What’s up with me: Past entries
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K. Bourdaghs homepage
(Entries
for the year 2004 can be found here; those for 2003 can be found here.)
Posted on
12/20/05:
Greetings to you all from a coffee shop in
snowy
The week got off to a bumpy start, however. As I boarded the
tiny plane that was supposed to take me from
The family joins me here in
Posted on
12/14/05:
The week has seen the battering of the
Japanese public's faith in its own institutions. Television news and talk
shows are obsessed with the rapidly expanding scandal that revolves around the
falsification of earthquake safety data in recently constructed
buildings. Now nobody feels certain that their own homes are safe.
On top of that, the Mizuho Bank made an extraordinary error that threatened to
throw the stock market into a panic: a client asked them to sell 1 share
of J-Com stock at 610,000 yen (a little more than US$5,000), but the company
instead registered a sale of 610,000 shares at 1 yen each. It's going to
cost the bank nearly a billion dollars to correct its error, which also
revealed the woeful inadequacy of the computer infrastructure at the Tokyo
Stock Exchange. It should have caught the fact that, among other things,
there are only about 140,000 shares of J-Com in existence. While all this
was going on, we also have had a string of grisly murders of children in
But in fact I am in
Posted on
12/4/05:
I found myself in Shibuya twice this week
-- once on Tuesday night to have dinner with friends from the graduate program
at
Now, however, I feel like an anthropologist when
I visit the place: the fashions have long passed me by. I still
like to do my CD shopping there, but I think the clerks at Tower and HMV are
mostly bemused to have a middle-aged foreign man browsing through the latest
J-Pop CDs. The
I managed to catch the enormous Hokusai exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum in
Posted on
11/28/05:
I spent much of the past week on the road. On Monday, I took
the train out to Yamanashi prefecture, where I spoke about Natsume
Sôseki's
experiences in
My family joined me in
In between all of the traveling, I tried to keep up with the
remarkable sumo tournament taking place down in
Posted on
11/20/05:
Another big week.
On Monday night, we visited the Fuchû no Mori Geijutsu Gekijô to hear the "Matthias Musicm
Ensemble," a chamber group formed by members of the NHK
Symphony Orchestra. It may seem that I
have misplaced a "u" in their group name, but that in fact appears to
be their official moniker. The ensemble played well, but mostly familiar
pieces--Mozart's Eine kleine
Nacht Musik and Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The one surprise was
Carl Nielsen's arrangement for chamber orchestra of Bach's Chaconne,
originally composed for solo violin: quite moving, and as far as I can
tell unavailable in recorded form.
Thursday, I attended the first day of the 29th
International Conference on Japanese Literature at the National
Institute of Japanese Literature. A number of interesting presentations,
including Stephen Dodd (
On Saturday afternoon, it was the Shôwa Literature Association meeting at the
Then Kang Sang-jung (
Posted on
11/13/05:
An exciting, intense week just flew past
at rocket speed: perhaps you heard the loud whizzing sound. The first
few days were spent in a series of intense meetings between faculty from
On Saturday, I attended the afternoon sessions
of the conference on "Parody in Japanese Culture" at ICU. Kojima Yasunori (ICU) spoke on the school of the
eighteenth-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Ogyû Sorai,
demonstrating that we need to take into consideration both the 'hard' (serious
thought) and 'soft' (parody) sides in considering Edo-period intellectual
history. John Mertz (
Finally, a report on a topic of
repeated conversations in our family the past few weeks. In
Posted on
11/6/05:
We're watching three different new tv dramas this season here.
All of them are keeping us reasonably entertained, but I'm not convinced we'll
make it to the finish line with all three. None is so outstanding that we
couldn't bear to drop out halfway.
On Monday nights at 9:00 on the
On Thursday nights at 9:00 on TV Asahi, we tune into Jukunen rikon ("Mature
years divorce"?), notable primarily
for its cast. The great 1960s Nikkatsu action
hero Watari Tetsuya plays a recently retired man
whose long-suffering wife, played by the famous actress Matsuzaka
Keiko, has suddenly announced (with the support of their grown children) that
she wants to strike out on her own now that she has fulfilled her
responsibilities to her family. It's not like we can't see the ending of
this from a hundred miles off. Does anyone really doubt the couple will
end up reunited after discovering they actually do love one another after
all? But there are still pleasures to be had along the way, I
hope. This show has also consistently shown up in the ratings top ten.
Finally, also at 9:00 p.m. on Thursdays, on the TBS
network, we're watching Brother Beat,
another domestic comedy. Three young and remarkably handsome brothers try
to find love and meaning in contemporary
Posted on
10/29/05:
It's been hellzapoppin' (any Olesen and Johnson fans
in the house?) around here lately. Last weekend, my father-in-law was in
town for a haiku gathering--I only wish my own life could be so elegant!
The kids enjoyed having Grandpa around, as did I and the better half. The
parental units even took advantage of the built-in babysitting opportunity to
sneak out one evening to sample one of the local izakaya
(pubs).
Also last weekend, I attended one day of the
I gave a guest lecture this past Thursday on
the theories and history of nationalism in a class at ICU. In between, spent my time trying to catch up on a flood of
recommendation letters, referee reports, book reviews, etc. I also
managed to sneak in a visit to Banthai, my favorite Thai restaurant in
Posted on
10/9/05:
I've been playing the role of culture
vulture recently.
A week ago Saturday, I caught the "Cubism in Asia" exhibit at the National Museum of Modern Art. Some striking pieces, but also much that
reminded me of the bureaucrat-safe strain of humanistic art that held sway when
I was a child--the sorts of paintings I remembering seeing on pamphlet covers,
upscale advertisements, and above all in liberal protestant church
publications.
From the musuem, it
was a short walk to the meeting of the "Meiji 30s Culture and Literature
Study Group." There, Professor Seki Reiko (
Then, last Tuesday, I attended the German
Institute for Japanese Studies' History & Humanities Study Group, where graduate student
Fabian Schaefer (
Posted on
9/28/05:
The highlight of the week came last
Sunday. It may, in fact, have been the highlight of the year--perhaps of
my entire life. Well, no, I suppose my wedding and the births of my children
stand out more, but this ranks just behind those. As a birthday gift, my
family gave me not just sumo tickets--but tickets to senshuraku,
the final day of the 15-day tournament. I arrived in Japan a few weeks
before the Nagoya basho
back in July, but was buried then in trying to learn my new job, and so I
consciously (albeit mournfully) decided to sacrifice that tournament and all
the pleasures it might bring. At the same time, however, I vowed to immerse myself in the September tournament here in
The basho opened with high
expectations. Asashôryû, the great yokozuna from
The Bulgarian sekiwake
performed so well that I began to fear he would wrap up the championship
early—that is, before the final day. The
turning point came on Day 13. Asashôryû,
with a 10-2 record, would wrestle Kotoôshu, who was perfect at
12-0. A victory by Kotoôshu would give him the
championship outright. The match lived
up to all expectations—unless, that is, you are a purist who expects tidy,
textbook sumo. It was a
take-no-prisoners street brawl, to hell with technique. Kotoôshu seized the early advantage,
and at one point even had Asashôryû turned around.
Normally in sumo, when you get behind your opponent and have a grip on
the back of his mawashi, it’s all over. But Asashôryû spun around ferociously
and somehow managed to break Kotoôshu’s grip. The
two then lunged at each other, and when the smoke cleared, Asashôryû had managed to topple the
challenger.
Kotoôshu, clearly unnerved, caved
in again on Saturday, so the two were tied at 12-2 going into the final
day. Each won his regular match in convincing
fashion, which meant they had to wrestle a special play-off match to determine
the championship—and, Dear Reader, I was there!
Asashôryû
won convincingly. Afterward, we stayed on to watch all of the trophy
presentations and end-of-the-tournament ceremonies. It was my sixth time to see sumo live, and by
far the most exciting time yet. I love visiting
the Kokugikan arena; the wrestlers usually arrive by
foot, so you can mingle with them on the sidewalk outside. There were two wrestlers, for example, on the
train I rode to get there, and my family—who joined me at Kokugikan
a few hours after I arrived—brushed past the young Estonian wrestler Baruto (the first blonde sumo wrestler
in history, if you can imagine it) on their way in. I will be back in January for the next
tournament in
Posted on
9/17/05:
The week began last Sunday with the
national elections here, and the disheartening triumph of the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party. Of course, I’m getting used to being disappointed by election
results….The main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, ran a campaign
that was astonishing in its lack of inspiration. LDP leader Koizumi’s
popularity is due, I think, mainly to the fact the people believe he really
cares about things. During the build-up
to the campaign, he made statements along the lines of, I don’t care if I have to die, I’m going to
get my postal reforms enacted. The
idea of dying for postal reforms is more than a little absurd, but as
performance it worked.
That same Sunday evening, just around the time the voting
ended, I was walking with my nine-year-old daughter past our dusty train
station on the fringes of
My
daughter and I crowded under the overhang as we read the handwritten menus that
are pasted all over the shack. We decided: she would have the curry rice dinner, and I
the curry-rice-with-croquet. I step up
to the window and the younger of the two bento stand workers begins taking my
order. I’ve managed to order my
daughter’s meal when suddenly I am jostled from behind. One of the two drunks we had spotted a minute
earlier has staggered up to the order window.
He thrusts his head in through the window to shout out something unintelligible
to the bento stand owner, who is working in the back kitchen. The drunk seems to know the owner, wants to
tell him how good the world is, how much fun it is to be drunk. The owner barely acknowledges him.
I
try to ignore the drunk and finish making my order. The young man behind the counter ignores the
distraction as well. I step away from
the window, toward my daughter. That’s
when the drunk man notices her, a nine-year-old blonde
here on the fringes of
The
man bends down, points at her, then looks at me. Kawaiiiii! he stumbles over the
word: Cute! We can smell the booze
on him, even from a distance of several feet.
He sways slightly, as if gravity is trying to knock him off
balance.
How old is she? He questions.
I tell him she is nine. Cute. Cute. He stands up straighter now. He’s trying to pull his scattered brain
together to say something. My daughter
is still frozen in place, too panicked to know what to do.
I’m Korean, the man says, using the word
Chôsenjin
that is preferred by those Koreans in
There
are two other Japanese customers waiting for their bento, their heads buried in
the manga comic books the bento stand keeps on
hand. I can see their ears tuned in to
the drama playing out here, but they aren’t going to be of any help if trouble
starts.
The
drunk starts fumbling behind the collar of his white golf shirt, trying to get at
something. He finally pulls out the
amethyst Christian cross he wears on a slender chain around his neck and
displays it my daughter. He mutters
something like, Do you know this? He tries to say the word: Christa...Christa…
but gets stuck. He goes back to, Do you know this? My daughter is still frozen
in place, unable to respond.
The
drunk looks at me, perhaps in disgust. She doesn’t know anything about it, does
she? He’s running out of things to
say.
To
my relief, he turns away from us, back to the order window. He staggers up to it again. I pat my daughter on the shoulder and nod to
her, trying to send the message that it’s okay, everything’s going to be
fine. The drunk is hollering something
back to the owner in the kitchen. The
owner is responding now, trying to keep the drunk
calm, trying, no doubt, to get rid of him.
I’m not listening to what they are saying.
Then
the drunk comes back. Go ahead and order you dinner, he says
to me. I tell him we’ve already
ordered. He staggers back to the window
and bellows out to the owner, You liar, they’ve
already ordered. He reaches into his
pocket and pulls out a small wad of bills.
He holds them up and says to me, in English, money.
He
argues a bit more with the man behind the counter, who asks him, Did they say it was okay? Now the drunk is getting belligerent, and I
realize what is happening. He wants to
pay for our bento. I step over and say, that’s not necessary, you don’t need to do
that, but the drunk raises a hand to brush me off, and I’m afraid to insist
further: that could lead to a fist
fight. He hands a 5,000 yen note to the
young man, who makes change. The drunk nods to us and then staggers away from the booth, back
toward the fruit-and-vegetable stand by the station.
I
turn to my daughter. “Well, we’ve had
our adventure for the day, now?,” I say, trying to
make light of it. She is still stone-tense. “I think he had too much to drink,” I tell
her. She can’t see any humor in the
situation, no matter how much I try to make light of it. She wants to know how many beers he drank to
get that drunk. You can see she is
worried: if you can’t even be sure of
adults, what sort of world is this?
A
few minutes later our bento are done. I offer at the window to pay for them; they
decline. I ask if I may leave money so
they can repay the drunk in the coming days, after he has sobered up. They say no, that I shouldn’t worry about it, he was drunk, after all.
They are very apologetic, ask me not to get
angry. He was just drunk, they repeat.
My
daughter and I start walking home under our umbrellas. We are supposed to stop at the convenience
store next to the station to pick up some margarine, but as we near it I spot
the drunk again, staggering around. I turn
my daughter in the opposite direction, hoping she doesn’t see him – or him
her. We can get margarine another day.
We
hurry home, my daughter asking more questions about the man—serious, humorless
questions. At home, she refuses to eat
the curry-rice dinner at first, because she feels bad about it. She doesn’t want to eat it because the man
was so drunk. He didn’t know he
shouldn’t pay for us, she says. It would
be bad to eat it. My wife and I convince
her, though, that she should eat it: it
made the drunk man feel happy to buy us our dinner, we
tell her. She begins to pick slowly
through the curry rice, finding no pleasure in it. The world is not as nice a place as she
thought it was just a few minutes earlier.
Her new goldfish swim around in their little aquarium, on a shelf by the
dining table.
The
next day, by chance, I was able to treat my office staff to tea and coffee when
we arrived too early for an appointment.
I was pleased to be able to do so:
I could finally spend the money that I had intended to use to buy my
daughter and me dinner the night before.
It felt like I had atoned for a small sin.
Posted on
9/11/2005:
It was a busy week, including visits to the campuses of
Yesterday afternoon, I was
killing time in one of the most pleasurable ways
A minute or two later, we heard another
loud commotion: the sound of Japanese drums and traditional Japanese
singing on the sidewalk outside. The clerks behind the counter sighed
loudly and rolled their eyes, as if to say, "What next, oh Lord, what
next?"
I wandered outside and found several sumo
wrestlers, dressed in colorful festival garb, carrying a drum and woodblocks,
their leader singing out to the assembled crowd. People were taking
pictures and videos of them. After they finished their performance, the
wrestlers moved fifty yards down the sidewalk to another storefront and
repeated it: a quaint public relations campaign to remind everyone that
the sumo tournament starts tomorrow at the Kokugikan
in Ryôgoku. I have tickets for the final day of
the meet, two weeks' hence. I can't wait.
Posted on
9/4/2005:
This past week, I celebrated my 44th birthday, an odd
number: it marks the beginning of the last year that I can describe
myself as being in my "early forties." Fittingly, perhaps, I
was sick on the big day with an uninvited return visit by the stomach bug that
wiped me out last month. But we had a nice, quiet celebration at
home. The best present I received: tickets to the final day of the
upcoming sumo tournament.
The weather in
Finally, a political
rant, set off by a week spent watching the horrific images from
Posted on
8/20/05:
We are now in our new house here in
In the midst of all
that, we were visited by another major earthquake--not too bad here in
The whole family
is addicted to a new television show, "Joô no kyôshitsu" (The queen's classroom), broadcast Saturday
nights at 9:00 p.m. on the NTV network. The show follows a sixth-grade
classroom with a mysterious teacher: utterly grim and humorless, she
wears black from head to toe. She singles out weak students and tells
them that society has no use for them, that they might
as well get used to doing everyone else's grunt work. She sets students
spying on one another, humiliates some pupils and plays favorites with
others. All the while maintains that this is for the best: it
prepares students for the real world. Even parents and other teachers are
afraid of her. The story focuses on a handful of students in the
classroom who refuse to adopt the dog-eat-dog ethic the
teacher promotes and who try to maintain something like a normal
sixth-grade life. The young actors and actresses in the series are all
terrific, and while the above might make the show sound quite grim, in fact it
is funny and entertaining. It seems, too, that we are on the cusp of a
great revelation: the preview for this week's episode hinted that we will
finally learn what tragic past has turned the teacher into such a
monster. Stay tuned.
Posted on
7/28/08:
We had a fine earthquake here last Saturday afternoon, 6.0 on the
Richter scale. I was watching sumo on tv when it hit. I try to pretend that
earthquakes don't bother me, but this one kept on rocking and rolling for more
than a minute, and made itself harder and harder to ignore....Luckily, no major
damage or casualties anywhere. It was the strongest earthquake
The weather has made the
transition from rainy season to hot, sticky summer. I've been out on the
town a little, seeing old friends, doing a bit of shopping, etc. There's
a new English-language used bookstore, Bondi Books, in Kichijôji, just a couple of train stops away -- I know I'll
be visiting them often.
One of the changes I've
noted on this visit to
And rhubarb too, it
would seem. A friend has just given me a jar of rhubarb jam from
Posted on 7/19/05:
It's been a whirlwind first few weeks here in
The new job is clearly
going to keep me busy, but I like the staff I work with very much, and the
students seem pretty cool, as well. In the meantime, I'm trying to dip my
toes back into Tokyo cultural life: managed to visit a fine exhibit of
twentieth-century Nihonga paintings by Kobayashi Kohei at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, and also went to a fine concert by the
legendary singer Helen Merrill at the Blue
Note Tokyo (the concert
also featured a fun two-song set by her son, Alan
Merrill, whose music has
been on my mind much in recent months). I've made contact with a few old
friends, too, and no doubt will be doing much more of that in the coming
months.
I've had ample opportunities to remember, too, how much I like
riding the trains in
This coming weekend,
I'll be attending what is fast becoming an annual tradition: a
get-together of the UCLA modern Japanese literature faculty and grad students
who are in
Posted on 7/1/05:
Hello from
I've been here two days now, as I
begin taking on my new duties, which will keep me here for the next two
years. I haven't lived in
The last few weeks in Los Angeles were quite hectic,
as we moved out of the house, watched our oldest child graduate from middle
school, sat in on a number of graduate student exams, and tended to all the
myriad other details that a trans-Pacific move involves. At one point, I
very cleverly shipped the computer on which was saved the only copy of our
painstakingly constructed "to-do" list for the move. But
somehow we got through it, and here I am. The rest of the family will
join me next week, after our oldest returns to
I've had very little time to get out into the
city since I arrived. I expect to hit the bookstores and perhaps see a
few movies this weekend. There is a municipal election coming up here on
Sunday, and so the entrance to the local train station is constantly barraged
with supporters of one candidate or another loudly asking for votes:
election-campaigning, Japanese-style. I've eaten ramen twice (both bowls
good, but neither great), and am looking forward to the sumo tournament that
starts Sunday.
Posted on 6/12/05:
The past week was remarkably busy.
It began in
I flew back to
Last night, the whole family headed out to Dodgers
Stadium to watch the Twins beat the local nine, 5-3, with Justin Morneau (a member of my fantasy baseball team who has been
notably unproductive of late) playing the role of hero. This keeps my streak
alive: I've seen the Twins play in person at least once a season since
the late 1970s.
We're getting serious about packing now, and I've
even started to clean up my office. I'll be on the ground in
Posted on 5/30/05:
It promises to be a quiet Memorial Day in
our neck of the woods--not quite as lively as the ones I remember as a child,
growing up in Stillwater, Minnesota. We always went downtown to
We've spent much of the weekend packing, in
preparations for our upcoming move to
I managed to finish a very rough draft of the working
paper I will deliver at a workshop on Natsume Sôseki's Bungakuron (Theory
of Literature) reconsidered from the perspective of psychology and the
natural sciences in Miami next week.
And one month from now, I'll be in lovely
Posted on 5/18/05:
A week ago last Saturday, I was a
discussant at the 11th Annual UCLA Graduate Students Japan
Studies Symposium.
The day featured a number of very good papers delivered by students from a
number of fields--including some of our own from here at UCLA. All in
all, a quite successful conference, put together entirely by our grad
students. It was fun, too, to see them act as organizers, trying to keep
track of all the details.
The following Monday, Joan Fujimura (University
of Wisconsin-Madison) gave an interesting lecture on "What Does It Mean to
Talk About Japanese Science?" She focused
on what being Japanese has meant to biochemists involved in the Human Genome
project--a very thoughtful presentation. It was quite useful for me, in particular, as I prepare a talk I will be giving in
My mother was here from
And of course preparations for our big move across the
ocean continue: the latest task for me is to find a storage unit for our
furniture.
Posted on 5/4/05:
Time continues to hurtle past,
oblivious to the fact that we have so many things to do in the next two months
as we prepare for our move to
In between open houses and
visits to the escrow office, we've been running around, trying to keep up with
life. David Lurie of
Posted on
4/25/05:
It's been a hectic, exhausting, and
sometimes even fun couple of weeks. It started when I and the Far Better
Half took a Saturday night out on the town, as we enjoyed the rare gift of
overnight babysitting services from my sister and brother-in-law. The two
of us spent Saturday night at a hotel downtown, had a lovely yakitori dinner in
Little Tokyo, and spent a leisurely hour browsing the books at Kinokuniya (they even have a copy of my The Dawn That Never Comes on hand, in case you've been looking for one). On Sunday
morning, we went to the Japanese American National Museum to see the "Japan After Perry" exhibit of ukiyo-e
woodblock prints of Yokohama in the 1860s and 70s -- and also, unexpectedly, "Lasting Beauty: Mrs. Jamison and the Student
Muralists," a moving
recreation of a set of murals painted by high school kids interned in Arkansas
during the war. Then we were off to see the Sunday matinee performance at
Disney Hall to see the Los
Angeles Philharmonic play Dvorak and Smetana on Sunday. Quite lovely, especially the brief Nocturne by Dvorak.
Alan Rich gave the concert a very positive review.
The following week, I was out of town for
several days, up in
The near future should keep us on our toes, as we gear
up for our move to
Posted on 4/12/05:
We finally managed to work our way through
all twenty episodes of "Fuyu no sonata" (Winter sonata), the
Korean soap opera that was enormously popular in
The Twins' opening week of the
season has been troubling. A couple of key injuries (including a bum knee
on the part of their #3 starter, Carlos Silva), some nervous defense by the
rookies in our infield, and an apparent inability by our starting pitchers to
get through the first inning without surrendering runs--all of it a source of
worry....It's early, yes, but jeez guys, let's get it going, okay? Batgirl, as usual, sums up the state of the world quite
nicely.
We look forward to the coming
weekend: we have tickets to see the Los Angeles
Philharmonic play Dvorak and Smetana on Sunday. It will be our first visit to the main concert hall
in Disney Hall.
Posted on
3/22/05:
It's nearly spring break now at
UCLA, but the pace has hardly slowed down. For those of you keeping track of
such things, yes, it is raining here again.
The March 14 workshop I organized on Natsume
Sôseki's 1907 Bungakuron
(Theory of Literature) went quite well. We had interesting papers from Karatani Kôjin, Ann Sherif and Atsuko Sakaki. Karatani's paper situated Bungakuron
against the "end of literature," both in Sôseki's
day and in our own, while Sherif explored the
differing relationships Soseki established with the
audiences of his writings, and Sakaki provided an
intriguing reading of the contrast between the concepts of "language"
and "literature" in Sôseki's thought. We
also had a productive roundtable session with Josephy
Murphy, Atsuko Ueda, and myself--the three organizers
of the huge Bungakuron project that should
keep us all busy for the next couple of years. The next step in the project is
a workshop in early June in
In a couple of days, I drive
down to
And when I'm not working
on any of the above, I'm either watching the current sumo tournament, which
after ten days looks to be another Asashôryu
walk-away victory, or listening to Internet broadcasts of Minnesota Twins'
spring training games from
Posted on
3/12/05:
Sorry for the paucity of activity
here lately -- we've been having computer troubles and have switched to our
back-up machine, a hand-cranked antique that uses Windows 98. This makes it a
challenge to do anything complicated -- like update this site.
But enough
about me. How are you?
It's been a busy couple of
weeks here at UCLA. John Treat gave an interesting lecture a couple of weeks
ago on the sudden boom in depictions of Multiple Personality Disorder over the
past decade in Japanese popular discourse and fiction. And Kyoko Inoue gave a
talk last week exploring how the concept of jinkaku
("personality" or "personal character") has seen
contradictory uses in Japanese education and intellectual life since the late
nineteenth century. In addition, our department organized a very nice dinner to
honor two genuinely beloved colleagues who will be retiring soon: Noriko Akatsuka
and Herbert Plutschow.
I'm currently neck-deep in the
final preparations for a March 14 workshop I am organizing, part of a multi-year
project I am helping put together that aims to start a conversation on Natsume Sôseki's 1907 Bungakuron (Theory of Literature). I am also
working on a paper I am supposed to present at the
Popular Culture Association annual meeting in San Diego in late
March, a discussion of the impact of the Kinks on Japanese rock and roll.
The
best written lines I've encountered in the past week. from
Ardashir Vakil's novel Beach
Boy, describing one of the characters from the perspective of the young boy
who narrates: "By far the most important aspect of her face, unless caught
in a moment of utter privacy, is that she is always smiling. To get to know
Mrs. Verma, one needed to comprehend the hundred
variants of her smile."
Posted on
2/26/05:
As you have probably heard, we have
again been buffeted by rains here in
The highlight of my past week
was my first-ever visit to Yale University, where I gave a talk on the film
music of Kurosawa Akira and the boogie-woogie queen Kasagi
Shizuko. It was nice to visit some old friends, meet some new ones, and to see
a bit of the campus. I landed in the middle of a snowstorm that eventually
dumped five inches on
The coming weeks bring a lecture here at UCLA by John Whittier Treat on
February 28 and, on March 14, a workshop I am organizing, part of a multi-year
project I am helping put together that aims to start a conversation on Natsume Sôseki's 1907 Bungakuron (Theory of Literature). I
am also working on a paper I am supposed to present at the
Popular Culture Association annual meeting in San Diego
in late March, a discussion of the impact of the Kinks on Japanese rock and
roll. I am keeping busy, in other words.
Posted on 2/14/05:
The week started out last Monday with a
very interesting lecture at UCLA by Margherita Long (UC-Riverside) on Tanizaki's Yoshino
Kuzu, a rebuttal of standard psychoanalytic
readings of the story that revolve around Oedipal paranoia about being
suffocated by the mother's body. Instead, Long used close readings of key
passages of the story (esp. those related to papermaking) to argue that it
relies on a more joyful, unthreatening view of the maternal body.
Then, later that evening, I attended a screening of some of acclaimed director Kawase Naomi's early autobiographical documentary films at REDCAT in Disney Hall. Kawase herself
was in attendance to introduce the films.
The week ended with the Grammys show on tv--which was unusually fun this year. How
great to see James Brown pull off a few fancy dance
steps--as well as to see Usher give the Godfather his props. It was a
nice mix all the way through: Kanye West with
the Blind Boys of Alabama and Mavis Staple, the great assemblage of Southern
rock dinosaurs, the oddball grouping of stars for the Tsunami charity version
of "Across the Universe" (Slash with Brian Wilson? Bono with Stevie Wonder?), Loretta Lynn looking genuinely overwhelmed
even as she tried to sass her way through her acceptance speech, etc.,
etc. It all worked because the focus remained firmly on the music, where
it belonged. It doesn't hurt, too, that the Grammy folks have
decades of bad decisions they can make up for now by giving out honorary
Lifetime Achievement awards to deserving folks who never won a Grammy--Janis
Joplin, the Carter Family, etc. Maybe next year they'll hand them out to
Beethoven and Mozart....
Hope y'all have a Happy Valentine's Day!
Posted on 2/6/05:
One tries to ignore the noises coming out
of Washington, D.C. this week, the patent dishonesty of Bush's claims about
wanting to 'save' Social Security: the man is on record for more than a
decade (from before there was even a whisper of a 'crisis') as wanting to
replace the system with private accounts. As many have pointed out (including
me here), we are witnessing a repeat of the
And so the professor in La-La-Land tries to focus on
his scholarship, which is of course what sabbaticals are for. Except that
administrative work of various sorts keeps popping up left and right--proving
once again the verity of an old professorial adage: get yourself out of
town when you go on sabbatical. I shouldn't complain, of course:
the load isn't that heavy, most of it is work I've taken on willingly myself,
and I will be disappearing from
Posted on 1/25/05:
This past Friday and Saturday I helped
host the big "Translating Universals: Theory Moves Across Asia" here at UCLA. It was a bit chaotic logistically—not
surprising, given the large number of participants and the complexities of
coordinating the requirements of multiple sponsoring agencies—but it all came
off without any major breakdowns. The papers and discussions were quite
provocative and informative. The final panel in particular, which brought
together four important intellectuals from across
With that conference behind me, I can turn
back to my own research now, in particular preparations for two upcoming
events: a
lecture I will give at Yale next month on the early postwar films of Akira
Kurosawa and the music of the boogie-woogie queen of Japan, Kasagi
Shizuko, and a workshop to be held here at UCLA in March on Natsume Sôseki's 1907 landmark work of literary theory, Bungakuron (Theory of Literature).
The latter is part of a big project I am helping organize that aims to
translate and launch a scholarly discussion of Bungakuron
and similar texts by Sôseki.
Posted on 1/17/05:
It was a quiet Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
weekend at our place; we certainly appreciated the three-day weekend. We
even barbequed steaks in the backyard for lunch today, in celebration not only
of the good reverend King but also of the warm, sunny weather that has
thankfully returned to
Satoko and I have started watching Fuyu
no sonata (Winter Sonata), the Korean soap opera that became a
runaway hit on Japanese television last year--it's just now being rebroadcast
on TV Japan here in the
This coming Friday and Saturday will be the big "Translating Universals: Theory Moves Across Asia" conference I am co-organizing here at UCLA. The out-of-town
participants are already starting to trickle into
And I continue to enjoy being on
sabbatical leave very much, thank you kindly.
Posted on 1/11/05:
And so it rained and rained and
rained. Finally this morning the rain stopped and the sun came out.
And it still took us more than three hours to drive the twelve miles from our
house to UCLA, because mudslides had taken out every road leading from the
In the midst of all that rain, Satoko and I spent the
past weekend in
UCLA classes have started up again now, though I'm not
teaching this quarter--or next. I am keeping busy, however, with research
and with final preparations for the January 21-22, 2005 "Translating Universals: Theory Moves Across
Asia"
conference I am co-organizing. It's looking to be a very exciting
event. We'll be bringing together specialists on
(Entries
for the year 2004 can be found here; those for 2003 can be found here.)