Lost In Translation

Read Real Japanese

I am trying to improve my Japanese thorough reading since I think it is one of the best ways to improve vocabulary. This last year I’ve been reading the Read Real Japanese series-there are two volumes: Essays and Fiction. Each volume has a CD reading of each of the 6 stories or 8 essays. The Japanese text has furigana (hiragana reading of the Chinese characters for those unfamiliar with them) and the opposing page has notes of English translations of some of the more difficult passages with grammar/cultural notes and a dictionary in the back. I usually read the story with the CD stopping to look at the cultural notes and then go back and highlight all the new vocabulary and look up the definitions and practice writing it out in a notebook to help memorize the new vocabulary.

The stories in the fiction volume are: "Kamisama" by Kawakami Hiromi "Mukashi yuuhi no koen de" by Otsuichi, "Nikuya Omuu" by Ishii Shinji, “Miira" by Yoshimoto Banana, "Hyakumonogatari" by Kitamura Kaoru, "Kakeru" by Tawada Yoko. To be honest I didn’t find many of these stories particularly interesting, save Banana Yoshimoto’s inexplicable story “Miira,” however it was an interesting way to learn new vocabulary.  “Miira” was a very intriguing story about sexuality, repulsion-conflicting emotions of a young girl who a strange sexual experience with an eccentric neighbor. This story alone makes me want to seek out some of her work that has been widely published in English-I have avoided it because the novel’s summaries didn’t appeal to me.

The essays were more engaging for me. These included: “Matsu Shirona Uso” by Haruki Murakami,  Junko Sakai “Densha no Naka de Wakamono ni Chuui,” Mitsuyo Kakuta “Ryouri,” Banana Yoshimoto “Utsushisa,” Kou Machida “Dou Kaite mo Iyana wa Yatsu Iya wa Yatsu,” Yoko Ogawa “Hakase no Aishita Suushiki o Megute,” Keiichiro Hirano “Mujyou Toiukoto,” and Hideo Levy “Bungashya no Kuni ni, Boku ga Iru.”  Murakami talks about his preoccupation with “white lies” in creating ficition. Sakai makes a curious about turn when she complains of the poor behavior of young peoplein trains then she refers to her own behavior as a young person and is more forgiving. Kakuta starts out criticizing men who cook and ends up writing a tribute to them.  The changing face of Kyoto which often comes under attack is defended by Hirano. I also really liked Levy’s essay about literary identity and the difficulty of translating different concepts into other languages.

The Last Days of Disco

Whit Stilman is one of my favorite directors, who I think has been woefully underrated, he recently had his previously out of print film The Last Days of Disco undergo the Criterion treatment. This ensemble cast was one of the first things I saw the stunning Kate Beckinsale in. She was great as the acidic Charlotte-so unlikable. It also stars Stilman regular Chris Eigeman and Chloe Sevigny in the impressive ensemble cast about the mating/dating rituals of yuppies in the early 80s.  It is my third favorite Stillman film after Metropolitan (which also got the Criterion treatment) and Barcelona (which deserves the Criterion treatment).  That being said it was better than I remember previously with the witty Stillman-esque dialogue including a hilarious take down of Lady and the Tramp. This DVD is a new restored high-definition transfer supervised and approved by Whit Stilman with audio commentary from Stillman, Sevigny and Eigman. Four deleted scenes with commentary. There's also an audio recording of Stillman reading a chapter from his book The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards. There are also a behind the scenes featurette, original theatrical trailer, and an insightful essay by novelist David Schicker. 

Brick Lane

I was inspired to read Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane, about Bangladeshis in London by my recent trip to Dhaka. It is an interesting novel that explores identity and the women’s role in a society that still practices arranged marriages. It has come under attack for portraying some Bengalis as uneducated and backward. It reminds me of the Jhumpa Lahiri books, except instead of middle class academics what we have here is the tenement dwelling underclass in London.  

Patti Smith Dream Of Life

I recently saw the Patti Smith documentary, Patti Smith Dream of Life directed by Steven Sebrig. I think it is illuminating about her sporadic second half career from 1988 to the present. However, it came across as more of an art film. I would have liked to have seen more straight forward exposition about her career and life as well as more vintage live footage. I read that Smith allowed this documentary to be made because it wasn’t a typical rock and roll documentary, so perhaps she was hoping for a less traditional take on the bio documentary.

Two More From Slate

There's an interesting dispatch series of one of the 9/11 bombers who was an architecture student in Germany at Slate.

I also found this Slate article discussing the use and abuse of genius thought-provoking as well:

I have my own strong feelings about the question of genius in literature. I've always felt that if we look at the past century, Nabokov was a game-changer, as the academic phrase has it. Nabokov showed there is a place you can go, a place that the alchemy of words can transport reader and writer to, that no one had gone before. And Nabokov went there, with ease, inLolita and Pale Fire. So it's hard to call any other writer in the past century a genius of the same order. Which in part accounts for my ambivalence about the decision to publish, against his wishes, an unfinished draft of his last incomplete work, The Original of Laura: No one was more aware than he of when a work of his had reached its zenith of genius. He didn't feel this one had. Perhaps, though, we'll learn some valuable lessons about the degrees of ascent to genius. Is it all or nothing?

I'd say the only work of genius in the past half-century to come close may have been Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. (Gravity's Rainbow was to be his Ulysses but turned out to be his Finnegans mistake.)

Maybe genius must give the feeling of effortlessness as well as utter confidence and transcendence. Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow both show the palpable sweaty strain to become encyclopedic works of genius: Always screaming across the sky: "This is a work of genius!"

Assassination Vacation

I had previously read Sarah Vowell’s engaging book of essays, Take The Cannoli, and it enjoyed it. And I liked the concept for Assassination Vacation-going on a road trip to various historical locations of the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. The first chapter is on the Lincoln assassination and it should come as no surprise that it is the longest and the most tedious for me there was a lot of attention to details that I found trivial or uninteresting. Perhaps it also had something to do with the familiarity of the subject as well, but also a lot do with the fact that she focuses too much on John Wilkes Booth. The second section on Garfield’s assassination was more interesting to me because I didn’t know as much about his assassination or his administration as president. Again perhaps there was too much information about his assassin Charles Guiteau as well. However, I found the third section about McKinley’s assassination the most fascinating because of what was going on with his administration as well as who took over once he died, Teddy Roosevelt, and the fact that his murderer Leon Czolgosz was inspired by Emma Goldman and the anarchists to assassinate McKinley. The last section that ties it together was really interesting as well. I would have preferred that Vowell spend more time on the administrations rather than the trivia surrounding the assassinations.

The Human Condition

I wasn't familiar with these films, The Human Condition, but they look appealing to me:

Based in part on a six-volume novel by Junpei Gomikawa and, in part, on Kobayashi's own wartime experiences as a pacifist trying to survive in the Japanese army, The Human Condition is as grand in scale and scope as that other anti-war classic, Gone With the Wind. Like the South, Japan lost a war and can't stop talking about it. Every great Japanese director has a movie about the traumas of WWII under his belt, but none is as ambitious as The Human Condition.

The movies focus on Kaji (Japanese icon Tatsuya Nakadai), a self-righteous leftist wanker who becomes, over the course of these three films, one of the most fully realized human beings in cinema, the equivalent of Charles Foster Kane or Michael Corleone. In the first film, No Greater Love, Kaji's unshakeable belief in the equality of men spawns a report on how to implement more equitable management techniques, which, in turn, earns him a promotion in his company and a chance to put his theory into practice at the Loh Hu Liong iron mines in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Before leaving, he impulsively marries the long-suffering Michiko and they head north, convinced that Kaji's socialist management style will carry the day.

More Mad Men Links

There's a link I found on a Mad Men discussion board about contemporary novels set in the suburbs from the NY Times:

Like the suburbs themselves, the suburban novel seemed for a while to go out of fashion: too old, too square, too white and middle class. Except for a few die-hards like Rick Moody and A. M. Homes, the younger novelists were apparently moving out and taking up residence in new fictional territory.

They were writing historical novels, like Kathryn Harrison and Brooks Hansen; they were traveling to Eastern Europe and reinventing magic realism, like Jonathan Safran Foer; they were working on brainy, Foster Wallace-style epics; like Alan Furst and Jonathan Lethem, they were working the fertile ground where so-called literary writing intersects with genre fiction; or, like Jonathan Franzen in ''The Corrections,'' they were writing novels in which the suburbs had been abandoned by the young and were inhabited now by the old and the gaga.

No one was left back in the old tree-shaded neighborhoods, a reader could be forgiven for thinking, except for the two Johns: Updike and the ghost of Cheever, gloomily surveying the well-kept lawns and the empty swimming pools and wondering where all the action had gone.

Also there's a great site that's called The Footnotes of Mad Men, which cites historical facts that drive story lines on the excellent AMC show.

Monthly Special

"Dragon" mabu dofu don buri (spicy goodness).

Mad Men's Women Writers

I came across an interesting article on the abundance of female writers for Mad Men:

"The truth is that a lot of these moments that seem period and horrible for women come directly from experiences that I and the other women writers have had in our lifetimes," says Veith, one of seven female writers on the show's nine-person writing team.

"Like the [first season] episode 'Ladies Room' where Peggy goes into the bathroom and there are women crying. That came from [consulting producer] Maria Jacquemetton's life experience.

That's not the only office drama Jacquemetton says she's seen firsthand.

"Peggy assumed that Paul Kinsey in Season One wanted to talk to her and valued her opinion, and it turned out he really just wanted to date her. That's something that has certainly happened to several women on the staff, including myself, in our early days out [in Hollywood]," she says.

"Men like women, and women want to be valued for more than just being attractive, and sometimes those things intersect. That's certainly not something that's decade-specific."