4

I have the best coworker in the world. I'm sorry everyone else; you lose.

Here's a little story about the past few weeks.

My coworker is a math teacher whose desk faces mine. We chat every day about this and that. A few weeks ago we got on the subject of James Joyce and I gave her my Japanese copy of Dubliners and introduced her, just for kicks, to Finnegans Wake.

(Usually when I start talking FW people start backing away slowly. But my coworker is different. That's one reason why she's the best in the world, as I said.)

She started reading Dubliners and the other day, nearly finished with the book, she asked me why I liked James Joyce so much.

In stumbling Japanese, I said Joyce was interesting because his writing style changed with each book. That he was neat-o.

In response, she compared Joyce to Natsume Soseki and commented on the way Joyce depicted life in Dubliners straightfaced, without comment, and the effect that lack of verbal decoration had on the narrative as a whole.

She said lots of other things, too, but I couldn't catch most of it. Part of the reason was because, as I mentioned before, my listening abilities in Japanese are dismal; but another part of the reason was that the conversation had turned me into a tightly wound ball of wonder and I was too caught up in the moment to think. Like when a fanboy meets his idol by chance in the street and can only gape at awesome fortune, here I was finally, after years in Japan, having a deep conversation about literature in a foreign language with someone much better read and a more articulate thinker besides. I was too existentially happy to bring anything to the table. Because--I'm saying--this was a dream come true. I have good conversations about literature all the time with non-Japanese friends over here, and I can get my lit-fix on the Internet anytime. But this was the first time that I had a serious, high-minded conversation on the topic with a Japanese person in Japanese.

It was thrilling. And that episode was followed up this morning when my coworker pointed me to this gardening blog written by a Japanese woman living in England. She recommended it to me on the basis of it being beautifully written in an older style of Japanese (take this for example: 「本当に長いご無沙汰の後の更新ですが、そして薔薇のシーズンにはまだ数週間を要しますけれど、今の庭の様子をご覧いただければ幸せに存じます」), and by telling me that "when I try to talk like that, my tongue catches."

I can sense the beauty of that sentence like I can fathom a glacier from its bobbing iceberg tip. But it's a start, and I have someone who can guide me sitting right across from me.That, to put it mildly, is McAwesomesauce.

Anyways, really happy with my luck this year. In fact, I've been having nightmares all week about the stuff I went through last year--school and roommate problems--but the atmosphere in my area of the teachers room is even better than the nightmares are bad. The kind of person my coworker is is truly rare, and I'm incredibly fortunate to have someone as quality (and as patient) as her to talk to every day. It's the kind of understanding we should always strive for in communicating with our friends, but perhaps rarely do. It's a return of that electricity that I felt most often in late high school and throughout college talking with my friends. It turns out it doesn't necessarily fade with age, just in the people who let it.

Maybe this is a small thing, but I don't think so.

3

Or: What I think about when I think about running.

I used this month's Audible credit on vol.1 of an unabridged Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire to prompt myself to keep up my daily run up the mountainside. At 40 hours and with two more volumes waiting in the rafters, I think I found my summer soundtrack. Not that I expect to remember most of it, but a few bits will stick, and I'll log a couple dozen kilometers at least in the process, so double-win.

Running is neat. Let's get that out on the table right now. It's at least as neat as napping, and twice as healthy. Here are some things I think about when I think about running, written as a presponse to getting through What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. (This'll be the third time I've started the book. Hopefully I'll get through the first chapter this time.)

:: Running, unlike walking but just like cycling or writing, gets me into this starman zone where I can just go as hard as I want and have fun doing it for a couple of minutes. It's an awesome feeling, but it only comes after an interval of really being involved in the activity, which is important to remember because if you forget about that you're likely to not find the motivation to start.

:: Here's a graph of my motivation when running on pavement or on flat, oval tracks:

kinda tapers off

And here's a graph of my motivation when running in the woods:

/!

I've been like this as long as I can remember. I was never any good at running miles in school, I wasn't very fast, and I got winded pretty quickly. In the woods, though, back in PA or now in Nagano, dodging or jumping over things kept me alert and kept me going. There was something thrilling, if that's not too strong a word, about running in the woods, even if it was only the fun of changing pace and having to watch where you were going. But running, like everything I guess, is more mental than physical. If you keep focusing on the negative or the monotonous, which running in circles or alongside straight roads all but pounds into you, you're likely to wind (short i) yourself mentally, even if your body could physically go on in more ideal circumstances. For me at least; I'm not advocating for forest-based races at the next Olympics or anything.

:: More on that last point: running in/on paved circles is to running in the woods as a lot of standardized education is to learning on your own. The former, unless you've got a pretty good teacher at the helm, is a monotonous, sometimes scary experience, whereas the latter is intrinsically motivating. The former trains you through the lenses of one-size-fits-all curricula; the latter lets you explore the world through your own eyes.

(Not that running tracks or going through the school system is all--or even mostly--bad. Just that it's good and advisable to know of and pursue a balance in stuff like this, since there are more than a few solutions to the game of life.)

:: Off topic: Bolero is great walking music.

:: My apartment and school are on one of the declining slopes of Chino that make up the toes of the 八ヶ岳 mountain range; the 永明寺山 (Ei-mei-ji-yama; Eternal Shiny Temple Mountain) is on the facing ridge-thing. Me and this mountain have become friends. After school, there's enough daylight left that I can run up to near the top of the mountain where there is a 50 meter slide which is Very Fun Indeed to slide down after a good hustleup the hillside. (It's technically a mountain, but since Chino is already at 800+ meters, the mountain probably only pops up another hundred or so meters from the town. I'll have to check the actual ascent sometime. But if it's only relatively a hill, it's a big ass hill.)

thïs > alles

The mountain and I are friends. The sky, though, has become jealous. I've been caught twice at the top when a shower creeps up from the other side of the mountain and drenches me. Last Sunday it was heralded by all manner of thunder and lightning, and also a snake. I was going to wait it out (the storm, not the snake) at a pavilion near this slide, but a friend brought to my attention that he doesn't remember any short storms in Japan.

Cue the run down the mountainside. The rain wasn't so bad under the trees, but each thunderstrike was closer than the one before, and just before I got out of the woods the lightning and thunder were Way, Way Closer Together.

And the snake. Running downwise you have too much momentum to stop yourself, so when I was brushing through tree branches and saw in the middle of the wee thin path a thick green snake crossing it, I didn't have time enough to make way. I spend way too much time in the woods out here not to have done my research on the poisonous species in the area...but here we were, lightning crashing, rain falling, snake coming up, hospital far away, and my heart running at a good enough clip to get any hypothetical poison running through my system in no time, give or take.

So I:
1) yelped,
2) jumped, and
3) didn't look back.

I lived, unelectrecuted and unbitten, alive to run the snake grounds another day. And now I have all sorts of intrinsic motivation to look up what else can kill me in Nagano besides bear claws and far falls. Thumbs up to that.

2

I was riding my bike a few weeks ago looking for roads into the mountains and one of them led to this solitary tree on top of a knoll, the 傘松 (umbrella pine), which, according to the sign, is a sacred Shinto tree.

--- -- --

I meant to have posted a story I've been working on this weekend, but I talked it over with my friend Dan this weekend and he convinced me to change the form of the thing, so it'll be a few more weeks before I can post it. In lieu of that, here's something that happened yesterday:

There's a little street in Matsumoto called Nawate-dori where you can find a lot of little specialty shops. And also frogs. Dan and I went into this boardgame shop that he likes and the owner was a nice, talkative old man named Saito. He and Dan were talking about boardgames and cardgames and suddenly Mr. Saito throws a question my way.

Now, in general, my listening is abysmal in Japanese. I like reading--books don't get embarrassed if I can't understand what they're telling me so I find them safe conversation partners. On top of that, I had poor or non-existant study habits for the first year and a half after I came to Japan, and by the time I started studying in earnest I'd already picked up the bad habit of nodding along at pauses in conversation, and over time I guess I got good enough at faking comprehension that most people assume I know what they're saying.

So I figured out pretty easily that Mr. Saito was asking me if I was interested in board games. I told him I played a lot of Axis & Allies in college, but nothing since then.

A few minutes later we were getting ready to leave, when Mr. Saito handed me and Dan his business card. Printed on the top left of the card was a copy of the large semi-abstract painting hanging in the shop. Now, being handed a business card in Japan is akin to being served tea in England: it's a gesture nearly ceremonial in nature and it's good form to make polite conversation in response.

I took the obvious route and asked Mr. Saito if he'd painted the picture. He had, and he asked what we thought it looked like. I thought it looked like a city, but apparently it was a tree something-something (again I couldn't really catch his explanation).

He went behind his desk and brought out a sheet of paper which was, he explained, a copy of a poem he'd written. It wasn't a haiku--he hated haiku. And I think he also said it wasn't tanka--he hated tanka too. It was either his own free form of poetry or a rare classic style that I wouldn't have caught the name if I'd heard it. It had on one side a picture of the print on which he'd written the poem, and on the other side an explanation of the poem. The explanation was necessary because the poem was, I guess, written in the old style of Japanese--all kanji, no hiragana.

Actually, the poems were really interesting as far as I could make out. The way he was writing allowed him to fit multiple meanings into each line. Very James Joyce. I haven't properly read the explanation he handed me yet, but if I can figure it out that would make an interesting next post.

After this paper, he pulled out a binder full of poems. I couldn't really follow what he was saying even from the beginning, but the longer he talked the less I was able to focus. After five or ten minutes I was sort of reduced giving numb responses when he asked me what I thought. "Very beautiful." "It's really interesting, I only wish I could understand it better."

This went on for some time. I was trying to pull myself away, and my answers were getting monotonous. I wanted to understand what he was saying, but it was impossible and I was getting tired.

He finished explaining another poem. "Very beautiful," I said.

「つらいよ,」 he said. 「癌。ステージ４。」("It's heart-rending. Cancer. Stage 4.")

He was showing me a poem he'd written about his wife's cancer, and I was spacing out.

"Ah. I mean the poetry. Of course the thing itself is terrible. I'm sorry."

Egads. Or, as Dan told me in so many words later, "How do you get yourself in situations like this all the time?"

Experiences like this are full of all the emotions: it's funny, it's awkward, it' touching, it's sad, and for me at least it's also inspiring me to hit the TV harder. I need to get my Japanese beyond bar-level conversations.

--- -- --

Speaking of bars, Dan and I closed out the night at Beer Garage Ganesha, which has about a kerjillion imported beers and is Very Expensive Indeed, but provides each beer in its own-brand mug.

1

This baby blog's title is from an underappreciated dependent clause by Samuel Beckett in the second sentence of his essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The picture is of an old hanzi that I took in China because it looked happy.

 --- -- --

Against my better judgement I started reading this book by Harold Bloom called The Anatomy of Influence. I'm reading him to understand him, because I really don't so far and this book is marketed as the most readable defense yet of his theory on influence. (That's some awfully dangerous marketing in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there.)

So far I've audiobooked two books by Bloom: The Western Canon and "Shakespeare's Seven Major Tragedies," a lecture series. In my experience Bloom typically has one or two interesting and revelatory things to say about an author or a character per chapter, but this is a cupcake's worth of material covered with a cake-cake's worth of icing. The icing comes in the form of really bold statements about the achievements of whatever author of character he's focusing on at the time--bold statements which are never quite qualified.

Take this paragraph for instance:

There is an occult relation between Hamlet's long malaise and the play's unique and dazzling enigma, the gap cut in mimesis from act 2, scene 2, through act 3, scene 2. We behold and hear not an imitation of an action but rather representations of prior representations. The covenant between stage of audience is abrogated in favor of a dance of shadows, where only the manipulator Hamlet is real. Destroying its own genre, the play thus gives us an unfathered Hamlet. Shakespeare scrambles after him, but Hamlet keeps getting away, Hobgoblin run off with the garland of Apollo.

There are interesting beginnings of ideas in this paragraph, but in my opinion the general swing of it is needlessly vague. The writer is assuming the reader will jump some gap to an assumed conclusion for which he (Bloom) has provided a sort of diving board. Bloom talks endlessly about the expansive consciousness of Hamlet, but I'm still lost as to what that means. It certainly doesn't just mean how clever the prince of Denmark is, because if that were true we might expect Bloom to have a bit more respect for Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle, which he plainly doesn't. Bloom's talking about something subtler than that which we readers can easily take in from a surface reading, but he never gets to the point of writing explicitly "Look at what Hamlet does here, and compare that with what this other character does in a similar situation, and look at how much more sublime (a favorite word of Bloom's) is. This is literature because xyz." Maybe I'm dense, but that's the stuff I want to be told. And I don't think I'm being ignorant of the inherent etherealness of literature in wanting to know these things.

Unless I'm mistaken. Bloom is a contested legendary critic, but he's still legendary, and widely regarded as the greatest in his profession in English. That's the reason I showed up on his door in the first place: I've been confused by lit crit ever since I started earning Cs in lit classes in college despite rather liking the books I was reading.

This all came to a head just the other day when I was finishing up this book by Will Durant called The Story of Philosophy. The last chapter was on John Dewey, of whom I'd heard but never about anything knew and to whom I was grateful to be introduced. Dewey, it seems, started from the basis that Darwin was right and it wasn't worth his time arguing details--and moreover, metaphysics was a monumental waste of time and his philosophy wasn't going to have anything to do with these fanciful flights of imagination that ultimately did nothing useful for anyone.

In other words: the self-conscious doubts I'd had about metaphysics and the questions of where consciousness comes from and how it relates to matter, etc a la early modern philosophy also existed in Dewey and he, being rather sharper and sure of himself than the present author, threw the whole imaginative mess out the window and redefined philosophy as the practical (or pragmatic) school of thought that it was (we feel) it was always meant to be. In other words, he made philosophy relevant again.

I felt a bit empowered after that chapter. I had the same doubts as Dewey for as long as I knew anything about philosophy, but I never knew much about it at the best of times, and in my ignorance assumed I was somehow wrong for thinking metaphysics and tome-length ruminations on the relation of matter to consciousness were perhaps best left to storybooks and scientists. Dewey and I might both be wrong in the eyes of the majority, but I'll stick with him for the hell of it. Feels about right.

I'm thinking, more boldly now, rather the same about lit crit. It's certainly a system in which your average thinker can excel, and certainly there are wonderful and beautiful things to say about literature, but, if I'm being honest with myself, I can't figure out why an Amazon book review and a properly published and lauded piece of literature criticism need to be considered two different animals. Certainly the one is bigger than the other, and infinitely more verbose, but I also find lit crit essays to be terribly vague for all their prosody. And the various schools of thought extant in the field feel the same to me as any argument over the worthwhiledness of a Stephen King novel.

I can't figure out what it is about lit crit. I'm 30 soon, and I've read and enjoyed even Ulysses. I figure I should at this point be able to write both a beautiful book review and a beautiful essay of criticism, but to me they're one and the same. If there's a difference in my mind, it's that the latter has a page limit and needs to be double-spaced by a due date, so your actual opinion ends up being secondary to the final written form.

So anyways, I'm giving lit crit this one last chance via Harold Bloom: his celebrity makes him a representative to all lit crit, and if there's any clothes on this scholastic emperor I mean to give them a close inspection.