icepatton's world-ending fire II

After a decade or so of putting together a library of my own, I decided to join LibraryThing in mid-February and started my previous thread in the last week of April or so (https://www.librarything.com/topic/359076). Now that we're nearing the second half of the year, it seems as good a time as any to step back and reflect.

With authors listed alphabetically, here are the books I've started and finished so far this year, with daggers indicating authors who are deceased (as far as I know):

・The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by journalist Mark Abley
・The Joys of Engrish by Engrish.com founder Steve Caires
・(In the Discover America State by State series:
T is for Tar Heel: A North Carolina Alphabet by Carol Crane
A is for Aloha: A Hawai’i Alphabet by U’ilani Goldsberry
A is for America: An American Alphabet by Devin Scillian)
・Be Smaller than Flowers: Paintings, Poems, and Essays by artist and poet Tomihiro Hoshino
・Obey, Not Know: Essays on Japanese Law and Society by business lawyer Colin PA Jones
・Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, edited by Bruce Rutledge of Chin Music Press
・So Can You by lawyer and speaker Mitsuyo Ohira
・No Man Is an Island by Trappist monk Thomas Merton†
・The Question of Palestine by professor and critic Edward Said†
・A Modest Proposal and Other Writings by satirist Jonathan Swift†
・Who Can Stop the Wind? Travels in the Borderland between East and West by theologian Notto R. Thelle
・Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home by translator Burton Watson†
・Wildlife & 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by critic and translator Eliot Weinberger
・(In the Discover the World series: K is for Kabuki: A Japan Alphabet by Gloria Whelan)
・Revolution of Values: Reclaiming the Public Faith for the Common Good by preacher and peacemaker Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
・An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Traditional Architecture and Everyday Things by Seiichiro Yamamoto

Also, here are books I'm currently reading or have added to my to-read list since the year began:

・I Ching, translated by Thomas Cleary†
・Genesis by Eduardo Galeano† (the first of the Memory of Fire trilogy)
・A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind by professor Siri Hustvedt
・The Rainbow by novelist Yasunari Kawabata†
・Effective Japanese Usage Guide by Kodansha Ltd.
・Selected Poems by John Keats†
・Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt
・Murmured Conversations: A Treatise on Poetry and Buddhism by the Poet-Monk Shinkei by professor Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen
・The Lost Book of Paradise: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by Bible scholar and poet David Rosenberg
・Martian in the Playground: Understanding the Schoolchild with Asperger’s Syndrome by autistic author Clare Sainsbury
・A Guide to Japanese Buddhist Sculpture by Hiromichi Soejima
・The Lady or the Tiger and Other Stories by novelist Frank R. Stockton†
・Uncle Tom’s Cabin by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe†
・Words in Context: A Japanese Perspective on Language and Culture by sociolinguist Takao Suzuki†
・The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain†
・The Lost Wolves of Japan by history professor Brett L. Walker
・Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan by translator Burton Watson†

It may seem like I'm going all over the place with these lists, but basically I'm reading what I read because of what I've seen other authors suggest in their own books over many yearsーand, well, because I'm a nerd. For the sake of time, I'll write some of my thoughts on these books in subsequent posts.

For one thing, The Question of Palestine will likely be the most important book I ever read this year and a long while after. I knew I had to return to Said at some point, as much of his writing (as well as Chomsky's, for that matter) concerns geopolitical issues that remain unresolved to this day. I had read Orientalism in college and soon felt that The Question of Palestine would be an even more important book. News of Iran firing missiles at Israel (even as Israel butchers Palestinians with American weapons) decided for me that it was time to read it. As intellectually demanding as it was, I'm glad I did.

No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton

I finished this book after months of putting it off, as the language seemed rather dated to me. Merton was a thoughtful writer, though, and as a Christian, I appreciate his definitions of central concepts of the faith. For example, regarding freedom and the problem of free will, he writes:

For our freedom is a gift God has given us in order that He may be able to love us more perfectly, and be loved by us more perfectly in return.

I'll spare users a protracted analysis and just remark that this sentence alone explained for me a great deal as to why God lets humanity sin, or why a loving God would allow evil in the world. There are many insightful points like this throughout the book, but a lot of the time I had trouble focusing on the words of the page. Not a bad book, though.

By the way, A Modest Proposal and Other Writings was for me another step in the direction of a better education in English classics, which started with me reading Pope's The Rape of the Lock a year or two ago. I can't say I understood much of what I read then, but I got through it just so no one can say that I didn't at least try. I enjoyed Swift's style a great deal more than Pope's, but I've moved on to a selection of Keats' poems in my bid to actually read more classics this year.

As a foreign national in Japan, maybe I've been going all over the place in my literary search for the familiarーbooks by authors who remind me of life in America, or books that can make sense of my strange encounters in Japan. At the end of the day, though, I'm just trying to make good on the fact that my major is English in a society that devalues both reading and thinking. I don't believe people are necessarily stupid for not caring to read more books beyond high school or college. The economic progress of countries like Japan and the US demands that people be as knowledgeable as they can about what employers have determined to be lucrative. In this sense, I'm actually quite lacking in knowledge and expertise, but I don't believe this is because English as a discipline is useless.

I think a very good explanation of why that is comes from an essay by William Deresiewicz in his book The End of Solitude (which I recommend, by the way):

When politicians talk about higher education ... they talk almost exclusively about math and science. And technology indeed creates the future. But it is not enough to create the future. We also need to organize it, as the social sciences enable us to do. We need to make sense of it, as the humanities enable us to do. A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts ... is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to organize society, or other meanings than the authorized ones. A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world.

In a twist of fate, Deresiewicz was one of the many authors I discovered only after I graduated college and found myself in the highly technocratic society of Japan. And since coming here I've been expected to teach English in a way that prepares students for rote memorization and test results rather than critical thinking or cross-cultural exchange. As writers like Deresiewicz and Jonathan Kozol have made clear, much of the same can be said about American education today. I'm not sure how I would have even discovered the American authors I have since coming to Japan if I stayed in the US. Maybe I would have read more Murakami novels, though.

>2 icepatton: Wow. I'll have to get to A Question of Palestine, and Orientalism for that matter.

>6 kidzdoc: Certainly! I look forward to what you have to say about Simone Weil's book, by the way.

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

There isn't much for me to say about this book, since I'm not nearly as much of a movie buff as Oswalt is, or a "sprocket fiend," to use his own term, nor do I hope to be after reading this book. But I like Oswalt as a comedian and got a better sense of who he is as a writer by reading this memoir of sorts, in which he relates his struggle to balance his avid moviegoing with his career and relationships. Many illustrious names in both film and entertainment get a mention. I, for one, am interested to hear more about the life and career of Maria Bamford, whose memoir I may pick up later. Readers unfamiliar with movie-making or acting may be better served by watching Oswalt's on-stage performances instead.

>5 icepatton:

I've many problems with Mr. Deresiewicz.

If liberal arts education creates "citizens", people who "think broadly" etc., how does one explain the condition of the US, or the UK for that matter? Considering the vast numbers of people with liberal arts education, to say nothing of the supposedly enlightening effect of growing up in such brilliant democracies... how does one explain the prevalence of ignorance and violence?

I'm also extremely uneasy about such facile dismissal of the Chinese as thoughtless robots, not least because that is a racist stereotype, and much older than the Chinese Communist state. Before they were (supposedly) mindlessly obeying the Party, the Chinese were mindlessly obeying the Emperor etc. And yet, these are the people who still revere poetry and poetical invention as the summum and proof of education.

It's also telling that the first and only thing that's suggested for the Chinese to think on, is "different organization of society". But let an American try to think about a "different organization" of American society and see how far he gets.

The implication that a scientific education does not (cannot) create "citizens", people who "think broadly" is incredibly parochial and speaks of an utter ignorance of science. And it too is an old and washed-up prejudice, all the way from the 19th century and even earlier, with the quarrels of "ancients and moderns". Why would caring more for science than for, say, literature mean a person thinks less "broadly" than the counterpart who cares for literature but knows nothing of science? This is a repetition of C. P. Snow's argument that someone who doesn't know the laws of thermodynamics is just as ignorant as someone who hasn't read Dickens, and, while overall I think Snow lost that debate (The two cultures), the argument is valid.

I could also quote George Steiner and his disillusionment with all culture in the wake of Nazi atrocities. Science may have enabled them, but it was myth and literature that fed them, that stoked hatred in people's hearts.

oops, there I go hobby-horsing again... sorry. Great thread, I admire the seriousness of your reading, I mean the approach and all.

>9 LolaWalser: Thank you for chiming in.

I'll address what I take to be your main points, if I may.

If liberal arts education creates "citizens", people who "think broadly" etc., how does one explain the condition of the US, or the UK for that matter?

It may be a crude illustration, but if everyone in Congress were Bernie Sanders, we would likewise see a difference in how liberal arts programs in the country are funded and organized. I think the age-old "love of money" does a lot to explain the current state of the US, at least.

...facile dismissal of the Chinese as thoughtless robots...

I don't think that's what Deresiewicz is trying to say here, though he does betray a certain ignorance of Chinese culture and history. After all, we know that even North Korea has its growing list of defectors. Using China as an example does seem to be a poor choice.

...let an American try to think about a "different organization"...

Well, yeah. I think Deresiewicz is perfectly aware of his lack of political clout, but I can see how this is an instance of the pot calling the kettle black.

Why would caring more for science than for, say, literature mean a person thinks less "broadly" than the counterpart who cares for literature but knows nothing of science?

I think it all boils down to whether one respects a person's ability to ask good questions and pursue investigations. Of course, scientists and literati are equally capable in what they do if they care about establishing the truth. I think it's safe to say a rift has separated the two over disagreements about what truth is. You mention Snow's arguments as well as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In our own context, I'm reminded of the Sokal affair. As for my own opinion, the path that led me to people like Deresiewicz also included people like Chomsky and Feynman. And whether they would all agree with each other or not about the role of science or literature in society is less important to me than each person contributing in some way to a constructive conversation about our limited understanding of truth and the complexity of life.

I hope that makes sense.

Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan

Another enjoyable read, courtesy of Burton Watson. From this book, I'm getting a better sense of the poetic tradition in Japan as well as China. Japanese poets, particularly Buddhist ones, often took inspiration from Taoist and Buddhist texts from China. Confucianism is another influence on Japanese culture, but I've been more interested in the Zen tradition of Buddhism as well as the natural themes of its poetry. I found out about Zen Poems of the Five Mountains when reading Watson's explanations of Ryōkan's poetry. Ryōkan himself was an interesting character, seemingly reclusive but high-spirited.

A few more books with explanations as to why they ended up on my list:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

When it comes to American literature, I haven't given Twain the attention he deserves. Although some of his books were lying around the house when I was little, I didn't read any of them. Yet Twain is such a towering figure that his name has come up again and again in my readings. This seems to be the book he is most known for, so I'll give it a try at some point.

The Lady or the Tiger and Other Stories by Frank Stockton

I wonder who remembers reading this story in high school. I remember reading it, along with "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell and Lord of the Flies. Many writers like these have fallen into obscurity, but their stories have a certain longevity. Actually, "The Lady or the Tiger" gets mentioned in Weinberger's collection of essays (which I recommend), Wildlife, and it seems Stockton was quite a literary figure of his time. I figured I should revisit his most famous story out of nostalgia and get a better sense of who he was as a writer by reading his other stuff.

A Guide to Kobe and Foreign Culture

Books like this are really hard to come by. I've spent undue amounts of time at libraries and on databases searching for English or bilingual books about Japanese places that are not simply glorified tourist brochures. I know books like Legends of Nara and A Guide to Japanese Buddhist Sculpture are out there somewhere, whether on a publisher's back catalog or in a dusty section of a library or bookstore. While the Internet Archive has been a valuable resource for checking out forgotten titles, nothing beats a chance encounter with a book you didn't know existed at a local library. For the longest time, I didn't even know there were English and bilingual books available for foreign residents at municipal libraries in Japan (though not always).

Anyway, Kobe is one of the first cities I ever explored in Japan and is an example of a cosmopolitan city, like Istanbul or New York. Although I've visited many times by now and learned much, I still look forward to reading this book. Many other places in this region of Japan have stood out to me, particularly Kyoto and Nara. I thought I would get a deeper sense of the history and culture when reading Kyoto: A Contemplative Guide a while ago, but it was a snoozer. A lot of the time, I've been left searching for a middle ground between the superficial travel brochure and the fetishistic cultural primer. This book about Kobe seems to be one that fits the bill.

>12 icepatton: One of Twain's overlooked books, but the one that he considered his most important and best, is Joan of Arc. I really enjoyed it, and it is so different from his other works. I also love The Diaries of Adam and Eve for its laugh out loud humor.

>13 labfs39: I've never heard of Joan of Arc or The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Thanks for the tip!

Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands

After several attempts, I think I finally found a book to read about Hawaiian foodways, or the cultural expressions of food in Hawaii and their historical basis. It doesn't seem to be available as an e-book, unfortunately. I guess I'll have to see if there is a copy somewhere in Honolulu when I visit again. Or simply order a copy on Amazon.

I've been thinking more about Hawaii since it became clear to my wife and me that we won't be able to visit family on the East Coast for Christmas this year, due to a combination of a weak yen, our meager savings, and expensive airfare. As disappointing as that is, at least we'll be able to see my sister, cousin, and brother-in-law in Hawaii, if everything works out. Better than us being cooped up by ourselves in Japan. Although I absolutely despise airports and flying, I've been more willing to take trips to the States ever since I got married.

I still remember my first trip to Hawaii last year and how a lot of it seemed to be a giant TV commercial. But the food was great, the people were nice, the natural scenery not completely ruined by real estate. And I have a little thing for aloha shirts. And I came across copies of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, which I wasn't expecting to find, and From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, which I've put on hold. I've gotten some recommendations for books like Michener's Hawaii, but I'm more interested in the cultural non-fiction of Hawaii.

New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by journalist Craig Taylor

I figured that since I ought to visit the Big Apple again at some point, and since it is such an indelible feature of American culture and history, I started reading this journalistic collection of stories and wisdom from everyday New Yorkers published in a kind of Humans of New York fashion. I haven't read Taylor's other stuff but he seems to be a bona fide reporter. I like how he keeps the questions he asks in his interviews off the page and leaves them to be inferred by the reader as his subjects slowly put together a mosaic of life in New York City. A lot of what I admire about American culture and art comes from New York, so I hope to get a better understanding of the city as it is today.

By the way, the closest I've been to New York in recent years was Washington DC, which isn't as appealing to me for some reason. By visiting the East Coast for the first time in years, I became more interested in reading about the history and culture of places like New York or Montreal, which I actually enjoyed reading about in Letters from Montreal: Tales of an Exceptional City after being snowbound there for a few days due to a cancelled flight. At that time, Montreal was supposed to be just a stopover on my way to DC, but it turned out to be a more pleasant and interesting city than I expected.

I'm not sure why, but for a while I was also interested in reading about Australia. It seemed to have been a combination of news reports about hellish wildfires, COVID-19, and my experience meeting people from other English-speaking countries in Japan that led me to read Fire Flood and Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020. A very good book that taught me a great deal about a place I've never visited but would like to one day.

Zen Poems of the Five Mountains

Something that strikes me as I'm reading the introduction to this volume of Zen poetry:

One obvious effect of the Zen outlook on the world is to create a world of ideation in which the poet does not stand apart from or in opposition to his work and environment. For all the particular detail of his observation, observer merges with what is observed so that there is no distinction between subject and object, perceiver and perceived. This effect is especially difficult to render in a language like English which requires pronouns, agents, subjects and objects, tense, and indications of transitivity where the original poem has none of these.

The last sentence in particular reminds me of the whole premise of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, in which various translators and scholars over time are shown to attempt a translation of a single poem by Wang Wei, with Weinberger, himself a translator of poetry, first acknowledging the same difficulty of translating Chinese, then offering criticism of 19 of these translations according to his own understanding of what the original text of the poem means, or what it couldn't possibly mean in an English translation unless translators were inserting their own cultural biases toward the original text.

Although Wang Wei isn't the subject of this book, I can see a similar problem happening in the case of Zen poetry, which translators may fail to grasp due to a lack of understanding of Zen as a worldview. To say that a Zen poem often says one thing while meaning something completely different is a bit of an understatement. The trouble of reading Zen poetry and presuming to explain its meaning ties in with the ineffable nature of Buddhist enlightenment. That is, the poems in this book and elsewhere may be taken as artistic expressions of people who have attained some ineffable state of awareness of the cosmic order in their training. As generations of poets and scholars can attest, the poems are also just fascinating in and of themselves.

Also, the idea that "observer merges with what is observed so that there is no distinction between subject and object, perceiver and perceived" is fascinating to me. I think this lends itself to the idea that Zen poetry is less about the words themselves and more about the cosmological structure behind them. Although I've only just started this book, I'm sure that by reading it I will come to appreciate poetry as a genre more.

Selected Poems of John Keats

I finished reading Endymion in this selection of Keats' poems. It should be noted that this isn't the entire poem, but a selection based on what the Penguin editors take to be the essence of it. So it's a bit of a cop-out for me to read this book and say I know Keats' poetry. Then again, I'm not interested in reading every word of every poem Keats ever wrote, and I'm not a The Complete Works of So-and-so kind of reader. I still remember enjoying the various well-curated Norton Anthologies when taking literature courses in college; I've come to trust a well-read editor's discerning eye for the sake of introducing literary classics to the average reader. I also just think Penguin Books are very good at what they do.

Hello, I just dropped in to say how much I enjoy your thread. I was an exchange student in Japan when I was in high school in the early 1970s, and enjoy reading about your experiences in modern Japan. I was an addicted reader before I went to Japan, and had trouble with the fact that it was hard to find English language books in northern Japan where I lived. But because of that, I did discover authors I wouldn't have ordinarily read, such as Somerset Maugham and D. H. Lawrence. My written Japanese never became proficient enough to read in Japanese - except for elementary grade children's books.

>19 janoorani24: Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad to hear about your experience in Japan. I believe I was able to discover many writers in this environment as well. I also have a hard time reading Japanese and don't think I will ever be able to read a long text in Japanese. It took me years to gain enough confidence to navigate a Japanese library system in order to track down English or bilingual books.

Zen Poems of the Five Mountains, a translation of poems by Zen Buddhists from late medieval/early modern Japan and China

So far, this is the best collection of Zen poetry I have ever seen. While there are many poets in this collection worth noting, I think it would suffice to pass along some sections that have stood out to me, regardless of who wrote them.

For one thing, I like this kind of poetry for its raw, earthy imagery:

...Water falls in the scars of creeks where icy bones have broken,
Moons grow in corners of rooms as tree shadows shift,
Incense hovers, printing antique characters from a lone censer...

Although the cultural and religious context of these poems is different from mine, I have been reminded all too well of my own place as a foreign national in Japan by lines like these:

Beneath a flimsy thatched roof, I live in this strange land,
Heart ashen, ambition withered like a cut vine.
My homeland? I’ve given up trying to predict my return—
Heaven and earth will keep me waiting till I’m an old man...

Other poems like this one are more spirited and playful in tone:

Countless dots of crows flying home break up the evening sky,
Wings flapping, beak to tail over the far line of hills:
It reminds me of a place where children practicing calligraphy
Have spattered black ink all over the paper windows.

Birds like crows and sparrows are a kind of sight for sore eyes in these poems due to their prosaic familiarity. I'm really enjoying this collection so far and look forward to reading the rest.

A bit further along in this anthology, New Yorkers, I'm getting nuggets of wisdom from a variety of perspectives. Such as the following, reassuring in its simplicity:

I just understand now like, there’s some people in this world that you’re not gonna be able to change. They’re not gonna be happy, they just won’t understand because they don’t want to. And you just have to leave those people in their own light.

Also, some harsh words about the work of capitalism in narrowing one's view of New York to the speculative flashiness of Manhattan:

The tourists come here all the time looking for a place that doesn’t exist, so they just shop. You walk down Crosby Street, it’s Millionaires Row. It’s really safe, but there’s nothing there. It’s just a place to shop or go to the gym. How many f*cking gyms can you have on one block?

In the story immediately following this one, in fact, I'm getting much the same feeling of dread as someone who must put up with the insanity of urban life on a regular basis:

Imagine feeling the energy of every person. And buildings have energy and then you have all the cars coming through and the people in the cars. It’s just too much. It doesn’t feel good. It makes me feel uncomfortable, irritated, and then tired. I usually have to go home and lie down.

Anyway, it just seems to me like this is the best format to read about a place as complicated and restless as New Yorkーinterviews disguised as stories told by New Yorkers from various walks of life. As a suburban creature, I get to thinking about analogs in other industrialized parts of the world like Tokyo and Honolulu. Places that literally make you sick at the high level of separation from the natural world.

A bit of a detour, once again, to go over some titles that I've chosen to abandon.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Too dense. Too weighty. A very important subject, mind you, but I couldn't keep up with Solomon. While he seems to have succeeded in writing a bestseller about a difficult psychological reality, I did something maybe I shouldn't have in retrospect and skipped to the end, where I got references to shorter books about living with depression, namely Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron, which I rather enjoyed for its plainness and brevity.

Porn: An Oral History

A book with a clever subtitle that had been on my radar since I discovered Polly Barton, whose book Fifty Sounds was a lot more edifying. But I wanted to read this book out of curiosity, thinking I could learn some things about my own struggles with porn, or the psychology behind porn; what I got instead was rounds of juicy gossip between the author and pseudonymous strangers about each other's interactions with porn, like a game of hide-and-seek with one's loved ones. Hardly any challenge to the toxicity of porn. Disappointing.

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Once again, an important subject, but boring. Academese for hundreds of pages. Apparently, focusing on the ideological battles between the US and Japanese armed forces in the Pacific theater of WWII. Dower may be a top scholar of his field, but I don't want to fall asleep when reading about war.

Zen Poems of the Five Mountains, translated in English from Japanese and Chinese

Opening the window at midnight, the night air cold,
Garden and roof a gleaming white,
I go to the verandah, stretch out my hand to scoop up some snow—
Didn’t I know that moonlight won't make a ball?

This poem was written by Kōkan Shiren, whose biography is detailed among the other Zen Buddhist poets selected for this volume. Musō Soseki, the eminent poet/calligrapher/landscaper of his time in late medieval Japan, is another name you'll see in this collection of poems, with some ink brush illustrations meant to accompany them for the sake of refining one's Zen practice. The introduction notes that many of these illustrations have been lost, yet the potency of the imagery in poems like this one by Shiren speaks to the power of poetry itself. Non-Buddhists like myself can still appreciate these poems as products of a disciplined, focused mind.

The poems in this book are categorized by 16 themes pertaining to Zen life: doctrine, meditation and daily practice, exhortations and warnings, living in hermitage, festivals and holidays, traveling to China, provincial (or rural) Zen, nature, time and history, fame and fortune (as well as old age), weather and the change of seasons, travels and excursions, friendship, tea, animals, and illness and death. The result is a rich assortment of poems that take readers between the Zen communities of China and Japan, showing how many of these poets were artists in their own right. Irrespective of the Zen calling to renounce the world and approach art from a kind of minimalist standpoint, one has to respect the work that went into the composition of, for example, "Inscribed on a Fan" by Mugan Soō:

Last year when the cool breezes arose,
I folded you back in your case;
Now once again the heat is upon us,
And again I’ve got you by the handle.
Coming out and hiding away—everything happens according to heaven,
Yet you betray neither anger in one nor joy in the other,
But with the gracious, generous spirit of a great man,
Deign to mingle with us frivolous and fickle sorts.

Whether Soō intended it to be or not, this poem even borders on satire. Such is the level of artistry in these poems, seemingly written without concern over whether future scholars and poets would critique it. Apart from that, I think readers would learn a lot about both Zen and Buddhism in this book.

I started reading Genesis, the first of Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. Each little story about animals is comparable to Aesop's fables (which I haven't finished yet), but the stories reveal a bit of the cosmologies of the various indigenous peoples in the Americas.

So far, I like this entry from "The Hummingbird" concerning the Guaraní people of South America:

At dawn he greets the sun. Night falls and he's still at work. He goes buzzing from branch to branch, from flower to flower, quick and necessary like light itself. At times he's doubtful and pauses suspended in the air; at times he flies backward as no one else can. At times he's a little drunk from all the honey he has sucked. As he flies, he emits flashes of color.

It is refreshing to see in print the kinds of stories people have been telling since time immemorial, and the creativity in the storytelling of humans trying to make sense of the world around them. I'm impressed by the breadth of Galeano's research.

The city of Nara, Japan

Or, "the cradle of Japanese civilization," according to this neat little book in a series of "Color Books" by a Japanese publisher, presenting imperfect yet informative translations of various guidebooks on Japanese culture and famous cities like Tokyo and Osaka. These guidebooks may now only be found in libraries and used bookstores, clearly showing their age, but when it comes to introducing old, enduring cities like Nara, the information they contain may not be so out of date.

At least, that is the impression I got from this book about Nara, which is like Damascus or Athens in that it has been continuously inhabited for millennia and been the stage for numerous dramas of history. Mainly because there are no cities quite like it in the US, I knew I had to visit to Nara when I first came to Japan, which was as much of a culture shock to me as when I visited more urban places like Tokyo.

For one thing, the sight of families of wild deer walking about the streets and parks is unheard of in Tokyo, let alone New York. The book notes that the deer is revered in Nara for having transported the Japanese god of thunder, Takemikazuchi, to the region after the ancient capital, Heijō-kyō, was built. While it is a crime in Japan to harm the deer, people are allowed to feed them with special bran crackers as well as pet them. Indeed, the deer are the most striking feature of Nara besides the World Heritage Sites, several of which the book includes with postcard-like photographs.

It's been difficult for me to find English books about places in Japan that don't reek of tourism, but I enjoyed learning about Japanese history and the cultural influences of Nara in this book.

_{Hydrangeas in bloom.}

Well, the rainy season has started in Japan. Or I'm late in reporting what has been obvious to people across the country for the past month or so: days of muggy weather and rainstorms with the possibility of typhoons. In the back of my mind is the question of just how hot summers could be in Japan even without climate change. The humidity already makes the heat unbearable.

Lately I've been focusing on New Yorkers at the expense of Galeano's Genesis or Keats. But I've also snuck in some reading about Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, places that I've been wanting to read about for a while. Along with these titles, I've added to my list The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost by natural farming advocate Masanobu Fukuoka and Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World, a collection of scholarly essays.

I've written my thoughts on Nara, and the other books in this series look promising. For some reason, Hawaii is also featured in this series, if not because Japanese tourists are a steady source of revenue for the Aloha State. The problem for me is that the latest edition available at the local library was published in 1978. And as far as I know this was the last edition. It's generally a good idea to read old books about a specific place to get a better sense of how that place has changed over time, though I reckon that a book about Hawaii couldn't mean as much to me as to someone who actually lives there (or who lived there in 1978).

As for Japan, I think a better way for readers to know what I'm talking about as a foreign resident here is to simply come see the country for themselves.

How long have you lived in Japan, Corey?

>27 icepatton: When I arrived in Japan for the first time, I had only ever known relatively dry climates, and experiencing that heat and humidity at the end of August in Tokyo was like hitting a physical wall. That was in 1974 — it must be much worse now.

>28 labfs39: Seven years.

>29 janoorani24: I don't know how much worse it is now. But spring or fall is definitely a better time to travel in Japan.

>31 icepatton: I loved the Fall, especially obon odori and the autumn colors. The winter was nice too, though very cold in northern Honshu where I lived.

By the way, I'm enjoying Thinking in Numbers so much that I went ahead and ordered my own copy, since the one I have is a library book and it's due today.

>32 janoorani24: I appreciate your comment on Thinking in Numbers. I recommend every book by Tammet. He's truly one of a kind. He's also published in French, namely a piece of apologetics called Fragments de paradis that I wish someone would translate to English already!

The farthest north I've been in Japan is Hokkaido. My wife loves it there, particularly the food. I guess it's alright. I liked Montreal more when we visited, though it was winter at the time.

>33 icepatton: I never made it to Hokkaido - Aomori-ken was the furthest north I traveled. I lived in a small village in Akita-ken for a year. Other than Honshu, the other islands I've been to are Kyushu and Okinawa.

>34 janoorani24: I can tell you there is now a section of track connecting Aomori to Hokkaido. Since its completion in 2016, people can ride the bullet train from Honshu to Hokkaido. I think it may be cheaper to just fly there, though.

My time in Hokkaido inspired me to put Our Land was a Forest on my reading list. There is an Ainu cultural museum outside of Sapporo that I wanted to visit, but it was too far. I want to go there next time.

I've never been to Okinawa or Akita, but I know people who have. Last year I went to Nagasakiーmy first time in Kyushu. I'm fascinated by the history of the Church there.

_{The Tower of the Sun, the centerpiece for World Expo '70 outside of Osaka, designed by visionary artist Taro Okamoto. It still occupies the original site of the expo, now used as a commemorative park.}

The city of Osaka

This book was actually kind of disappointing. Not because of its datedness, but because of the impression it leaves that there isn't much history of Osaka to discuss. I get the sense that Osaka is pretty much a steamrolled natural haven with decades of concrete and metal laid on top of itーbasically a textbook example of a modern, globalized city with much of its history lost or slated for oblivion.

I get that the purpose of this book isn't to explore origins but to introduce one of the great economic hubs of Japan to the curious visitorーthe site of World Expo '70 (and soon-to-be World Expo '25), as well as of Shinsekai, in its early days known as Luna Park, which was modeled after Coney Island. Little facts like this have been why I wanted to read other books in this series about modern Japan, but it seems some books have more to say about history than others.

As for books that get more specific about the history of Osaka, and the place where I live, the search continues.

New Yorkers

Going through these stories about life in New York, I'm reminded of national news-making events that I had never understood for their impact on the social consciousness of New YorkersーOccupy Wall Street, the Stonewall riots, Hurricane Sandy, to name a few. It's curious that I'm halfway through the book and 9/11 hasn't come up yet. On the other hand, if Black Lives Matter or COVID-19 were never brought up I would have seriously questioned Taylor's motives.

Side note: As I'm reading, I find myself checking out various places on the map like Washington Heights, Broadway Triangle, and Rockaways. So many places I've never been with stories behind them. I may be a fool for saying this, but the most interesting place to me is Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

_{Municipal building codes don't allow the construction of tall buildings in Kyoto. This is what makes panoramic views of the city so special.}

The city of Kyoto

It may be redundant at this point for me to talk about my favorite city in Japan, besides Nara. While this book taught me a few things about the history and traditions of Kyoto, I find myself wanting to talk about my own experiences of the city, rather than the book itself. It could be because of the book's introductory format that I find myself taken to many places on the map, with all the associations and memories thereof: Kiyomizu Temple, Kibune Shrine, Kawara-machi, Kyoto Imperial Palace, Togetsu Bridge. The list goes on.

Would this be a good book for those who have never been to one of the most important places, if not the most important, in Japan? Yes. Would it give you relevant information, though it was published in 1985? To a certain degree. As the section on Langdon Warner in the Nara book points out, many historical sites and cultural relics in this region were spared from the destruction of Allied bombing during WWII, thanks to the diplomatic efforts of this art historian from Massachusetts. This means a good number of buildings have been kept in more or less the same condition since they were first built for various authority figures in medieval Japan.

To be sure, fires throughout history have often destroyed buildings in Kyoto, such that places like Higashi Hongan-ji are relatively modern reconstructions. One of the newest buildings is actually Heian Shrine, built to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Heian-kyo, an old name for Kyoto when it was the capital of Japan. Anyway, the creative blend of the old with the new continues to be why many people around the world flock to the city, myself included.

If you have enough pennies saved up for a trip around the world, let this city, and books like this one, be one of the reasons you would go to Japan.

I reckon we're all feeling a little shook since the SCOTUS ruling on Monday. Not a good sign for the second half of 2024.

I'm glad I found this website as a kind of bastion against the squabble and noise of politics. But in times like these I feel like I'm under attack.

Anyway, here is a list of books I've categorized and read so far this year, with daggers indicating the deceased:

ーEssays & Criticismー
・Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan by various authors
・Obey, Not Know: Essays on Japanese Law and Society by business lawyer Colin PA Jones
・The Question of Palestine by professor Edward Said†
・Wildlife & 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by translator Eliot Weinberger

ーHistoryー
・American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by historian Benjamin E. Park
・Between Heaven and Earth: A History of Chinese Writing by calligrapher Bo Shi

ーJournalismー
・The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley

ーMemoirー
・Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt
・So Can You by lawyer and speaker Mitsuyo Ohira

ーPoetryー
・Be Smaller than Flowers: Paintings, Poems, and Essays by artist Tomihiro Hoshino
・Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan & Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home by translator Burton Watson†
・Zen Poems of the Five Mountains by professor David Pollack

ーReligion & Philosophyー
・No Man Is an Island by Trappist monk Thomas Merton†
・Revolution of Values: Reclaiming the Public Faith for the Common Good by preacher and peacemaker Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
・Who Can Stop the Wind? Travels in the Borderland between East and West by theologian Notto R. Thelle

ーMiscellaneousー
・100 Beautiful Words In The Way Of Tea by Bruce Hamana Sosei
・(In the Color Book series about Japan: Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka)
・(In the Discover America State by State series:
A is for Aloha: A Hawai’i Alphabet by U’ilani Goldsberry
A is for America: An American Alphabet by Devin Scillian
T is for Tar Heel: A North Carolina Alphabet by Carol Crane)
・(In the Discover the World series: K is for Kabuki: A Japan Alphabet by Gloria Whelan)
・A Guide to Kobe and Foreign Culture by various authors
・An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Traditional Architecture and Everyday Things by Seiichiro Yamamoto
・The Joys of Engrish by Engrish.com founder Steve Caires
・A Modest Proposal and Other Writings by satirist Jonathan Swift†

Lastly, here are books I'm currently reading, or trying to read:
・Genesis by Eduardo Galeano† (the first in the Memory of Fire trilogy)
・New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by journalist Craig Taylor
・Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World by various authors
・Selected Poems by John Keats†

A separate post to include books I had started reading at some point but couldn't finish until this year:

ーHistoryー
・Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber†
・Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i by various authors
・Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism by cultural historian Paul Collins

ーJournalismー
・Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath by Eric Talmadge†

ーPoetryー
・A Literary Bible: An Original Translation by poet-scholar David Rosenberg

ーReligion & Philosophyー
・Flowers, Birds, Wind, and Moon: the Phenomenology of Japanese Culture by Seigo Matsuoka
・Living Life as It Comes: Post-Disaster Reflections of a Zen Priest in Fukushima by Gen'yu Sokyu

ーMiscellaneousー
・Legends of Nara by Kenji Inui

New Yorkers

Reading the chapter of interviews with people involved in the MTA, I came across this gem drop that could describe the state of infrastructure not just in NY, but in the US as a whole:

The hard thing is to take physical infrastructure that is one hundred years old, that has been through storms and calamities, and keep that in what we call a sober state of good repair. Let’s say your great-grandfather, or whichever piece of your generational tree, was born in 1907, and he had a great coat. And you keep wearing it all the way to now. All you’ve only ever managed to do is on some nights patch it a little, stitch it a little. Just imagine what that coat would look like. And you wear it every day all the time. It’s very frail, it’s threadbare. So things can push our system over the edge very easily.

I'm particularly drawn to the phrase, "a sober state of good repair." It sounds a bit like something I heard growing up, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Then again, public transportation is an area where the risk to passengers' lives due to a lack of renovation and repair could make national headlines in the worst way possible. I can imagine a scenario in NY that leads to what happened in Mexico City a few years ago, where a number of administrative oversights eventually cost the lives of 26 people riding the city metro. I really don't know what the current situation is like in NY, but I can get a hint from the interviewees in this volume.

>39 icepatton: It's certainly a diverse and interesting set of readings. I've enjoyed your comments on the things you're reading, and also these very nice pictures of Japan.

>42 rv1988: Thank you!

New Yorkers


_{The Statue of Liberty on a clear day.}

The fabric of America, the things that make us this country, we’re stripping them away. The idea of like, “Let’s make America great again” . . . well, then, we should be more welcoming, because that is what made us great in the first place. You know, we should stand up and say to tyrants around the world, “If you mistreat your ethnic minorities, your religious minorities, you’re okay here.” That’s what New York, and especially New York, has always been about.

Taylor put a lot of time and energy in this collection of interviews, and it shows. Although he isn't from New York originally, one can tell that he cares deeply about the people he associates with in this volume, meeting as he does a diverse cast of New Yorkers for what seems to be as accurate a portrayal of the city as one can expect. With so many great examples to choose from, at least the quote above could serve as a definition of New York, which in many ways is a portal to America.

For example, I can see the resilience and tenacity of people in New York by this testimony of a COVID-19 survivor who was hospitalized during the height of the pandemic:

I’m not looking to be on a dollar bill, but I don’t want to be wiped off the face of this earth without being heard from. I don’t mean for the whole world, but for my world. My world, my city’s got to have one more f*cking dance with me. That’s how I’m thinking. My crowd, my friends, my people, one more night where we scream and yell and dance. When you get called on the carpet and you know this is your life, you gotta be who you are. That’s how I fight. That’s how I reduce this thing. I had to put it on my terms, on my level.

I'm also drawn to the wisdom of a hired nanny that seems to speak volumes about human relations:

The part of your brain that’s responsible for creativity, abstract thinking, or emotional development is kind of a luxury. If you’re surrounded by stress and trauma your whole life, your brain just goes, “Hey, we can’t afford it. We don’t have the energy to devote to thinking about things and reflecting those things.” And so there’s impulsivity that you see with people. If there’s a lot of impulsivity and there’s a lot of disregulation, there’s people who are quick to anger. They probably have a trauma history or grew up in a lot of stress. It’s not because they’re just bad. Understanding that has made me a lot more compassionate.

There were also moments when I felt convicted by what I read, particularly as it concerns our treatment of the poor and the houseless:

Mitch Snyder, a political activist and advocate for homeless people who died a number of years ago, gave a talk once where he said something like, “If somebody’s asking you for a dollar, you don’t have to hand them a dollar, as long as you say something.” If somebody asks you for a handout, don’t feel constrained to give them a nickel. Your constraint is to acknowledge that they have just asked you for a nickel. You can say no, but just don’t ignore that they just asked you for a nickel. People are hungry for acknowledgment of their being, their personhood.

Overall, a pretty good book worth reading by Americans and anyone else.

Having just returned from a visit to NYC, I'm intrigued by this book. Thanks for taking the time to type in the quotes.

>45 labfs39: You're welcome. I actually just copied the text from my reading app!

A Guide to Kobe and Foreign Culture


_{A view from Kitano-cho, Kobe.}

I admit that lately I've been kind of obsessed with places as they exist in my experience, or as destinations in the world yet to be reached. And because summer is here I get to thinking about traveling.

A while ago I came across this book at the local library about the port city of Kobe, Japan. It is the work of various local residents presented in English for foreign readers, and as a kind of celebration of the city's international heritage.

Kobe was one of the first Japanese cities to be opened to foreign trade after the US negotiated a treaty with the isolationist government in the mid-19th century. It has since become the residence of people from around the world, historically from Western powers like France, Germany, and the UK, now more likely from other Asian countries.

This book is parts travel guide and history. In the back are sketches of various historical figures involved in the modernization of the city. Some of their names adorn the Western-style buildings located in the Kitano area, which was known in its time as a hub of foreign merchants and diplomats.

Although the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused widespread damage in the region, the book also serves as a kind of dedication to those who lost their lives and to the recovery of the city. One can get a sense of its cosmopolitan identity from the various places introduced in the book, from the Chinatown to the earthquake memorial, from the mosque to the baumkuchen shop.

Whether it interests other readers or not, I'm glad I was able to find this book and have it mentioned in a way it otherwise wouldn't have.

Selected Poems by Keats

I'm making slow but certain progress in this book of Keats' verses, having read as much as "To Kosciusko," "A Song about Myself," and parts of Endymion, among others. My favorites so far are Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil and Hyperion, which Keats was unable to finish. I admire Keats for his craft and choice of subject matter, but I don't know much about what he is writing. Obviously, he is following the example of poets before him who were versed in Greek and Roman classics. Another way to put it is that the classics were just what people of Keats' time had to know about in order to be accomplished poets and scholars. That said, I don't share Keats' interest in Greek mythology, though his writing about the Titans facing off with the Olympians in Hyperion has a certain persuasiveness to it that I respect. I guess I can expect the same from the other long poems in this selection.

>44 icepatton: A great review. I especially liked this phrasing: "People are hungry for acknowledgment of their being, their personhood."

>47 icepatton: I like how this photograph has captured both, traditional and modern architecture in one vista.

>49 rv1988: "People..." Indeed, it's a powerful statement. It was surprising to me how much wisdom Taylor's contacts had to share.

"I like how this photograph..." The same could be said of many cities in Japan and in other Asian countries.

I've enjoyed reading along with your thoughts on New Yorkers.

>22 icepatton: ... I get to thinking about analogs in other industrialized parts of the world like Tokyo and Honolulu. Places that literally make you sick at the high level of separation from the natural world

This separation of urban people from the natural world is something that worries me a lot. If you're not aware of it, how can you make any decisions about it from a personal or policy level going forward? (I live in a small hamlet.)

>51 SassyLassy: Thank you for your comment.

"This separation..." First of all, it's good that you don't live in a city. I don't know anything about where you live, but I already know from your admission that you have a better connection to the land than I do. You see, I live in a commuter town outside of Osaka, which is as much of a hotbed of mindless consumerism in the form of plastics and electronics as one can imagine.

I assume you're asking about my own situation. I can only speak on a personal level. Writers like Derrick Jensen have opened my eyes to what I have lost as someone who depends on a city, which is doomed to eventually collapse, for survival. I have been made to feel this separation and isolation in ways I had never thought about before. At this point in my reading, I think I know what is in my power to do but I'm just being lazy. For example, how about spending less time in front of a screen and more time growing tomatoes on my back porch? Even little things like this can teach us a great deal about our need for a healthy planet.

I write this post having returned from a three-day weekend in Kagawa, the smallest prefecture in Japan, known for its production of udon noodles. My wife's birthday was last week and we decided to celebrate by visiting Shikoku together for the first time. The trip was more expensive than I anticipated, but the experience was worth it. Getting a closer look of the Seto Inland Sea and its small islands was refreshing.

One of the places we visited was Shōdo Island, off the coast of Takamatsu. The island is famous for its olive groves and soy sauce. It's also known for its curious art installations and the set location for the Shōwa-era film, Twenty-Four Eyes, based on a novel of the same name by Sakae Tsuboi, who grew up on the island.

Although we didn't go to the set location, I became more interested in Tsuboi's life and the circumstances that led her to write Twenty-Four Eyes, her most famous novel about a schoolteacher on the island grappling with the spread of Japanese nationalism during WWII. I added this book to my list, thinking I'll get a better sense from it of life on the island and the impetus of Japan choosing to go to war.

>53 icepatton: Twenty-Four Eyes sounds right up my alley. I'm debating whether to add it to my wishlist now or wait for your review.

>54 labfs39: I don't know when I'll read it. You have a more refined taste in novels, so I'm sure you would at least put it on your wishlist.

Genesis

In this book, I'm getting a wider view of the Age of Discovery and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The first part of the book, a collection of indigenous creation myths and fables, is generically worlds apart from the second, which details the blood-soaked history of colonization at the hands of conquistadors, starting with Columbus' first voyage to the West Indies and moving on to the gold-obsessed careers of Cortés, Balboa, Pizarro, and others in what proves to be a cautionary tale about the price of civilization.

It's interesting to note that the stories in the first part don't have assigned dates to them like the stories in the second part do, suggesting their ageless, unbound quality. Chronologically speaking, I'm currently half a century or so past Columbus' first encounter with the Taíno people of what is now the Bahamas, reading about the Spanish exploitation of the Andean peoples as well as the ideological clashes between the clergy and the military. Galeano continues to impress with his erudition.

Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World

A highly informative book of essays that is filling in the blanks in my understanding of religion in Japan. Of particular note are the sociological assessments of so-called "new religions" that have come to the fore since WWII (most notably, Aum Shinrikyo). It was refreshing to get a historical survey of Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity in the first part of the book. In the second part, it seems I'll be getting a clearer image of the contemporary religious scene.

After some deliberating, I've decided to give Alex Kerr's Lost Japan a try. This is because I find myself agreeing with him more and more about the state of Japanese art and the general lack of concern over the ruin of the Japanese countryside. I believe I had judged a book by its cover by dismissing Kerr's work as the bloviatings of another cloistered white Japanologist. But it seems upon closer inspection that Kerr just cares deeply about art and wrote this book because he hates to see it go to waste.

I think what he will have to say about Kyoto and Nara especially comes from a genuine appreciation of art for art's sake, as he seems to be a modern Langdon Warner (yes, another white American male in Japan, I know). Having read Kerr's preface, I can already tell this book will be a lot better than The Big Elsewhere: Views from a mountainside, which I tried to read a while ago to get a glimpse of "the essence of Japan," if you will, but which turned out to be incredibly boring.

Genesis

In this book, I'm now over a hundred years after Columbus first touched down in the Antilles, and the dramatis personae has expanded to include big names like Cervantes, Walter Raleigh, and Shakespeare. Galeano has been demonstrating in a seemingly endless series of vignettes how all were involved in the exposition of the New World. Indeed, words like "blood," "gold," and "guilt" are impossible to leave out when narrating this pivotal time in world history.

>59 icepatton: This is on my wishlist. Sounds fascinating.

Genesis


_{The earliest known map depicting the Americas, by navigator Juan de la Cosa, not long after Columbus' first voyage to the New World.}

The desire to make money, not to win souls, is what builds empires.

This is a quote from a story in the book about the 16th-century philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who is notorious for his clash with contemporary Bartolomé de Las Casas over the nature of Indians in the Spanish colonies of the Americas, whom the former described as being as different from Spaniards as women are from men, or as monkeys are from humans, while the latter insisted on their common humanity. The quote actually does a lot to describe the tone of the book, in which Sepúlveda finds plenty of company with slave traders, governors, inquisitors, and a whole rogues' gallery of names behind the dirty business of empire.

The story of colonization and resistance is summed up quite nicely in this telegraphic exchange between the conquistador and the Indian in a story about the conquest of New Mexico:

"Surrender."
"I prefer death."
"You'll go to hell."
"I prefer hell."

I actually learned a lot of history from Galeano in this tome of quasi-encyclopedic entries that form a stunning mosaic of colonialism in the New World. While most of the history concerns Galeano's own place in Latin America, I learned quite a bit about the British colonies as well. My favorites were "Whiffs of Virginia in the London Fog," "The Language of Dreams," and the entries about the life of Sor Juana. There are many other highlights to choose from in this 400-page brick.

The demise of Charles II of Spain was a fitting choice to end the book with, though the story picks back up in Galeano's next installment in the trilogy, Faces and Masks. I can't say when I will find time to read it, but suffice to say that Genesis was the best history book I've read in a while.

Because Genesis was such a captivating read, I decided to pick back up The Lost History of Christianity, which I had put aside earlier this year due to its somber tone. I understood from Galeano, however, that while a history may be dark and dismal, one must patiently search through it for moments of redemption (I got the same vibe when reading Debt by David Graeber). With Jenkins' book, I already know how the story is going to endーthe eradication of Christianity in the Eastーbut I hope to get a better sense of the diversity of cultures and societies that existed under early Christianity.

_{The cicada in Japan insists that you know it's summertime, whether your ears are ready or not.}

Yesterday I tried writing a post about my conflicted feelings as a foreign resident in Japan, having seen and heard much in just the past week, but I ended up scrapping it.

Anyway, The Lost History of Christianity is just not as engaging as I thought it would be. And once again I'm slacking off at reading Keats. Lately, I've been plodding through Lost Japan and find it to be rather well-written and constructive. It's a bit of a segue from the essays I read in Religion in Japanese Culture, which I enjoyed.

The Electric Geisha has also been on my radar recently, along with The Philosophy of Punk. Before the year is out, I think I'll have to finish reading Kawabata's The Rainbow before moving on to Tsuboi's Twenty-Four Eyes, or perhaps Nakagami's The Cape and Other Stories. To make good on my intention to finish what I start, I need to go back to Arundhati Roy at some point, along with the anthology of autistic writers, All the Weight of Our Dreams, and other titles before they vanish from my memory.

Lost Japan

This was actually a very good book written by a so-called Japanologist. I can't say I was expecting Kerr's writing to be so perspicacious. One might describe Kerr as a tour guide, or local expert, with a chip on his shoulder: disdain for the apparent lack of appreciation among Japanese people today for their own cultural heritage. Although Kerr does possess a sense of irony about this, the fact of the matter is that he is a foreign national daring to lecture to the natives about their lack of appreciation for Japanese culture, particularly the arts. And while it seems Kerr's own lack of roots in any particular country, owing to his itinerant childhood, or his various credentials could be brought up to justify his position, I can see it being a tough sell for Japanese and foreign readers alike: who is Kerr, a privileged American, to decide what other people should do about their national culture?

That being said, Kerr does have a profound sensibility and understanding of culture to match what Japanese experts may have already said about the so-called decadence of Japanese society today, a theme that I suspect will be taken up further in Dogs and Demons. What kept me reading and nodding my head in agreement to Kerr in Lost Japan, however, was not so much his level of expertise as his critical stance toward the greedy corporations and governments of industrialized countries like Japan that have destroyed the natural beauty of the landbase. He also just writes admirably about the history of the place in Japan I live in, which includes Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. And his overall message of hope makes me wonder if a much more fitting title for the book wouldn't be In Defense of Japanese Art.

So despite its flawed premise, I rather liked this book and will see what he has to say in his other books.

Selected Poems by Keats

... Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade

At a glance, I can tell from Keats' poems where Fitzgerald may have gotten the title for his book, Tender is the Night, or in the case of this poem, "Lamia," where Dawkins got the title Unweaving the Rainbow. The excerpt given here really is a fine example of English poetry and shows how skilled of a poet Keats was. Despite my lack of interest in the source material of most of his poems, Greek mythology and all, I respect the level of dedication he had to poetry as a craft. I enjoyed this book mainly for Keats' artistic vision.

>64 icepatton:

Lost Japan is one of the best travel books I've read. It's been over 25 years, but I still remember the section about (re)thatching the roof and the ramifications he drew from the problems encountered around that (loss of craftsmanship etc.)

Have you read Tanizaki's In praise of shadows? It's probably the most famous (at least in the West) example of the slew of Japanese writing bemoaning the loss of tradition (and possibly somewhat dodgy, given the period it was written) and I always wondered how much that sort of thing influenced japanophiles.

>66 LolaWalser: Thank you for your comment!

No, I haven't read In Praise of Shadows. Or anything by Tanizaki. It certainly influenced Kerr. I'm not sure why it was written, but I think the modernization of Japan was the cultural context, as you say. Have you read it?

The Lost History of Christianity

So long, Mongol and Mamluk invaders. Next stop, the Armenian Genocide (ooh, boy...). So much carnage and bloodshed. So much destruction and death. The story of Eastern Christianity was already going to be sad. Now I suppose the persecution of Christians will reach its climax with Ottoman Turkey. I'm just holding out for what comes after that. What about the Armenian Church today? Are there no pockets of Nestorian resistance in Central Asia? Are there no hidden vaults of Coptic or Ethiopian manuscripts? Once in a while, we may still hear about a random discovery of a long-lost text being sold at a yard sale in Dubai and used as someone's pillow case in Belfast. We know about the Nestorian Stele in China and the rock-hewn churches in Ethiopia. As I'm reading, I'm praying to get some kind of relief in the form of knowledge about these things and how they have stood the test of time.

My reading lately has been quite grim. I've arrived at the eve of the Armenian Genocide in The Lost History of Christianity and Kerr's intrepid investigations in Dogs and Demons have taught me that the power systems of Japan are irredeemably corrupt. I may find some levity in an illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables, which I had cracked open last year but left behind. I can see it being a bit like Genesis or Wildlife, both of which featured lighthearted stories of animals.

Dogs and Demons

I feel like I've really hit a gold mine with this bookーill-gotten gold, that is. There is already so much I can say about it as someone who witnessed the scandals surrounding Fukushima and the Tokyo COVID-lympics, which go to show that the problems of Japanese politics raised in this book don't seem to have changed in any meaningful way since it was published decades ago. One can assume the problems Kerr discussesーthe bloated construction industry, the know-nothing bureaucracy, the pampered ministersーare behind the authoritarian decisions made to put Expo 2025 in Japan, for example. It is evident from this book and my own observations that Japanese leaders are as contemptuous of facts, democracy, and justice as Trump is.

Truly evil stuff.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan


_{A bit of context for the book, and to show how essentially nothing has changed since its publication in the early aughtsーBehold, a giant squid statue built in an impoverished town during COVID-19 with emergency funds! Construction Ministryー1, COVID-19 victimsー0.}

In the ancient Chinese philosophical treatise Han Feizi, the emperor asked a painter, “What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?” The artist replied, “Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy.” By that he meant that simple, unobtrusive things in our immediate environment—like dogs and horses—are hard to get right, while anyone can draw an eye-catching monster. Japan suffers from a severe case of “dogs and demons.” In field after field, the bureaucracy dreams up lavish monuments rather than attend to long-term underlying problems. Communications centers sprout antennas from lofty towers, yet television channels and Internet usage lag. Lavish crafts halls dot the landscape while Japan’s traditional crafts are in terminal decline. And local history museums stand proud in every small town and municipal district while a sea of blighted industrial development has all but eradicated real local history.

Well, I went ahead and read the whole thing, a lamentation of modern Japan that builds on what is explored in Lost Japan. And I came to realize that it isn't simply a privileged white guy whining about "the good old days," moreover, of a national culture that isn't even his. There is still an element of that here, I think, but Kerr makes it clear that the Japanese he has come to know over the years feel the same way about the sacrifice of their country on the altar of greed, and that they have shaped his own thinking as someone who cares deeply about the connection of a people to nature through the arts. Kerr's argument is essentially that a country loses its way when it loses that connection.

Ultimately, an American doesn't get to decide what Japanese people do with their traditions, but Kerr makes it a point that he is in the business of "describing" the problem, and not "prescribing" solutions. It doesn't seem to me that many foreign writers on Japan today have the same level of self-awareness. I had assumed that Lost Japan would be a tiring read, as the title suggests, about how "the book of Japan is so much better than the movie," and so on and so forth from the perspective of an amateur. I'm glad there are writers like Kerr to prove me wrong.

Anyway, more about Dogs and Demons: the best book about Japan I've ever read, written by someone who knows what he's talking about, even as his opinions may ruffle some feathers and not earn him a seat of honor at feasts. As Kerr explains in the prologue:

People writing about Japan make a big mistake if they believe that to gloss over its troubles is to “support Japan” and to point out difficulties is to “attack” or “bash” Japan. Japan is not a monolithic entity.

While he spends much of the time bemoaning the various industries and ministries that have turned Japan into an ugly, concrete monument ("Ozymandias" is even referred to here), his distinction between the foreign enthusiast with rose-colored glasses and the disillusioned Japanese is a crucial one that I think serves as the whole premise of the book. These two ideological camps clashed in a powerful way that Kerr relates in the following anecdote:

As I was walking down the rows of flower arrangements［at a modern ikebana exhibition］, I came across a young American woman who was studying ikebana in Tokyo and her middle-aged Japanese lady friend whom she had brought along to see the show. “Isn’t the Japanese love of nature wonderful?” the American woman commented to me. “I guess so,” I replied. “But I see here some vinyl, here some fiberglass and leaves stapled to painted cardboard. Where’s the nature?” The American ikebana practitioner grew angry. “Treating flowers this way is traditional!” she exclaimed.

The Japanese woman, who had not said a single word, joined in at this point. It turned out that she was not an ikebana practitioner herself; she had come along merely to see the art form that her foreign friend was so enthusiastic about. She had been walking around feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but in such a prestigious location and with her friend oohing and aahing, she had not felt confident in expressing her doubts. Hearing me, she relaxed and gave vent. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “These things are monstrous. This is environmental degradation, that’s what it is!”

Kerr goes on to say that the American woman "was typical of a phenomenon: the foreigner who converts to Japan, as one might convert to a religion," and that the Japanese woman "had a healthy and natural response; she didn’t care about tradition: ugly was ugly. Or, at a deeper level, she instinctively understood what the tradition should have been, and could feel without knowing exactly why that these arrangements were all wrong."

As with Lost Japan, the message of Dogs and Demons is ultimately one of hope and anticipationーfor what Japanese themselves will do to rise against their morally bankrupt government and restore their landbase. In other words, the first two "revolutions" of modern Japan happened when outside forces under Commodore Perry and General MacArthur brought change to Japan, but the "third" one will be at the hands of everyday Japanese instigating change from within. What that change will look like remains to be seen, but the point I believe Kerr is trying to make is that Japanese people are not as childish, servile, and close-minded as foreign commentators have made them out to be. As can be said about politically stalled societies elsewhere, the problem is with the fossils in government who absolutely refuse change, not with the Japanese themselves.

Another round-up of titles in my library:

＊ R-E-A-D ＊ T-H-I-S ＊ Y-E-A-R ＊
ーChildren & Young Adultー
・Aesop's Fables
・A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara
・I'll Always Love You by Hans Wilhelm

ーEssays & Criticismー
・Obey, Not Know: Essays on Japanese Law and Society by business lawyer Colin PA Jones
・Lost Japan & Dogs and Demons by Japanologist Alex Kerr
・The Question of Palestine by professor Edward Said
・Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan by various authors
・Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World by various authors
・Wildlife & 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by translator Eliot Weinberger

ーHistoryー
・Between Heaven and Earth: A History of Chinese Writing by Bo Shi
・Genesis by Eduardo Galeano (the first in the Memory of Fire trilogy)
・American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin E. Park
Started last year:
・Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism by Paul Collins
・Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
・Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i by various authors

ーJournalismー
・The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley
・New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor
Started last year:
・Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath by Eric Talmadge

ーMemoirー
・So Can You by lawyer and speaker Mitsuyo Ohira
・Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt

ーPoetryー
・Be Smaller than Flowers: Paintings, Poems, and Essays by Tomihiro Hoshino
・Selected Poems by John Keats
・Zen Poems of the Five Mountains by David Pollack
・Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan & Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home by Burton Watson
Started last year:
・A Literary Bible: An Original Translation by David Rosenberg

ーReligion & Philosophyー
・Who Can Stop the Wind? Travels in the Borderland between East and West by Notto R. Thelle
・Revolution of Values: Reclaiming the Public Faith for the Common Good by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Started last year:
・Living Life as It Comes: Post-Disaster Reflections of a Zen Priest in Fukushima by Gen'yu Sokyu
・Flowers, Birds, Wind, and Moon: the Phenomenology of Japanese Culture by Seigo Matsuoka
・No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton

ーMiscellaneousー
・(In the Color Book series about Japan: Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka)
・(In the Discover America State by State series:
A is for Aloha: A Hawai’i Alphabet by U’ilani Goldsberry
A is for America: An American Alphabet by Devin Scillian
T is for Tar Heel: A North Carolina Alphabet by Carol Crane)
・(In the Discover the World series:
K is for Kabuki: A Japan Alphabet by Gloria Whelan)
・The Joys of Engrish by Steve Caires
・100 Beautiful Words In The Way Of Tea by Bruce Hamana Sosei
・A Guide to Kobe and Foreign Culture by various authors
・An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Traditional Architecture and Everyday Things by Seiichiro Yamamoto
Started last year:
・Legends of Nara by Kenji Inui
・A Modest Proposal and Other Writings by Jonathan Swift

＊ C-U-R-R-E-N-T-L-Y ＊ R-E-A-D-I-N-G ＊
・Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
・The Art of War by Sun Tzu
・Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by psychologist Mary L. Trump

＊ N-E-W ＊ A-D-D-I-T-I-O-N-S ＊
・The Education of Henry Adams by same
・Another Kyoto by Alex Kerr
・The Prince by Macchiavelli
・The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura
・Twenty-four Eyes by Sakae Tsuboi
・A Day in the Life of Hawaii by various
・Selected Poems of Du Fu & Han Fei Tsu by Burton Watson

What a lovely variety of genres and books

It turns out there is a black sheep in the Trump familyーand a clinical psychologist to boot! I learned about Mary L. Trump's book about his notorious uncle's rise to power after chancing upon a social media post of hers following another episode of his usual theatrics at a press conference. I very much look forward to getting an insider's perspective on the whole con game that is Drumpf's political careerーand a better understanding of sociopaths in general.

>73 labfs39: I appreciate the comment.

Something that struck me as I'm reading The Art of War:

So in the case of those who are skilled in attack, their opponents do not know where to defend. In the case of those who are skilled in defense, their opponents do not know where to attack.

One of my hobbies is table tennis, and this turns out to be a pretty good description of team sports in general. As for playing styles in table tennis, I'm on the defensive side.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

There isn't much for me to say about this book. It's a must-read for understanding the sociopathy of the Trump family and how it reflects the toxic masculinity of American culture. Forthright and courageous, Trump says everything I would have ever thought to say about her fraudulent uncle, especially as he approaches the end of his life and his house of cards starts to wobble.

>71 icepatton: A really thoughtful and detailed review, thanks for sharing. I've met many people with this Japan obsession, chiefly born from anime, and not from any interest or engagement with the culture and history, who find that actually encountering the country is a shock to the imagined version they were holding on to. This sounds like it has a very nuanced take on the subject.

>78 rv1988: Thank you for your comment. I was actually one of the Japan-obsessed, but since coming here I have graduated from that. Kerr is one of those people who would pop someone's bubble, for sure.

As I wait for my students to return from their summer vacation, I've been staving off boredom at my computer at school looking for new books to read (and for some reason, Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" plays in my head as I do this). After several rabbit-hole dives at the Internet Archive, I've come across some pretty fascinating titles:

・Evolution: A Visual Record
・Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged
・Illusion Confusion: The Wonderful World of Optical Deception
・Jesus: A Life
・Mythology: An Illustrated Journey into Our Imagined Worlds
・Patterns of the Earth

I know there will be more to come in this sea of 42 million titles (ones that haven't been copyright-struck, that is). The Internet Archive continues to be a very useful engine for discovering books, and it's just a matter of knowing what filters to use to find one's next read. I think filtering books by their publisher or imprint is a good place to start.

>80 icepatton: Interesting remark about the Internet Archive, I always find to so hard to navigate, but it’s true that it’s full of fun rabbit holes.

Histories of Nations sounds like a great idea, I wishlisted it. In France the nation’s history is a politically fraught story, and I suppose this is true of many countries.

>81 FlorenceArt: Thank you for your comment.

Math was easily my least favorite subject in school, so I wasn't expecting to find Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More by Matt Parker. It seems like a witty, good-humored book for those of us with bitter experiences of math class. The "building block" arrangement of chapters is interesting, too.

Mythology: An Illustrated Journey into Our Imagined Worlds was a kind of crash course for me on mythologies from around the world. I learned a lot about (or was reminded of) Greek and Roman mythologies in particular. It was overall a neat presentation of the classical world, a kind of museum in book form.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

The first aspect ［of mathematics］is hunting down and describing patterns; the second is finding out why those patterns are there and proving they will always work. Finally, all this is done simply for the fun, just for the sheer hell of it.

Parker certainly presents math in a way my teachers in school never did. Starting this book, I'm encountering things I had never seen before like flexagons and Reuleaux triangles (he gives illustrations). So far, I'm most interested in reading about the innovations achieved by Pythagoras, Euclid, and other mathematicians throughout history. For someone who sucks at math, this book looks fun and educational.

>85 icepatton: Ooh, that looks interesting. My math teachers in high school were terrible (my trig teacher used to read romance novels in class after he gave out the day's assignment).

>86 labfs39: That's funny! My math teachers all just seemed to be bad at teaching kids...

_{The Beijing National Aquatics Center, used during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The Weiare-Phelan structure, itself based on a geometrical study of foam, was the basis of this "Water Cube" design. Parker has a selfie taken in front of the building in his chapter on mathematical packing problems.}

I just feel like passing along this image as I get deeper in Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension (I had wanted to go back to Histories of Nations on the Internet Archive, but it is no longer accessible, unfortunately). This is turning out to be a lively, entertaining book about math. I could bring it up as an example of what a writer can do to make a dull subject interesting for disenchanted readers. Granted, Parker is also a comedian, but I get the sense as well that mathematicians are humorous and witty.

Going forward, I'll have to be on the lookout for Parker's one-liners. Here is an example:

When life gives you oranges, make a tetrahedron.

>88 icepatton: Ok, now I have to read the book!

>89 labfs39: You may like it for the wittiness!

I found a new book to read about hip hop, in memory of the legendary battle rapper, Pat Stay, who was tragically stabbed to death on this day in 2022. I've always wanted to read #Bars: the Evolution of Battle Rap in the Internet Age ever since I discovered the art of battle rap on YouTube, but copies of books like these are scarce. For a long time, battle rap was the only expression of poetry that made sense to me (despite all the vulgarity), and it has been a portal for me not only to the culture of hip hop, which defines much of the fashion of young people today, but to the contemporary strains of American culture. For an American living in another country, battle rap has been a way for me to keep in touch with the American political scene as well as put my own cultural background in perspective. I'm a suburban geeky white guy (with a receding hairline) who believes the content of battle rap videos showcases the diversity of American culture.

So it's a bit odd that this book I found, Hip Hop Stylography: Street Style and Culture, is an English translation of an Italian publication, but it looks well-researched and -presented. It looks like a textbook for a hip hop course in college. I'm glad I can finally start reading about something I've only ever been able to watch in private.

I've also been reading Another Kyoto on the side. It's not as accessible as Kerr's other books, but it shows the real depth of his knowledge not only of Japanese culture, but of the history of neighboring countries like China as they have shaped Japanese culture by way of architecture, painting, music, religion, and other fields. The city of Kyoto is brought into focus due to its long history in the development of these fields in Japan, even in the face of Western modernization.

I've also recently re-discovered the card game, Magic: The Gatheringーthough I never actually learned to play it or understood the rules. It just represents a time in my life when I was heavily into fantasy fiction and world-building. I dreamed of creating my own world as I saw it done with games like World of Warcraft and the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire. My ideas for writing a fantasy novel or building a world never quite got off the ground, but I once took inspiration from the artwork and snippets of lore from Magic: The Gathering cards. My recent reading about math in Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension kind of dovetails with a book I found out about and bought right away, Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering, since mathematically inclined people were involved in the creation of the game.

Although I quite can't wrap my head around such a game, it's still kind of amusing to read or hear commentary about it, just as one would listen with interest to experts who know what they're talking about and who are passionate about it, whatever it is. By reading Generation Decks, I don't think I'll get a better understanding of a game I never particularly cared about, so much as indulge a bit in the nostalgia behind it (Magic: The Gathering was created not long after I was born in 1990). It's also helpful that the book is written by a fan of the game.

To get myself in the mood for Halloween, I have some titles lined up that have been on my to-read list for a while now. By the way, I finished Capitalism: A Ghost Story recently, but it wasn't so much a ghost story as a cautionary tale about India. I find 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep to be more suitable based on the following passage, which seems to be straight out of a psychological horror film:

It is important to note that the treatment of so-called “high-interest” prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere combined explicit forms of torture with complete control over sensory and perceptual experience. Inmates are required to live in windowless cells that are always lit, and they must wear eye and ear coverings that block out light and sound whenever they are escorted out of their cells to preclude any awareness of night and day, or of any stimulus that could provide cues to their whereabouts. This regime of perceptual deprivation often extends to routine daily contact between prisoners and guards, during which the latter are fully armored, gloved, and helmeted with one-way Plexiglas visors so that the prisoner is denied any visible relation to a human face, or even an inch of exposed skin. These are techniques and procedures for producing abject states of compliance, and one of the levels on which this occurs is through the fabrication of a world that radically excludes the possibility of care, protection, or solace.

I can't imagine surviving such a regime that the US government has in fact inflicted on certain Middle Eastern prisoners. This story is all the more haunting because it is real. But this is not to exclude Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination or The Snow Ghost and Other Tales, a collection of Japanese ghost stories. I started Tales of Mystery and Imagination a while ago but didn't get very far. The last story I read in this particular edition was "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which was quite spooky. The next story will be "Ms. Found in a Bottle." I think I should read everything else before moving on to The Snow Ghost and Other Tales.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More by Matt Parker

I would be remiss if I limited my response to this book to taking Parker's sense of humor out of context. For example, when he states, "Mathematicians still have much to learn about kissing," without referring to his explanations of sphere packing, or what is known as a "kissing number" for how spheres (whether they be cannonballs or oranges) would contact each other in a confined space. I actually learned quite a lot about math in this book, particularly about the history of math and how mathematical knowledge has shaped our understanding of the universe. I also liked Parker's ideas for recreational math activities, namely the use of falling dominoes to illustrate how electronic circuits make calculations. Although many things about math are still too abstract for me, I applaud Parker's efforts at making the subject more accessible. Overall, this was a pretty fun book.

_{The snug interior of CC's in Kyoto, established in 1974.}

Staying in Kyoto this past weekend, I became interested in the life of Cid Corman, a poet and magazine editor from the Beat Generation whom I chanced across on the Internet Archive. What interested me about him was the fact that he opened up a cafe in Kyoto called CC's, which is still in operation since he passed away in 2004. Although famous for its American homemade pies and cakes, it seems to be on its last legs. The Japanese couple who run the place look to be well into their 80s, if not 90s. Eating there was thus a bittersweet experience for me. I couldn't help but feel like I had gone back in time to enjoy the last moments of a history and culture that everyone has forgotten. I want to go back there before some heartless developer buries it in concrete.

By the way, some updates from my library:

＊ R-E-C-E-N-T-L-Y ＊ F-I-N-I-S-H-E-D ＊
ーHistoryー
・Another Kyoto by Alex Kerr

ーJournalismー
・Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy
・Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

ーMath & Scienceー
・Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More by Matt Parker

ーReligion & Philosophyー
・Mythology: An Illustrated Journey Into Our Imagined Worlds by Christopher Dell
・Echoes from the Bottomless Well by Frederick Franck
・The Art of War by Sun Tzu

＊ C-U-R-R-E-N-T-L-Y ＊ R-E-A-D-I-N-G ＊
ーHistoryー
・Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged by various

ーJournalismー
・Hip Hop Stylography: Street Style and Culture by Adrianna Piazza

ーMath & Scienceー
・Nothing: From Absolute Zero to Cosmic Oblivion, Amazing Insights into Nothingness by various

ーMystery & Horrorー
・Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

＊ N-E-W ＊ A-D-D-I-T-I-O-N-S ＊
ーClassicsー
・Metamorphoses by Ovid

ーEssays & Criticismー
・24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
・Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop by Michael Eric Dyson

ーHistoryー
・Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering by Titus Chalk
・A History of Warfare by John Keegan

ーMath & Scienceー
・Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life by various

ーReligion & Philosophyー
・Cave Of Tigers: Modern Zen Encounters by John Daido Loori
・Blues of the Sky: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Psalms by David Rosenberg
・The Sermon of All Creation: Christians on Nature by various
・Jesus: A Life by A. N. Wilson

(((Books Put On Hold)))
ーEssays & Criticismー
・A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt

ーHistoryー
・The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died by Philip Jenkins

I recently finished a collection of popular science articles about Nothing from the magazine New Scientist and it was pretty interesting. I'm reading Tales of Mystery and Imagination more slowly, but since my last mention of it I got through "A Descent into the Maelstrom" and "The Black Cat." So far, I like "The Black Cat" the most. I remember reading "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Tell-Tale Heart" in high school, so I look forward to those. I've read over half of Histories of Nations and enjoy it so far; I look forward to the essay on Japan.

I recently finished Histories of Nations and rather liked it. The choice of countries to include in a list for a book like this one would no doubt be curious to readers wanting to read about New Zealand, but getting Australia instead, for example. While this book is well-intentioned, it's certainly not for everyone. The modern format makes it appealing, though.

I've also read Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" in Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I thought the former was a lot spookier. Next up is "The Premature Burial."

Just yesterday, I found out about 27 Views of Raleigh: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry, an anthology of local writers that I look forward to reading at some point (one of my literature professors at NC State, Elaine Neil Orr, happened to make a contribution). The same publisher is behind The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, which I've had on my to-read list for a while now.

Having had my interest in scientific studies piqued by Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, I've gone back to Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by ethologist Frans de Waal, who I'm sorry to see passed away earlier this year. He also seems to have the wit and sense of humor to make his particular field of study more approachable.

The other day, NHK aired a special segment on their news channel to mark one year since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, highlighting the devastation suffered by Palestinians like Izzeldin Abuelaish, whose three daughters and niece were killed during the Gaza War in 2009. It's only rarely that I find a new book to read by watching TV (especially in Japan, where most of the "news" one gets in the morning is corporate-sponsored ads for consumerist products and celebrity worship, in between more of such ads), but that's how I found out about Abuleish's memoir, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity. I don't know when I'll read it, but I already know people of moral strength and character like him are in very short supply in this political climate.

>100 icepatton: I Shall Not Hate is an exceptional book. I highly recommend it.

>101 labfs39: Thank you.

_{Once again, I stumbled across a book that no one seems to know about.}

Unfortunately, the Internet Archive has been down for the past several days due to a DDOS attack. While the situation seems to be under control, there are some books and publishers in mind that I had been wanting to check out on the website. I recently found a book that doesn't seem to be on any of the searchable databases on LibraryThing, an English edition of The Country where Turtles Cry: Climate and Poetry of Japan by literary critic Susumu Nakanishi. I'm pretty sure it won't be on The Internet Archive once it turns back on, which means I'll have to order a copy. I'll add it to LibraryThing if I can. I'm sure it will be worth reading, since I enjoyed reading The Japanese Linguistic Landscape, also by Nakanishi, earlier this year.

Dwelling on the likelihood of another Trump presidency, and just thinking about the kind of person he is, I'm reminded of an exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Anderson Cooper on a CNN broadcast shortly after the death of Jerry Falwell in 2007. Among the many salvos he fired at Christians in general, Hitchens had the following to say about Falwell in particular:

The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend.

To Cooper's surprise, he goes on to say:

H: The fact is, the country suffers to a considerable extent from paying too much by way of compliment to anyone who could describe themselves as a person of faith: Jimmy Swaggart, Tim HaggardーChaucerian fraudsーpeople who are simply pickpockets, and frauds, who prey on the gullible...

C: Do you think ［Falwell］ believed what he spoke?

H: Of course not. He woke up every morning, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, "I got away with it again!"

C: Really? Whether or not you agree with his reading the Bible, you don't believe he was sincere in what he spoke?

H: No. I think he was a conscious charlatan, bully, and fraud. I think if he read the Bible at allーand I doubt he could actually read any long bookーthat he did so in only the most hucksterish, Bible-pounding way.

Hitchens closes by tying the bow on a profile of someone that in many ways applies equally to Trump:

Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they are a person of faith.

Granted, the context for this whole exchange was Falwell's political and religious legacy as a reverend (as well as the publication of Hitchens' book God is Not Great), but replace "Reverend" with "President" and I believe you'll have a perfect description of Trump's legacy. While he is definitely not a minister like Falwell was, many people seem to think he is deeply religious, even the incarnation of Moses. At the risk of putting people on here in a bitter mood, I believe next month will show whether my country really is as stupid and delusional as stupid and delusional can get.

>104 icepatton: Many of us here think as you do. I do not understand those people who revere Trump and who appear to believe that he has the support of the Christian god.

We can only hope he’s not elected, but even if this is the case, that we don’t get another Jan 6, or worse.

>105 kjuliff: Thank you for chiming in.

Still singing the DDOS blues as the Internet Archive remains offline. I read "The Premature Burial" by Poe, but I probably won't be able to read all his stories by Halloween. I've actually spent a lot of time reading 27 Views of Raleigh, which has highlighted for me the importance of knowing where you come from (in my case, the Piedmont region of North Carolina, although without a Southern accent).

So I haven't had as much time for Halloween-related reads as I would have liked. Maybe I'll get around to 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep in anticipation of an extra season of horror with the re-election of Drumpf, if that is what ends up happening (it's already scary to believe it's true, given the logical outcome of his constant failing up the ladder in life and the dysfunctional system that allows it).

By the way, my copy of The Country where Turtles Cry: Climate and Poetry in Japan came in today and I've added it to the LT database (that itself was kind of fun).

A post about music (and a Bible verse), if I may. Today I've had the song, "With You Smile," stuck in my head, one of the songs being rehearsed at my school for the Chorus Contest next week. The lyrics are in Japanese, and I only know them briefly, but the beauty and uplift of the melody are enough to bring tears to my eyes. It makes me think of the love that couples have for each other, and of all the hard times my wife and I have gone through both individually and as a couple, striving toward a better future (I wish I could post the song here; it's on YouTube).

The message of the song is essentially along those lines, something about the staying power of relationships despite adversity. I guess it also reflects the somewhat fragile state of my mental health at the moment as I anticipate another season of challenges ahead (preparations for a new job next year and communication hurdles at my current job). I've also been reading the Bible a bit more. At the risk of sounding preachy, I've always been drawn to the words of Jesus in John 16: "I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” Whatever happens, I just pray for love and peace to be there ahead of me.

>108 icepatton: A lovely message. In the world you have tribulation indeed. I wish we may all find peace in the days and weeks ahead, but I'm not hopeful. Perhaps I need to listen to the song. I'll go look on YouTube.

>109 labfs39: Thank you, Lisa.

_{Looking back at how Raleigh has changed since I left for Japan in 2017, I'm glad to see the local cafe, Cup of Joe, hasn't been bulldozed to make room for "student housing."}

The Internet Archive has been back online since last week, albeit in a kind of safe mode (https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive). That means logging in to actually check out books (ones that aren't in the public domain, that is) is not allowed currently. But that's still a lot better than having zero access.

Not to jinx anything, but I actually had a dream the other night that Kamala Harris was elected president (not without threats of violence from the Trump campaign, of course). I feel a bit like how I felt in late 2016, between having a car accident in October and witnessing the rise of Trump in November, when dreams and nightmares all kind of clashed together and it was hard to know who to listen to anymore.

Last week, I finished 27 Views of Raleigh and enjoyed reading about the city of my college years. There wasn't a lot in the book that spoke directly to my experience of the City of Oaks, but I have fond memories of the local bookstore, Quail Ridge Books, which, as Bridgette A. Lacy explains in her piece, "A Literary Place," was once known as Quail Corners before it moved to a shopping center near my university and changed its name. It actually moved again to an upscale neighborhood not long before I graduated with my Master's in 2016 (I even applied for a part-time job there but was turned down).

I could go on a tangent about the places most familiar to me as a former Raleigh resident, but the places of interest in the book are mostly historical sites downtown (North Carolina being a former Confederate state and a battleground in the civil rights movement). So I learned quite a bit about the history of Raleigh and about places in the city I never spent much time in.

_{A portrait of Puss in Boots by Russian painter, Nicholas Kalmakoff.}

Happy Halloween! I briefly revisited "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe, having been focusing more on his stories I haven't read beforeー"The Imp of the Perverse," for example. I just finished "The Island of the Fay," but I still have a long way to go in this collection. "The Black Cat" is still one of my favorites.

The above painting has nothing to do with Poe, but I think it is a fitting image for this season of Halloween. Kalmakoff was little known in his time, but he has somewhat of a cult following today for his surreal and evocative (and kind of spooky) paintings.

I have a confession: I didn't vote. I could write another post complaining about Trump 2.0, but there is no escaping the simple fact that I didn't vote (for the record, I didn't vote in 2020, either). I realize that living abroad is a poor excuse to distance myself from the political process. I just shake my head and wag my finger without really knowing the level of privilege I have to be able to choose to opt out of a democratic election. This is before we even get to how much better or worse one presidential candidate is compared to the other (then again, I'm reminded of the politically charged episode of South Park in which voters at the elementary school are given the choice between Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich for the new school mascot).

I can look at what Facebook friends in the States have posted about Republicans or Democrats, and how both parties have shifted so far to the right, but I can be pretty sure that at least they voted. In all this, I can't help but feel like I'm sitting on my hands as the world burns and Palestinians are slaughtered. Who cares what I want to read or write about? I might as well be in my own little world.

Be that as it may, I do feel it is necessary to think of what to read in response to the election. I believe books like Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right and The Making of Donald Trump are still hot. I highly recommend Mary L. Trump's Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.

I recently read through Michael Eric Dyson's Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop and enjoyed it. His more recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, may be what I read from him next. I'm also interested in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, who also wrote Strangers in Their Own Land. Since his publication of The Making of Donald Trump, David Cay Johnson has written two more books targeting Trump, but I'm not particularly interested.

Now, if only it were possible to vote by reading books...

A bit of fresh air in this political miasma: I'm super excited about a belated birthday present from my brother; I finally got my hands on a copy of #Bars: The Evolution of Battle Rap in the Internet Age. It's been a hobby of mine since coming to Japan, in somewhat of a paradox, to watch other Americans spar with each other in rap battles, which the author explains, "pit combatants, usually two at a time, against one another in a contest to see who can do a better job of insulting his or her opponent in rhyme form." ("Insult" here is a bit on the nose, since many battlers who become good friends over the years may only put on a show of despising each other for the sake of a rap battle, but I digress.)

Just by opening the book, I'm intrigued by the long list of names of famous battlers and associates whom O'Leary features in what he claims to be "the most comprehensive history of battle rap ever assembled"ーa list including people like James McCall (a.k.a. Nocando) and Peter Morris (a.k.a. The Saurus), whose likeness is featured on the back cover. Indeed, they are "The Voices" for what seems to be the whole content of the bookーeveryone listed having some space for commentary or reminiscence about the artform and of hip hop culture at large (and, of course, not all of them are Americans). As someone who has watched many of their videos on YouTube, I'm very much looking forward to reading what they have to say.

>113 icepatton: I read this post with interest several days ago, but have forgone responses to political posts as it is too raw. I will say that Hochschild's books sound interesting and might help me grasp why certain groups of people vote as they do, as I just don't get it. I'll see if my library has either.

I don't mean to be rude but, since you freely posted about it, I don't understand why didn't you vote? Given that you clearly don't seem indifferent to what is happening.

>116 LolaWalser: Because I'm totally disgusted by everything.

>111 icepatton: It's been very troubling, following what is happening with the Internet Archive. I agree that limited access is better than the archive going dark, but I am not hopeful about the judicial decisions that may eventually end it.

>118 rv1988: I didn't post about it, but the Internet Archive has been back to normal for a while now. Let's hope it stays that way!

An addendum: my brother actually sent me three other books for my birthday, which are Hanif Abdurraqib's essay collection They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us, Rick Ruben's The Creative Act, and a modern translation of a book from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Unseen Warfare. Of these three, I'm most interested in Abdurraqib's book.

My brother's birthday is not long after mine, so I ordered two books for him as well: Chris Hedges' When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists and Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century. I'd recommend Hedges to anyone struggling to come to terms with the insanity that has swept the US. My brother works for the army and I pray for his safety.

I look forward to your take on They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

I'm still reading Poe at a snail's pace. It's way past Halloween, but I mean to finish this collection of stories before the year is out. The other day, I finished reading the first chapter of the long essay, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, a sobering look at what we have sacrificed by letting machines dictate how we perceive our environment. I also finished an early chapter in Frank de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, a book about ethology. I won't be able to finish these books until next year, however, as I'm more interested in #Bars and They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us.

In other news, the first book I read on the Internet Archive after it went back online (and enabled user logins) was a photo essay from the early '80s, A Day in the Life of Hawaii. My wife and I will be going to Hawaii again next month for the year-end holidays, and I've been interested in learning more about life on the islands. Actually, friends from Oahu came to Japan recently and gave us a bag of goodies. Even before going back there to stuff our faces with malasadas and pancakes or whatever, we may gain a few pounds. It would be a Christmas present to myself if I find a copy of Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands at a local bookstore.

I’ve been terrible this year and just zoomed through your entire thread, composed over several months, in about ten minutes. You have a fantastic rich thread and I’m sorry i didn’t visit sooner.

Zooming through i saw Keats! You’re reading Keats! I just read an introduction to him and finished in a swoon. What a character and what an era. Now I must read more Keats. And his letters, I must read them too. Have you read any letters?

Anyway, carry on. Keep at it. Enjoy Poe. Enjoy Hawaii.

>121 kidzdoc: I appreciate the comment.

>123 dchaikin: What do you mean, terrible? Anyway, thank you for your compliment. You don't need to apologize.

Yes, I read a selection of Keats' poems. No, I haven't read his letters. Should I?

>125 icepatton: the author of the book i read would say, yes, you should Keat’s letters. 🙂 Apparently they are very open and playful with sketches of poetry, some written as he wrote the letters, and only ever found there

Lately, there have been a few books that I had put on my to-read list a while ago, but I've chosen to drop them due to a lack of interest:

・Cave Of Tigers: Modern Zen Encounters
・The Lost Wolves of Japan
・Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine

Of course, this isn't the first time it's happened and there may be many other examples. In this case, I just don't see when I would get to any of these books and read them all the way through. As for Cave of Tigers, I don't feel like I'm in the target readership after all, though I do have an abiding interest in Zen poetry and philosophy. Reports from the Zen Wars: The Impossible Rigor of a Questioning Life was outstanding when I first read it a year or two ago and its central question, "Whatever you do will not doーwhat do you do?" still occupies my mind to this day.

As for The Lost Wolves of Japan, I believe people like Alex Kerr and Derrick Jensen have already articulated what Walker seems to take up in this book about modern Japan and particularly the baneful effects of industrial civilization on wildlife (in this case, the extinction of the Japanese wolf). In other words, I believe I already know a lot about what Walker has to say in this book, and I don't think it will be worth my time to sit through another 500 pages of indictment.

The British philosopher, John Gray, mentioned Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety in his latest book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism, which I read last year. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans & Other Animals is still one of my favorite books, and I pay attention whenever Gray has something to say about history, science, and religion. Although I'm interested in the subject matter of this book he mentions, it seems rather dated, and I'm sure there are many other books worth checking out when it comes to the sea change in religious thinking in the Roman world.

>117 icepatton:

I sympathise. Do you think that explains the millions of (supposedly) Democrat voters not turning out for Harris?

As this confounding year draws to a close, things have actually been great as far as books are concerned. I, for one, am excited to hear that Daniel Tammet has written a new book about the lives of people on the spectrum. Ever since my diagnosis of Asperger's in high school, Tammet has been one of the few authors with whom I can say I have grown up alongside. I loved Born on a Blue Day and have read each one of his books with gusto (the ones written in English, that is). I said this before, but I wish there could be an English translation of his Fragments de paradis. I wouldn't mind reading his novel, Mishenka, either.

>128 LolaWalser: To paraphrase a Facebook friend of mine: the reason why Kamala Harris lost is because Democrats refuse to address any actual problems in the US. People are living paycheck to paycheck. Nobody can afford to have kids. Muslims and Arabs in Dearborn, MI are watching Kamala Harris slaughter their families (in the Middle East). Dems act like it's all going just fine. I still don't know any actual policies from Harris besides, "I'm not Trump." That's not good enough. People are hurting. Trump was the one who gave people COVID checks. Trump was the one who did a rent freeze. Like, what did they think was going to happen? People need help. Bernie beat Hillary in every single swing state, and Dems didn't take any lessons from that at all. He offered a way out, and this party crushed his movement, so now we're in the fascist timeline. A far right populist coming to power when people are barely surviving is the most predictable thing in history. This is going to keep happening unless Democrats move left and actually try to help people, but they're gonna take one look at this and go, "We gotta be more racist." It's insane.

>130 icepatton: but… but… that’s all so random and so half-true as to be essentially entirely untrue. 🙁 Anyway… I’m not here for politics. Good luck to your fb friend

_{Ah, yesーthe mosh pit. Nothing like a mass of flailing limbs and drop D tuned guitars to bash your face in.}

It is easy to be black and non-confrontational if nothing is on fire, and so it has never been easy to be black and non-confrontational.

If I were to summarize They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us with a single quote, I might go with this one, but then I wouldn't be doing justice to this powerful collection of essays by the Ohioan poet Hanif Abdurraqib. Although I didn't ask for it, my brother was wise to send it to me as a birthday gift, and I'm glad he didーnot only does Abdurraqib speak to my experience growing up in American suburbia at the turn of the millennium, he has also dropped some heavy gems to my understanding of race relations in the US, especially in light of Trump's election.

The above image actually has little to do with what Abdurraqib talks about in the book, but he does include essays about alternative rock and emo bands, namely Fall Out Boy and Cute Is What We Aim For, the former having been a lot more commercially successful (and hence subject to criticism). My brother, Abdurraqib, and I could well have been at the same shows at the noisy, smelly bar down the street where numerous forgettable bands vied with each other for a slice of the commercial pie. Their music became something that Abdurraqib writes about as a well-meaning critic with a touch of nostalgia. Simply put, a lot of the bands we listened to in high school weren't that great, and many of them were actually terrible, yet we all blush at the memory of who we were and what we liked as teenagers.

This book speaks to me about something both Abdurraqib and I have in common: suburban rage. However, Abdurraqib sets himself apart by relating his experiences as a black man from a Muslim household in post-9/11 white suburbia, later on having to deal with such travesties as the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the rise of Trump. I may be as white and corny as the next guy, but I'd say essays like "They Will Speak Loudest of You after You've Gone" are must-reads for people grappling with the certainty of a fascist state under Trump. They are also just very good examples of writingーAbdurraqib is a very good and sane writer, reminding me of when I first read the essays of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I look forward to getting more cultural commentary from him in future collections.

>132 icepatton: I had this book on my radar, thanks for a wonderful review.

>130 icepatton:

Thank you for indulging graciously my curiosity. I can't disagree with anything you say. I'm ambivalent about not voting, but not being American, it's not up to me to judge that choice. It would be necessary, however, for your compatriots to FINALLY take note of it (instead of blaming the non-existent "far left", scapegoating minorities etc.)

Even a hopelessly bourgeois rag like the NY Times, hellbent on defending the idea that capitalism and American so-called "democracy" are doing fine until the last tree standing, published this yesterday:

Democrats, It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Our Neoliberal Era

Since I'm not sure the link will work for all, here are some excerpts (bold emphasis is mine):

(...) The numbers don’t lie: This was a rejection of our party’s leadership.

How did we get here?

The contemporary Democratic Party emerged from the “greed is good” era of the 1980s in part by co-opting pieces of the Reagan agenda. President Bill Clinton built a coalition — part working class, part Wall Street — that led Democrats back to the White House without redefining the political system. The limitations of this “third way” came to a head during the long recession following the financial crisis, when the party was tasked with charting a new direction. The truth is, it never did. (...)

Rather than create an agenda intimately tied to the people’s pain, the Democratic establishment helped rescue the institutions that had just pushed the economy to the brink of collapse, further cementing the public’s view that our political and economic system was rigged for the rich and powerful. (...)

This presents an opportunity for Democrats, but only if we are willing to challenge the systems and institutions that have caused Americans to lose faith in government. Our philosophy must make clear that the real threat to democracy is widening economic inequality and the colossal power of big money in politics. (...)

It's disheartening that even this much tepid effort will probably fail. The comfy people simply will not admit that misery is increasing for most... or they couldn't care less.

>132 icepatton:

That was an interesting read for me too, although it's even more foreign (not male, American, suburban, and ignorant of virtually 100% of the music mentioned, to say nothing of basketball). He brought out the social and political aspects of the topics.

I think my reading for 2024 is pretty much done. I'm still nowhere near the end of Tales of Mystery & Imagination, but I'm not about to rush through it for the sake of a "reading challenge" or whatever. I am about halfway through #Bars: The Evolution of Battle Rap in the Internet Age and can easily finish it in the next few weeks.

So I guess that's what I'll be doing as the page turns on 2024. As for next year, I don't have any reading plans and merely want to discover more books while reading whatever catches my eye. Nor do I much care about literary prizes or lists of winners. The Internet Archive has been such a valuable resource for me. My method of discovering more books has simply been the digital equivalent of browsing the bookshelves at any old corner store. The challenge of the Internet Archive has been knowing what search filters to use to navigate its sea of millions of titles. I've found that searching by a book's publisher or imprint brings up a lot of potentially good reads.

Because the year is winding down, it only seems right to go over my favorite books read this year according to their genre. I will have more to say about them in future posts.

>134 LolaWalser: Thank you for sharing the news article.

I believe Abdurraqib can speak to someone like yourself because he comes across as someone who knows what he's talking about and who has endured much. And he is truly razor-sharp with his pen.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Children & Young Adult: Aesop's Fables

For me, these were worth reading alongside Eliot Weinberger's Wildlife and Galeano's Genesisーalso featuring stories about animals with a moralーbecause who doesn't remember "The Tortoise and the Hare" or "The Boy who Cried Wolf?" I'm glad I could revisit my childhood, in a way, by reading these classic stories.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Essays & Criticism (contested):
・They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us: Essays by poet Hanif Abdurraqib
・Obey, Not Know: Essays on Japanese Law and Society by business lawyer Colin PA Jones
・Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan by Japanologist Alex Kerr
・The Question of Palestine by professor Edward Said

All of these books were excellent and it is impossible to choose just one. Abdurraqib's book is freshest in my mind and easily serves as the exclamation mark for the end of the year. For some reason, the neighborhood I lived in during my college years came to mind as I finished the book. Many of the national topics that Abdurraqib speaks on (the careers of pop artists treading the color line, Black Lives Matter, Drumpf) were resounding as I packed my bags for Japan. Most recently, the leonine roar of Kendrick Lamar at the start of the music video for his hit single, "Alright," which Abdurraqib mentions in his essay, "Tell 'Em All to Come and Get Me," has cut through all the bullsh*t surrounding current presidential politics. All I can say in response is, the world needs fewer soldiers and more artists like Lamar and Abdurraqib.

Jones' book, which I read early this year, is one of the few I've come across that takes off the fetishist-colored glasses that many Western writers seem to wear for their "interpretations" of Japan and throws them in the trash. As a well-spoken lawyer with a successful career in Japan, Jones doesn't hold any punches when it comes to stating uncomfortable truths about legal issues in Japan that have international impactーthe bitter custody battles with Japanese divorcees over the children of foreign parents, for example. Jones' cynical wit also comes to the fore in essays like, "The LDP’s Comic Appeal for Constitutional Change Falls Flat," in which he exposes the thinly veiled contempt that the Japanese government seems to have for the average citizen in its dumbing down of serious matters like constitutional reform with cartoon characters that border on the grotesque. Again, I say this about Jones, Japan needs more published writers and thinkers like him, Japanese or other.

I'm not sure how I decided to read Kerr, or if it was simply a misjudgment on my part to not have read his work until now. I had assumed that Kerr was a boring Japanologist like all the others I see lining the bookshelves in every major bookstore. Boy, was I wrong! While Kerr is not your usual expat writer in Japan, his books are unapologetically critical of the way Japan has sacrificed its art and traditions for the sake of modernization (a phenomenon which has afflicted other Asian countries and former Western colonies, to be sure). Although many Japanese before him have made the same arguments, Kerr writes with the authority of someone who loves art and nature, meaning that he hates to see these things go to waste as they seem to have in modern Japan, despite their place of reverence in world history. So this book was not what I expected, in the best possible way. I don't recommend it to anyone who has never been to Japan, however. Kerr shouldn't have to spoil anyone's plan to enjoy what Japan still has to offer for the curious visitor.

As Israel proudly violates Palestine with impunity even now, I knew earlier this year that I needed to return to Said to read this monolithic essay, which has stood the test of time since it was first published in the late '70s. And this is because many of the same problems we hear about today in US-Israeli-Palestinian relations were present in Said's time, starting with the very definition of Palestine and the problem of how Palestinians, as minor as they may seem in world affairs, would have others see them. I'm no expert on politics in the Middle East, but Israel today may as well be repeating the same dictum that Said identified, that Palestinians never really existed and that there can be no such thing as Palestine. As an ethnic Palestinian with a critically trained mind, Said does an outstanding job of presenting one of the thorniest political topics of our time.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

History: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano

The philosopher and activist Derrick Jensen drew my attention to this book in one of his vlogs on YouTube. I had also been wondering where to start when it comes to reading about South America. The Age of Discovery seemed like the proper context for approaching Galeano and the history of the Americas, which he lays out here in stark relief. An outstanding work of research and storytelling.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Journalism: New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor

I'm still reading #Bars, which is itself a fine piece of journalism, but I'm willing to concede to this book about New York. #Bars is only loosely connected in that New York is the birthplace of hip hop, and the city proves to be so much more than that. I remember checking out various places in the city as I was reading this remarkable collection of stories and interviews by Taylor of the people who live there. The stories of resilience by survivors of COVID-19 were the highlight for me. Of course, I want to visit New York again someday, just as I enjoyed my unexpected stay in Montreal, another great northern city, a couple of years ago.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Memoir: So Can You by lawyer and speaker Mitsuyo Ohira

I came across this book at a local library in Osaka, where for the longest time I had no idea there were English-language books available. I'm glad I could find this kind of book from a Japanese publisher, though it may no longer be in bookstores and be unknown to most people. This memoir about Ohira's decision to become a lawyer, despite her lack of education and all the terrible things that happened to her, was pretty inspiring. I appreciate the philosophy of "getting revenge by living well," which is essentially Ohira's message to her readers, particularly those who have gotten the short end of the stick in life.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Poetry: Zen Poems of the Five Mountains by David Pollack

I don't normally read poetry. Just sitting down to read a book of poetry never made much sense to me, when I could more easily listen to the lyrics of a song or the bars on a hip hop track. No doubt, there is a high level of artistry in Keats' verses, but to me, poetry is more attractive when performed. That being said, the draw of Zen poetry is exactly in its lack of performance or flairーto the contrary, it aims to eliminate the presence of the conflicted poet in order to reveal things as they really are. This calls for a certain level of discipline in the poet through rigorous Zen training, which this compilation of poetry does a good job of presenting for a general readership. The poems are highly visual and seem to mean more than they let on, such that the self seems entirely absorbed by the surrounding cosmos. To me, this was poetry in its most distilled and most potent form.

_{Noah Weston, a.k.a. Soul Khan, one of the best to ever do it, was who first got me interested in battle rap.}

In this rare treat of a book, #Bars: the Evolution of Battle Rap in the Internet Age, I learned more about the nitty-gritty of battle rap, from the streets and parks across America where the first battles took place, to the live shows where emcees battled each other on stage to a beat, to the high-production acapella format on YouTube that I'm most familiar with. O'Leary does a pretty good job overall of orchestrating interviews with some of the top battlers in the world to present a history of the artform, in which Soul Khan is admittedly a minor figure.

A lot of what I had known about battle rap before reading didn't come into play until about the last third of the book, when the heady success of the World Rap Championships in the mid-aughts gave way to the Grind Time (USA), King of the Dot (Canada), and Don't Flop (the UK) battle leagues, which had to adapt to the rise of YouTube and other streaming platforms (as opposed to DVDs and videotapes). Many of the battlers I had seen online (Hollow Da Don, Dizaster, The Saurus, Illmaculate, Pat Stay, Passwurdz, E. Ness, Shotty Horroh, Soul Khan, to name a few) are present in this book, one way or another, and I could hear many of them speaking their words on the page, just as I have heard them speak in their battles or in commentary on YouTube. O'Leary even includes QR codes in the margins for readers to check out some of the most iconic moments in battle rap for themselves.

Reading about battle rap has confirmed for me that it isn't easy to introduce this "niche within a niche," to quote videographer Kyle Gray (a.k.a. Avocado), to friends and family. But I believe his own Ruin Your Day channel on YouTube (particularly his Watch Battles segments, in which veteran battlers and associates join him in his studio to reminisce about past battles or provide commentary on recent battles) would go far in introducing people to the vibrant culture surrounding battle rap. It's another thing to recommend this or that battle to someone who wouldn't be able to move past the blatant vulgarity in a lot of cases (in the early years, many battlers made heavy use of the word "f*gg*t," for example) and who wouldn't understand much of what battlers are even saying to each other (hip hop slang and such). Viewer discretion is advised.

Sure, a lot of what battlers have said to each other is vulgar, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, even racist, but that's simply because, as I mentioned before, the whole point of battle rap is to try to get under someone's skin, using any and all dirt at one's disposal. That's not to say, however, that there are no constraints on what battlers can do (for one thing, white battlers avoid using the n-word, and for another, the line is drawn at physical violence on one's opponent). Especially since streaming services have become the norm by which people around the world tune in to battle rap, and because battlers are aware that one's money and reputation are on the line, they do what they can to steer clear of controversy while on camera (whether or not they actually believe in such things as gender equality is another story).

And I think therein lies the challenge that makes battle rap so fascinating: you use your presence and lyricism in the heat of battle to nullify whatever unjust statements your opponent has lobbed at you or anyone you know. You can say whatever you want and take whatever angle you want against your opponent, finding creative ways to use words to your advantage and get the crowd on your side. Call it freedom of speech.

Is there any mention of the extempo wars in calypso? It seems unlikely that there would be no connection. Although in calypso the emphasis is on wit rather than browbeating your opponent with vulgarity. Mind you, they still love a lot of innuendo... (see for instance Mighty Sparrow, The big bamboo etc.)

>144 LolaWalser: I've never heard of that tradition, but thank you for sharing. This book focuses on battle rap as an offshoot of hip hop in the US, particularly in the West Coast and East Coast scenes. But who is to say that calypso and hip hop don't share a common root? It seems that one spoken word tradition or other has been around since poetry was invented. Dizaster himself, a Lebanese-American, has referred to the tradition of zajal in another context. It seems like the Arabic version of calypso.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Religion & Philosophy: Revolution of Values: Reclaiming the Public Faith for the Common Good by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

This book is a must-read for fellow Christians dealing with the great swindle of our communities by Drumpf and his fanatical base, which has totally drifted off the political spectrum. For someone who truly believes the words of Jesus in such verses as, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves," (Matthew 7:15) it must be tiring to have to apologize constantly for the miscreants that constitute some of the most dangerous political groups the world has ever seen. Let me just say that with books like this one, it is possible and necessary to imagine a Christian life that isn't Bible-thumping madness in support of theocratic fascism. Wilson-Hartgrove patiently reminds us that there is truth and life in the words of Jesus, and that the Bible itself shouldn't be a reason for non-Christians to assume that pious fascists are taking over the government. The problem lies in how the Word of God is used for selfish political ends and how easy it has been for people,
whether they are Christian or not, to be duped into Drumpf's shell game, owing to the carnal, materialistic culture of America. As the title implies, Wilson-Hartgrove calls for a revolution in our values, by which we may reclaim the Bible from an unjust political system and stand by Jesus in his association with the least of these, which include the very immigrants that hypocrites like Drumpf threaten to kick out.

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Science & Math: Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker

Just a quirky and fun book about math. I may read more books by this author, who is a mathematician and comedian. I admit the only other book I read in this category was about Nothing, so Parker's book was the only one that stood out to me. (Just kidding!)

ーTop Reads of 2024 by Categoryー

Miscellaneous, or Uncategorized: 27 Views of Raleigh: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry by various local writers

For one reason or other, I've never been back to Raleigh since I left for Japan nearly eight years ago! I'm sure there is a lot that I'm not getting from this book about how the City of Oaks has changed since I graduated from NC State, whose main campus runs along Hillsborough Street, which stretches east into downtown. For one thing, I can tell from a simple search on Google Maps that certain old buildings have been replaced by student apartmentsーand it seems to be an ongoing process. However, I'm sure many things about the city will stay the same: the annual State Fair, the Belltower, the Krispy Kreme on N. Person St., the Court of North Carolina, among others.

Elaine Neil Orr, a novelist and literature professor with whom I once took an introductory course, is one of the contributors to this book, so it immediately caught my interest. Science fiction author John Kessel was another name I recognized, though I had not read any of his work before. Most people I had never heard of before, or maybe I had just seen some of their faces here and there. The anchor of the literary scene in Raleigh seems to be Quail Ridge Books, which Bridgette A. Lacy gives a brief history of in her contribution, and which I remember visiting when Dr. Orr gave a reading from her new novel about Africa, A Different Sun.

I'm glad I could revisit such memories in this book, but I honestly don't know when I can go back to Raleigh, or North Carolina, again. Such are the times we live in that everyone in my family has more or less been scattered across the map.

Honorable mentions of 2024:
・American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin E. Park
・A Literary Bible: An Original Translation by David Rosenberg
・Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
・Living Life as It Comes: Post-Disaster Reflections of a Zen Priest in Fukushima by Gen'yu Sokyu
・Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i by various

More anti-Trump reading: believe it or not, there are Christians, and white evangelical Christians, who aren't happy with how things have turned out. After a bit of digging, I found about historian John Fea's book, Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, written during Trump's first term. Fea identifies as an evangelical Christian, yet he is critical of Trump and other shameless hucksters who have learned to take advantage of political fear (and voters' credulity). In other words, if someone like John Fea is any indication, there are Bible-believing Christians who possess some degree of sanity and who nonetheless go to the same churches as those who voted for Trump in 2016 (and 2024, for that matter). I may just make another addition to my list of books read this year.

Good to know that not all Evangelicals are crazy. Last year i went to a funeral for a neighborhood mother who had passed. She was so nice. It was in a huge local Evangelical church. The funeral was moving, and then the minister spoke. He was completely insane, ranting anger and condescension. Ruined whatever warmth was there in the mood. The crowd appreciated him. Weird.

>145 icepatton:

Hmm, that does seem curious... calypso is at least a couple centuries older than hiphop, the populations overlap, both forms are connected to resistance and rebellion... you'd think at least a contrast would be made.

>149 icepatton:

I don't get the part where these people go to the same church. If nine people are regularly sitting down with a Nazi, there are ten Nazis at the table.

>150 dchaikin: Sorry to hear about your experience at that church. Some pastors are insensitive, to say the least.

>151 LolaWalser: I doubt whether any battle rapper interviewed in the book knew what extempo even is. That's not to say no valid comparisons can be made, though. I mentioned Dizaster, who is unusual in that he has traveled around more and understands more about other cultures than most battlers can say they have. However, this book was written to show how America-based battle rap has become popular internationally rather than to explore the connections to be made between regional artforms.

Also, I'm pretty sure that analogy wouldn't sit well with Fea (excuse the bad pun). He seems genuinely concerned and distressed as someone who never asked to be seated alongside a Nazi or Nazi-supporter in the pew. I really can't tell what kind of church he goes to based on this book, but the political division in churches is very real and certainly an important topic for another book.

I'm just not going to finish this year with Poe like I said I would. Tales of Mystery & Imagination has taken a backseat to this daring account by Fea about Trump's America. I'm already in the third chapter, "A Short History of Evangelical Fear," which is excellent so far. I'm learning from books like this one that I need to bone up on my history. I'll try to find more worthy historians for next year's reading.

There is actually a book I found that I plan to spend all of next year reading. It's By Way of the Desert: 365 Daily Readings, a kind of devotional, one reading a day. I'm glad I can use something like this to make prayer a daily habit.

>153 icepatton:

In non-Godwinable terms, lie with the dogs and rise with fleas. Not a point I'd insist on, it's just that the evangelicals' plans for American politics have been old news for at least three decades (I recall reading, for example, a long exposé in Harper's Magazine back in the late 90s/early 00s), so I don't know how someone can exist in that milieu unaware.

>156 LolaWalser: Would you mind referring me to that exposé in Harper's? I would at least like to know who the author was. I appreciate your comment!

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

ーMatthew 7:21-23 (ESV)

With every chapter in this book, Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, I could imagine Fea striking hot iron in a smithy of historyーhistory as a bastion of knowledge and truth. I only wish there were more Christians to read it and more Christian writers of such books. I found myself agreeing with almost everything Fea said about Trump and his deeply disturbed base. Whether one is Christian or not, I think one has to hand it to Fea for presenting a damn good case against white supremacy, albeit indirectly.

What I mean is, Fea introduces himself as a white evangelical Christian, which may seem odd considering, as he admits in the introduction, 81 percent of self-described white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 (and this book was published in 2018ーwho knows what that number was this year?)ーbut Fea takes Christian faith seriously enough to do the hard work of deconstructing the edifice of, in his words, fear, power, and nostalgia of the Christian right, which he refers to history to show how slaveholders and segregationists believed in much the same thingーa white Saviorーand how such a belief was wrong. Instead of fear, power, and nostalgia, Fea calls for Christians especially to take on hope, humility, and a better understanding of history, drawing on the example of the civil rights movement in particular.

I quote Matthew in passing because I think it should be quite easy for someone who knows about the least of these, or who believes in such verses as, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me," to see that, well, Trump and his kind are wolves in sheep's clothing, and they wouldn't know Jesus from any other undocumented immigrant, ethnic minority, or houseless person. As a historian, Fea takes it upon himself to make this connection in ways he feels he is compelled to as a Christian, in order to demonstrate that it is possible to be a voice of reason within a community that isn't exactly known for its humility or sanity. I think Fea does an excellent job.

>157 icepatton:

Sure, if I can find that issue (I actually have some Harper's that old around bc I used them as toppers in book boxes); unfortunately I'm not a subscriber anymore so can't access their archive. It was a fairly well known name and he published a book about it too.

More book news: Words By Baye, Art By Miki: Crafting a Life Together with Affection, Creativity, and Risilience, an early Christmas present, I suppose, to be published on the 16th. A collaboration between Brooklyn native Baye McNeil and his Japanese wife, Miki, this book appeals to me as a fellow American and foreign resident in Japan. Although I haven't been keeping up with McNeil lately, a few years ago I read Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist, which had me unsure as to what he (nicknamed Loco) means by being racist as a black American in Japan (could he be both victim and victimizer?). But I look up to him as a writer and activist for racial minorities in Japan. And I'm sure this new book will have much to teach me about international marriage in Japan.

_{It was around this time in 2022 that I found myself stuck in one of the most interesting cities in the world.}

I wish I could find another book about Montreal. I was surprised at how lovely the city turned out to be when my flight got cancelled en route to DC two years ago, and my then-fiancée and I were forced to spend our Christmas in the city. Being stuck at Montréal-Trudeau Int'l Airport would have been a nightmare for us had we not found a hotel to stay in. I could not speak French to save our lives, but luckily customer service was in English.

We stayed one night near the airport and found another hotel the next day in Downtown Montreal, near the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral. Before our rescheduled flight to DC a few days later, we just spent our time taking in the sights of the city. We went to Old Montreal and visited the Notre-Dame Basilica. We went to the Chinatown a few blocks away. We went to see the Christmas lights at the Quartier des Spectacles and toured the Underground City. We ate breakfast at the Chez Cora at our hotel on the day of our departure.

The whole time it felt like, though not in America, we were still in a North American city that happened to be bilingual. It was my first time in Canada and Quebec. The mix of British and French influence was fascinating and I wanted to know more about what we experienced in Montreal. That's how I found out about Letters of Montreal: Tales of an Exceptional City once we got back to Japan. Most recently, I checked out other titles on the publisher's website and did some searching elsewhere but couldn't find anything interesting. I would still like to go back to Montreal someday even if I can't find what to read next.

I want to thank you for recommending Strangers in Their Own Land. I started it yesterday and found it both readable and thought-provoking.

>162 labfs39: You're welcome!

It's been a while since I started reading a book like How Happy Became Homosexual: And Other Mysterious Semantic Shiftsーa book about the evolution of English. It was eye-opening for me when I first learned about etymology and language families, or the idea that German, English, and Icelandic are related like family members. The idea that the word, "beam," for example, is etymologically related to the German word, "Baum," set me off to find other similarities across languages (and have a better understanding of my own language in the process). This book in particular relates how common words like "gay" and "obnoxious" have undergone changes in meaning over the centuries in a linguistic process called semantic shift. It's interesting to see the examples Richler gives of how various authors have used these words in their writing.

It must have been back in 2010 or so, when I was enrolled at a community college, that I came across a copy of Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography, seemingly because I was doing research for a paper in an anthropology class. The name "peter kulchyski" caught my eye because his contribution to the book, an essay about forms of communication among the Inuit of Pangnirtung, was the only one that totally ignored rules of capitalization, as if e e cummings had published an academic paper. Fast forward to today. While searching for books to read about Montreal and learning the names of contemporary Canadian authors along the way, kulchyski came up again when I flipped open Aboriginal Rights are Not Human Rights: In Defence of Indigenous Struggles and saw the same peculiar lowercase style in the table of contents. I can't say I was expecting to find him after all this time, but I may have found something to read otherwise: a collection of short stories by Montreal resident Kaie Kellough called Dominoes at the Crossroads. It may just be time for me to get back into reading some fiction in order to learn more about the city.

>161 icepatton: ...one of the most interesting cities in the world Absolutely! Definitely one of my favourites.

This list may help with your quest (Kaie Kellough is on it): https://www.mtl.org/en/experience/montreal-books

>166 SassyLassy: Great website! Thank you for sharing that list with me.

When I read Debt: The First 5,000 Years, or tried to, I'm pretty sure the main points about the economic history Graeber presents were lost on me, but I think that's because my ability to retain facts and figures is shoddy to begin with, and I thought I could just read a brick of a book like Graeber's on a whim. It's actually a highly dense work that I could only write a blurb about after having put it aside for months and then finally deciding to go through with it. I can't really articulate why it is such a worthwhile book, but I could tell that Graeber knows what he's talking about, and his presentation of the material was what kept me reading. And I agree with his approach to storytelling and history. I wish he was still with us.

Fortunately, he was around long enough to complete The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity with co-author David Wengrow, the result of over a decade of collaboration. I'm more aware of what kind of book this will be than when I started reading Debt, so I look forward to the challenge. At some point, I would also like to try The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, also by Graeber.

>168 icepatton: i tried The Dawn of Everything on audio. Not hard at all. But it’s all an argument and not a new one, and, IMO, uncomfortably manipulative (even when i agreed). I got annoyed and stopped. i posted a mini rant review.

>169 dchaikin: I would like to see your review once I finish the book.

>161 icepatton: Hey Icepatton, I'm a french from Montreal, always cool to read nice comments like this about our city and about the differences that caracterize us. On your side, it's really interresting that you now have a connection with the japanese culture, in addition with your native american culture. On my side, I published my first book talking about the different energies that surround us and that are in us. No need to say that the dominant energy/vibe in Japan is not the same than in U.S.! I would be honoured if you could be one of the first readers of my new book and give me an honnest review on it. Let me know how can I send you a free ebook copy. :)

>170 icepatton: no. I quit about 25% in. Not going back. 🙂

>171 stephboily: Thank you, but I'm not in the business of reviewing books. Best of luck to you, though!

I will be making no friends in the tourist industry or with pregnant women by relating that the first definition of “travel” in the OED is, “Labour, toil; suffering, trouble, labour of child birth.” I will add salt to the wound by relating further that the word derives from the Latin tripalium, a three-pointed stake used by the Church to torture prisoners in the 6th century. Notwithstanding that today you might think of driving through gridlock as a form of torture akin to “travel” in the Middle Ages, it is important to remember that “travel” in earlier times was a far more arduous endeavour. The roads were bad, the horses and buggies unreliable and the mountains regarded as virtually impassable. Usually, it was undertaken only when absolutely necessary or by those engaging in a pilgrimage that might mend the soul while wreaking havoc on the body.

How Happy Became Homosexual: And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts was OK. I wish I could retrieve my own list of changed words that I posted in a note on Facebook once upon a time. I know there are plenty of examples in English of semantic shift that Richler could have chosen from, all with interesting stories behind them, but for publication purposes he seems to have chosen the most sensational ones, neatly placing them in categories of grammatical, religious, agricultural, and legal terms, among others. I thought the chapter about historically religious terms was the most interesting, but the entry about travel, which I quote here, is from the chapter about nouns. There is also a chapter about adjectives, where Richler explains that the word, "gay," as hinted in the title, is an old word that used to mean something like "happy," but since the early 20th century has come to mean, "homosexual."

Before reading, I had already known that in English, and languages in general, every word has a story, a history that could well go back centuries, and with entries like "Travel," it is evident that Richler believes the study of etymology can tell us a lot about how our cultural attitudes and sensibilities change. But he seems to have written this book mainly to draw attention to English words that have been the subject of controversy or dispute, "gay" being much more title-friendly than, say, "faggot," which he also writes about.

The main idea that Richler wishes to get across is that spoken languages are never static, and even now, as he explains in the conclusion, there are words in contemporary English whose correct meanings and usages are constantly argued over, with Richler offering his own opinions on certain words. Seemingly little things, like whether it is proper to use "destroy" instead of "decimate," just shows that change is always happening to language, whether we care to know it or not.

Here I was daydreaming about snow-blown Montreal, when actually I'll be spending Christmas in Hawaii this year. So it's only right that I try to find more books to read about the Aloha State. Since my first trip there with my wife last year, I've read several collections of essays, mostly dealing with Hawaii as it is today. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i, which I wrote about earlier this year, was highly instructive. Although I had been reading Trask's book about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, From a Native Daughter, it wasn't exactly light reading for a balding haole tourist like myself. I still haven't finished it, but books like Nā Kua'Āina: Living Hawaiian Culture and 'Ōlelo No'eau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings could help me along. I've started reading another collection of essays by a former resident of Hawaii, Volcanoes, Palm Trees & Privilege. These are among the titles I've seen generated by LibraryThing Recommendations, which has actually been pretty helpful.

For me, Siri Hustvedt's essay collection, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women, was another book I had put on hold because I wasn't sure what I would be getting myself into, which at minimum one might expect to be intelligible writing. I'm not even through the first part of the book, but I've already run out of patience. It's my impression that Hustvedt's writing makes extraordinary demands of the reader's knowledge of vague, abstract terms like "contiguity" and "tonalities," which she never seems to define before moving on to the next idea, and the next idea, and the next, until I feel like I'm lost in an echo chamber. It just seems par for the course that writers of a postmodernist bent like her don't have an interest in what readers know and don't seem to care if anyone doesn't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. And I don't criticize her because she is a woman and an accomplished author. Based on the title of this book, I had thought she would be setting out to challenge cultural conceptions of art and beauty that are harmful to women. And maybe that's what she is really doing in her work, but the essays I've read here have done more to obfuscate than clarify. A disappointment.

Siri challenges, but she also has fun. Yes, sometimes you need to keep up. But i don’t think she’s any more difficult than the other playfully clever contemporary authors. I haven’t read that specific book though.

_{I'm having a hard time getting this image out of my head; Hickam Air Force Base is right next to Daniel K. Inouye Int'l Airport.}

Well, I've been seeing the "Continue this topic in another topic" link on this thread since the 150th post or so. I couldn't get it on my previous thread because I cut it off too soon, apparently. I didn't know the magic number. Lesson learned.

I've been reading Volcanoes, Palm Trees & Privilege: Essays on Hawai'i and enjoy it so far. It's been a good way to kick off my second visit to what Prato consciously writes the name of using the 'okina, or Hawaiian glottal stop, between the last two letters.

Before landing in Honolulu, I had only wanted to sleep on the plane, which once again proved to be a failure. But the direct flight my wife and I took out of Osaka was less than seven hours, which isn't bad at all. The first thing I ate off the plane was a burrito at Moe's Southwest Grill, an old standby from my high school days on the mainland. It sure hit the spot. A friend of my wife had picked us up at the airport and gave us a ride to the post office down the street, where we were able to send off a package of Christmas gifts to a family gathering in Ohio just in time for Christmas. As for my wife and I, we're staying at the house of one of my cousins who lives in Pearl City, and my sister and brother-in-law flew in from Washington, DC to join us.

This time, I brought with me a copy of Dower's War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, a book I could never finish, to try to sell at a used bookstore. During my first visit last year, I came across a copy of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism and took it home with me. I'll be on the lookout for more books to read about Hawaii as well as copies of good books I've already read digitally.

Some things that have come up in my trotting around Oahu:

I need to find more reading about first contacts, specifically the ill-fated relationship of Captain Cook with the Hawaiians (something like Marshall Sahlins' work comes to mind).

I need to learn more about the place of the Hawaiian language in Hawaii. I can get an idea from children's books like Say It in Hawaiian: Nā Hua 'Ōlelo, which is short and sweet.

The man at the local BookOff said that my lightly used copy of War without Mercy would only sell for like $5, so he would only give me 10¢ for it. I just passed it off to my brother-in-law instead.

I ought to learn more about the islands and wildlife. I went snorkeling for the first time at Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve and came across species I had never seen before, like the umauma lei, or orangespine unicornfish. As majestic as these sea creatures are, it was quite an eerie boundary between industrial civilization via tourism and wild nature. I felt like I was barging into someone's home and was more comfortable lying on the beach.

So far, I've only gone to a single used bookstore in a rundown shopping mall, where I came across a copy of Deresiewicz's most recent book, The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society, which I read when it came out in 2022. I'm looking forward to visiting the independent bookstore, Native Books, in downtown Honolulu at some point.

Merry Christmas from Hawaii! Spending this season in Hawaii has been a blast. Everything from the beaches to the people to the natural wonders to the food has been delightful. I can't say I ever thought I would be getting so much out of what would seem on the surface to be a tourist trap. Hawaii is a truly fascinating place with so many stories and cultural flows.

Just yesterday, my wife, sister, brother-in-law, and I ate breakfast at a local pancake joint before going to Honolulu to see the street art at Kaka'ako and then to Chinatown for the manapua (pork buns). Downtown Honolulu features a couple of bookstores that could not be any more different from each other. I took everyone to Native Books, a mainstay of Hawaiiana, where I found plenty of things to read about Hawaii, though I wasn't expecting to see I Opened the Gate, Laughing: An Inner Journey, which is about the author's Zen awakening, or The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life's Turning Points. I just might read these.

Just a block away, Skull-Face Books & Vinyl greeted us with heavy metal guitar licks and titles like Gothic Fashion: The History and Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person. There was even a Christian section in the back of the store, where I came across such titles as Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, and Troublemakers in the Church: Dealing with the Difficult, the Dangerous, and the Deadly. I don't think I would have found these in the staid Christian bookstore down the road.

Merry Christmas to you.

Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity

lol

Sounds like a memorable Christmas!

_{An interpretation of the Hawaiian creation story, the Kumulipo, by Hawaiian artist Carl F. K. Pao, on display at the Bishop Museum.}

Yesterday, we went to the stately Bishop Museum, where I was able to buy a copy (with my sister's help) of ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings for a lot cheaper than the Amazon price. And it is brand new, plastic wrapping and everything, though a bit oversized. I'll start reading it next year.

The Hawaiian Hall was easily my favorite wing of the museum, a vivid presentation of Hawaiian cultureーfrom the Creation Story on the first floor to the Hawaiian Renaissance on the third floor. On the second floor, I learned about how Hawaiians lived before Anglo-American infiltrationーthe tools they used, the food they ate, the calendar they followed, even the games they played. Of course, there was a section about hula chants and dances, namely "Ke Ao Nani," which teaches children about the living world around them, from the birds of the sky to the fish of the sea. On reader's desks were materials such as Pua Polū, the Pretty Blue Hawaiian Flower, a children's book about the importance of living in tune with the cycles of nature.

Later in the day, I chanced upon a local bookstore that had an extensive collection of Hawaiiana. That's where I came across The Mana of Translation: Translational Flow in Hawaiian History from the Baibala to the Mauna, which I might read. It was also nice to see books I've read that I had never seen in print before, namely The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism and Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan.