We encountered this character in the woods not too far from here. The photo was taken by a Blockhead spouse, Sayuri.
—David
Mikan (tangerines; mandarins; satsumas) are a winter treat. Light in the palm of the hand, spherical, seedless, citrus, and with a loose orange skin coarse with pores, they are available here in Kanto from November to February, the first brought from the far south, then Chubu, and finally ripening in local orchards. You can pick up a plastic bag of 10 or 12 at a roadside stand or supermarket. Or save a lot of money by buying a carton.
Take a mikan. Stick your thumb into the skin near the crown, releasing a spritz of zesty oil. Smell it for a moment in the air, and lingering on your fingers. Tear the peel from top to bottom, keeping it in one piece until the fruit lies nestled in the jagged white petals of its skin. Lift the fruit free and, removing the remaining veins of white pith, pull it into sections eaten one at a time, each self-contained and releasing its juice when chewed. The remaining membrane is easily swallowed. When all is consumed, fold the empty peel into an orange ball.
I'm now enjoying the last mikan of the season, sweet and thick skinned, harvested locally and late from the orchards on the hillsides above Sagami Bay, brought by a farmer who sells them door to door from his pick-up truck, weighing them out at 10 kilograms for 2000 yen, the same price as every year. Soon they'll be gone. When they appear again in nine months time, they'll be all the more delicious for the anticipation.
Carton of mikan;
A sweet pleasure
for the coldest days of the year
--Julian
In this era, humans have been cut loose from ancient moorings of meaning and purpose. The context within which this condition is most manifest in the United States is the debate--or more precisely, the lack thereof--over what is called 'national security.' The phrase is potent because it promises something that is impossible, since the human condition is by definition insecure. When candidates vie with one another over who is most qualified to be 'commander-in-chief,' and when they unanimously promise to strengthen military readiness, they together reinforce the dominant American myth--that an extravagant investment of treasure and talent in armed power of the group offers members of the group escape from the existential dread that comes with life on a dangerous planet. That such investment only makes the planet more dangerous matters little, since the feeling of security, rather than actual security is the goal of the entire project.
--James Carroll writing in today's International Herald Tribune.
It's rare to find wisdom and the willingness to think thoughts that do not echo the standard bromides in the newspaper, or anywhere else, for that matter. Read Carroll's whole piece here.
--David
Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in language. Yet he is one of the half-dozen poets who are widely read; and of them, the one whose work is most frequently imitated by fledgling poets and students of 'creative writing.' His success, however, is less disheartening when considered as an emblem of an age—perhaps the first in human history—where poetry is a useless pleasantry, largely ignored by the reading public.
Eliot Weinberger
in Written Reaction: Poetics Politics Polemics (1979-1995)
More recent work by Weinberger, one of our livelier critics and writers, here and here.
—David
The last few days have been fine and the nights clear as the moon has grown. It appears low at dusk, a ghost growing brighter as the sun sets. By midnight it has climbed almost directly overhead before sinking toward the west and melting away at daybreak.
The companionship of the moon is all the more special for its rarity. The full moon often passes unseen in a cloudy sky. Or it rises and sets at odd times, leaving the black night to the stars.
Last night was frosty and the moon shone bright in a clear sky. Opening the front door, I started at the dark shape crouching on the wall. The moon, one night shy of full, bleached the garden and cast surprising shadows.
--Julian
Last month I kicked off an occasional series of posts on the simple pleasures of Japan with one about tatami. I concluded that "to truly relax and to reclaim one's center, a chair will no longer do," and wrapped up with some lines about the smell of the straw mats filling the house.
About relaxing on mats vs. chairs, I thought it was a matter of posture and position, but there might be even more to it. A study by Hiroshi Morita of the University of Kitakyushu found that kids sitting in a tatami room outperformed kids sitting in a classroom when given an academic test, an effect that increased with age. The researcher suggests it isn't because--my first guess--a classroom is a dreadful, inhuman environment, but instead that it comes down to the aromatic compounds in the mats—phytoncide and vanillin among others—that "provide relaxation and make it easier to become more intimate with your surroundings."
On reflection, "reclaiming one's center" is a poor description of the effect of relaxing on tatami. Feeling at one—intimate—with one's surroundings puts it much better.
--Julian (written in a chair at work, far from the aroma of tatami)
Those who believe race to be an immutable category may find the item below of interest . It first appeared in 1932 and was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune's "In Our Pages: 100, 75 & 50 Years Ago" column on October 23, 2007. Once upon a time, it seems, "Italian" and "Irish" were thought not only to be races, but two distinct races.
Irish and Italians Clash in Prison
One prisoner was stabbed to death and a score of others wounded today when rival groups of convicts clashed in the yard of the city prison at Welfare Island. Police reserves from every city precinct were needed to quell the riot, which threatened to develop into a jailbreak. The outbreak occurred during the recreation hour without warning. George Holshoe, leading member of a committee of Irish convicts, was fatally stabbed by an Italian in the warden's office, where he had gone to confer with an Italian committee concerning grievances between the two races. In the middle of the discussion, the Italian whipped out a knife without warning, leaped at Holshoe and inflicted a mortal chest wound. News of the attack quickly filtered to the yard, where several hundred men were exercising.(Italics added)
--David
My Blockhead colleague, Julian, has just added Ward Just
Forgetfulness, by Ward Just. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN-13: 978-0-618-63463-7, 258pp., $25.00.
Americans were once exhorted to “remember the Alamo,” and now they are reminded that “we will never forget.” The point seems to be that memories of wrongs done to us must always be kept alive and festering, but an opposite tendency urges us, with Confucius, to “forget injuries, never kindnesses,” or, more simply, to “forgive and forget.” Ward Just’s Forgetfulness is a study of the virtues of forgetting and the difficulty of doing so. It is a gripping examination of an artist’s reaction to the murder of his wife, but it is more than a well-done psychological thriller. It is, thanks to the formal integrity with which Just has laid out his protagonist’s agony, art of the highest order.
Thomas Railles is an American artist long resident in a remote French village. His wife, Florette, with whom he is deeply in love, is murdered by a group of men, apparently jihadis, who find her incapacitated on a mountain path. They first attempt to carry her to safety, but finally decide, in the encroaching darkness, that they must get about their business. As the men are deliberating Florette’s fate, and she is lying on the ground in pain, she remembers her past: her childhood in the village, her dream of fleeing that village for Paris where, in Place Vendôme, she would be a fashionable couturier. She remembers, too, coming to understand that “Place Vendôme was not beyond her wildest dreams, in fact it was her wildest dream; but it was only a dream and so she had left it behind.” She also recalls dinner that evening with her husband and his American friends. Thomas had explained the discussion she couldn’t quite follow as being about “capitalism’s responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mine shaft.” She remembers her husband, on the day he was to propose to her, standing with the owner of the local café against a band of ugly Americans whose blind and aggressive leader, it emerges, may have been in the twin towers on the day they were brought down. One of the women with the blind man berates Thomas: “There was a time Americans stuck together, members of the same tribe. Cut one, the others bleed.” That time, she tells Thomas, is “New York. Right now. This minute. It’s beautiful.”
Thus in this first chapter, a tour de force, we see the themes laid out which will run through the pages of Just’s masterpiece: memory and forgetting, capitalist brutality and the brutality of its opponents, an American fighting to protect something valuable and an American blundering, blind, in a rage.
Just, in a previous life as a foreign correspondent, reported from many of the world’s hottest of hot spots, and his books tend, like this one, to be grittily political. His work, therefore, is often, more or less reflexively, compared to that of Graham Greene, but the comparison only works if one is talking about Greene’s best work (The Quiet American, say), and if one understands that the philosophy and political thinking which underlies Just’s work, less bound by dogma than Greene’s, endow his novels with a more complicated, and therefore more compelling, view of the world.
Railles’s past, in which he was an odd-job man for the CIA, complicates his reactions to Florette’s death and to those who killed her. The American buddies with whom he complains about capitalism are full-time operatives, and as such they don’t like to leave cases open, questions unanswered. It will never be enough for them to tell themselves, as Thomas briefly does, that Florette’s death was a mishap, a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Preferring closure, preferring coherence, they go to work and ultimately bring Thomas—not entirely against his will—together with the men who killed his wife. We understand, as Thomas watches them being tortured (and is aware that he is seeing the least of their ordeals) that as inadequate a response as forgetting may be, vengeance, too, is unsatisfying.
He shares a meal with the head interrogator who tells him: “You need an excellent memory. You must never, ever forget. Forgetfulness leads to—.”
Thomas interrupts him: “Forgiveness?”
“No,” the interrogator assures him, “not that.” What forgetfulness—or its opposite, never forgetting—does lead to, for the interrogator or for Thomas, is never definitively spelled out, and this is one of the many strengths of Just’s novel. The questions he asks are not easy ones, and thus he can offer no easy answers. Like Thomas, all we can do is to “wait for the light that arrives ages later, light even from a dead star,” and as we wait, console ourselves with the beauty of Forgetfulness.
—David
