

2006-06-21T07:24:00.000-04:00

THE PHILOLOGIST!

I have a feeling if I were ever bitten by a radioactive spider, I wouldn't luck out like Peter Parker did. I'd end up with some sort of lame ability like the ability to spot a spurious etymology from a hundred yards. Who needs a power like that? Anyway, this little number goes out to all the classicists who never thought I was a real philologist (*cough*John Foley*cough*).

わたしのなまえをおしりになりたいのでしょう
watashi no namae wo oshiri ni naritai no deshou

I never would have suspected Shiina Ringo to have written a song entirely in kana, given her penchant otherwise to use kogo (classical Japanese) and some of the most obscure kanji (chinese characters) in composing her lyrics. it looks like a kids' song (Ringo's [Apple's] Song), and that's precisely what it was when the song was set to an animated short for NHK's Minna no uta (Songs for Everybody).

you probably want to know my name

The Ringo persona addresses her audience in keigo (respect language) and further softens the presumption that she knows what her superior desires with the supposition deshou. assume for a moment, though, that oshiri ni naritai is not keigo at all.

you probably want my name to shoot our your butt

But now that Ringo is no longer speaking keigo she could just as easily be talking about her own desires.

I kinda want to shoot my name out my butt

The auxiliary verb なる (whence naritai, "[somebody] wants to なる) becomes 生る, "to bear fruit," a verb entirely appropriate for the assumption that Ringo is singing in the persona of an apple tree. and if なる becomes 生る then something has to be done with oshiri; easy, make お知り (the articular form of the verb 知る, "to know") into お尻, "butt." you might prefer something more literal, then.

I kinda wanna bear the fruit of me name in me bum

it's no coincidence this song comes as a loner when Ringo was making several transitions: a transition to motherhood, a transition from marriage to divorce, having her trademark mole removed, from a solo career to joining a band. the biographical reading of this moment is both easy and entirely unnecessary.

I wanna shove my name up your ass

なる could just as easily be 成る, "to include/to comprise." we've already seen how the lack of explicit subjects in Ringo's statement permits a shifting of perspectives. it can just as easily switch back. once again, you might want something more literal.

I want for my name to be included in your butt

Normally, we'd expect oshiri kara here if the verb なる is in fact to be read as 成る. I don't think this is a matter of great concern, as the most common verb of receiving もらう can take either or kara to indicate the direction of reception (はは　に/から　りんごをもらった, "I got an apple from my mom"). I see a certain affinity between the two verbs, so let us assume for the moment 成る can take ni as well.

I want my name to be behind me

What if なる is just なる? in pulling the syntactic taffy, I've failed to entertain the possibility that なる is just plain old なる, "to become." and until now I've also assumed that を is nothing but the particle that marks a sentence's direct object. it has an emotive use as well.

夢と知りせば覚めざらましを
ah, if I'd known it to be a dream, I'd never've awoken!

What is your butt? euphemistically speaking, it's your behind. it's behind you. in that other video set to the same song, Ringo appears alone re-presenting all of those images of herself over the years. it's cute in its own way.

2006-06-13T11:13:00.000-04:00

Manga-loids

I am somewhat surprised at how hard it is to find a Peanuts collection in this country. Everywhere I go I see students with little plush Snoopy or Woodstock figures attached to their bags along with tiny, tinny, annoying little bells. I suppose it is symptomatic of my general inability to find even the books I'd settle for (much less need), more often than not winding up with something that isn't quite good enough but in general resembles the kind of information I need. I'm starting to realize what a wealth of Lit. there is on these here interwebs.

Literature (of course, to pronounce that correctly you need to suck your bottom lip back a bit and slur the word into lit-chruh-chuuuuuur) does not seem to be much of a priority to the Japanese. As Colleen can attest, many students can barely remember having ever read a book much less one they enjoyed or read recently. I'd like to think it's differnt [sic] in the old US of A, but perhaps it isn't.

So, I walk into the Book Off (not its cousin the Hard Off, which, as I feel the need to point out to anyone who'll listen, is the opposite of a hard on) in Toyohashi to look for a few books, nothing major just some pop crap to read on the trains. Your average used book shop in DaiNippon is roughly 50% comics, 20% "other books," 20% digital media (CDs, games, DVDs, etc.), and 10% porn of various stripes. The porn is particularly perilous as a faulty sense of how the shelves wrap can lead you from the hardcover M's right into a wall of innocent (buxom) animated schoolgirls being raped by intergalactic sex demons. Generally speaking, I wind up looking about for 10 minutes trying to find a copy of Murakami's Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which supposedly sold several million copies here), giving up, and heading over to the manga section to buy an old issue of Hikaru no Go or occasionally the weird Tale of Genji manga.

Comics in Japan have something of a throw away quality to them. In the US, pimple-faced barely pubescent nerds (and their fat, middle-aged counterparts) treat their comic books with something of a reverent awe. Generally, after the most mild of readings with perhaps a pair of tweezers or rubber gloves, the comic book is locked away in a mylar bag to protect it from 1) any acids that might discolor the paper and 2) the general wear and tear that might result from transport or a particularly uncooth manhandling. Manga here are, for lack of a better term, cheap pieces of crap, generally published on the lowest quality newsprint one can find. The weekly anthologies in which the newest chapters of each publisher's running series appear are typically given a once over and tossed in the trash. Incidentally, train station trash cans are something of a trove of reading material.

So as a dedicated word nerd, I am sometimes saddened to live where books just aren't made to last.

2006-06-04T05:52:00.000-04:00

So, Blogger screwed up and somehow my most recent post got put in the wrong place. You can go directly there, if you so wish.

2006-05-29T10:22:00.000-04:00

In this corner...

I begin this post with a picture of a toilet, not because everything I do is scatological (hehe, poop, funny) but because I think it properly sets the stage for what I'm about to discuss.

Those who know me are well aware by now that I study poetry, perhaps even do so for a living (ha!), so I have over the years made contacts with other morons of my ilk. We like to pass the occasional bit of information (read "gossip") with almost childlike giggles, because we realize what we do is entirely meaningless.

I was made aware recently of a fandabulous new site on the interwebs, or whatever it is you whipper-snappers call it these days, so hip, so daring, so fucking NEW that it will like totally blow your mind, man. That site is Quickmuse.

"What is Quickmuse?" you ask. Each week two well known, well respected, well traveled, perhaps even well bred (you should probably read this all as "well trod") poets battle it out in the most grueling of media: lyric poetry. Contestants are given 15 minutes to improvise a bit of verse on a theme or passage supplied by the groundbreaking folks at Quickmuse. They then post the finished poet on the Quickmuse forums for all to see and judge. Apparently, quickmuse fever has so gripped the nation (i.e. you guys, the US), that a reporter from the world renowned New York Times saw fit to write a piece about it.

I have to say, it's been a long time coming. I have often sat in crowded, smoke filled cafes wondering to myself what it would be like if there were a venue where dueling lyricists could duke out like the troubadours of old. Maybe each poet would compose verse spontaneously before a live audience, whose favorable reaction would determine the winner. I even had this crazy idea once for a movie about a young poet rising from obscurity in Chicago or New York or Detroit to prominence amongst his fellow lyricists. The battles would be set against the backdrop of his struggles to achieve financial solvency and escape the trap of poverty he was born into.

That would be pretty sweet, but I suppose for now Quickmuse will have to suffice.

2006-05-25T21:32:00.000-04:00

Mr. Donuts Musings

Yet another installment in things that come out of Nicholas' brain:

So Tawara avoids excessive explication; there isn't a single note in her text to explain why it is one poem was translated this way and that one another. all the reader has to go on is Tawara's stated intention that she wishes to communicate something of the poem's 匂い (nioi) to the kind of reader who may not be familiar with intricacies of poetry written in the classical style. yet, with this ignorant audience in mind she gives nothing but Akiko's verses and hers with little to link the two besides the mere fact of proximity and little to distinguish whose is whose besides the fact one is written in literary Japanese and the other isn't.

おもひおもふ今のこころに分ち分かず君やしら萩われやしろ百合

鉄幹を思う心に差はなくて君が晶子か我が登美子か

thinking/yearning now in my heart I'm wondering/doubting
whether you're the white clover and I the white lily...

with Tekkan in my heart and no clear state of affairs,
are you Akiko, and am I Tomiko?

So bare, so spare, so evenly matched this translation, this modernization if you must pedantically insist, interrupts and intrudes upon its original. there is nothing here to defend Akiko from Tawara's insistence via nudity that one can be reasonably equated with the other: no notes to reveal what Akiko might have had in mind, no annotations to give the lie to what Tawara has perpetrated, no third voice in the text (with the possible exception of the ignorant reader) to make sense of what has transpired in the maddening silence of an otherwise blank page.

Tawara takes the tabloid writer's approach to revelation. having saddled herself with the artificial constraint of re-presenting Akiko's 31 syllables with 31 of her own, she has little recourse but to name outright those people whom Akiko has concealed beneath the elaborate floral vocabulary that runs throughout the Midaregami. of course, Tawara can't necessarily be faulted for making use of nearly a century of scholarship that revealed long ago how the word "white clover" stands for Akiko, "white lotus" for her husband Tekkan, and "white lily" for her friend Tomiko, whose amorous relationship with Tekkan has peaked the interest of more than one literary historian. Tawara can be forgiven, then, for naming Akiko and Tomiko for the benefit of Our ignorant reader, as their floral counterparts do make an appearance. but the inclusion of Tekkan's name is suspect at best. The subject of おもひおもふ is not explicit; is Tawara trying to read Akiko for us? what is an ignorant reader to do? what if not knowing was the point all along? Tawara provides her reader with no consistent guide through this morass as 3 poems later she decides to keep the floral nomenclature intact. it is possible Tawara intends to make up for her fit of yellow journalism by pointing to the literal use of these words on top of their figurative usages. Though in the following poem, she reverts back to naming Tomiko outright.

The elegists were not the first to veil the amorous objects of their poetry (be they direct or indirect), but with them the practice became relatively standardized. Ovid had Corinna, Tibullus had Delia, and Propertius had, err... whoever it is Propertius had. if Our understanding is correct, the practice is in fact quite straightforward: all one need do is compose as if she were writing to her lover--name and all--then immediately prior to publication substitute a metrically identical name. if this follows, at some point Catullus' "vivamus, mea Clodia, atque amemus" became Our "vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus." similarly, if Juliet had wished to keep her love a public secret, perhaps instead of "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" she could have substituted "O Julio, Julio, wherefore art thou Julio?" though now the simple substitution has become anything but. the overarching existential question in Juliet's speech (why does it matter so much that you are a Montague and I a Capulet?) is compounded by a new frustration (why, if your name is so important, must I call you something else?). is she, in the end, merely talking to herself? after all, what is Julio if not the masculine (perhaps less diminuitive) reflection of her own name?

A few notes: 1) The word nioi is most commonly used in modern Japanese to mean "scent," but its aesthetic range is not limited to the olfactory. A better description would be any of the ephemeral qualities that radiate off something (e.g. shine, taste, scent, sound, etc.). 2) The real genius of Akiko's poem lies in the doubled verbs (omoi-omou and wakachi-wakazu), as they mirror the doubt made manifest in the second half of the verse. In my mind, not-knowing is the point or at least a large degree of doubt. 3) I wrote most of this while sitting in a Mr. Donuts in Kanayama.

2006-05-23T10:37:00.000-04:00

Hai's and Lows

It's possible, I think, to have an entire conversation in Japanese saying nothing but "hai," but of course the better half has to supply the impetus for the conversation to continue. I know this is possible in German, though more commonly in triplicate, "ja ja ja." And that would seem peculiar to our resident Hispanistas, who may or may not have read that as laughter. But yes men in Japanese have the pleasure of throwing out their affirmations in single bursts, much more like semi-automatic weapons. German machine guns were more efficient.

It's impossible to describe how happy Hamamatsu makes me. It has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, a yearly kite festival I can't miss, and generally speaking better weather. Sure it gets hot there, but the humidity isn't as oppressive as here, and the constant rain seems more a logical result of living by der river Ocean (der, because Okaianos is masculine, Mike, not because Fluß is). Rain here in Three Rivers (i.e. Mikawa) makes it seem as if it has always been raining and will continue to until the end of time. It's funny you guys should comment on my paleness in that photo Colleen took of me on the beach, as I left that day with a pretty wicked sunburn. Even painfully ruddy skin can't detract from my paradisal vision of Hamamatsu.

It seems I was pretty down on poetry today:

"I can't shake the the notion that poets are compensating for something; and it seems bold poets, err... "strong" poets are the worst perpetrators. if I were one to guess, I'd call it a foolish attempt to beat back the suspicion that poetry is truly insignificant.

The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet, but seldom the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not what is wanted. The presence of the great poet conquers--not parleying [sic], struggling, or any prepared attempts. (Whitman from the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass)

Whitman is a specter who looms just as hauntingly over lyric composition (Pound) as he does over lyric criticism (Bloom). The great poet celebrates himself, and sings himself, and what he assumes you shall assume, for every atom belonging to him as good belongs to you. The strong poet is overbearing, a bully, the kid in your 3rd grade class who acted out for the sole purpose of stealing attention from you and your genius. The strong poet refuses to concede that the poem lost out to the song a long time ago, in fact that the former was never ascendent over the latter; the poem has never been much more than the song's ponderous, inbred cousin. Of course, this distinction only holds so long as you believe lyric and lyrics name fundamentally different things. Whitman didn't."

And yes, that is going in my topics paper.

2006-05-16T01:18:00.000-04:00

To Mickles and Mencia, with love...

What follows is an excerpt from my topics paper especially dedicated to probably the only two people who read my blog besides Colleen. Enjoy!

I bought a bottle of Itoen Ooi Ocha for my lunch before leaving for Hamamatsu to attend their annual kite festival during the Golden Week holidays. On the bus to the beach where the giant kites would fight it out, I fidgeted with the strange day glow green bottle, that is until I noticed the following haiku written on the side.

大晦日今年も地味にそば食べる
omisoka kotoshi mo jimi ni soba taberu
on New Year’s Eve: this year too I’ll eat my noodles plain

だれが来て私の心をノックして
dare ga kite watashi no kokoro o nokku shite
someone’s coming but my heart does the knocking

今急に大きな海が見たくなった
ima kyuu ni ooki na umi ga mitaku natta
now all of a sudden I got the desire to see the open sea

these three poems appear on a half liter bottle. as one might expect the two liter bottle has more poems, though the exact number varies in my experience between seven and ten. the size of the bottle does not set an absolute limit but rather a somewhat flexible upper and lower bound. statistically speaking, then, the smaller bottle is a smaller text in terms of the number of verses.

there is no real consensus among classicists if the Catullan corpus as we have it constitutes a whole book in the sense of liber, that is one whole papyrus scroll. a great deal of research has been done by papyrologists such as Birk Oddink as to what the upper and lower bounds of a papyrus scroll text would be, but the results are neither definite nor terribly enlightening for our purposes. it is partially Catullus’ fault. he refers to his own work as a libellum, the use of which diminuitive has led some to express the opinion that the “polished off book” (libellum… expolitum) of the supposed dedicatory verse in fact only comprises poems 1-60 of our corpus or some combination of that and the other shorter verses, namely those in elegiac couplets. this opinion takes libellum to be literal, “a small book,” and is largely dependent upon a reading of Cat. 1 as an entirely sincere dedicatory verse.

Cornelius, to you: for you were accustomed
to think that my trifles were really something
since then, when you alone among Italians
dared to scribe every age in three volumes
learned, by Jove, and thoroughly wrought.

If We are to believe this dedication to be sincere, We also need to assume that Catullus values qualities like doctus and laboriosus. This Catullus, this seeeeerious Catullus, this member of the same fraternal orders as the “old, learned, respectable bald heads” reveres the voluminous product of extensive historical research and desperately yearns for its approval. This Catullus has something of an inferiority complex; this Catullus defers to power; this Catullus would write a “little book.”

diminuitives are tricky things; certainly We might take them literally. there’s no reason not to. but anyone with half a brain knows they have an adjacent sense as well, a usage that indicates a degree of one’s concern for the diminished object rather than mere size. I am fairly certain no one would mistake “you poor little thing” for “you small object of limited financial means.” what then, if libellum has little or nothing to do with the size of the liber? does this Catullus really think his trifles are trivial? would docta be a little more than dogmatic, and is “laborious” more than a mere cognate? Who is this Cornelius, anyway, and why would this Catullus be using his tomes for anything besides doorstops, table props, or paperweights? The only other memorable use of the word carta in our Catullan corpus refers to them as shat on (cacata).

2006-05-14T08:28:00.000-04:00

Three Different Things

I have been intermittently working on a new version of my topics paper, as the one I previously submitted was not exactly received with flowers and virgins. So I, being the me that I am, decided to go for something even weirder, because I don't take too kindly to criticism like "you need to explain this more." Some initial reactions to this new thing to which you shan't be privy have been along the lines of "you're all over the place."

A flash animation.

I went to an English department enkai on Friday night at a yakitori restaurant in Toyohashi. A couple of teachers I haven't seen since they left at the end of the last school year showed up, so I had a chance to chat. I was bald when I last saw one of them, Ozawa-sensei, and she commented on how much longer my hair is now (not much at all, really). She also remarked how she thought I looked better without hair; I do not agree. I asked her to explain why she thought so. Her explanation: "perhaps it is because you have a beautifully shaped head."

2006-05-11T11:37:00.001-04:00

The Arbiters of Cool

Whether we like to admit it or not, we do tend to judge each other on the most insignificant things: taste in clothes, in food, in music, in movies, in books, even in other people. I've always felt a little ashamed for liking the things I do, as if someone in my position were always supposed to utter things like "[i]'ll use Miles as an example, since you bring him up. Miles' stinker is that pile of shit known simply as 'Doo-bop.' And I think you see a similar problem with Ahmad (admittedly, i haven't listened to the Olympia concert album, so I don't know). Most of the album is painful to listen to, because Miles seems to be struggling against rather playing with the hiphop beats that underline each track. 'Duke Booty' is probably the only tolerable track, because Miles sheds his typically punctuated style in order to better simulate the 'flow' of MCs with his horn. So, it sounds like rap without words, which could be interesting if explored thoroughly." When anyone who knows me is aware I'm much more likely to say something like this.

So, a person of my refined character (cough, mumble mumble) would be expected to enjoy something of this caliber (also, interestingly, the inspiration for the photo of Shiina Ringo JD adored in places we're not allowed to talk about until the trial's over). I'm fairly certain even this wouldn't damage my hip rep too much. Though I have a feeling that by no means should I have any affinity for this, with the possible exception of a certain ironic attachment--ah, always the Iron E! The truth is Otsuka Ai, the very epitome of genki, reminds me that there is in fact a warm, fuzzy core to my cold black soul.

So I went to see The Da Vinci Code this morning (yes, this morning, 9am in fact) with Colleen, Kobayashi-sensei, and his son Koya. It was... well... in word... if I must... ok. I have not read the book, I have no intention of reading the book, and I found it rather plodding at times. Colleen assures me that a significant chunk of the book was cut out; even so, I thought a lot more could have been removed. One of things I always appreciated about the Lolita novel and movie is how Nabokov understood that it was okay for them to be different. Oops, there I go liking something I should.

I wonder if 嫌われ松子の一生 (Memories of Matsuko) is something I merely want to see or if it's something I'm supposed to want to see?

2006-05-11T11:37:00.000-04:00

Schooling and Being Schooled

Ok, let's begin with a quick poll, seeing as the vast majority of you reading this blog can pretty much instinctively tell what does and does not sound funny in English. Which of the following would you choose:

3D C.G. is now a necessary part of visual productions such as movies, games, and animation.
3D C.G. is now a necessary part of visual productions, such as movies, video games, and animations.

Post 254 is basically me being a dick to someone who had poorly translated the above phrase. Post 256 is another person "correcting" me. The BBS in question is 2ch (pronounced two-chan), a sort of tribute to old school internet protocols that refuse to die here. This thread is one of many in which people request a phrase in Japanese to be translated into English. I'm particularly fond of trolling these threads in the ENGLISH [sic] section of 2ch, because the Engrish you can encounter there is often of mind-boggling proportions. Back on topic: I tried to reason with 256, pointing out that 1) a comma is in fact not necessary 2) "video games" can be inferred from "games" and 3) animation is not a countable noun and thus cannot have a plural under normal grammatical conditions. Reason didn't win out, so I dropped the I'm-a-native-speaker-you're-not card and things quickly settled down.

Of course, peculiar English stemming from literal translations is not specific to the Japanese. Off the top of my head I can think of a poorly versed Frenchy spouting something along the lines of "for to do" or the slightly less awkward "I call myself." After typing it, I realize the latter of those two is more obviously hypothetical.

I took particular umbrage at 256's last retort. He basically said that he looked through an online dictionary thoroughly and determined that "animations" is the best translation, as if Virginia Woolf's "nothing has happened until it has been recorded" is transformed into "all that has been recorded is all the truth there is." (something of a riposte to a specter of JD, who, I'm certain, is looming over me at the moment) We all know books are never wrong.

I made one of my semi-regular visits to Nagoya University to return some books and check out more. It turns out one was a wee bit late, so the library staff decided to punish me. I thought, "it's just a book; what can they do?" Well, they can suspend my borrowing privileges for 2 weeks. I guess I'll be working on those materials for the Shizuoka Translation Competition for the next couple of weeks.

I made my way back to Sakae after returning all the books to the shelves myself, bought a cup of coffee and a scone, and popped a squat in Central Park to wait for Colleen. A homeless man was yelling at a pair of black cats whom I don't know whether they were fighting or gettin' it on in a frisky catty sort of way.

Another homeless man, zombie-like, collapses in front of me as I look on the scene before me. He rolls over, looks up at me and my cup of coffee, and says "gimme" (ちょうだい). After a little resistance and the realization that I'm not a complete asshole (or maybe the realization that the coffee was now lukewarm), I handed it over to him. I fully expected him to teeter off and drink my cooling coffee somewhere out of sight. Instead, he tells me this elaborate story how his mother left the country suddenly to marry an American and live with him in the states. He stayed in Japan and without a family to support him had a rough time in his teens finding direction or even a simple job. He then launched into how he doesn't blame the gaijin-san (which, I suppose, was for my benefit), because the real problem is that Japanese people don't give a shit about anyone but themselves (this is, of course, not a literal translation, but I want to convey how harsh his language was). Only then did he teeter off as expected.

Earlier, on the train from Nagoya U., I had been reading a weekly news magazine that had an obscene number of advertisements for foreign aid NGOs. As I walked from Sakae to Fushimi, I thought about how I had casually passed them over at the time. I tried to recall just how many there were.

2006-05-07T03:01:00.000-04:00

Wishing you were here...

Kisses.

2006-05-02T11:20:00.000-04:00

May Day Basketcase

So, brave readers, tommorrow is the first day of golden week, so I'm gonna be off getting plastered somewhere and what not. I'll be back to share the further adventures of GAIJINMAN!!!!!! in about a week.

I first saw Diane Kichijitsu perform last July while Sylwia was here, shortly before returning for my entirely unnecessary stay in Ann Arbor. English rakugo (comedic storytelling) is not exactly a new thing, but it is odd that a Liverpudlian would take it up and become so popular. Rakugo for it's (weak) humor mostly relies on bad puns and addressing people improperly with honorific forms. Diane is no exception but in fact beats you over the head with the rule.

Her new lastname, 吉日, literally means "lucky day," which is a multilingual pun on her first name, which in katakana becomes homophonous with the word 大安, an annotation used on Japanese calendars to mark an auspicious day. This is at the heart of her schtick. Her performances are usually half English, half Japanese, and almost always involve some foreigner having difficulties navigating Japanese society. So, in the English act, a Brit arrives at Kansai International and is shown around by a Japanese friend. The Brit wants to learn a few Japanese words but has trouble making out the pronunciation. Example, if someone thanks you, it's proper to respond "dou itashimashite" which the Japanese friend turns into "don't touch my moustache" for the sake of our hapless Brit.

Similarly, American pilots were taught to yell "mayday mayday mayday" if they were ever to bail out over that great chunk of rock we call Europe (because apparently everyone speaks French?). Apparently this is supposed to be an imperative derived from the verb m'aider. Though from what I know m'aidez wouldn't be grammatically correct. So basically, Americans are so dumb that we have to learn a bastardized method of pronouncing bastardized French. Hurray for US!

However, alternatively, moreover, in opposition to the previous statement, though, I'd like to add that even rote observation of the rules can be taken too far.

N.B. As it turns out the Wikipedia article on katakana was incorrect in several fundamental ways, so I changed all of the most glaring errors. Anymore and I would have had to rewrite the whole damn thing. Stupid internet.

2006-04-26T02:17:00.000-04:00

Shiina Ringo's Magic Powers

The punk scene in Japan is somewhat touch and go. Occasionally, you see a somewhat original act come along but most of it is just a bad Green Day rip off or costume rock. So, when Shiina Ringo put together a new band, The Tokyo Incidents (東京事変), I was somewhat hopeful for the future of Jpop. I've given a thorough listen to both albums they've put out in the past couple of years, and with the exception of Shiina's recent tendency to sing through a megaphone, both albums are entirely solid productions.

But--there's always a butt with me--Shiina at some point in her musical education managed to acquire the most amazing talent: the ability to take any given song, even those that should by all rights rock the house, and in performance make it seem downright boring. I thought possibly this was a feature of the "artsy-fartsy" music videos directors feel the need to churn out these days, but the same seems to be true of her live performances as well. At times, it looks like she'd much rather pop a squat on the monitor and crack open any one of the numerous disgusting canned coffees you can buy here.

Of course, this is neither typical of Japanese punk nor of a particular feminine performance trope. The Pillows easily dispell the former and Yoshida Miwa (of the band Dreams Come True) the latter. Though, admittedly, she (Yoshida) is the only Japanese woman I've ever seen who can work the pimp hat. I go so far as to mention this, because one of the aforementioned mantics has proclaimed Shiina Ringo the messiah who will save Jpop from it's uglier tendencies to imitate the west. I am, in fact, starting to get sick of the occasional sweaty who picks up a copy of something by Zizek and let's it "blow his mind" or something like that.

I have in the past described Shiina's music as mesmerizing; perhaps stupifying was the correct participle.

2006-04-19T06:17:00.000-04:00

A Little Not-music

So, challenged by our savage to produce yet another work of genius, I have translated another poem by Cao Cao, if only to prove that I can do it. Admittedly, after studying it some, I like it more than the tortoise poem--which, I don't really like all that much. The original can be found in Liansu's comment on my previous post, so I won't bother reproducing it here.

I must say, I found translating this a bit taxing, and not merely because Classical Chinese is not one of my better languages. It has certain musical features that I would love to reproduce but invariably can't. The repetitive adjectives in certain lines (e.g. "bright so bright the moon") are meant approximate the repeated syllables in Chinese, but I just can't manage the internal rhyme.

So, thinking about what Liansu said about the kind of language used, I tried translating it into an affected Elizabethan English. The result was monstrous, because Classical Chinese tends toward the spare and direct where The Queene's Anglishe is ornate and oblique. So, instead I decided to go back to the alliterative style common in Old English, even reproducing the caesura that I felt roughly approximated the pause in the Chinese lines. I'm not certain I succeeded to any significant degree--I'm certain the Savage Sinologist will let us know--but if nothing else the lines "from far and wide / we gather together / to rest and rehearse / the rites of our friendship" are some of the best I've ever produced.

N.B. I apologize for the picture of the text; I couldn't for the life of me get the html to do what I wanted it to.

2006-04-17T02:48:00.003-04:00

Go update your blog already (cept Mickles).

2006-04-17T02:48:00.000-04:00

Assholes Make the Best Poets

This post is at least partially dedicated to our resident 中国野蛮人, Liansu, who recently badgered me into updating my blog. I'd also like to note that Colleen has a new "thinking blog," which, though still in it's infancy, promises great things. The link to the right has been updated to direct you there.

So, like many of my filthy generation, I was first introduced to the intracies of Chinese history via that now classic strategy game for the NES, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was notorious amongst gamers of the era for being absofuckinglutely hard and damn near impossible to beat without about a gabillion hours of gameplay. The series--yes, series--is now in it's tenth incarnation. The graphics are better, but it's till basically the same. All that the PS2 has done for the title is to make micromanagement even more intricate.

Your only real hope of beating the game was to choose Cao Cao (for those of you about to make moo jokes, it's pronounced tsao-tsao) as your starting character. Only much later did I realize that it's because he is the one who historically was in the position of greatest strength. The novel of the same name mostly maligns the man as cruel and ruthless (which he probably was) and fails to mention that he was mostly responsible for bringing about reunification after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty. However, he did not live to see this happen.

Our chinoise savage did her best to convince me this morning that Cao Cao was, in fact, a gifted poet. I was inclined to disagree partially out of my generally contradictory nature and also partially because the only poem of his I've read is about a tortoise. This multi-lingual pugilism is the basic format of our conversations (much like mine and Mike's, though with different languages), a kind of playful jibbing that has upset more than one liberal minded professor of a prestigious Midwestern university.

Two universal truths came out of our conversation this morning: one directly and one indirectly. First, all assholes live long, healthy lives. Furthermore, this does not necessarily mean all people who live long lives are assholes. Second, for some inexplicable reason, the truly talented lyric poets tend to be righteous pricks. Cases in point: Ezra Pound, Yosano Akiko, Catullus, Goethe, Walt Whitman, etc. I'm sure the list could go on ad infinitum. It remains to be seen, though, whether all assholes have the potential to be good poets.

神龟虽寿，猷有竟时。
the blessed tortoise lives long but has only his allotted time.
腾蛇乘雾，终为土灰。
the winged serpent rides the mists but finds his end in ashes and earth.
老骥伏枥，志在千里；
the old warhorse submits to the stable but longs to run a thousand miles.
烈士暮年，壮心不已。
the noble warrior getting on in years never gives up the fight.
盈缩之期，不但在天；
his life, full or cut short, does not depend on Heaven;
养怡之福，可得永年。
he who is fit and carefree can live countless years.
幸甚至哉！歌以咏志。
with a joyous heart, I long to sing this song.

No doubt Liansu will be itching to fix all the egregious mistakes I made in translating that, but consider it my penance for insulting her tastes earlier.

I leave you with an obligatory picture of cherry blossoms, if only because it's spring.

2006-04-14T11:24:00.000-04:00

The Fifth Humor

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Jacques Derrida.

Jacque Derrida who?

Precisely.

2006-04-10T21:54:00.000-04:00

Audience Participation

Spring in Dai-Nippon brings with it the usual schedule of getting out after holing yourself up in a drafty apartment watching the bitterly cold rain rappel down the concrete sides. The cherry blossoms bloom, and most see fit to honor this harbinger of spring by plunking a little plastic mat down somewhere and getting piss drunk on it. Remember to take off your shoes before entering.

Colleen and I, though--always ones to buck the system--decided to take in a bit of light entertainment at the Misonoza in Nagoya. Seats were offerred at a reduced price (though the added price of the nosebleeds may have covered the difference) to we foreign folk, and as an added bonus they threw in a little lecture beforehand to acculturate our barbaric tastes to the finer points of kabuki. It wasn't so much a lecture as a comedic duo comprising a nasally "lecturer" and his consistently interloping translator.

Our Japanese Laurel and Hardy went to great pains to be certain that we would pay particular attention to the culmination of the evening's final performance. After the curtain closes, the character Benkei was to perform a particular flourish as he exited on the hanamichi. I remember it leaving me with the impression of being a simplified form of hopscotch. Shit, I did that in grade school!

Kabuki seems to be mostly about posing, after all the modern verb to which it is related, kabuku, means "to strut" or "to show off." Everytime one of the actors would pose, geezers in the audience--kabuki otaku, if you will--would yell out the player's name in almost ebullient glee.

That was Saturday.

Sunday, our cravings for music having not been satisfied by the twanging of shamisen and shrieking of bamboo flutes, we headed to Sakae for a Pillows concert. It was the sweatiest I've been in a long time; even today my right ear is still a little numb from how fucking loud it was in there. Normally these things would piss me off, had the concert not been so absolutely amazing. The floor shook from the beating it was receiving and I think it was the guitar solos that were making my balls vibrate. I found myself yelling out Yamanaka's name with ebullient glee as he climbed on top of the monitors and leaned out over the audience. Can you blame me? The man is a golden god!

Later, Yamanaka mused to himself as the band prepared for a second encore, "Nagoya is a mysterious place."

Well, only in spring.

2006-04-06T01:05:00.000-04:00

25 Days in a Cage

If I had to pick one critic (that overgeneralized word for "smart" people who write books) I admire more than any other, it would have to Frederic Jameson, not becuase I actually believe his Marxist claptrap but because I really have to admire someone who can be a Marxist and simultaneously filthy stinking rich. I heard somewhere, can't remember where, that all American Marxists are really capitalists, because, ultimately, all Americans are capitalists, closet or otherwise. Ah, yet another gross overgeneralization...

If I had to pick one critic (here meaning someone who actually criticizes written works, social systems, and so forth) whose influence I grapple with most, it would be Ezra Pound. I've always admired people who, despite being fundamentally flawed, manage to produce pure genius. Also, being something of a polymath myself (according to Mickles), I see something of the old, middle, and young Ezra in myself. The major difference is I try to shut up about the things that could quite easily land me in hot water.

I resent being something of a mantic. In this half the world (i.e. Asia, the new Orient), I spend most of my time conversing with non-Western types explaining "our culture" to them in terms they claim to understand. The same, of course, is true back in the Fatherland. Japanese, Chinese, whatever culture is a big fucking mystery to the paleface (apparently), so we produce a class of mantics whose jobs it is to commune with the natives and interpret their signs for the powers that be. "Why are Japanese men so concerned with saving face in public?" Hmm, good question, because obviously Americans have no need of spin doctors or PR firms.

And we punish these mantics when they're wrong. I should revise that statement: we punish these mantics when we perceive that they are wrong.

All of you already know that you learn infinitely more about people when you live among them. The first and truly valuable thing you learn is despite superficial peculiarities, they're not different.

Ezra Pound went apeshit trying to make sense of the world as a whole. When the Americans found him in Italy they locked him up in an outdoor cage for the better part of a month. When he was finally released from the mental institution where he spent a good deal of his remaining years, he returned to that Italian city which I still claim to this day stinks of cigarettes and garbage, obviously something a sane man would not do.

2006-03-30T10:09:00.000-05:00

The Meaning of Candy

Over the past week I've spent a lot of time making a real story out of "Porcelain." I refuse to post it, though, as I realize that the character I later write of quite loathingly is basically my ideal vision of myself. Freaky!!!

"I'd like a Kit Kat." Seems like a rather simple statement doesn't it? Apparently, it demands a response: "what flavor Kit Kat do you want?" "What do you mean, 'what flavor?' Get me a fucking Kit Kat!" But it's not that simple. You have your wine Kit Kat, maccha (powdered green tea) Kit Kat, passion fruit Kit Kat, your cherry (the flower not the fruit) Kit Kat, your white chocolate Kit Kat, your dulce du leche Kit Kat, etc. and so forth. I even bought a Kit Kat recently that came with the new Kimura Kaela single.

So, the future of numerous students has been decided, namely whether they will continue to run the gauntlet of endless studying for entrance exams or drop out and do something marginally useful. I saw a student going into an exam with a pair of Kit Kats, and I, being hungry and a bit greedy, ask him if I can have one. His reply, "absolutely not!" It's difficult to describe how rude abruptness is in Japanese, so you're just going to have to believe me that it is. But you see, he dare not give away his precious Kit Kat at such an important time.

Why?

A linguistic oddity: two candy bars are Kit Kats and one is a Kit Kat. Transliterate the former into Japanese, and you get "kitto katsu," which interestingly enough is homophonous with the phrase that means "I'll definitely succeed." However, take away that precious English s and transliterate again. What do you get? "Kitto Katto," which would be "definitely cut." If he were to give away one of his Kit Kats, he'd literally be tempting fate. Considering how apoplectic students get about exams in this country, I can see why he reacted the way he did.

The Kit Kat, then, is no longer food; it is now a kind of totem or charm, like the little badges you can buy at shrines to promote success in business, fertility, or good health. To eat the candy would destroy its lingui-mystical power. All of this is my long winded way of explaining why I think they taste like crap.

2006-03-23T10:59:00.000-05:00

ladles

dipping and tipping - redipping and tipping
so concave and dipping and tipping
stopping - slopping - mopping

dropping - plopping, wiping and griping
sniping, wiping and griping, moping
groping - grasping - gasping

fighting and frightening - setting, regretting
waiting and baiting, chilling, anticipating
waiting - baiting - hating

serving every man in turn with reverence,
reserving sacrilegious thoughts for sacred places
deserving of little but scorn

hoping and probing, considering eloping
doping, duping and being duped, helping
belting - dying - melting

belting - flying - melting

belting - trying - melting

2006-03-23T00:03:00.000-05:00

Barring Certain Philosophical Discourses

I am, perhaps, somewhat well known for my near complete inability to sleep in anything approaching regularity. More often than not this tossing is accompanied but the great vanilla chocolate swirl that is my thoughts: thoughts on anything including the highest temperature at which one can become hypothermic, what the constituent minerals of lapis lazuli are, how to flip a pancake without all the crap spraying all over the place, etc.

For the most part I observe what I have come to refer to as the 20% rule, that is only 20% of the swirl ever makes its way to some kind of vocalic expression. The remaining 80%, then, breeds with itself and produces some of what will become 20% and some which by it's very wackiness will demonstrate that certain soon-to-be-former residents of the 80% are now timid enough to stop out for the occasional walk. The 80% is where most of my "hard thinking" takes place and is more than partially responsible for my opinions occasionally coming out of left field.

Topic: Desire-Will-Control-Power

I like to come up with sequences, sometimes causal sequences that help me define for myself what exactly it is I mean when I say something is something else. Most of my confusion results from people (including myself) using a word in a way I have never heard before, so with each new datum, I like to refine my sequences so as better to accommodate what practical usages come my way. An example:

Moving from inside to outside (alt. from self to other): desire is the emotional/rational reflection of a want or need "I want to punch Mike in the balls." Will is the first projection of desire. Desire generates a certain degree of pressure in the self (most will note I'm stealing this from Nietzsche) that initially finds it's valve in will "I get up the nerve to punch Mike in the balls." This pressure is akin to entropy, being here the greater tendency of potential energy to become kinetic energy. If desire continues to build pressure without any sort of projection, it can find a certain conversion (though not relief) in the form of frustration in much the same way chemical waste from metabolism builds up as lactic acid if it isn't flushed out. Will can find a physical manifestation in the form of control. Control uses the energy generated by will from desire in order to act. Once again frustration provides an alternative should the will not get used up "I clench my fist and hurl it toward Mike's balls." Control over something is power. When control finds its object, when control connects with an other, it becomes power "I punch Mike in the balls." I think this is why knowledge is a kind of power. Knowledge is control over arbitrary bits of information, namely in the ability to accept or reject (I'm not sure whether I'm agreeing or disagreeing with Foucault her; that whole exchange metaphor usually makes my eyes permanently roll in their sockets). If you want to you could even stick threat in there: the lingering presence of power "Mike is wary of me punching him in the balls again."

So there you have it, a complete thought of mine arranged in a semi-comprehensible format. Bon Apetit!

N.B. The examples are merely chosen for levity.

2006-03-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

How other people see me:

How I see myself:

Bonus points if you can identify who the first photo is actually of!