Lost In Translation

Eating Korea

I previously read Graham Holliday's book on Vietnamese food, Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table, and found it to be entertaining and informative. It was a great companion guide to a recent tip to Viet Nam. And while I enjoyed his follow up, Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance (2017) it didn't have the same impact as his earlier book on Viet Nam. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the former book was something of an autobiography and was informed by his blog on Vietnamese food, while this book was more akin to reporting on contemporary Korean food culture. It didn't have the same authority as the book on Viet Nam. However, it still was very fun to read. Here's some examples:

I ate dalk galbi almost every weekend when Ilived in Korea. Dak galbi is special, it's a violence, a mess, a mistake that works. It's like a building site where everything Korean that's edible got dumped inside, turned upside down, rattled about, and thrown into your face. I adored i,t and I wanted it again.

This time around, the hongeo was chewy. Very chewy. The texture was unlike fish; it was more like a land-based animal. Just as I I was contemplating this curious sensation, I cracked through the tough tendon. This was more by mistake than by design, but exactly as Tom had said it would happen, it happened. It was like I'd severed a critical pipe in a chemical factory.

It was as if a urinal cake were now lodged inside me. And it was dissolving, seeding evil, within, I swallowed. The image fixed in my mind, we started to exchange adjectives across the table. "Cleaning product," said Chris. "Ammonia," said Tom. "It's like soap made of pee."

So I have to admit that this book overall was very entertaining and informative. But I think I would have to spend much more time in Korea to truly appreciate the subtle insights from this book.

The Unwinding

I had previously read a couple of compelling books by George Packer (The Village of Waiting and The Assassin's Gate) and thought The Unwinding: An Inner History of New America (2013) looked interesting. Published in 2013 it is somewhat out of date, failing to predict the Trump takeover, but uncovering the deep malaise in America that was behind it. The book begins in 1978 and records how the right in America maneuvered to take over not only government but society to remake it so that it basically catered to the needs of the 1%. Packer looks at seemingly average citizens, specific regions, and major players to tell the story of the great "unwinding". There's the monomaniacal Dean Price looking to make a fortune in ethanol, Jeff Connaughton, a Wall Street refugee looking for salvation as a devotee to Joe Biden-of all people, and Tammy Thomas-a factory worker form Youngstown, Ohio who can't get a break. Silicon Valley is an area that gets Packer's scrutiny to explain the new economy as does Tampa, Florida since it was hit very hard by the housing bubble and economic collapse of 2008. Some of the major players profiled include Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Raymond Carver, Sam Walton, Colin Powell, Alice Waters, Robert Rubin, Jay-Z, Andrew Breitbart, and Elizabeth Warren. I'm not sure Packer has an easy to sum up conclusion about this volatile period of American history, but he has given some insight into how America had changed in the period. I think much of the impact of the era is still yet to come, and most of it feels will not be so positive, but I am hoping I'm wrong. 

Song Of The Lark

Song Of The Lark (1915) is the second volume of "The Great Plains Trilogy" after O'Pioneers and preceding My Antonia. It is a bildungsroman or story of the development of an artist from youth. The novel follows the development of Thea Kronberg from her childhood in 19th-century Nebraska to her career as a renowned opera singer. The early parts of the novel were its strengths and were not dissimilar form O'Pioneers. However, the later parts of the novel were something of a chore. I do plan to finish the trilogy as well.

God Save Texas

Lawrence Wright has long been a favorite staff writer of mine from The New Yorker, I recently read his 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower after watching the TV mini series based on the book. I should have known it would have been so impressive given his work for The New Yorker. Anyway, I was excited to learn that he had written a non fiction book on Texas, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). It would be preparation for my first visit  to the Lone Star State. In the first chapter: ""The Charms, Such as They Are", Wright explains his affection for the place where he has lived most of his life. He sums it up as thus:

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America-the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities-what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois, and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don't bear the responsibility of being the future.

This is followed by Chapter Two: "A Tale of Three Wells" which looks at the oil industry and its impact on the growth of the state. In the third chapter, "Houston, We Have a Problem" Wright takes a historical look at one of the great Texas cities-Houston as well as the NASA space program based there. One surprising fact that emerges is that Houston is the only major city in America without zoning laws. Another is that it is the the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country. Still another is that the city is over 600 square miles-so big that Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit could all fit within the city limits simultaneously. There's also a fun little digression into the sale of the Astrodome. Next in "Culture Explained" Wright explains his theory of culture in which there are two levels. Level one is basic building block of culture things that have been cemented into everyday culture such as Tex Mex food, pickups, and the like. While Wright sees Level Two culture arrives with money and is imported-it is the culture that is longed for such as museums, ballet, and opera. And Level Three culture is about "returning to one's roots, self-confidence and occasionally forgiveness." His examples of Level Three are Beyonce's Lemonade and the Lake Flato Library in Austin. In Chapter Five, "The Cradles of Presidents" discussed the the three presidents that have called Texas home: Lyndon B. Johnson, George W. H. Bush, and George W. Bush. In the subsequent chapter, "Turn the Radio On" his discusses the AM and FM phenomena-FM is for the city dwellers, AM is for Trumpland and piety and paranoia are the main subjects. Alex Jones of Infowars is one subject analyzed as are mass shootings and the open carry gun laws plus the other permissive gun laws and other aspects of Texas paranoia.Dallas-the big "Big D" is the focus of Chapter Seven. Wright starts out with the Black Lives Matters protest in Dallas in which policemen were shot and that leads back to the Kennedy assassination. Politics comes to the forefront in Chapter Eight "Sausage Makers" has Wright proclaim:

Fairly considered, the Texas legislature is more functional than the U.S. Congress, and more genteel than the House of Commons, but a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state's reputation for aggressive know-nothing-ism and proudly retrograde politics.

There's a section on the career of W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, a true to life populist-that I thought was a fictional caricature-since the Coen Brothers introduced such a character in their 2000 comedy O'Brother, Where Art Thou? There was significant discussion of state politicians who don't want their state to become another California. As well as Texas' obsession with the bathroom bill banning transgender people from using their non birth certificate sex bathrooms.  Austin gets its Chapter, Nine, "The City of the Violet Crown". Here Wright talks about how living in Austin is forgivable to outsiders in a way that living in Texas is not. Austin is Wright's place of residence and the second most popular tourist destination after Las Vegas! Incredulously Matthew McConaughey was a former neighbor to Wright. Politics once again is the focus in Chapter Ten, "More Sausage." In the following chapter the relationship between Texas and Mexico is analyzed in "Borderlands." The musical legacy of the state is discussed in "The High Lonesome." And "Far West, Far Out" looks at the remoteness of West Texas and the irony of the Martha artist colony that is situated there. In "Among the Confederates" Wright comes to terms with is life in Texas and revels where he has decided to be lain to rest. Here are some random facts I learned while reading the book:

Texas is near the bottom on education spending and academic achievement.

About 35 percent of Texans own guns.

In the decade between 2005 and 2015, more than 300,000 Americans were killed by guns compared with 94 who died in domestic terror attacks.

I really enjoyed this comprehensive and eclectic look at Texas. It reminds me of one of my other favorite books from 2018-Sam Anderson's book on Oklahoma City, Boomtown.

City Primeval

City Primeval (1980) is another compelling Elmore Leonard crime novel set in Detroit. In this novel we get an epic showdown between a psychopathic criminal, Clement Mansell, also known as "The Oklahoma Wildman," and a thoughtful, laconic homicide detective named Raymond Cruz. The action starts when Mansell kills a controversial black Detroit Judge Guy and his companion for the night over a road rage incident. Cruz quickly connects the dots and is bearing down on Mansell who escaped prosecution once before due to luck and and flaws in the criminal justice system, but then again he has one of the best criminal lawyers in the cool, calculating Carolyn Wilder whom Cruz finds intriguing. Throw in Mansell young, attractive dope smoking former beauty queen and a distinct supporting cast of characters and you have another winning Leonard novel with great dialogue and a page turning plot-it was highly entertaining. 

The One From The Other

The One From The Other (2006) is another entertaining installment in the Bernie Gunther private detective series from Philip Kerr. This time it is 1949 and—after being forced to serve in the SS—Bernie has moved to Munich to reestablish himself as a private investigator. When the beautiful Frau Britta Warzok hires him for an apparently simple job in Vienna, Bernie’s finds himself the victim of a frame up. Kerr has created a compelling narrative. And there's plenty of great hard-boiled dialogue as usual, for example Gunther says: "Schiller? Sure. He's the guy who said that the truth lives on in the midst of deception. We keep that quotation over the office door. He's the patron saint of detectives everywhere." There's plenty of great historical details through as well-details like the "Nakam" or Vengeance squads where small groups of European Jews avenged the murders of Jews by Nazis. The novels opens with Bernie doing a job in Israel where he meets Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen-a historical fact. Furthermore, the American Office of Scientific Research and Development did conduct medical experiment son prisoners in state penitentiaries to an effort to develop a vaccine for malaria in 1945 as recorded in a Life magazine from that year.

Night In The American Village

Akemi Johnson takes a look at Okinawa and analyzes its history as a "contact zone"-a place where cultures intersect through trade and conflict, by focusing the narrative via the perspectives of eleven women from the island in The American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa (2019). The first chapter, "Rina", is named after 20 year old Rina Shimabukuro who was raped and murdered by an ex-marine working as a civilian contractor on a base in 2016. Johnson states that she starts with this story because it represents the larger story of Okinawa and shows what many people get wrong about it-there is a long history of military sexual violence, but only big stories like this get reported. These personal stories allow Johnson look at them in context of the history since occupation after WWII. The second chapter "Eve" is named after a 29 year old receptionist who is obsessed with finding a black husband before she is too old to marry. This chapter gives Johnson an opportunity to look at some subcultures among women on the island. They are given the derogatory names such as "ame-jo" and koku-jo", I had assumed the "jo" meant women who like Americans or blacks. But it turns out that it comes from the Okinawan word "jogu" which means appetite for something with sexual connotations. In the third section, "Ashely", the focus is a wife of a Marines officer describes her life as being like an extension of college with parties and outings on the island. The fourth chapter is about "Sachiko" a WWII survivor who worked as a nurse in the caves on the island during the war. Johnson analyzes the last days of the war where many Japanese chose to kill themselves rather than be raped and tortured by the American devils. "Arisa" the subject of chapter five, grew up near a base and ended up marrying a soldier from the base. Thus, in this chapter Johnson looks at history of international marriages between Okinawan women and the soldiers on the base and how they evolved over time. It is clear that Arisa's stable marriage is something of an exception when you hear the stories of the support group that she volunteered with. The sixth chapter focuses on women's rights advocate "Suzuyo" Takazato and allows Johnson to delve into the other sensational military rape case that took place in 1995 when three marines abducted a 12 year old girl raped her and then dumped her in a trash can. The following chapter, "Daisy, is about a Philippine who came to the island as a hostess and managed to find a decent life outside of the red light district, but this is an opportunity for Johnston to analyze trafficking in Japan. Chapter eight focuses on "Miyo" daughter of an African American and Okinawan woman. Johnston explains that the term applied to Miyo: "hafu"-derived from the English word "half" is "a neutral or positive identifier for most mixed-race Japanese people." "Kiki", the subject of chapter nine, happily works on Futenma base, the most dangerous base in the world given its proximity to a densely populated town where crashes have narrowly avoided killing or injuring local people. Other factors such as pollution and prospects of what the spaces would be used for once a base closes are discussed in this section. "Chie", the main subject of chapter ten, was introduced in chapter four when Johnston focused on her mother "Sachiko." Chie is a lively free spirit and English teacher by trade but she is a leading base protester who devotes most of her free time to protesting the building of the new base Henko north of Nago on the island. This was one of the most interesting chapter for me since it focuses on the main issue of the day in Okinawa-moving Futenma to Henko. The last chapter focuses on the youngest generation by focusing on recent protester "Ai" who due to her family's urging has stopped protesting after she was outraged by the rape and murder of "Rina." There are few young people involved in the protest which suggests that the bases will probably live on in Okinawa as they have in the past. Despite the fact that Okinawa is unique in that "the U.S. military presence creates social spaces and opportunities otherwise hard to find in Japan, Johnson has arrived at a personal conclusion. She says:

But the more I learned about the situation and history, the more I felt the bases in Okinawa need to close. Knowing how Okinawans suffered through World War II; how the United States snatched their land; how mainlanders relegate bases to Okinawa to keep them out of their own backyards; how there's no tragic reason for such a heavy military concentration on one small island; how pervasive sexual assault is; and how Okinawans have demonstrated their opposition, time and time again, through democratic means, I know it's an injustice to have so many U.S. bases continue to exist in Okinawa.

33 1/3: Gang Of Four's Entertainment!

I have to admit that I came to Gang of Four's album Entertainment! late. I suspect that I tracked down the album after hearing the track "Natural's Not It" on the soundtrack fro Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette. I'm pretty sure the album was featured in Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 as a prime example of the genre. Anyway, I really enjoyed Kevin J.H. Dettmar's take on 33 1/3: Gang Of Four's Entertainment! (2014). I think his approach may strikes some readers as pretentious, but I do think there was much more behind the lyrics than I was getting from my listenings. Dettmar calls it one of the "lodestars of my intellectual life"-the other being James Joyce's Ulysses. Dettmar approaches the album with the rigor of cultural analysis using theories from the likes of Raymond Williams, Marx, Engels, Foucault, Zizek, and others. His references range from Jay Z, Nirvana, Elvis Costello, to Arthur Miller, E.M. Forster, and other more high brow references. Dettmar alternates between discussions of key words (such as Ideology, Nature, Theory, Alienation, Consumer, and Sex) and explains how they are applied to the songs from the album. His discussion of the songs do not follow the track listings on the original album but are from the author's own design: "Ether"/"Guns Before Butter", "Natural's Not It"/"Contract", "Not Great Men"/"Glass", "At Home He's A Tourist"/"5.45", "return the Gift"/"I Found That Essence Rare", and "Damaged Goods"/"Anthrax". It was an entertaining and informative analysis of a seminal postpunk (the author would bristle at this label-but here it is).

The Betrayers

I have been a fan of David Bezmozgis since his initial short story collection, Natasha and Other Stories, and was very much looking forward to his latest novel, The Betrayers (2014). This novel feels something like a departure since his other novels and stories were more about personal identity and the idea of home. This novel is the story of a disgraced politician who accidentally runs into the old friend who denounced him to the KGB forty years earlier in Yalta in the Crimea. So this novel focuses on morality and forgiveness and among other things. I suppose the novel is also very much about being Jewish-the main character has emigrated to Israel where he has risen in prominence as a politician and is fleeing a scandal having escaped here to the Crimean with his much younger mistress leaving his wife and family behind-is the sort of territory that once belong solely to Philip Roth. Bezmozgis has created a believable depiction of an esteemed man in crisis.

Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women

I was interested in reading Phyllis Birnbaum's Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women (2000) mainly because one of the chapters, the final one, focuses on Hideko Takamine one of master director Mikio Naruse's favorite actresses (thus one of mine). But all of the women profiled in this book are fascinating on some level. The First Chapter, "Slamming the Door Scaring the Neighbors" is about the volatile actress Sumiko Matsui, who is said to have been responsible for her lover's, the writer Hogetsu Shimmamura, death through negligence. The woman from rural Japan through force of will became the defining stage actress of her generation. The Second Chapter, "He Stole Her Sky", tells the tragic story of the life of the poet Chieko Takamura. She established her reputation with Chieko's Sky and died an early death from tuberculosis after having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The early feminist and author Byakuren Yanagiwara was the focus of Chapter Three, "Shinning Stars, Lonely Nights." This woman may be the most complex and difficult to understand of the women profiled in this collection. Yanagiwara was ill treated by her family who essentially sold her off first to her childhood sexual abuser then to a much older and wealthy merchant from faraway Kyushu. She was from an influential family with ties to the emperor and used poetry as a diversion from her unhappy marriage and eventually broke free by publicly breaking from her husband via a newspaper article and going off with the husband of her choice Ryusuke Miyazaki. Chiyo Uno, subject of Chapter Four: "Modern Girl", was another trailblazer and man-eating writer and kimono designer who broke the mold for modern women in the Taisho era. She went through a number of husbands while supporting herself as a writer over a long career. The final chapter, "The Odor of Pickled Radishes", focuses on Hideko Takamine, a well-known star of Japanese cinema in the golden years. Takamine also worked with several other notable directors like Keisuke Kinoshita for example. She lived a very sad life as a child star before maturing into memorable roles for elite directors in the golden age. It's interesting that in the preface Birnbaum talks about the difficulties of meeting biographical subjects with preconceived notions that were often repelled by the subjects. Therefore she chose to focus on dead subjects later, grappling only with the written histories rather than the subjects themselves. Only the final two subjects Chiyo Uno and Hideko Takamine were alive at the time of the writing of the book. Overall, it was a detailed look at five exceptional modern Japanese women.