03/28/2011: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
A surprisingly readable biography on Emperor Hirohito that gives a cogent and level-headed narrative to not only his life, but the history of modern Japan as seen through the lens the monarchy.
Apologies for the lack of updates. I went on vacation and am now trying to desperately make up for all the Greek and Latin I haven’t done during the summer. But for now, here’s my favorite photo from a weekend in La Jolla.
(The rest of my family, unaware of the lurking Nancy Rubins work)
Till after my placement exam, χαίρετε φίλοι!
The Trees by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
While reading Larkin last night, I found out that you can hear
his reading of two poems ("The Trees" and "The Whitsun
Weddings") here. His voice is soft, solemn, and a bit wearied,
but breathes into his poems a stirring. The site is wonderful
and features many other poets (going as far back to Tennyson!),
but, of all the poets I heard last night and today, I still
find Larkin to be the most resonant.
Here I am, talking to a college friend into the early hours. Spurred by nostalgia, I found myself shifting through the internet for all things Columbia. Somehow or another (and it all began with trying to remember if Fayerweather was indeed spelled with a Y or not), I found Tony Kushner’s 2004 Class Day speech. The hilarious speech (complete with ample jabs at Columbia’s hate for and inferiority complex about Princeton) can be found in its entirety here, but here is a really splendid excerpt.
“This is the Columbia dialectic, the New York City dialectic, all this spectacular symmetry, all this Euclidean geometry, all this rational griddage is a lattice entwined with floribund, uncontrolled and uncontrollable vines, shoots, roots, fruits, leaves, bees, busily cross-pollinating. This box, this machine, this is a crystal incubatory whence comes the fluid, the protean, the revolutionary, the non-mechanical, the non-commodified, the non-fetishized, the human. The air this morning is electric. You have fed, you have sated, you’re ready; and every step you take from this point on counts. This is your Code Orange: Life and its terrors, terrible and splendid, awaits. I know I speak for Jon, Warren and Justice Ruth — seek the truth; when you find it, speak the truth; interrogate mercilessly the truth you’ve found; and act, act, act. The world is hungry for you, the world has waited for you, the world has a place for you. Take it. Mazel tov. Change the world.”
If you and I talked about music anytime during the past year, I probably have gushed to you already about how much I love the Swedish musician Fever Ray. She’s recently confirmed that her next song would be a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” and the vinyl for the track is now available for pre-order on her website.
It is fuckin’ amazing. It’s hauntingly beautiful and does Gabriel immense justice.
Andersson, the face behind Fever Ray and one half of the electronic duo the Knife, says of the track herself, “We made it more intense and faster to fit our eccentric pecussionists and energetic live musicians. It is a monotone track but we worked with the dynamics trying to make it sparkle. I listened to it a lot when I was around 15, and it still moves me. It made me start reading Anne Sexton too.” (lifted from NME)
I read Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird last week and have been thinking about it and its surrounding controversies since. The allegation that either Kosinski or the publishers consciously exploited the Holocaust by publicizing the book as being an autobiographical work seemed strange to me because I had interpreted the novel’s primitive landscape as a liminal space where the boundaries between historical realities and Bosch-like dreamscapes composed of demons from folklore, nightmares, and and children’s imagination have dissolved.
While I’ve been thinking about this now and then for the past week, my friend sent me today a link to a selection of color photographs from early 20th century Russia. While the time and geography is a bit off, I couldn’t help but look at these and imagine Kosinski’s unnamed protagonist passing through many of these places. My rambling thoughts on Kosinski aside, these photos are really something.
I haven’t been devoted to this as much as I would have liked. A part of it is my own laziness, but a part of it also has to do with how Tumblr is not a writer friendly blog. However, despite the title of this post, it’s not really a resignation, as I’ll be moving onto http://thebyblian.blogspot.com/.
Hope to see you there.
I was at the Fowler Museum in UCLA last Sunday for the opening of the Contemporary Korean Ceramics exhibition. Despite being distracted by the festivities and the bustle of the exhibition’s inauguration, I nevertheless left very much disappointed. Given the lofty ambition to represent the contemporary face of Korean ceramics, the one lone gallery room filled with few select pieces from only five artists seemed irretrievably insufficient.
Because the exhibition gave only the skimpiest history of Korean ceramics, the context needed to understand the relationship between traditional forms and modern visual rhetoric was missing. While I really liked a several of the works individually, I felt the exhibition as a whole was incoherent. I could not but feel that the motive behind the exhibition was a desire to display Korean art, rather than a genuine in the dialogs and meditation on contemporary Korean ceramics.
I did, however, very much enjoy the smaller exhibition of Korean funerary figures also currently being exhibited by the Fowler Museum. Thee festively painted wooden funerary figures, or kkoktu, are fascinating relics of the rural folklore and superstitions. And since I generally tend to associate Joseon Korea with Neo-Confucian sterility, I was pleasantly surprised to see the gay colors, funny expressions, and dizzying creativity on these figurines. I also thought it was really interesting how the figure of the guard changed with time; while the 19th century ones showed Joseon military men with spears, the 20th century ones show mustached police officers.
While the two exhibits are not worth going out of the way for, it doesn’t seem like a bad way to pass the time if you’re in the neighborhood. Plus, the UCLA campus is gorgeous.
(Picture: Installation of 111 bowls by Lee Young-Jae, by far my favorite piece in the exhibition)
[music: Yankee Fox Trot Hotel - Wilco]
[reads: The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski]
1 Matsui homerun*
1 out of town friend
7 attempts to finish Helvetica
1 bottle of Riesling, 1 bottle of Moscato
6 chapters of Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
1 pending cat adoption!**
*Went to Game 2 of the Angels Blue Jays series with the Blue Jay fan in my life. Given the good seats and the multiple homeruns, it was easily the most entertaining baseball game I’ve attended. However, I am somewhat racked with guilt that this was my younger brother’s first baseball game and it was not a Dodgers game.
**A 4 month old gray tabby male who is stunning!
