When reading William J. Tyler's anthology, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938, one realizes that "modanizumu" (modernism) is a very broad term. It seems to mean, for Tyler anyway, any work produced during the years he designates that is not absolutely reactionary in its style or concerns. Thus readers who are hoping for Japanese fiction that, in Ezra Pound's phrase, "make(s) it new" may be disappointed to find that Tyler's expansive definition of modernism allows him to include work that simply deals with the new: the "fashion, mores, and manners" of the years with which he is concerned. Whether Tyler's definition is too broad is a question probably best left to those interested in literary taxonomy.
See what else I have to say about Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938
--David
Flying in from Japan, we pass over the vast Russian tundra with its icebound lakes and rivers and plains. When the planet heats, this will be a center of civilization for what remains of the human race.
Cissie tells me that you are on to Bach. Poor wretch! You, I mean, not Bach, who never was that. I have had to put up with a huge composition by him, humorously entitled: Suite for Orchestra, conducted by the ignoble Furtwängler, who, it appears, has had the better part of his nudity covered with interwoven swastikas. He has the charming modesty of letting himself be led by his brass-players, who blow as only beer-drinkers can, while making with his little left hand very daring gestures towards his first violins, who fortunately paid not the least attention to them, and swinging the soft fleshiness of his posterior as if he longed to go to the lavatory. Hardly had I recovered from this assault when he had the impertinence to launch into Schumann's Fourth Symphony, which is less like a symphony than an overture begun by Lehar, completed by Goering, and revised by Johnny Doyle (if not his dog), and which is
really not worth thinking about let alone launching into. Needless to say that the murderous Furtwängler, with the connivance of his damned souls, was victorious, if massacring a score that has certainly never been alive can count as a victory. To make nothing out of nothing, and take three-quarters of an hour over it, now there is an achievement! Then finally he was able to go to th lavatory. But instead of staying there for the rest of his life, he came back, followed by his assistant executioners, in order to tear into tatters, in front of us, Beethoven's 7th. Mr. Furtwängler, like the good Nazi he is, cannot tolerate mysteries, and it was rather like a fried egg, or if you prefer, like a foot put in it, that he presented this music. He played the last movement like the most elegant of Ständchen. He had a rapturous reception. Not only did he button up that poor symphony to the point of strangulation, but he took the liberty of giving it a colorful buttonhole. And with what, in God's name? A Würstchen.
--Samuel Beckett, in a letter to Morris Sinclair, dated January 27, 1934. He is writing about a Berlin Philharmonic concert at Queens Hall, London, held on January 22 of that year
--David
Samuel Beckett's letters are a treasure box of delights. We find, for example, this description of his poetic goals:
I suppose I'm a dirty low-church P. even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice. I'm in mourning for the integrity of a pendu's emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.
but also, surprisingly, this apology for blogging avant-la-pixel:
I'm not ashamed to stutter like this with you who are used to my wild way of failing to say what I imagine I want to say and who understand that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must stutter or rest. And it needs a more stoical mouth than mine to rest.
Both are from a letter dated October 18, 1932 and addressed to Thomas McGreevy. It's one of the epistles collected in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940
—David
Today I was supposed to fly, and the flight was delayed 24 hours. Because I'd already mentally committed my time, what I did today wasn't part of a plan and I could see it for what it was... time spent doing stuff. Usually my time spent doing stuff is charged with inevitability and importance. Not today.
By 2030--in 20 years time--"food, water and energy shortages will unleash public unrest and international conflict" according to a new report by a UK government scientist.
I saw today that I was not an innocent bystander. I am choosing this future. I'm choosing it because I don't act every day to avert it. Because I'm busy with my own important activities. As almost all of us are. We are all unwittingly yet actively choosing a future that is rapidly becoming the present.
--Julian
This is the latest in my series of unpublished letters to editors. I was reacting, in this one, to John Sutherland's assertion in the Financial Times that to have Poe meet Dickens, as Dan Simmons does in his novel, Drood, is "unhistorical."
Dear Editor:
In his discussion of Dan Simmons's historical novel, Drood, John Sutherland writes, "On his first trip to the US, 30 or so years earlier [than 1870], we learn, Dickens had a conversation with Edgar Allan Poe (unhistorical) . . . " ("What the Dickens?" March 14-15). Sutherland's parenthetical assertion that Poe's meeting with Dickens is not part of the historical record, but rather the product of Simmons's imagination, is incorrect. Having read Poe's long and detailed review of Barnaby Rudge in Graham's Magazine, Dickens—three years younger than Poe, but much more successful—did agree to meet with him in March of 1842 at the United States Hotel in Philadelphia where Poe lived. What they discussed was not, as far as I know, recorded.
The Japanese author and scholar of mysteries, Taro Hirai, who used the pseudonym Edogawa Rampo (get it?), is probably correct when he states in his essay "Dickens and Poe" (my source for the information above): "While we can say with certainty that Poe was stimulated and influenced by Barnaby Rudge, Dickens betrayed no interest in Poe whatsoever." Support for the first part of that statement might be adduced from Poe's remark on a certain bird that turns up in Barnaby Rudge. "The raven, too," he writes of it, "intensely amusing as it is, might have been made, more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama."
Sincerely,
--David
It seems that David and I were unwittingly in the same general area at the weekend. His last post indicates he was in the Enoshima aquarium while we were right outside the door, cycling up the coast and past Enoshima Island.
But our quest was for flowers, not fish.
--Julian
In this our winter
your kiss and caresses
return me to the summer of love
