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Posted on 12/20/03:
Dick Pels' very
useful study, Property and Power in Social Theory: A Study in
Intellectual Rivalry. It's helping me sort out a number of issues in
my own work on the novelist Natsume Soseki and the way he plays with images of
property in his fiction. I'm also enjoying a terrific book manuscript on
recent Chinese rock music and youth culture, which I'm a peer reviewing for an
academic press. Finally, I'm working through Karatani Kojin's Marukusu
sono kanosei no chushin (Marx: The Center of Possibility), a
rethinking of Marx's philosophy from a deconstructionist and -- in many ways --
anarchist position, precisely the sort of thing that the Pels' book is all
about.
Posted on 11/23/03:
Jhumpa Lahiri's
short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. I first read some
of these in the New Yorker, where I made a point of remembering the
author's name. At her best, she is really quite remarkable, capable of
catching the drama of everyday life in its mundane details--her stories breathe
life into the smallest household objects. Am also reading a new
book that's just come out about the Kinks: Andy Miller's The Kinks are
the Village Green Preservation Society, a detailed study of the making of
the 1968 album of the same name, part of the 33 1/3 series published by
Contiuum Books. One of the better books available on the Kinks, I
think.
Posted on 11/4/03:
The latest volume
of poetry from my friend, Peter Robinson: Selected Poems, published
by Carcanet.
It includes pieces from all of his previous collections, very nice. He
has a remarkable eye for the tiniest shifts in atmosphere and mood, and his
language is a joy to read aloud. The publisher's blurb is here. Am also reading Karaki Junzô's 1932 Gendai Nihon
bungaku josetsu (A preface to contemporary Japanese literature), a
fascinating Marxist history of modern Japanese fiction, written at the height
of the proletarian literature movement.
Posted on 10/12/03:
I continue to
enjoy Bill Holm's Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary.
I am also reading Kawabata Yasunari's 1954 novel, Mizuumi (The Lake).
When I first read him as an undergraduate, I really disliked Kawabata, but now
when I return to him, I find him much more interesting. The same thing happened
to me with Tanizaki; guess that means I'll have to start re-reading Mishima
soon.....
Posted on 9/27/03:
I recently read
Natsume Soseki's comic 1908 short story, "Buncho" (Java
Sparrow?). As usual I find myself in awe of Soseki....Now I'm reading
Bill Holm's travelogue, Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary.
As with all of his writings, very pleasurable and thoughtful. He weaves
together his actual travels, his childhood memories growing up the son of Icelandic
immigrants in southwestern Minnesota, and his textual travels through world
literature.
Posted on 9/7/03:
Having recently
re-read Beowulf with Walter, I'm now re-reading John Gardner's
remarkable little novel, Grendel, the whole tale as retold from the
perspective of the monster, a nihilistic and cynical creature.
Existentialist angst transferred to the Dark Ages....And I've been reading
Barbara Sato's useful and intelligent new book, The New Japanese
Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan.
Posted on 8/28/03:
Still wrestling
with Kawabata Yasuanari's remarkable Asakusa kurenaidan, a 1929
modernist reportage novel about life on the streets of Asakusa in the years
after the 1923 earthquake--the chapter about it in Seiji Lippit's Topographies
of Japanese Modernism was very helpful in trying to sort things out in this
experimental work. An English translation, by the way, will be appearing
soon. Am also reading Bill Bryson's very funny A Walk in the
Woods, lent to me by a friend. The book recounts the author's
misadventures in walking the Appalachian trail in 1996.
Posted on 8/19/03:
With Walter (as
part of his summer homework), I have been reading Beowulf in Frederick
Rebsamen's lovely verse translation. It's the first time I've read it
since freshman year in college. And with Sonia, I've been reading Laura
Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek, the only volume of the Little
House series actually set in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, which we visited on
our recent trip. And on my own, I've been reading Kawabata Yasunari's
remarkable Asakusa kurenaidan, a 1929 modernist reportage novel
about life on the streets of Asakusa in the years after the 1923
earthquake.
Posted on 7/20/03:
I was reading
Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death, a continuation of his work in
radically rethinking the idea of the gift as argued by Mauss. The
impossibility of a gift (which by definition is something given with nothing
received in return -- including gratitude or even the self-satisfaction one would
receive from knowing one had given something) is linked here to the
impossiblity/ possibility of death, as that which cannot be shared. Hence,
death is a kind of singular, unimaginable gift. But then I lost the
book at LAX, before I finished it. If you should happen to find it, let
me know. I'm dying to see how it turns out.
Posted on 7/12/03:
As part of a
class on film and music I'm sitting in on this summer, I've been reading
Claudia Gorbman's Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, a lucid
textbook on the subject. I'm planning to write a paper next year on the
way Kurosawa used music in his films, and this is quite helpful in helping me
organize my thoughts. And I continue to read the lovely 1920s
detective/suspense/horror stories of Edogawa Ranpo, very nice indeed. Why
has so little of his stuff has been translated into English?
Posted on 7/5/03
While in
Minnesota, I read the first half of Dale Bumper's memoir, The Best Lawyer in
a One Lawyer Town. I used to really like this kind of book, but found
myself underwhelmed by it. Have I changed--or has the world? The
New Yorker, in the meanwhile, continues its tradition of wretched coverage
of Asia. A feature in the June 30 issue by John Lahr on the director Ang
Lee informs us that the "Western drama is built on the escalation of
tension; Chinese life is built around the reduction of it." That's
what Mao always thought, anyhow.
Posted on 6/20/03:
The books that
are coming to Minnesota with me: a book
manuscript I am reviewing for a university press, a collection of Edogawa Ranpo
stories I've been reading for the past few weeks, Jacques Derrida's The Gift
of Death, Karatani Kojin's Marx: sono kanosei no chushin,
another Japanese book about the walking sticks in the novels of Natsume Soseki,
and Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction. Wonder how many I'll actually
read....