closing time

YAMAMOTO Tarô, 2004

Image from http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~nipponga/works/04/04.html

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this site. I opened it up when I started writing my “tenure” book. Which is now–cross your fingers–finished, and on fairly stable legs in the sea of the publishing process. This winter, I turned attention full-tilt to my book, and to day-job type writing, and put this blog on ice. I’m happily shocked, though, to see that there has been a lot of traffic lately, especially to the Captain Beefheart and the “parakeet of justice” posts.

Besides finishing the book, the parallel world that spun off this site, one further reason for shutting down–killing off this character, so to speak–is that I moved, so the small postage stamp of Atwater I used to write about is no longer my home. I moved just across the ‘5, to Silver Lake, in the hills, plausibly close to public transportation, and near cafés that stay open late at night–just like ‘real’ cities. !.

In any case, I”m re-starting a new blog, called Sengo, which I will post details on soon. Those of you who speak Japanese or know me from my day job know that this word means postwar (戦後) as well as, in the spoken vernacular, a thousand words (千語). I, along with some collaborators, will be posting 1000-word essays and translations–adorned by a single picture, worth 1000 words, naturally–mostly on Japanese pop culture, or things that connect current events in Japanese pop culture to more broad/deep/blurred swaths of history. I wanted to do something different than writing for purely scholarly audiences, and provide an alternative to the limited playbook of pieces from big news outlets on wacky/kooky Japan. This image is an example of such a group of 1000 words, yet to be written…

So, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

her version of the sherwood forest

In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on the shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

From Sherman Alexie, “The Search Engine,” p. 5, in Ten Little Indians.

There are nine stories in the book. “Nine is a much funnier number than eleven.” True enough. Eleven is dogmatically prime and kinda tries too hard, whereas nine is two primes, like his character Jackson squared, someone also down with the idea of ceremony (a word that appears frequently in characters’ internal monologues).

Also great: more than one absurdist love story about basketball.

like “befriending a porcupine”–Trout Mask Replica, 1969

Another beauty from the 33 1/3 people. I was at Skylight, looking over the wares, and got to talking to the other guy doing the same thing. He recommended this one.

It’s a bit different than many of the series. It does start with the “conversion narrative” beginning–how the world was forever made different, and given a direction, even a misguided one, by the acquaintance with the particular record. Writer Kevin Courrier recounts how the album was given to him by a speed dealer, earlier maimed by a train (it gets better in his version, trust me). Rather than meditating on the difference between trapped/stuck/mobile that such an opening sets up, and going into grotesquerie and irony, he turns to an exploration of the metaphorics of “fish”–as in Don Van Vliet’s persona, the trout–and “pond,” as a broad concept for the larger world and the world-lets within it.

The chapters follow how Van Vliet fashioned himself as a weird fish, a small fish, in the smallish pond of So-cal suburbia, “jumped” out of the pond, met and tangled and worked and collaborated with Zappa, and how in the end “everybody drinks from the same pond.” It’s not the most eco-friendly of ponds, but, hey.

Courrier succeeds in grounding Van Vliet in American/primitive/surrealist/blues counter-circles, at the same time he really conveys how the Trout Mask Replica album was just really out there. It was simply not devoted to being a “tissue sample” of its day and age, but is actually “an art album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener, whether the listener wanted to retreat or not.”

Lester Bangs got at the extroverted anti-social-ness of Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby pretty well. Typical of Bangs’ style writ large, his review is full of generative words, which in this case fit the affirmative desperation of DVV’s particular brand of freakiness. The Courrier book got to me in a different way than Bangs’ headlong apreciation, because it effectively dramatized how yo-yo’ing a feel it is to swim in DVV’s world. One minute you’re immersed, the next, because of some over-the-top control freak move, like twenty sleigh bells full of syncopation, you’re cast out by over-saturation. True story from TMR rehearsal history: you’re living in a communal house in the San Fernando Valley where your food is rationed, and you find yourself crawling into the kitchen under cover of darkness, to filch yourself a little something to eat: pancake syrup squeezed from a bottle into a mug, which you drink, sip by syrupy sip.

Indeed, the album is, as Courrier says, like “trying to befriend a porcupine.” Cf DVV’s description of a watch: “you see, a lot of people put this little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing: keeping time.” You see, such circles are for squares: in the DVV universe, you can sneak into the rhythms of time, outrun it, get people lost in it, but you can’t, literally, keep it.

I have this album on LP. While I find it a bit too polarising to say “Zappa was shrewd. Beefheart was a visionary,” I see why Courrier included this 1971 breakdown as a representative point of view. There is no doubt that a song about a girl who sits on a burning waffle iron may indeed have a hard time finding mainstream success. A bit of Crumb-style fear of cooties streams through the blues moans, but then again, 1969 was a mixed-up year.

The social context cross-over that I actually found most jarring and pinpointed that yo-yo effect, to illustrate the “cast out of the pond” feel of the record, was the song “Pachuco Cadaver.” I know the 60’s had an affection for metaphor. In general, we’re supposed to read the maximalist hostility as a kind of devotion, at least in the case of the girl/big-mama songs. She’s glam and can kick his ass, so she has to be a bit overwheming, preferably in a way that has a delicious payoff (as do most of the romances in DVV’s songs).

But this one seemed a bit too referential, for someone growing up in Southern California as DVV did. Courrier sees the title as misleading, that it is actually a “surreal love letter” to “the Zoot Suit era of the 40’s and 50’s.” (I think he means the WW2 era, especially between Pearl Harbor and the summer of 1943, but he is writing from Toronto, and might not have the micro-view of So-cal histories.) It is indeed truly a joyful song, like happy Swordfishtrombones. But in my listen, despite the loopy imagery and wild-westy story-telling voice that strive for intimate folksiness, the “pachuco” figure is purely decorative, and very much sidelined.

I get this impression because while the singer gets the girl, the other guys are left out: “pachucos got the blues.” Turning to the lyrics, in the form of the song, I heard what Courrier hears as tribute more as triumph.  The singer (DVV) casts the patchwork surrealist girl as a hybrid of people and objects (she is 99, she wears a bolero, and “She looks like an old squaw indian,” all at the same time). She is an inaccessible figure, even if she is tempting in her gaudy display of experience (“She wears her past like uh present”). And what she wears is a predatory belt-notching past that has not been easy on soldiers (“Got her wheel out of uh B-29 Bomber”). But in the end she goes, if in fantasy, with the folksy but ultimately white singer.

Drives uh cartune around
Broma’ seltzer blue umbrella keeps her up off the ground
Round red sombreros wrap ‘er high tap horsey shoes
When she unfolds her umbrella pachucos got the blues
Her lovin’ makes me so happy
If I smiled I’d crack m’ chin

Not quite the moral panic that was called up in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, when, as Luis Alvarez writes, “As Chicano/s historians have demonstrated, hundreds, if not thousands, of young Mexican American men were violently attacked by white servicemen” (155). I know we’re not supposed to take loopy stream-of-consciousness surrealism at face value, but still, the song does stage a competition between the singer and the “Pachuco cadaver” left in the dust, a kind of drama of the (white-but-curious?) woman let loose to drive her own “cartune” during wartime, whose dalliances are now over, when the singer shows up.

I recently read Ken Gonzalez-Day’s history and photographic history  Lynching in the West, a history of unofficial justice between 1850 and 1935. Long story short, frontier justice was multi-cultural in its reach, and more executions and vigilante killings of Mexican Americans were conducted than of any other ethnic group. (The book contains some of Gonzalez-Day’s own photographs, a series he did of the “hang trees” where lynchings took place. It is a compelling outline of an under-known map of the city of LA and larger parts Californian/western.) So while I know “Pachuco cavader” is one of DVV’s “colorful” psychedelic throwaways, it bugged me, given the history.

Courrier does a great job of micro-mining the journalism and interviews for phrases such as this. The understatement and “blank space” he finds in descriptions of DVV the maximalist, who left room for virtually no “negative space.”  As a book that set its own terms, a system of metaphorics that goes way beyond the “conversion”/production/track-by-track structure of many of the books, I found it quite awesome.

nobel, schmobel, noberu, ノベル

Photo from the Guardian

I was a bit taken aback when I heard and read all the spluttering about how no Americans got within even shouting distance of the Nobel Prize for literature this year. The Los Angeles Times critic, David Ulin, took an extremely offended stance, and panned the winner, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, as an “irregular” resident of Albuquerque, and “very much a writer of the moment.” It is hard to say who looks sillier, in all this mess. The gate-keepers of high literature, as characterized in the piece:

Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, called American literary culture “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” — comments widely seen in the United States as evidence of the insularity of the Nobel itself and proof that American writers would be shut out again.

or the affronted shock troops on the literary pages themselves. I would also note that the LA Times actually deleted its own book review section (a decision which cannot have made many people there happy, especially when one of the sections that replaced it, the glossy “advertorial” LA Times Magazine, has proven to be as dull as dishwater), so it has little to stand on as a defender against philistinism. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this:

It’s hard to say where Le Clezio fits into all this; I’ve never read his books. In fact, until Thursday morning, I’d never heard of him — and I’m not alone.

Ulin casts le Clézio as trendy and kind of boffo, as apparently living overseas and learning several languages can only be seen as trendy fiddle-faddle. But he does not bother to pick up his mouse and click on a library catalog (I recommend Worldcat.org, personally). Nor does he pick up the phone and call any of the number of French readers around town who might be able to loan him a copy of one of the best-known and -regarded writers in France, a country where people, um, actually read books. Le Clézio  is often taught in college-level French classes, as I was informed by a highly erudite and well-read scholar of French lit, to whom I often sit next on the bus. If he is on the radar of the LAPL, and any moderately alert nineteen-year-old in a foreign language class, he should be on the radar of a book critic of a flagship newspaper. If he is not, a simple run to the library can do the trick. Or Google can help, at the very least. A major newspaper should simply not have a headline announcing the selection of a Nobel prize winner titled “Le Clézio–Who’s He?” It’s indeed possible that the committee should re-think the kind of works it tends to pick. But complaining about the provinciality of the prize structure without actually reading the winning novelist’s work is untenable. It actually reinforces the impression of US provinciality.

I turned to my lazy-taxpayer’s weapon of choice, the LAPL catalog, and found–lo, fifty-two books! One for every single week in the year! In Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and even a few rogue volumes in English. Quick, if you move fast, you can still snap up the English translation of Oritsha, a semi-autobiographical novel about living in Nigeria as a child, while it is still on the shelf.

All of this is to say that literary critics seem to be helping with the nails in the coffin of literary journalism, these days, tapping the lid a little more firmly shut with their own closed minds. I can’t help but wonder about the reasons for such trivializing descriptions as the NY Times faint-praise description of le Clézio as “a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers” (italics mine).

The resentment seems to derive from the dreary out-dated Henry James complex about European-ness many US critics seem to maintain. The defensive attitude seems to be about defending the US candidates’ presumed social engagement from charges that it does not exist. To me, the difference is clear, given the historical tendencies of the Nobel committees to privilege the modernist engagé writer. Le Clézio’s books take place, in large part, in developing countries–Mexico ranks high, in terms of mise-en-scène, as well as Africa and parts of Latin America. Encounters with otherness are part and parcel of the stories, both colonial and geographic/linguistic others.

In contrast, neither Philip Roth nor John Updike seems high on the list of non-narcissistic engagé authors. I do love Roth, or late Roth anyway. And Updike provides a window into certain east coast psycho-pathologies of the suburban era, with doleful yet somehow self-congratulatory insights in highly stylized prose whose descriptions of quiet desperation I have learned a lot from. He can also be wickedly funny. But neither is especially social. I mean, The Terrorist was downright embarrassing. Rabbit, Really? I also really like Joyce Carol Oates, especially her non-fiction writing about boxing and the meanness of girl culture, which preceded the current buzz by, oh, twenty years. Her short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is on line here. It is breathtaking. It is not, however, gnarly modernism, of the sort favored by the prize committee.

All of the above is why I was thrilled today to learn something that killed two bad literary journalism birds with one stone. (Sorry about that sentence…) This announcement appeared on the 33 1/3 series blog a couple weeks ago:

Yes, it is the first Japanese translation of one of the 33 1/3 series, Jim Fusilli’s chapbook on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. That might seem to be quite a mind-meld, but given the many varieties of electro that ambiate in Japanese pop, it makes a good deal of sense.

The kicker is that the translator is probably Japan’s next big hope for the Nobel, Murakami Haruki. Now that is a new paradigm. Not the inward gnarly modernism of a Nabakov or Roth. Not the tragic “weighing in” of many Nobel writers, who seem more valued as pundits than stylists or engaged intellectuals. And proof that you can write serious fiction–like about death camps and subway terrorism–and have a sense of experiment and fancy. I am not sure the Nobel, founded by a dynamite magnate, will ever be ready to swerve from the tenets of modernist writing it seems to prize so dearly, and embrace a postmodern oeuvre. But this is truly refreshing, to see a seriously engaged writer also be seriously at play.

the melancholy of the tennis boy–more facts only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

Continuing with last week’s Murakami Ryû obsession, I came across something you don’t see often enough with US authors–cocktails named after their works! Something to strive for with the next great American novel. The conceit here is that Murakami’s late night TV blab-show, “Ryû’s Bar,” generated the drinks. Above, we have the Almost Transparent Blue.

Fair enough, very drinky sounding. Let’s see what’s in it: 15 ml eau de vie de framboise, 1 t of green mint, 60 ml of champagne. Seems a bit classy for all those orgy scenes, but maybe Ryû is just a cooler customer than I, and lord knows blue is not a naturally-occurring food color. (Here I’m not getting bent out of shape about orgies, but referring to the clichéd, un-humanish style of Murakami’s prose with the ‘unnatural label. And let’s not even ask about the draft version of this drink, shall we, as I mentioned here.)

What’s next? Well, cutting to the chase, a gin drink, the “melancholy of the Tennis Boy.” I guess the tennis boy is an old-school rummy. Also, this is the cougar drink of choice, say the jodhpurs below, when shaken, not stirred. Why not help him out by setting him up with some drinky stripes. His other ingredients include 1 t of green mint (liqueur, I am beginning to surmise), 10 ml of Pernod, 60 ml of soda.

And lastly–skipping, sadly over such drinky marvels as the “69″ and the “War on the Other Side of the Ocean,” we will truly know when we have bought the fascist farm when we all drink three squares of this, the “Love and Illusion in a Time of Fascism.” Mind you, this is a two-volume novel about survivalist high tech operators in the Arctic Circle in the time of millennial hunter and gatherers, that reads like the dry parts of the Economist. No psychology whatsoevah.

In case you are wondering, after the apocalypse, we will be drinking single malt Laphroaig Scotch and dark beer combos, 30 and 45 ml, respectively.

facts that only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

The train-wrecky prose of Murakami Ryû is known for many things. Murakami published a novel, called Almost Transparent Blue… (『限りなく、透明に近いブルー』）in 1976, and won the big-ticket lit prize of the time, the Akutagawa prize. Critics rumbled, in part for thematic reasons, because they objected to the sex-drugs-rock’n'-roll description of a bunch of decadent youth living in a group house near a US Army base. A more interesting critique was launched by neo-con critic Etô Jun. Soon after, he quit writing reviews after 20 years, in large part because of the fatal drift he felt subculture narrative was succumbing to.

Etô’s really interesting work had to do with Occupation censorship policies, and how the linguistic spaces of postwar Japan continued to harbor Occupants well after the official end of the Occupation in 1952. Murakami was one of his chief antagonists because he found that Murakami did not “express” anything new, merely reflected the “realities” of base culture, and forms of dependency invested in it . This impression was fortified by Murakami’s own camera-style, or as I like to think, cliché-style, realism.

Here is the opening passage:

It wasn’t the sound of an airplane. The buzz was somewhere behind my ear. Smaller than a fly, it circled for a moment before my eyes, then disappeared into a dark corner of the room.

On the round white tabletop reflecting the ceiling light was an ashtray made of glass. A long, thin, lipstick-smeared cigarette smoldered in it. Near the edge of the table stood a pear-shaped wine-bottle, with a picture on its label of a blonde woman, her mouth full of grapes from the bunch she held in her hand. Red light from the ceiling trembled on the surface of the wine in a glass. The ends of the table legs disappeared into the thick pile of the rug. Opposite me was a large dressing table. The back of the woman sitting at it was moist with sweat. She stretched out her leg and rolled off a black stocking.

Despite the succulent marbling of the “blonde woman’s” mouthful of grapes, this image remains in the realm of the neo-pinup, certainly an Occupation leftover. (Parenthetically, I have always liked André Bazin’s essay ‘The Entomology of a Pinup Girl’ as a good breakdown of this genre of image.) The book is most “controversial” in a thematic sense because of the orgy scenes, and because most of the orgy scenes feature Japanese women, African American men, and the narrator, who looks on, capturing the events in the cliché’d narrative fashion I think you can see above. It captures, like a camera shutter in short intervals of time. The organization of the scene is spatial, rather than narrative, meaning an interpretive thread based on an internal, psychologically linked set of associations, one that would give insight into a volumetric space of character psychology.

What I think interesting here is two things, in terms of how image and character work. Etô’s critique of literary dependency is definitely at play. The characters seem to reproduce all sorts of idealized base-based ideas of transgression. A Japanese critic who had his first life as an Americanist, Karatani Kôjin, called the work a ‘Basically base novel, based mainly on the base.” It is a decadent novel, with a saccharine ending, in the form of a frame ending, a nostalgic letter to the women depicted above rolling off a black stocking (in summertime, Southern Japan, mind you). It is also interesting because of the headless nature of character.

The other 2 novelists who are big at the time (putting aside all those even who are merely compelling or interesting and not big) are preoccupied with psychological space–the kind of 3-D space that exists between your ears. Murakami Haruki is all about ears. His heads open up into volumetric universes whose spaces are explored through genre, and which may co-exist simultaneously without cancelling each other out, as in a surrealist space. His characters go into wells and forests to find themselves.

Nakagami Kenji, on the other hand, features a classical acephalic character as his main protagonist. “Acephalic” in the sense that engaged existentialist critics, for one, loathed as hopelessly trivial, a position also taken up by proletarian and other far-flung movement-based critics. Akiyuki is a construction worker who digs and digs for thousands of pages, yet never builds anything–not even a chicken coop, or a shed. Not anything. His character always delivers completed thoughts, that are never incomplete, and never in-process, in the nature of Murakami’s. Many of which are occupied by his father, whose eyes he can feel, and which he wants to “burn out of their sockets” in The Cape, and elsewhere.

The “ready-made” nature of thought here has an attachment to the patriclan that is hard to shake. Its dependency and Occupation is oedipal. You can’t tell here, but the father is a mad imposter, a charismatic and dissolute figure who has made up his own from-ruination creation story, in the ashes of the war. He is a Thomas Sutpen figure, with all the attendant anxieties of how his offscreen past will bring down the monument he is trying to build, a vast land empire. You also can’t tell here, but he is a figure only possible in the postwar era, when government legislation was passed to enable improvement of living conditions in buraku areas.

So, in contrast to this “other” Murakami and to Nakagami, Murakami Ryû has developed a style that is all about connecting dependency (economic, military, security) to commodity culture, through depicting images as clichés, as they move from base to local site.

The original title for his book, that fact I was recently surprised by, spells this out bluntly in typically Murakami-like vulgarian detail. 『クリトリスにバター』。Butter on clitoris (possibly plural, it’s hard to tell, and the orgy scenes don’t make this distinction any easier.) Butter is the post-Meiji signifier for anything Western, a very slappy shorthand for neo-colonial domination, via the senses (smell, in particular). It’s the image of the female characters’ bodies as pieces of toast that really took me aback. (Not to mention the passivity of the narrator, in contrast with his active fetishism of both soldiers and chicks.) Here the initial title captures the senses of sexual and capitalized dependence quite…nicely doesn’t seem the right word, but precisely anyway. This seems a much better title to me, though it does not capture the Vaseline-y tone of the rueful aestheticism that frames the book, when it narrates the goings-on as distant past.

parataxis, mon amour

Today I would like to give a little tribute to one of my favorite rhetorical/poetic devices, parataxis. It is, says the OED:

parataxis (gram.) placing of propositions or clauses side by side without connecting words. XIX. — Gr. parātaxis, f. paratássein place side by side

I first really got obsessed with parataxis by reading Gertrude Stein. She has a lot of cryptic crypto-theories about words and citizenry–citizen word stands alone, forthright, apart, but adjacent.

Parataxis tends to privilege the world of the sentence, and movement within it. I have been working obsessively on chapter titles lately, so I have found this mini-genre of sentence or clause very intriguing. I think it’s such an interesting format because it is so simple, and places such emphasis on the relations of the respective units, which makes it different than just paradox or repetition.

A paratactic title may modify (“Girl, Interrupted”), or surprise with counter-intuition (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”). It may sit elements in a curious relation to one another, in paradoxical (or is it metonymic?) opposition: the title of Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi. One more example, here in sentence form, which starts admitting action and characterization, is here in Chandlerian form:

“He stopped. His eyes rolled. His head jerked.” Farewell My Lovely.

And now in Roman imperial form: “I came; I saw; I conquered.” (Julius Caesar).

And in Roxy Musical form!!–”You came, you saw, you conquered me.”