Narita Ruichi and Iwasaski Minoru, Norma Field wa kataru: sengo bungaku kibo 『ノーマ・フィールドは語る―戦後・文学・希望』(2010). Part of the handy Iwanami Booklet series, in a compact 63 pages this provides an appealing portrait of the life and scholarship of my colleague, Norma Field. In a series of interviews with two of Japan’s leading intellectual historians, she talks about growing up the daughter of an American soldier and a Japanese woman in 1950s Japan, about her intellectual awakening in the 1960s and 70s, and about the ethics of scholarship in today’s tangled academy.

Alexander Saxton, The Great Midland (1948). A recently revived classic of late American proletarian literature, the story of Communist Party activists on the South Side of Chicago: railroad workers (both black and white), University of Chicago armchair radicals (both male and female), immigrants and their children. Reminiscent of early John Dos Passos, the narrative moves forward and backward through the history of the first half of the twentieth century as it depicts the friendships, jealousies, and confusions of a generation of American radicals.

Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989). West’s classic account of American pragmatism is driven by great passion and intelligence, and he makes a persuasive case for the relevance of James, Dewey, Peirce and their intellectual descendants in today’s world. But I’m also struck by the remarkable undercurrent of American exceptionalism that runs throughout his argument.

From West’s fine book, I also learned the part of the story that usually gets left out when it gets related here in Hyde Park:

Unfortunately, Dewey himself failed to articulate a plan for social reform to which his progressive schools could specifically contribute. He was aware that schools by themselves could not bear the weight of a full-fledged reform of society; yet he also knew that the schools themselves were ideologically contested terrain, always worth fighting for and over. And in 1904 Dewey’s school came to an end after a series of mergers and the subtle dismissal of Dewey’s wife from its principalship by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper. Dewey immediately resigned from the university. Luckily, Columbia University moved quickly and financed a new chair in philosophy for him. And the luck was American pragmatism’s too, for it was in New York City, and maybe it had to be there, that Dewey emerged as a world-historical figure. (p. 85)

Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, a collection of English translations of Natsume Soseki’s writings on literary theory that I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy, is now available in paperback for a mere $27.50. Such a deal!

The volume was originally published in hardcover last year. Public Radio International’s “The World” picked the book as one of its “International Reads for the Holidays,” and the journal Japanese Studies called it “an impressive work of remarkable erudition matched by the precision and lucidity with which the complexity of Soseki’s thought and of its context are presented….eminently readable, lively, and lucid.”

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt….

The Women of Yueh (1)

She is a southern girl of Chang-kan Town;
Her face is prettier than star or moon,
And white like frost her feet in sandals–
She does not wear the crow-head covers

(In these poems, Li Po records what he saw of the “southern” girls in Kiangsu and Chehkiang. These provinces were under the king of Yueh in the 5th and 6th centuries, B.C. Chang-kan is near the city of Nanking, and was at Li Po’s time inhabited by the lower class of people. The “crow-head covers” are a kind of shoes worn by upper-class women of the north. So named on account of their shape and very small size–small feet seem to have been already at a premium. “It is interesting,” remarks a native critic demurely, “to note Li Po’s admiration for a barefoot woman.”)

[Translation and notes by Shigeyoshi Obata, from his edited volume The Works of Li Po, The Chinese Poet (1935)]

(Image source)

Ugaya Hiromichi, J-Poppu to wa nani ka: Kyodaika suru ongaku sangyo (What is J-Pop? The expanding music industry, 2005). A provocative study of the music business in Japan since the late 1980s, when marketing executives coined the word “J-Pop” to suggest the appearance of a Japanese pop music scene that could compete on an international basis. Ugaya isn’t as interested in musicians as he is in the business, technological, and marketing sides of the industry. He shows, for example, how the switchover to the CD format (along with the rise of inexpensive CD players) transformed the gender and age demographics of the music-buying audience in Japan.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1816). In which a British female writer tells us what women really want. It’s amazing how contemporary Austen’s characters remain, despite the now-archaic nature of the world they occupy. Differences of birth or class are both overcome and reinforced (just like today!), and of course the colonies hover in the background: the widowed Mrs. Smith gets her happy ending when her rights over her late husband’s estate in the West Indies are recognized. No wonder Natsume Soseki loved her writing so much. A fine novel to begin the summer with.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1998). In which a British male writer tells us what men really want. Hornby’s comic memoir of his life-long obsession with soccer seemed a good choice to accompany this year’s World Cup. As usual with Hornby, it’s inlaid with countless funny, poignant observations–e.g.:

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?

When I wrote The Poetics of the Everyday, I wanted to learn how quotidian experience could foster rather than frustrate poetry: how twentieth-century poets turn everyday life, so often a chore or requirement, into a creative activity. More specifically, I wanted to learn how poets ground creativity in everyday time, that over-and-over in which each morning seems both the same as and different from the one before. My investigations focused, then, on repetition and verse writing. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking also about verse reading. How do I and others read poetry, ordinarily? I don’t mean how we comprehend or analyze it—rather and more basically, how do we take it in? How does this reading fit among other everyday activities? How should it?

Phillips proposes including a little poetry in your everyday routine, an idea that at least sounds attractive. It might also seem a wee bit unrealistic, akin to the eternal repetition of resolving to get more exercise (and Phillips warns against treating poetry as if it were a form of therapy).

This may sound entirely too obsessive, but I usually keep a book of poems on my desk and I read one or two when I’m waiting for my computer to boot up or to download something: the slower my computer gets, the more verse I read. It takes me a month or two to work my way through an entire volume. I normally read each poem twice, and I try to voice them aloud.

There are a handful of poets whose work I read exhaustively, purchasing every new volume they publish. One of those is Bill Holm: at this moment, the poetry collection on my desk is his posthumous book, The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems. From his poem, “Ars Poetica“:

Shakespeare, Tao Chien, Homer, Pushkin,
Basho, Gilgamesh, Walt Whitman,
Anonymous–all wastes of time.
Your practical uncles were always right.
Still, if we move this word over here–
take out a line there–make it sing better–
there may be a surprise in it–though maybe not.
But we’ll do it anyway, to pass,
as Buddha says, the time–
to thicken the plot. What else
have we got to do until the end?

Then there are the oddball books I pick up because something about them attracts my hand. After finishing Holm, I will move on to a faded 1935 collection I stumbled into at a used bookstore last year, The Works of Li Po, The Chinese Poet, translated into English by Shigeyoshi Obata. After that, maybe it will be time to reread one of the big modernists, Eliot or Yeats.

How (where, when, why) do you read poetry? And, after all, what else have you got to do until the end?

I have tickets to see the one and only Ray Davies here in Chicago on Saturday night. Here’s one of the back-catalog songs he’s resuscitated for the current tour:

And here’s Delroy Wilson’s 1968 cover of the obscure Motown song, “Put Yourself in My Place” (apologies for the abrupt cut off at the end):

Ah, the sadness of pop songs. As Nick Hornby sums it up so admirably in High Fidelity, “Which came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?” Hell if I know, but Mr. Bartender can I please have change for this fiver so I can plug another handful of quarters into the jukebox?

Oe took up Najita’s landmark study, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka, and traced its impact on his own life and writing. It turns out that Oe’s own Great Grandfather studied at a merchant academy much like the Kaitokudo in nineteenth century Osaka, where the Confucian concepts of “kogi” (ancient meanings) and “gi” (righteousness) were crucial. An old school building his Great Grandfather erected that still stands on the grounds of Oe’s family home in Shikoku has hanging on its wall calligraphy samples of those two phrases, and Oe himself ended up using those words frequently as the names for characters in his novels.

Oe revealed that Najita’s book was in many ways responsible for his most recent novel, Suishi (Death by water, 2009).　　Najita’s study of the intellectual tradition of Osaka merchant culture opened Oe’s eyes to ways that his own father’s life could be understood as something other than a failure: it allowed him to make sense of his own father’s life and death, which in turn made it possible to realize his long-held desire to write a novel about his father’s death in a flood in 1945, just before the end of the war.

Oe praised Najita’s writing style for its warmth, rhetorical skill, and intellectual rigor. He then cited a talk Najita gave at a 2004 symposium in honor of Masao Miyoshi, in which Najita proposed a radical rethinking of the Japan’s “peace constitution” as being instead a “peace and ecology constitution,” a reinterpretation that would vastly expand the concepts of sovereignty. Oe said that he has frequently quoted this passage to great effect in talks he gives across Japan to groups organized to defend Article 9, the “no war” clause of the Japanese constitution, and he traced how Najita’s contemporary ethical claim was rooted in his historical scholarship on the eighteenth century thinker Ando Shoeki.

Oe concluded by celebrating what he called his “three American tutors”: Najita, Miyoshi, and Edward Said. He quoted a phrase Said used just before his death to describe the stance he sought to maintain despite the difficulties of today’s world situation: “optimism as an act of will.” It was a phrase, Oe declared, that applied to all three men.

We’ve videotaped the lecture and will post it on the Center for East Asian Studies webpage in the near future. In the meanwhile, I remain delighted and more than a little astonished to have been able to be a small part of such a meaningful and historic event.

Then yesterday I was on an airplane flying from Chicago to Minneapolis. For a paper I’m writing on early Cold War culture, I was re-reading Lionel Trilling’s classic 1950 study of American literature, The Liberal Imagination. In his chapter on Mark Twain, he writes about the Mississippi, about how its brown, muddy presence functioned as something god-like in Twain’s imagination, a divine and sometimes vengeful presence that embodied the pure, natural power that Twain believed ruled in America prior to the high capitalism and corrupting influence of money that held sway after the Civil War. The antebellum Mississippi, Trilling writes, was a road that moved you, one that would crush you if you weren’t properly respectful of it.

As I was reading Trilling, the pilot announced that we were beginning our descent into Minneapolis-St. Paul. I looked up from my book to glance out the window and there it was: the Mississippi River. Of course it was white, flat and immobile now, a snowy ribbon twisting its way across southern Minnesota.

I’m up in Minnesota because we’re in the process of selling my mother’s house. It’s a trip full of various emotions. I write these words in the kitchen of the place I’ve called “home” since 1969, but it’s the last time I’ll be here. When we first moved in back when I was a third grader, we discovered to our delight that we were within walking distance of the Mississippi. As a grade schooler, I used to hike down to collect fossils from the limestone banks above the water. As a high school and college student, I used to pass evenings with friends down at the river’s edge, building bonfires and watching the barges slowly drift past. More recently, I’ve taken my own children with their grandparents down to the waterfront for picnics and to skip rocks across the river surface.

Change is bad. Luckily, the Mississippi has figured out a way around all of that.