Farewell, Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

Click here to visit the website of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development.

For Wikipedia's article about Rosa Parks, click here.

posted by C A Crowley @ 7:23 PM

Autumn Poems from Asahi

Here are some from the Asahi page:

After the rain
crickets singing
in concert

Sleepless night
of subtle noises
drifting leaves

--Ari MIYAZAWA


Pitch dark path
sound, then smell of fallen
persimmon

--Reiko NISHIMURA

(1) Crickets: This weekend when I went to the nature preserve (see the post below) the crickets were so loud it was like standing in the middle of a machine shop listing to motors whirring away. Really quite remarkable.

(2) Sleepless night: Been having quite a few of those recently. My house is under a lot of pine and oak trees, and in the night the sound of--what? pine cones? twigs? acorns?--striking and then rolling down the roof keeps sleep away.

(3) The persimmon poem makes me think about the time my mother and I visited Kyorai's Rakushi-sha (Hermitage of the Fallen Persimmons) near Kyoto. Follow the link to see pictures of this place--it's really nice there. I like Nishimura's poem a lot--visual, aural, olfactory all at once.

posted by C A Crowley @ 10:50 AM

Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve

This is a picture from Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve in Decatur. It's a small park in a suburban area that feels like somewhere way out in the country. It's a great place to go for a walk, especially at this time of year.

posted by C A Crowley @ 11:46 PM

Leavetaking Moon

Here's an autumn hokku by Bashô.


ferns of memory persist
on the bridge beams--
leavetaking moon

hashiketa no shinobu wa tsuki no nagori kana

"Shinobu" is a popular word on the internet because one of its meanings is "secret"--to write it, you use the Chinese character that is the "nin" of "ninja." This is not a poem about ninja--though there is a theory that Bashô was a ninja--his itinerant lifestyle and innocuous persona would have put him in an ideal position for surreptitious fact-gathering.

"Shinobu" can also suggest a secret tryst. This implication is strengthened by including "tsuki no nagori"-- leavetaking moon. This is the one that is visible at dawn, just when a stealthy lover would be sneaking home, filled with sweet regrets.

However, Bashô wasn't really a lover, any more than he was a ninja. He was far more distinguished as a traveler. "Shinobu" here is used in another way, i.e., playing with its other meanings:

-- to persist or endure
-- to remember.
--a kind of fern. Here is a picture of the fern.

Ferns like plenty of humidity, so it's easy to imagine them growing on the underside of a bridge.

The verse, then, is an expression of the sadness of leaving a friend. The speaker is about to begin his journey by crossing a bridge. He's starting out before the sun has even risen. As he approaches the bridge, he can just about make out the shape of the beams underneath it. There, drawing moisture from the water below, are shinobu ferns. The name of the ferns reminds him that he can endure the sorrow of parting and of the loneliness of the road ahead on the other side of the bridge. His memories will also endure, as secure as the ferns quietly rooted to the strong beams of the bridge.

I like the way that in English, "beams" calls to mind both the bridge and the light of the moon. I imagine this bridge being curved like the leavetaking moon, and faintly silvery in the gray dimness of dawn.

For Lynn. A safe journey.

posted by C A Crowley @ 11:15 AM

Haiku Guest Lecture

Yesterday I visited Deborah Ayer's class on writing to talk about haiku. It was a great privilege to be in a class with such obviously bright and talented students. I hope I did some good; I rather felt like I left everyone slightly confused. If I had to do it again I would try and say about half as much, and try and let the students talk four times as much.

What did I want the students to understand, exactly?

Haiku is actually quite an amazing poetic form. I know people go around calling things haiku that are not, that are more or less short expressions intended to be funny or absurd (especially in a way that feigns wisdom in a fortune-cookie sort of way): "computer haiku" are a good example. I like these, I think they're funny, but they're not haiku. Why is that? The answer is a bit more complex than you might think.

Haiku can be funny. In fact, haiku (especially in the old days, when it was called haikai in Japan--say, from around the 15th-19th centuries) were very amusing indeed, especially in contrast to the other poetry that people wrote normally. Haiku is meant to convey a stunning moment of insight or surprise, the sort of moment that makes you say, "wow! I never realized that before, but now that you mention it, yes!" in a pleasurable way. Like jokes do. Haiku are like jokes in that both they create an unexpected shock of recognition. On the other hand, haiku are poems (unlike jokes) because they take great care with language.

Of course, not all haiku are actually laughable--sometimes the shock of recognition is one of pathos or wonder. But they all use the same basic principle, which is:

Haiku work by juxtaposing one thing with another. Typically that other thing is incongruous in some way. The incongruity is what makes them a bit shocking. We looked at a famous haiku by Bashô (this translation is by David Landis Barnhill's Bashô's Haiku:

fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
by my pillow

nomi shirami uma no shirosuru makura moto

which is clearly shocking, in the sense that it has quite vivid and earthy imagery that brings together the worlds of ordinary life (evoking the gritty realities of travel) with elegance (the pillow, redolent of a romantic ideal). Somewhat more subtle is the most famous haiku of all, Bashô's:

old pond--
a frog jumps in
sound of water

furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

This, we saw, was not only nice and insightful in its own right, but also was shocking (or at least surprising) because it defied an expectation with its original readers. Since the time of the first imperial poetry anthology, Collection of ancient and modern poems (Kokinwakashû, 10th c) whose preface stated something along the lines of "everything in the world has its song--birds sing, frogs croak, people write poetry," people expected that when poets were writing about frogs, especially noisy frogs, they'd refer to the frog's call. In that sense, Bashô's poem ambushes the reader--this 17th c reader goes along, imagining a pond, visualizing a frog, expecting something along the lines of "a chorus of song!" "peals of croaking!" and instead, he or she just gets a PLOP! as the frog jumps out of convention and into the deep waters of a moment of insight.

Haiku use various techniques to transcend the narrow confines of their form. This brings us back to the point I made above, about juxtaposition. The basic form of haiku is A - B. In the first place there's a topic, and then there's a comment on that topic. I was impressed to see how quickly Professor Ayer's students picked up on this. An example that we talked about is Arakida Moritake's :

A fallen leaf
Flew back to its branch!
No, it was a butterfly.

(Translation by H. R. Blyth; we read a different one, I believe.)

This is actually a fairly wordy version; the basic idea is that the speaker sees what he thinks is a blossom falling from the branch of a tree; he concludes it simply with the word "butterfly" (none of the commentary of "no it was" etc. is in the original.) There's an A part (the butterfly) and a B part (blossom falling). These don't have to be in any particular order. What matters is the tension between them--there should be a certain analogousness to them, but at the same time, a noticeable difference. What makes them interesting is the balance. In one way it's like a high wire act--there's a careful equilibrium between the two elements, and you're taking some risk in bringing them together. In another way, it's like electricity--you have to bring two objects close together enough that a charge can jump between them even though they don't actually touch.

The trick. The trick is, how do you do this in English? You don't have all of the rich literary history that the Japanese haiku poets had in making these tiny little poems reverberate with all the echoes of the universe. (Don't believe that they do? Keep reading! It's amazing!) There were some good ones in the textbook; some others that I read in class were from Jim Kacian's A Glimpse of Red

1. W.F. Owen

pet store
nose prints
both sides

flea market--
seeing my old shirt
on her new husband

lifting the hammer
the old carpenter's hand
stops shaking

2. Tom Painting

a dry leaf
scratches along the sidewalk
All Soul's Day

3. Ken Jones

Well-thumbed public map
"You are here"
no longer there

4. Christopher Herold

foghorns...
we lower a kayak
into the sound

just a trickle
seeping between river stones
summer twilight

All of these isolate a single experience, a single moment, and describe what makes that moment intensely meaningful. Of all of them, Christopher Herold's are the most similar to Japanese haiku--you clearly see the A and B structure, and he also does some nice things with ambiguity (punning on "sound" in the first case, and recasting the image of water as one of light in the second) which would have pleased the classical Japanese haiku poets very much. But all of them are successful.

P. S.

Some notes on pre-modern Japanese poetic forms:

a. Waka. Classical Japanese poetry. 31 syllables, 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm, confined to elegant words and situations. This structure:

ooooo
ooooooo
ooooo
ooooooo
ooooooo

if o is a syllable.

See Thomas McAuley's excellent site about waka for more information.


b. Renga (linked verse). Medieval form, composed collaboratively in sequences, often 100 verses long. 5-7-5. 7-7. 5-7-5. 7-7. etc. Basically you break apart the waka, and give the pieces to different people to compose, and weave them all together in a constantly varying sequence.

Poet A composes

oooooo
oooooooo
oooooo

Poet B composes

ooooooo
ooooooo

Poet C composes

oooooo
oooooooo
oooooo

etc.

posted by C A Crowley @ 5:32 PM

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki III

More about the book. As it says,

"From these plays it is abundantly clear that kabuki is not, as it is sometimes said to be, a monolithic theatre with a limited range of possiblities. On the contrary, its dramaturgy, themes, characters, and performing styles continually altered audience reality, while keeping a firm hold on its past. Just a Minute! is a boastful, fantastic earlier work: Precious Incense is morally implacable, serious, and mature; Kasane reeks of over-the-top cruelty and decadence; while The Woman Student speaks in the unmistakable voice of the modern world." (15)

These are the plays:

1697 Just a Minute! Shibaraku
1730 The Stone Cutting Feat of Kajiwara Kajiwara Heizô no Ishikiri
1745 Summer Festival: The Mirror of Osaka Natsu Matsuri Naniwa Kagami
1766 Japan's Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety Honchô Nijûshikô
1777 The Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai Meiboku Sendai Hagi
1781 The Revenge at Tengajaya Katakiuchi Tengajaya
1796 A Message of Love from Yamato Koi Tayori Yamato Ôrai
1799 The Picture Book of the Taikô Ehon Taikôki
1813 The Scandalous Love of Osome and Hisamatsu Osome Hisamatsu Ukina no Yomiuri
1823 Kasane
1836 Masakado
1851 The Tale of the Martyr of Sakura Sakura Giminden
1860 The Three Kichisas and the New Year's First Visit to the Pleasure Quarters Sannin Kichisa Kuruwa no Hatsugai
1877 The Woman Student Onna Shosei Shigeru
1883 The Fishmonger Sôgorô Sakanaya Sôgorô
1892 The Dropped Robe Suô Otoshi
1893 The Mirror Lion, A Spring Diversion Shunkyô Kagami Jishi
1905 A Sinking Moon over the Lonely Castle Where the Cuckoo Cries Hototogisu Kojô Rakugetsu

Nice translations of the titles; they really make you want to see the plays, a lot of them. As a title, "Kasane" of course is not all that exciting perhaps. But if you know anything about the play, well, it will send shivers down your spine. "A fearsome tale indeed."

Structure of the book then: Preface, introduction, eighteen translations, glossary (337-342), bibliography. Author info, index at the end. There is also a handy list of the titles of the plays included in the four-volume set that makes your REALLY WANT the four-volume set. Wow! What a great list of plays! I'm delighted A) yes these are indeed plays that get performed a lot, so if I had this whole set, I'd enjoy my kabuki viewing a lot more and B) the poets I work on, Yosa Buson especially (who was a crazy kabuki fan) refer to these plays in their poems a lot. How useful!

posted by C A Crowley @ 8:01 PM

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki II

Continuing my as-yet unsorted-through thoughts on Brandon and Leiter's Masterpieces of Kabuki:

The introductory section is very good. It gives basic information about the development of kabuki without too much complexifying detail. This would be an excellent reading assignment for students (and anyone else) who wants to know key information about the genre. It's extremely short (15 pp) but so well written that the reader is introduced to all of the following in an easily comprehensible way: origins, major playwrights, names of plays, main categories of plays, kinds of performance, stage techniques, etc. We learn how these things changed over time, and find out important information about the social and historical context that helps us make sense of these changes.

Aside from its benefits for people who want to find out about kabuki and read kabuki plays, this book would be of immense interest (I should think) to people who like ukiyo-e woodblock prints. You get to find out who exactly were all these characters and actors featured in the prints.

It would be good for teachers of Japanese history and other kinds of J literature of the early modern/bakumatsu/Meiji periods. As the development of popular taste in kabuki, which seems to have moved increasingly towards violence and chaos during the bakumatsu period and reform during the Meiji period reflects political and social trends so plainly, it would be very interesting to add a script or two (even just an excerpt) to a syllabus of readings on the modernization of Japan.

This blog could be worse.

posted by C A Crowley @ 3:44 PM

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki I

I'm working on a review of the book Masterpieces of Kabuki: Eighteen Plays on Stage by James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter. The publisher is U of Hawaii Press; it's copyright 2004.

This is an excellent book. I really, really like it. Some thoughts that occur to me as I read it:

The editors are nutty about kabuki, in the best possible way. Their enthusiasm permeates the book, and it's infectious. I was a bit of a kabuki fan myself already (see the post below), but this book makes me want to go see every play they mention, right now. Somehow they manage to make the appeal of these plays extremely immediate and transparent. Of course when you see a kabuki play, especially as a newcomer, there are plenty of things that stop you feeling like you know where you are with the stories or the performances. However, what Brandon and Leiter do in the book is help you forget the barriers as much as possible. I'm interested in figuring out how they do this.

I think part of it comes from the fact that, although they revere kabuki and its traditions, they refuse to treat it as mystical, elite-culture, exotic stuff. Of course, there's plenty of that kind of thing in contemporary kabuki--it's a centuries-old art form, supported by the government, non-commercial, run by specialists, appreciated by rich people from old-timey rich families, performed at the National Theater, etc. The snob factor is huge. And at the same time, it started out as trashy popular culture, and for most of its existence remained trashy--becoming increasingly sexy, violent, lurid, and extreme as the years past. (The introduction has an excellent summary of kabuki's history. Very readable and easy to follow.) The book walks this line very well, maintaining an informed, disciplined, scholarly distance yet at the same time conveying the excitement and fascination of kabuki very effectively.

To quote from the preface "the editors have recently published fifty-one previously untranslated kabuki plays in the four-volume Kabuki Plays on Stage (2002-2003, also by U of H press). The present volume...contains the editors' selection of outstanding dramas from this series..1697-1905." It represents "major playwrights, chronological periods of playwriting, play types...and performance styles. Plays from Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka are included. None of the plays had been translated until their appearance in Kabuki Plays on Stage. All except one are in the current repertory and regularly staged" (ix).

Contents of the four volume series (i.e. not this book, but the one with 51 plays in): v. 1. Brilliance and bravado, 1697-1766 -- v. 2. Villainy and vengeance, 1773-1799 -- v. 3. Darkness and desire, 1804-1864 -- v. 4. Restoration and reform, 1872-1905. This one, the 18 plays volume, retains these divisions in the introduction's discussion of kabuki history.

The first thing you notice about the book that makes it very functional is its typesetting design (is that the right term?). Elegant fonts throughout, very clear layouts. Also, as noted in the preface, they aim to keep technical terms to a minimum; unfamiliar ones are defined in the glossary. Translations are in chronological order and they are accompanied by short introductions; longer introductions are available in the four-volume set.

So far, so good.

posted by C A Crowley @ 12:34 PM

E-Mailing a Professor, DIY Planner

This link here takes you to a blog with a useful post about how to e-mail professors. As the author, Michael Leddy notes, it's advice about how to "keep the e-mailer in the high esteem of any professor to whom he or she is writing." A good thing.

Leddy notes that this post has attracted a huge amount of interest. It's a good one.

His site has lots of good posts/links/blogroll. I liked this one on looking at art. His series on organization is also pretty good.

Really worth a visit.

Also, this site, diyplanner.com is full of suggestions elegant organizational strategies. Looking at them all almost gives one the feeling of having got something done. Although of course one has not actually gotten anything done.

posted by C A Crowley @ 10:16 AM

Pictures from the HNA Conference

This was where the meetings were.

Below is where the food was.

Nice weather, right?

posted by C A Crowley @ 9:16 PM

A Morning Glory; Another Book Review

This is by Emiko Miyashita, whom I met at the HNA conference. Ms. Miyashita is a poet and translator, and a very impressive speaker as well.

a morning-glory

blue to its throat:

I refill my fountain pen

The poem is published on the Simply Haiku website.

Haiku are published in anthologies, and because they are short, these anthologies get crowded, and it's hard to focus on any one verse This is true of classical anthologies also--it's like sitting down to dinner and finding your plate stacked with extremely high-calorie food, all of it intensely delicious. After a while, it's hard to appreciate any one of the poems. Sometimes it's good to just choose one and live with it for a while.

So that's what I'm doing with Ms. Miyashita's today.

Other than that, I've got another review to do, this time for Philosophy East and West. It's on a book about kabuki. I love kabuki; I like to go see plays at the Kabuki-za and the National Theater of Japan. Kabuki is absolutely amazing. I credit my friend Tomoe Shimizu (alias Wangwang) with introducing me to it. That and bunraku, the puppet theater, which is in some ways even more amazing. (If you don't know what kabuki and bunraku are, the National Theater website explains it all a bit.)

I'll write more about the book soon. In the meantime, while the morning glories in my garden are long since gone, I might go out in search of the osmanthus that some people in my neighborhood have thoughtfully planted. Not because it's beautiful to look at--it doesn't look like anything special, in fact. However, osmanthus has a fabulous fragrance--warm, lush and magical. I don't know which gardens have them, but a lot do, because when walking down the street and just breathing, this fragrance is suddenly present, and and you find yourself reminded of a faraway world. And then it disappears again.

But something of that world remains.

posted by C A Crowley @ 9:53 AM

Today, Some Anonymous Work

Can't say anything about what I was working on today. It's good to have gotten something done on it, although it's not really finished.

I also practiced my calligraphy a bit. D improved the look of this page, also.

Here's a bit of poetry for the day. It's a bit drizzly and misty here today, but pleasantly warm. This is from the Asahi site.

The woods are rusting
under this October rain--
leaves of bright copper

Alan Maley

posted by C A Crowley @ 4:40 PM

More from Clueless

Still reading Clueless in Academe. Now the focus is on the wisdom of not avoiding arguments, but instead having better arguments. Professor Graff mentions these books. They all sound interesting; they address issues connected to the teaching of writing:

Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. Oxford UP. Doesn't give a date. Or an author, for that matter. (There's no bibliography in this book, by the way. Very inconvenient. Emory's library has this: The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. Corbett, Myers, and Tate, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. The essay I want to read is by Peter Elbow)

Everything's an Argument. Lunsford, Ruskiewicz, Walters. Boston: St Martin's, 2001.

Street Smarts and Critical Theory. Thomas McLaughlin. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educational Underclass. Mike Rose. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature. New York: Teacher's College Press, 1998.

Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Boston: St Martin's, 2004.

posted by C A Crowley @ 11:12 AM

From Clueless

Clueless in Academe is by Gerald Graff, a very professorial-looking tweed-wearing bookshelf-snuggling person judging from his photograph on the back cover. This book came out in 2003.

It's a very attractive book. I like it especially because not only does it define a problem well, it has lots of convincing views on how the problem might be solved, which is extremely reassuring. Most importantly, it is a very well-written book, a book written by someone who knows how to argue (which is not coincidental, given the book's premise) and deploy graceful rhetorical flourishes with great effect. I particularly admire the use of lists (an example follows), and the use of catchy phrases that encapsulate his points ("mixed-message curriculum," "Volleyball Effect"). Very tidy.

Here's a nice list of "standard academic practices that often seem second nature to teachers and A-students but come across to many students as bizarre, counterintuitive, or downright nonsensical" (44) This is all imperfectly quoted or paraphrased, by the way; for authenticity, take a look at the actual book please, it's published by R.R. Donnelley and Sons. My own observations are in italics:

1. The Problem Problem. Academic assignments ask students not only to become aggressive know-it-alls, but to cultivate problems to an extent that seems perverse or bizarre. A fixation on seemingly superfluous problems.I see this all the time. Students are nonplussed when asked to come up with a thesis paragraph for a paper--it's the biggest struggle of the whole semester and often a lost cause. I find Professor G's remarks here offer lots of insights into the nature and causes of this great drama.

2. Negativism and Oppositionality. To make a "case" for yourself, to make statements that are "arguable," you must be oppositional and defensive, if not cantankerous. Furthermore, the value academia places on making "arguable" statements can seem not only needlessly embattled, but flatly illogical. Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? It seems like bad manners to contest this, so I will politely murmur, "mmm." There are some real gems embedded in this part of the chapter, little chuckle-inducing passages. Read the book, I'm not going to type them out.

3. Persuasion as Aggression. When the academic penchant for problematizing and negativity goes unexplained, the intellectual energy expended on academic tasks tends naturally to look like mere aggression rather than reasonable behavior....This student attitude toward persuasion is tied up with a deeper refusal to become the sort of public self that schooling assumes we all want to be. Yes, that's interesting. Blogs are a symptom of this. Lots of people write blogs to proclaim their views and don't mind putting their names to them; but a lot of people don't. Even those who do might not be so willing to do so if it involved, say, posting it all conspicuously where they live or work--or somewhere else where they could easily be confronted or challenged with it. Bumper stickers are popular, of course, even quite strident ones sometimes, but most of the time one is driving away from that confederate flag or F the president sticker, and those weird magnetic ribbons are seldom even legible. (I was going to put the Macintosh apple thing on my car but couldn't decide where to put it pathetic, really).

4. Elaborated Codes [The] seemingly superfluous degree of self-explanation and elaboration [of academic intellectual discourse] especially when we compare that discourse with casual conversation...Novice writers often have trouble generating much quantity of text, since to unpack and elaborate on their points would make them feel they are laboring the obvious. Yup, okay. That does explain a lot of recurring problems.

The above is from Chapter 2.

So that's the post for today. I will try to return to this later.

posted by C A Crowley @ 5:38 PM

The Garage, the Public Library

Not much in the way of research today. I had to have something done on my car, and it took quite a long time. While I was waiting, I had a trip to the public library, and got several books. One of them was on blogging, and it wasn't a great help to be honest, so I won't name it because I don't recommend it. I also got Clueless in Academe. I can't remember what one is supposed to think about it, so I'll see what I think on my own. I got a couple of books about painting, including Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Artist Within. I suppose it's a bit dated, and maybe been repudiated in the years since it was published. But that's all right. There must be something useful in it.

I rather liked this bit, to start off with. It's actually from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (1955), cited on page 130 of Edwards's book:

Omit needless words.
Place yourself in the background.
Revise and rewrite.
Do not overwrite.
Do not overstate.
Do not affect a breezy manner.
Be clear.
Write in a way that comes naturally.
Work from a suitable design.
Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.

Not all of these things are easy to do, especially when you're trying to do them all at once. But it's a very good ideal for which to strive.

N.B.: I don't know if this actually is in Strunk and White, as described. Must get a copy, at some point.

posted by C A Crowley @ 4:38 PM

Pause for Thought

Well, the review of Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks is finished. When it's published, I'll post a link to the page. In the meantime, I've got another review to do, so I'll get to work on that soon. In the meantime, a task that is at once boring, calming, and interesting is next: making some sense of my paper archives. Of course it's not obviously thrilling, or else I wouldn't have put it off as long as I have. However, it has two payoffs: first, organization; second, it will help me get farther along on my next project, which will have something to do with women writing haikai in the early modern period.

So, what it lacks in glamor it makes up for in suspense.

Something quite nice from the Asahi Haiku network (find it by following the link to Asahi News at right--it's on their home page):

Morning paper:
while reading leisurely
autumn begins

Masami Fujita, Tokyo

posted by C A Crowley @ 12:53 PM

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks III

The last chapter is called "Indexical Imagery." It focuses on a screen painting of rocks in the Powers collection. Professor Rosenfield writes "In the history of Japanese painting there are few works so boldly conceived and yet so enigmatic as this screen..." (49) speaking of its indirect method in simply putting the image forward without any accompanying inscription, confident that his viewers would grasp its connection with Matsuo Bashô, in whose honor it was painted.

JR notes that when it was first shown in the US, some viewers compared it to the Magritte painting "Clear Ideas," which shows a rock floating in the air between the sea and a cloud (there is a reproduction of the picture provided). Some more informed viewers --i.e., art historians, regarded the painting with suspicion, calling it at best an anomaly among Buson's paintings and at worst a fake. JR defends it by assigning it to a category of "indexical images," pictorialized literary motifs (with a nod to Joshua Mostow) which are images of things or places so well known from literature that they can be presented without comment--everyone already knows what they are.

The next section, "Historical and Cultural Context of Buson's Rock Screens" is really interesting, because it tells us some details about a similar painting owned by Gichû-ji temple (site of Bashô's grave). It describes Bashô's connection to the temple and its role in the Bashô Revival cult. The following section, "Buson Rock Paintings" discusses the hokku and haiga of yanagi chiri / shimizu kare ishi / tokoro dokoro (willow leaves fallen / the clear stream dry / rocks here and there) and its origins in Buson's revisiting Bashô's Narrow road to the interior route. It has illustrations of other Buson paintings which simply show rocks against an empty background, and a page out of the Mustard seed garden manual of painting which is most likely their source. That's useful and it's good to look at these things side by side. JR then gives us a list of rock-related hokku just as he did in the chapter on the mynah birds. Again, there's no doubting that Buson painted pictures of rocks and wrote poems about rocks, but it would be interesting to be told more about why these things necessarily are related.

Again, like we saw in the mynah bird chapter, JR gives us an interesting overview of "Chinese rock lore" that helps us understand how rocks were viewed in the Chinese literati cultural tradition, their importance in gardens, and that type of thing. He concludes this chapter, too, with a discussion of a Maruyama Ôkyo painting, just as he did the one about haiga. That ties the whole thing up rather tidily.

Well, those are my notes about the book. I'll do some more thinking about it now, and will try to finish my review as soon as I can.

posted by C A Crowley @ 9:40 PM

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks II

The second section addresses the topic of mynah birds, starting with a reference to a pair of paintings of these birds held by the Freer Gallery in Washington. Professor Rosenfield tells us that "Buson took the subject--fighting mynah birds--from a mode of painting that had come recently from China, but he imbued it with the spirit of haikai verse, and thus made it far more expressive than his models." My question is, what is the spirit of haikai verse, and what does it mean to say that a painting is imbued with it? (He may address this later; I note it as something that comes to mind, especially since Japanese scholars are always making references to haikai spirit and I'm never sure what they mean by this term. Although I can guess, it's better to be told what they think.) JR says that Buson's use of a specific painting technique here, "an underlying geometric framework" that counterbalances the "puddled ink" brushwork, that is derived from the work of Shen Nanpin. The paintings were done for Ashida Kafu (whom I write about in my book). In introducing Kafu, JR tells us a little about the details of Buson's relationships with clients and how he procured materials, but he drops this interesting subject almost immediately, I'm sorry to say.

Next is a short introduction to the uses of mynah birds in painting. JR takes issue with the assertions of Haga Tôru and Hayakawa Monta that these mynahs were emblematic of the state of unrest in the society at the time and the fact that mynahs are symbolic of pandering to authority bears this out. However, mynahs mean something else in a different context. And, JR points out quite accurately that Buson didn't make much reference to politics or social protest in his verse. (Haikai poets of this period didn't.) Given that this is the case, JR looks for "artistic motivations" to help us understand the painting.

After that is a nice brief overview of the Nagasaki School, particularly of Shen Nanpin's activities. JR says that Buson's mynah bird painting is an indication of his familiarity with the work of Nagasaki school painters, though it's not known how he came to know of it. (24) A couple of interesting things here: first, the illustrations of schematic plans of painting compositions from Ransai gafu--I've never seen anything like this before. I suppose it makes sense, but it's amazing to see how completely formulaic it all was. Second, JR's comment that it's revealing to compare what Buson (a "gifted painter") does and what these sad old professional hacks of the Nagasaki school do with a similar subject. Buson's is "far more dramatic" (26).

JR then tells us that Buson's interest in the Nagasaki school style marked him as different from most of his colleagues--the aims of the Scholar-Amateur (i.e. nanga) painters were opposed to those of the more "academic" Nagasaki school affiliates. This is perfectly in keeping with the approach he took to haikai: he wasn't much interested in orthodoxies of any kind.

The next section, "Poetic Vision" in Buson has some nice translations of Buson hokku that also deal with birds. What worries me about this section is that JR does not comment on the fact that in the first instance, the mynah bird paintings, he's talking about visual art, and the second instance, hokku that use bird imagery, he's talking about literature. It's problematic, I think, to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about two very different contexts or media here. It is true that in many ways Buson and his colleagues acted as if there was no meaningful distinction between painting and poetry, consistent with a long line of haikai poets and indeed a good deal of the cultural tradition of China and Japan. However, there is a distinction, to the extent that it's worth pointing out that it is being ignored. I don't think I'm expressing this clearly. How about if I say this: just because Buson acts like the distinction doesn't exist, and indeed precisely because he acts like it doesn't exist, it is important to comment on it. Otherwise we miss a lot of what makes Buson's paintings and poetry--his haiga especially--cool.

So that's something my review needs to mention. How great it would have been to read someone as amazing as Rosenfield really getting his teeth into this problem. I'd really like to hear what he has to say about it.

The next chapter is about haiga. Haiga are so amazing and so under-studied, especially by art historians in North America and Europe, I'm delighted to see JR talking about them. He starts out by telling us a bit about Bashô's haiga, then jumps into Buson's. He gives us a short commentary on the Hashimoto piece. He then gives us a summary of haikai by resorting to a massive block of quotations from Haruo Shirane's book Traces of Dreams. All of these are terrific quotations, and anyone could be forgiven for thinking they couldn't have said it better themselves, but in a book of this kind it seems sort of timid. I completely understand the way it feels to reach into a different discipline--I felt much the same myself in trying to write about Buson's paintings as a mere literary historian, and may yet suffer hideously for daring to do so. But Professor Rosenfield has nothing to fear from anybody, I would have thought. Here he does something I holler at my own students for doing. It's mysterious. After this comes a pretty detailed discussion of the Manzai dancer painting, one of a hachi tataki guy and lastly that charmless Maruyama Ôkyo one with the cat and the spoon.

These are nice, brief expositions of some important haiga that give readers a good idea of how they work. Okay. That's it for this section.

posted by C A Crowley @ 4:09 PM

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks I

Continuing to think about the Rosenfield book. I'll just list the things that occur to me. They may or may not appear in the review. If I am somehow impolite in my comments I mean no disrespect to Professor Rosenfield; I'm just trying to get things straight here and may sound slightly intemperate. But I doubt it; there is nothing offensive in this book--it's quite dignified and uncontroversial. I hope to be much the same.

Overall this is a good book; I'm glad to see American art historians writing about Buson. There are a lot of very useful illustrations--most of them different from the ones that James Cahill includes in The Lyric Journey. The writing in The Lyric Journey seems slightly more polished and smooth, however. There are some odd phrasings that suggest a rather quick editing job here. I wonder what that's all about.

He refers to Haruo Shirane as Shirane Haruo. I am sure that Professor Shirane would be too gracious to complain about this but since he's an American scholar, it seems it would be better to put things the other way around.

1. Characterization of Buson as both a magnet of media interest and someone whose complexities are misunderstood. I think that's fair. It's good that JR alludes to the some of paradoxes/contradictions that become apparent after you take a look at some of Buson's letters, and find out more about the details of his life.

2. Describes Buson as "first of all a poet." This is interesting, especially coming from an art historian. As a scholar of literature, I would say just the opposite, and I'm impressed by the difference in perspective. Professionally Buson was first of all a painter, and while the quality and quantity of his writing certainly justifies the impression that he must have made poetry the center of his life--he wrote over 2700 hokku, participated in over a hundred (published) linked verse sequences, and wrote a substantial amount of prose, especially prefaces for his and other people's collections, it's also possible to take the position that he was first of all a painter. His income came from painting. His major life choices (if that's not too crude an expression) were determined by his development as a painter--he decided to spend years in the Tôhoku area, then in Tango and Sanuki, in order to improve his painting skills and work with patrons. While he wrote plenty of haikai, haikai was not just a practice he engaged in for its own sake, but as a way of getting access to clients for his paintings. He didn't "reopen" the Yahantei school until he was in his 50s, and was a reluctant leader even then. The periods in his life when he was most active as a poet were also those in which he was most active as a painter, and there were times, like when he was in Tango in Sanuki, when his focus on painting was so intense that he wrote/preserved very little haikai at all. In other words, I would say that one could just as easily say that Buson was first of all a painter, although poetry was an important part of his work as a painter.

3. This is an interesting point: "The artistic and personal activities of Yosa Buson for the last two decades of his life can be explored more thoroughly than can those of any other artist of the Edo period (sic). Vast amounts of primary data have survived: more than 350 letters, thousands of published verses, several theoretical statements, comments about him written by others, and more than 800 paintings, many of them bearing informative inscriptions." The interesting point is "more....than....any other artist of the Edo period." Is it because writers are more apt to leave behind writing (=primary data) than painters?

4. JR calls Hayano Hajin one of Buson's main teachers, but then calls Hattori Nankaku his other main teacher. Many things I've read call this into question. They say that while there was no doubt that Buson was aware of Nankaku, consorted with his students, and might have known him, there is actually no written evidence for this. So while it's important to mention, and JR gives the reader a nice brief introduction to what Nankaku's all about, I wonder why he states this so definitely. If I read the sources he cites in the footnote, Yoshikawa Kojirô (Jinsai, Sorai, Norinaga) and Najita Tetsuo (Tokugawa Political Writings), it was a long time ago. Maybe I need to dust them off. Anyway, I'd be surprised if either of these writers actually said, "Nankaku was Buson's teacher."

5. I like JR's translations of studio names, etc., such as Three Fruits Society for Sankasha. Sometimes it sounds a little precious (Three Fruits Society is a good example) it doesn't hurt and readers want to know. Since we are giving the translation, it would be helpful to know more about the literary/historical sources of these expressions but maybe that's too much to ask.

6. I was eager for some more art-historian information about the reception of Buson's paintings during and after his lifetime, and JR gives us a couple of tiny paragraphs on this topic. It disappointed me, simply because I don't know much about it fervently wish I knew more, but there is little here to help me understand what happened to Buson's painting after he died, and for that matter before he died. This is really regrettable. Where else can the English speaking reader find out about this stuff? I understand that it's a short book, but it would go a long way to helping readers figure out where Buson belongs in Japanese art/cultural history as a whole.

7. The chapter section with the subheading "Haikai Poetry and the Scholar-Amateur Movement" is just fine, and helps to make the later discussions about the linkage between haikai comprehensible. I have no complaints about the hokku translations here. I noticed how exercised people at the HNA conference got over controversies like three lines or not, capitalization of first line or not, punctuation or not, but it doesn't worry me too much. Anyway, if the majority of readers of this book are HNA-type people, it might be an issue, but speaking for myself I'm just grateful that this book takes on Buson's art and poetry both, and don't see the need to get fussed over this kind of thing.

So that's the first section. To sum up--perfectly serviceable, if brief. Sort of Buson Lite.

Maybe I'll end this post here. Of course no one reads my little blog, and anyone who tries will be rewarded with an overwhelming urge to sleep or to move on to something else, but why worry about that? Anyway, the next bit will be above.

posted by C A Crowley @ 1:01 PM