Weblog Yahantei

Notice to readers

2011-09-24T18:20:00.003-03:00

Weblog Yahantei has been in retirement for a while now and will not be updated.

I've started a new blog here: http://cacrowley.blogspot.com. Please stop by.

My Book on Yosa Buson

2007-03-18T22:08:00.000-03:00

My book on Yosa Buson has recently been published by Brill. Take a look at its fabulous website!

http://www.lanticmedia.com/yosabuson/

It's a wonderful, exciting read! Lots of interesting historical information about haikai in the 18th century, and translations of Buson's verse and prose as well. Here's a brief description:

This book uses the haikai verse and paintings of the brilliant, innovative artist Yosa Buson (1716-1783) as a focal point from which to explore how Japanese writers competed for artistic authority in a time when popular responses to economic, technological, and social changes were creating the beginnings of a modern literature.

A good thing about it is that it addresses not only Buson's writing, but his haiga, or haikai painting, as well.

The web page above lists the table of contents. I'm working on getting some more "look inside this book" stuff into Amazon. That should be ready in the near future. And after that, podcasting? Maybe!

Remembering Valentine's Day 1990

2007-02-14T22:58:00.000-04:00

This is the anniversary of the day that Voyager 1 took a photograph of the earth from space that was the subject of Carl Sagan's most famous statements, in which he called the Earth a "pale blue dot." Here it is, for those of you who remember it, but especially for those who don't.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

That's about as romantic a Valentine's Day wish as anyone could hope for. We miss you, Carl.

February Already

2007-02-03T19:13:00.000-04:00

Two things, not related.

The first is the inauguration of a new blog, which is the public website of my class this semester called Introduction to Japanese Culture. The blog is intended as a place for us to share information about Japan we find on the web, primarily from the websites of various English-language publications, like Kyodo, Asahi, Yomiuri, and Japan Times, among others. As of this writing, I'm the only one who's posted anything. I look forward to the future. The link is on the right, or here.

The second is a bit of verse having to do with February. After a disquietingly mild December, winter has settled into a dreary routine of very cold nights and chilly days. These lines have little to do with Atlanta, which has only the most rudimentary rail system. Still, in its mood, it has much in common with the weather now:

Beads of glass, pearls and diamonds
glint on rails strung out tensely into a dim beyond
below the stare of an indifferent moon
the shriek of steel flashing sparks and then
nothing as the city remembers it was still.
Wind stirs the only movement, bringing clouds
to further postpone the dawn.
Voices muffled into the grayness
grow indistinct and disappear.
Cold drizzle leaks without a sparkle
dripping into puddles that simply stand and don't reflect.
A dream struggles feebly against intruding cold
and loses its grip in all the slickness
slipping back into never into nothing
as pale light rises, reaching toward morning.

Old Phil in Pennsylvania is an optimist this year. It's something to be grateful for, and gives us something else to look forward to--along with the students' contributions to the aforementioned blog.

Ramen inventor

2007-01-11T10:13:00.000-04:00

This article in the New York Times announces the passing of the inventor of instant ramen. It's hard to imagine that something so essential really had an inventor, but it did, and happily, he lived a long life.

Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.

Using the New York Times website requires registration, but it's well worth it.

Flying North

2006-12-09T17:34:00.000-04:00

This week I'll be traveling over the cold windy sea into the night of a northern winter. I've been thinking about Yeats a bit recently, and was looking to see if he had written anything to take with me--something about geese perhaps, or cold lonely places. This isn't quite what I wanted to find, but it has its own charm:

The Realists

Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

To anyone who finds him- or herself in a strange place this winter: I wish you warmth and happiness as the year draws to its close, and the earth (in the north, at least) pauses for a rest before turning back towards the light.

Emerging from Absence

2006-11-20T13:44:00.000-04:00

This, gentle reader, is a fabulous site. It is beautiful to look at and extremely friendly to the user:

Emerging from Absence

Run by David Ewick of the Chûô University of Policy Studes, it collects poetry and prose in English about Japan, starting in the 19th century.

I found it by looking for discussions of Pound's Vorticism on the web; a quotation from it that refers to haiku is here.

Fenollosa / Pound

2006-11-18T20:34:00.000-04:00

"The twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.

The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful, and the most human elements in it."

So opens The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, written by Ernest Fenollosa in 1908 and recovered, finished, and published by Ezra Pound in 1918. Over the next few days I'll be trying to make sense of it, and of the dizzying edifice of responses that have since been built over its foundation.

At the moment the most I can say about it all is that he quotes from a verse by Sugawara Michizane, entirely without attribution. He just mentions the first line, but this is the whole thing:

月夜見梅花 Viewing Plum Blossoms on a Moonlit Night　　

月輝如晴雪 The moon glitters like snow on a clear day
梅梅似照星 The plum blossoms look like shining stars
可憐金鏡転 It is a gorgeous gilded mirror as it sets
庭上玉房馨 Across the garden, fine fragrance carries

I don't know this poem well; I was only struck by it because the first two lines were the project I was working on for kakizome (New Year's calligraphy) this time last year. The website where I found it just now, Kanshi no sekai, notes that Michizane wrote it when he was 11 years old--can that be true?

What was Professor Fenollosa thinking, and crafty old Pound? In translating it the way I have, do I prove the professor's point that "the Chinese line impl[ies], as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose." How did he happen upon this poem, I wonder? One I think of as my calligraphy lesson?

Here he goes:

"[Chinese poetry] speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate."

Fenollosa (Pound?) goes through each of the characters in an interpretative method that would be helpful in puzzling out the pronouncements of an oracle. He doesn't translate the poem, but offers instead a "paraphrase." I'm not entirely confident of my translation, especially the last line, but there's a lot of embellishment going on in this one, I promise:

The moon's snow falls on the plum tree;
Its boughs are full of bright stars.
We can admire the bright turning disc;
The garden high above there, casts its pearls to our weeds.

This is followed by the most delightful comment:

"If our universities had been worth half a peck of horse-dung, something would have been done during the last quarter of a century to carry on Fenollosa's work. Millions have been spent in stultifying education....The infamy of the present monetary system does not stop with the malnutrition of the masses; it extends upward into every cranny of the intellectual life, even where cowards think themselves safest, and enough men of low vitality feel sure that boredom can never kill." This last remark makes me think Pound must have read my teaching evaluations.

He continues:

"The state of Chinese studies in the Occident is revoltingly squalid, and one has to read Frobenius in his own language? Because English and American professors are moles." Marvelous.

The back cover on my edition (San Francisco: City Lights, 1983) says it all, "Whether or not Pound proceeded on false premises remains an academic question. Let the pedants rave."

So that's what we do, eh? I suppose so, when we're doing what we should. That, and drink coffee. Beats murmuring.

Blue Sky and Lost Leaves

2006-11-12T15:14:00.000-04:00

The sun is bright and the sky is blue. Last night we had a lot of wind and a bit of rain, and it brought a lot of the leaves down. All sign of the raking I did yesterday has disappeared completely. Seeing this intensified my wish I hadn't gone out at all--if I hadn't, I would have also missed my part in a chain of events that led to the death of one of the neighborhood's stray cats. It ran into the road in front of a car; the driver stood in the road weeping, saying, "It was the same color as the leaves!" We took the cat to a veterinary clinic but all they could do was euthanize it.

Here's a poem for the cat, for Ruth and Tom who looked after it for years, and for the driver, whose day (had it been good up until then?) was shattered by brutal randomness. It's from Gary Snyder's The Back Country, and called "Burning the Small Dead" My ignorance of HTML precludes accurate lineation; the words are right, but they're in the wrong place, so for the real poem, you'll have to get the book:

Burning the small dead
branches
broke from beneath
thick speading
whitebark pine.

a hundred summers
snowmelt rock and air

hiss in a twisted bough.

sierra granite;
mt. Ritter -
black rock twice as old.

Deneb, Altair

windy fire

A Little Romanticism

2006-10-14T22:55:00.000-03:00

I've been away from the blog for quite some time--I started to get taken up by working on classes and other things. I'm sorry about that.

My classes this semester are:

Heroes and Heroines of Japan (for first year students--a freshman seminar), and
Japanese Film and Literature (films and writing related to samurai and geisha)

I didn't set up any public blogs for these classes; I'm using a lot of copyrighted material so it made more sense to use the "Blackboard" facility the university offers. Perhaps it would be good to post a syllabus of the freshman seminar, at least--for the benefit of the world. I'll work on getting that done, although it might take a while.

In the meantime, here's a bit of Wordsworth. I was never much of a fan of Wordsworth when I was doing my English major long long ago (if I had to choose one of the Romantics I preferred Keats, though my real love was the blessed Frank O'Hara). However, last night I found myself within arm's length of a copy of The Prelude, and longing for a bit of brilliance, I had a look. Such a different sort of thing from haiku, isn't it? What would Buson have thought, had some space-time wormhole opened up and dropped it off in his mailbox? Or alternatively, would Wordsworth have been able to learn anything from Buson? Anyway, here's a fragment that I liked:

Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace
How Nature by extrinsic passion first
Peopled my mind with beauteous forms or grand,
And made me love them, may I well forget
How other pleasures have been mine, and joys
Of subtler origin; how I have felt,
Not seldom, even in that tempestuous time,
Those hallow'd and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
An intellectual charm, that calm delight
Which, if I err not, surely must belong
To those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And, in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union betwixt life and joy.

That's something like lines 571-585 of Book I. It goes on quite a lot after that.

I was looking for a nice bit about autumn, because autumn has finally made its slow golden progress down to our latitude here; I couldn't find anything particularly striking so I'm making do with "life and joy," which really should be enough for anyone.

Effortful Study: It Only Takes a Decade

2006-08-14T23:14:00.000-03:00

"[E]xperts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields."

This is from a recent article in Scientific American that talks about the development of expertise. The example author Philip E. Ross chooses is chess, but apparently it holds true for all fields: practice, practice, practice really is what gets you to Carnegie Hall, not "genius."

Scientists of the mind like to look at chess players to understand how brains work. One thing that interests them is how grandmasters (sorry for the sexist term: there are female grandmasters as well) can figure out what move to make in seconds. They do this much too quickly to actually be analyzing things. One explanation for this is memory--grandmasters are able to remember information in much bigger and more complex clusters than novices can. They do this by putting hierarchies of information into "chunks," mental file folders that are precisely labeled and ordered, rather than the flurry of unbound papers that flies in the psychic air around novices. There are competing theories about how this works, but for the most part it's about building patterns of memory in the mind that allow for efficient sorting. And that brings us to the really interesting bit:

The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field.

Ross introduces the notion of "effortful study" as the single thing that distinguishes experts from everybody else. Striving for improvement consistently over a long period of time creates mastery. Motivation, the constant desire to look critically at your performance and modify it based on experience, is most important.

I found the part about memory interesting, thinking of the story of Ihara Saikaku, who is supposed to have composed over 20,000 hokku in a single 24-hour session. I don't believe he managed quite so many, but I'll accept that he composed a lot. Poets who wrote linked verse had to be able to improvise quickly. There are lots of complicated rules in linked verse, and huge amounts of information to remember. I wonder if it's the case the really good ones were similar to the modern chess grandmasters Ross is talking about--even though they were working with new situations every time, in fact, they did it all from memory.

I also found the article very encouraging as we move into the beginning of the new academic year. It's good evidence for students that working hard has its rewards. Even though the "ten-year rule" might seem to be daunting, in a way it's reassuring. It takes time to get good at anything. But if you take the time, you will get good at it. Research proves it.

What a relief.

Bad Characters

2006-08-12T23:16:00.000-03:00

The blog Hanzi Smatter is dedicated to debunking what it calls "the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture."

The most recent post (as of my post today) brings up the myth that "the Chinese word for crisis means danger and opportunity," which, it notes, came up in the context of The Daily Show. It also does an energetic job of exposing the silliness of certain tattoos.

While, given its narrow focus, it's not as robust as some other good debunking sites I have become quite fond of, like Quackwatch, the New England Skeptical Society, and James Randi's site, it does perform a useful, if small, public service.

Worth a look.

Shooting Stars

2006-08-11T16:47:00.000-03:00

Keeping with the celestial theme.

This weekend the Perseid meteor shower is at its height. It's going to be tricky this year, because the moon will spoil most of the fun. But it's worth a look, if you happen to be in a place where stargazing is good. NASA recommends that you try between 8:30 and 10:00 pm. Details are at their site here.

This haiku is from www.haikuworld.org.

Almost dawn--
a bright meteor flashes
into a summer sea

Zhanna P. Rader

If you're somewhere where you can watch the Perseids over the sea, I envy you.

Summer Moon

2006-08-09T14:40:00.000-03:00

Last night the moon was rising in the trees behind my house. There are too many leaves out there to see it distinctly, but even that was nice. The light was all milky, refracted by the hundreds of separate, slightly glossy surfaces. On nights like last night, the moonlight looks very ancient and distant, even though it's coming in from where astronomers would tell us is very close and recent. And it gets very gold and warm from the haze in the humid summer sky.

In haiku the moon is a seasonal word for autumn, unless you specify another one. Oborozuki 朧月, the misty moon, is in spring; the summer moon, natsu no tsuki, is something different altogether. Buson has some summer moon hokku, but this is the one I thought of last night:

coolness!
growing distant from the bell
the sound of the bell

suzushisa ya
kane o hanaruru
kane no oto

A hokku without a moon at all. I thought of it because I was reminded of fûrin 風鈴, little bells you hang up from the eaves in the summer so that the tinkly sound can make you feel cool. I don't have a fûrin, and even if I did it wouldn't help because there is no wind. Just the sound of insects in the garden, buzzing in quiet conversations. Which in itself is pleasant.

The bell in Buson's poem isn't a fûrin; it's a kane 鐘, something bigger and more dark and powerful, like one you'd hear at a temple. Imagine a rich, deep sound that seems hang motionless in the air, not quite leaving the place where it started. If a fûrin feels cool, the ringing coming off Buson's bell in this hokku must be almost cold: a deep, refreshing pool of sound to float in.

Another summer hokku--this one comes from Kyorai, Bashô's disciple.

the very rocks and trees
blazing to the sight--
heat

ishi mo ki mo
manako ni hikaru
atsusa kana

If Kyorai were here, he'd have mentioned pavements and windshields too, I'm sure.

Where did that cool moon go?

Calm Gray Haiku

2006-08-07T16:47:00.000-03:00

Today was an unsually quiet day. It's still hot, but it hasn't quite been sunny all day--there's been a film of dinginess over the sky, like it's been covered in a fine dust.

Here are two haiku for a day like this. Both come from Asahi:

Watching the rain
wondering
for how long?

Lorne Henry

The note mentions that Mr. Henry's in Australia, and his is a winter poem. But it's been so dry here also that I thought I'd cite it. It seems to want to rain late every afternoon, but seldom quite gets up enough nerve. The other night it rained for a while, and I did think, for how long? And it finished quickly. Not enough to soothe the hydrangea--it's still bent over in despair.

I liked this one too, being a fan of the moon. It's by someone in Japan. It's fabulous, isn't it?

How can I
tell them I just
discovered the moon?

Patrick Sweeney

Eccentricity: The Durian

2006-07-21T17:32:00.000-03:00

Maybe because it's a Friday afternoon and Yahantei are feeling a bit fatigued, what with the relentless hot weather and pitilessly blue empty skies, but I started to think about durians.

The durian is a kind of fruit that is popular in southeast Asia. It has an odor that can politely be best described as "powerful"--well, okay, even its fans admit it stinks. Some people hate it, but others absolutely love it. People in the UK speak of Marmite, people in Japan of nattou (smelly fermented bean product)--stuff you either crave or despise. I think that's kind of like the effect the durian has, although I believe it's far more fragrant than either of those things.

I can't help but think that early modern haikai poets would have liked the durian. It's got all the features of the haikaiesque--aromatic, slightly disreputable, questionable to the uninitiated but exquisite to those who've acquired the taste.

Here's a page by a deeply tragic durian fan.

Wishing everyone a good weekend.

Podcasting; Asian Studies in Australia

2006-07-16T19:41:00.000-03:00

Here are some podcasts for people interested in learning more about current events in Japan:

NHK News in English (via Radio Japan)

Yomiuri News in Japanese

The Yomiuri one gets updated a day after the fact. It's interesting to compare these two broadcasts; Yomiuri is a bit more straightforward and detailed; NHK is a bit more sanitized but has better international news.

Weblog Yahantei was visiting Australia for the past few weeks. I gave a paper at the conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. It was a really nice event; a lot more user-friendly than the AAS, maybe because it was on a smaller scale. I heard some very interesting papers and met lots of nice people. I've had good experiences with Japanese literature scholars in Australia--maybe it's because Australia's closer to Japan geographically than the US is. Well, in fact it's not that much closer--it's still a very long flight between Japan and Australia. So maybe it's because of being on the Pacific side of the world. It is not unusual for young people to study Japanese in high school.

The ASAA conference is bi-annual; next year is the turn of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia to have their conference.

East Asian Poetry Online Journal

2006-06-24T09:04:00.000-03:00

Take a look at Full Tilt, an online journal of East Asian poetry. Works are in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, along with English translations.

It's also a very attractive layout, something that I really appreciate.

Song in an Age of Discord

2006-05-29T15:19:00.000-03:00

I'm working on a book review for The Japan Studies Review. It should have been finished a long time ago. It's on a topic that will be of great interest to haiku fans, especially those who want to find out more about the history of Japanese poetry.

The book is H. Mack Horton's Song in an Age of Discord: 'The Journal of Sôchô' and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan, published by Stanford University Press in June 2002. Here's the Table of Contents:

1/ "These useless products of my brush": Sôchô and His Journal
2/"What is to become of me as I travel on my way?": 'The Journal of Sôchô' as Travel Literature
3/ "How I do love a garden": 'The Journal of Sôchô' and the Literature of Eremitism
4/ A diary of things both serious and frivolus": Poetry in 'The Journal of Sôchô.'

It concludes with an epilogue and thre are three appendices: The Imagawa House Lineage, Two Early Biographies of Sôchô, and Major Works by Sôchô, as well as two glossaries. There are also illustrations in a separate section.

From the flyleaf:

Song in an Age of Discord is a companion volume to the author's translation of The Journal of Sôchô, the travel diary and poetic memoir of Saiokuken Sôchô (1448-1532), the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his generation. The Journal--which records several journeys that Sôchô made between Kyoto and Suruga Province during the tumultuous Age of the Country at War--is unparalled in the literature of the period for its range of commentary and freshness of detail, and for its impressive array of literary genres, including more than 600 poems.

This review has to get done soon, so I'll be back here working on it before very long.

Pedagogy Seminar - List of Web Sites

2006-05-27T12:22:00.000-03:00

This post is not very narrative; it's a short list of websites I want to keep track of. Pat Cahill gave us the first one; all the rest come from Pat Marsteller.

Meyerhoff Scholars Program

This is a program for "exceptionally talented minority students" to study science, math and engineering.

http://www.umbc.edu/meyerhoff/

On Powerpoint

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
Washington Post article
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Technology in the Classroom

website

Advising as Liberal Learning

http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-sp06/le-sp06_LEAP.cfm

Science songs

http://www.songsforteaching.com/sciencesongs.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/crowther/Misc/Songs/music.shtml
http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/links.html
http://www.scientainment.com/songs.html
http://www.tomsnyder.com/products/productextras/SCISCI/songs.asp

Science Poems

http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/poems.asp
http://aer.noao.edu/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=10
http://www.superdeluxe.com/elem ental/
Poetrykafe

Poetry for Chemists, Poetry for Teachers

2006-05-24T17:28:00.000-03:00

I had hoped to write in more detail about the Pedagogy Seminar, which has been going very well Maybe I'll have some time this weekend, as its a long weekend.

In the meantime, here are a couple of things related to poetry:

Daphne Norton mentioned Roald Hoffman, who is both a scientist and poet. To quote her description, "Professor Hoffman received the Nobel Prize for the development of a theory to model molecular orbitals and explain interactions between electrons
that impact reactivity and structure." She gave us a link to his website, here, and highly recommends the poem, "Fluorite."

Dr. Gregory mentioned another book related to both poetry and teaching, Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach, Intrator and Scribner, eds. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. Anything that sustains the courage to teach must be good, in my view.

Pedagogy Seminar

2006-05-18T14:25:00.000-03:00

I'm now taking a 30-hour seminar on pedagogy, led by Marshall Gregory of Butler University. There are about 12 other Emory faculty in the course. It's a wonderful opportunity to think and reflect on what we do in the classroom, and how to do it better.

Many of the articles we're reading were written by Professor Gregory, but most are not. Some of the ones we've covered so far are:

Bain, Ken. "What Makes Great Teachers Great"
Brookfield, Stephen. "Teaching Responsively"
Gregory, Marshall. "Forgetting, Learning, and Living: A Pedagogical Theory of How Education Makes a Difference even Though We Forget Most of What We Learn"
--. "Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos: Being Friendly and Befriending"
Parini, Jay. The Art of Teaching (excerpts)
Spector, Marshall. "'Look at Me!'--A Teaching Primer"

We also were treated to presentations on teaching (more or less along the lines of what's normally called a "teaching demonstration") by members of the course. Pat Marsteller gave a wonderful presentation on Problem-Based Learning, and Pat Cahill demonstrated how she would lead a discussion on a Shakespeare play. Both of these sessions were thrilling--when you're with a good teacher you just feel smarter, somehow--and it's great to be in the company of people who are serious about teaching.

I have to give a presentation myself tomorrow, and am not sure how I'm going to go about it. I'm going to look over some of the things I've written on this blog about teaching, and see if there's anything there that can help.

This afternoon I asked my friend Ling about what she thought was good about good teachers. She said "encouragement." This seems obvious, but for her encouragement wasn't just someone pointlessly saying "great! you did a good job!" but more about someone creating incentives for you to do your best. I mentioned that I was thinking about how the Chinese character for teach, 教, is a graph of a cringing child being beaten with a stick. She reminded me that there's a distinction between punishment and encouragement.

I don't know where this is taking me, but it's the place I'm going to start from. I don't think that the intention of this seminar is to get people thinking they need to get out their sticks and start swinging. So let's see what I can come up with.

I'll make sure to tell you if it's interesting.

A Letter to a Professor

2006-05-17T01:00:00.000-03:00

Today I start a two-week seminar on pedagogy.

Thinking about this letter I read on sothere.com. It's not addressed to me specifically--the letters there are addressed to everyone--but as I begin the seminar, it helps to reflect on what we're doing and what it sometimes means.

Japanese Classical Literature at Bedtime

2006-05-16T08:52:00.000-03:00

Japanese Classical Literature at Bedtime is a wonderful place. It's a non-commercial podcast of selected works of pre-modern Japanese literature. The author thoughtfully includes links to e-versions of most of the texts.

Of most interest to Weblog Yahantei visitors is the reading of Bashô's Oku no hosomichi (Narrow road to the interior). However, there are also excerpts from Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji), Tosa nikki (Tosa diary), Hôjôki (Account of my hut) and others.

Give it a try!

E-Dictionaries; Studying Japanese; New Simply Haiku

2006-05-15T11:41:00.000-03:00

Over at H-Japan, John Campbell brings our attention to this page where Henry Smith reviews recent Japanese electronic dictionaries. Japanese electronic dictionaries really are the coolest bits of tech ever; they're like a little library of reference tools tucked neatly into a palm-sized package. The development of electronic dictionaries certainly helped those of us who would find themselves schlepping around from library to library carrying various kinds of dictionaries in book form: kanji, ei-wa, wa-ei, classical etc., and feeling dumber than a sackful of hammers. Not to mention having nowhere left to pack a lunch. Professor Campbell has his eye on the Seiko SII SR-E100000--available at the vertiginous price of JPY 78,300.

This looks like a good blog for learners of Japanese: Japanese! Japanese! Pity about the name.

Simply Haiku has a new issue now. Lovely picture of a seagull there to make you feel all summery. There's a permanent link to this site on the right.

Williams Paper Museum; National Diet Library

2006-05-10T10:42:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I met with the curators of the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum at Georgia Tech to talk about their plans for a workshop in November on Japanese papermaking. The workshop is planned for two classes of fifth graders--we'll post more information about it when more of the details are finalized.

In the meantime, this is a fabulous place with a small but fascinating library of books about papermaking and great exhibits.

Also, try this link to the Japanese National Diet Library's digital collection. I'm not sure how it works or I'd have added it to my links collection. But I hope to try it myself soon, so I've put it here as a reminder.

Neglect

2006-05-07T19:56:00.000-03:00

This blog has suffered from some neglect over the past few months as we were involved in teaching and the other things that make the semester a bit intense. I'm working through everyone's finals and papers now, though, and I hope that will be done soon so I'll get to write some more things on this blog.

Highlights for the upcoming months:

0. Pedagogy seminar (last two weeks in May).
1. Revising the book.
2. Revising an article on women haikai poets.
3. Working on a conference paper for the Asian Studies Association of Australia's bi-annual conference (end of June).
4. Getting ready for two new classes: a film course with Matthew Bernstein and a new freshman seminar.

Something to look forward to, anyway.

Old and in the Way

2006-05-01T15:11:00.000-03:00

I was saddened to see this article in the New York Times yesterday:

Village Writes its Own Epitaph

Many rural towns and villages in Japan are suffering a serious problem: young people leave to find work elsewhere and never come back. The older people left behind struggle to survive. This story tells of one village where the people decided that their only option was to shut their own village down, and sell their homes and lands to a waste management company.

The Times requires a subscription to read some of its articles. Here's a quotation for those of you who don't have one. If you want to read more, try logging in from your public library, or if you can, subscribe--it's well worth it.

Thinking of you, YK.

The Cherry Blossom Invasion

2006-03-25T10:21:00.000-04:00

I've been away from this blog for quite a while. Some of the things I've been doing I've noted on my class blogs; other than that I've been doing a bit of traveling, and there's been other work as well.

A good story to get us in the mood for spring is this one on cherry blossoms in Japan, here. People get pretty particular about cherry blossoms, because they are spectacularly gorgeous, don't last long, and present a great excuse for going outside with your friends for picnicking and partying. As one person says in the article:

"It's only this time of the year we can enjoy friendship, rice wine and flowers at the same time. We'll come back here during the peak of the season, then before the end — imagine sitting under a tree with petals falling all over you."

The wave of blooming that moves north across the country is called "sakura zensen" 桜前線 "cherry blossom front," as in a weather front, a term that itself originates in the battlefield--i.e., the front line of combat. Despite the grim origins of the term, the advancing line of the cherry trees' bloom is the kind of invasion that people eagerly welcome.

Here's a link to a page of articles in Japanese about the cherry blossoms this year. If you can't read Japanese, choose the pages marked with a little camera icon--there are pictures there that give you some idea of what it's all about. Scroll down the page for pictures--click on the thumbnails that are there.

I'll list links to more fabulous photos of flowers at famous sites in Japan on my class blog for "Literary and Visual Culture" (at right).

Weblog Yahantei wishes everyone no delays in the arrival of spring, wherever you are.

Rallying Against a Female Emperor

2006-02-01T09:38:00.000-04:00

Another article from the BBC site, "Rally Against Japan Royals Change."

Former trade minister HIRANUMA Takeo led a rally against changing Japanese law to allow women to ascend the throne. There were female Japanese emperors in ancient times, by the way, but Mr. Hiranuma apparently feels that this is not authentically traditional or he wouldn't have described his actions this way, "We'll do our best to preserve the authentic tradition and culture and protect our nation."

Says Mr. Hiranuma: "If Aiko becomes the reigning empress, and gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their child may be the emperor."

Hard to know how to respond to that. It's problematic on so many levels.

Click here to read.

One's heart goes out to Princess Masako. To be so accomplished, intelligent, and well-educated, and then be turned into an object of the world's scrutiny not on the basis of her professional abilities, but her fertility. It must be heartbreaking for both her and for Aiko.

Students Rate Professors: Pathetic

2006-01-27T17:56:00.001-04:00

I really enjoyed this article at the BBC site.

Students Bemoan 'Unhip' Lecturers

"They try to be funny - I'm not at clown college."

"Every aspect of their measly little lives irritates me."

A delicious little read for a Friday afternoon.

Spring Semester 2006 Begins

2006-01-20T18:49:00.000-04:00

Back from my journey. The weather here is beautiful--sunny and almost up to 60 F.

Classes started at Emory on Wednesday, the 18th. I'm teaching two classes this semester: a freshman seminar, "Introduction to East Asian Studies" and "Literary and Visual Culture in Japan." I'm looking forward to both of them very much; it looks like both classes are full of very interesting students.

I'm keeping separate blogs for both these classes, so take a look and watch how they develop. I'll add links on the right to let you navigate there. In the meantime, follow the links in the text of this post.

It's nice to be back.

Journey West

2006-01-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

Weblog Yahantei is taking flight again for another two weeks or so, following the sun as it races across the world. I'm traveling to some other islands, ones that float above a different cold and glittering sea. However, even there, behind the snowy clouds the stars will be the same.

I'll try to check in now and then. In the meantime, watch the moon--when it starts to wane I'll head for home.

And while you're waiting for me, listen to the legendary story of Mornington Crescent.

Views of the London Eye I

2006-01-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

Waterloo Station, with the Eye just becoming visible; above Thames with a side view of the Eye.

Views of the London Eye II; Cheshunt

2006-01-02T21:55:00.000-04:00

Looking towards Fleet Street and the City; the New River, Cheshunt

East Asia @ MLA; The Crescent; Freshman Seminars

2005-12-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

Back on earth for the next few days.

I. East Asia @ MLA

I first went to Washington DC for the MLA conference, where I gave my paper on Buson and Chinese poetry--the one that I've been thinking about here on the blog. Its official title was "Haikai and Kanshi: Buson's Haishi." I think it went well--we had a nice discussion afterwards. The powerpoint slide show didn't work out, but that's the way of powerpoint. It didn't matter a whole lot. There was a respectable audience, considering it was the Modern Language Association, and we were talking about stuff in classical Japanese. My appreciation goes out to Laurel Rodd and Faye Kleeman for their hard work in establishing a presence for East Asia at the MLA. The way things are now, MLA should really be called something like Modern Languages of the West Association; impressively polyglot as it appears (and it is fun to walk around at the conference listening to all the heteroglossia happening) it's really only focused on part of the world.

On the other hand, given that the people there were pretty much all specialists in modern literature, most of them were interesting to look at. I don't know why it is, but modern literature folks tend to have a much better fashion sense than the usual run of academics (my own disastrous wardrobe does nothing to raise the bar, I admit). While there was a certain amount of dress diversity at the conference and a few real shockers, for the most part these people had taken time out from their dangerous left-wing intellectualizing to shop for outfits. It was very impressive.

II. The Crescent

From DC I went home on Amtrak, on the train called The Crescent which travels from New York to New Orleans. I love Amtrak and wish it were better looked after by the people who are in a position to look after it. The journey took 10 hours--considerably longer than a flight would have--so it's not something I can ordinarily do. Being of a rather sensitive and misanthropic nature, I would have preferred the solitary confinement of one of the little sleeper cabins, but they were sold out by the time I made my reservation so I took my chances in an open carriage. There are drawbacks to this--other passengers will insist on carrying on with their lives and personalities, even in public--but I was ready for them, and I enjoyed my journey.

I was sorry not to have a window by my seat. However, it was dark for most of the trip, and by the time the sun rose we were already in familiar territory, so it wasn't that big a deal.

Trains are absolutely magical and soothing. I love the sounds they make, gliding over the rails, rocking gently, creaking now and then. I love the sound of the whistle, of passing trains moving in the opposite direction. I love the anxious expectancy when the train comes to a stop, whether in a station or not. Most of all I was pleased to have the opportunity to be quiet and think. You get a lot of thinking time on a train. I highly recommend it.

III. Freshman Seminars

I saw news about Freshman Seminars on Yahoo today. It says that oddball freshman seminars are a real hit these days (well, read it for yourself!). I was encouraged by this, because I'm teaching a freshman seminar next semester that some might think oddball (I don't--it's basically Great Books of China and Japan). Wishing myself luck with it.

Island of Light; More Buson + Chinese Poetry

2005-12-24T07:12:00.000-04:00

Island of Light

It's Christmas Eve.

Writing to you from a quiet, shining place surrounded by a distant sea. The clouds are very thin today, faintly moving across pale icy blue. Bare branches of trees reach out to the sky absently, holding their lives still in winter sleep.

....

More Buson + Chinese Poetry

What was the relationship between haikai and kanshi?

The Japanese wrote poetry in Chinese for centuries, more or less. The form experienced a revival in the 17th century as part of the emergence of cultural discourse related to the figure of the bunjin or literatus. One of the people most famously associated with this development was the scholar, teacher, and poet Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728), whose teachings emphasized the actual production of Chinese poetry in addition to reading and interpreting the work of classical Chinese poets.

This was contemporaneous with the development of haikai. In some ways haikai might seem unrelated to kanshi, because it was written in Japanese and its metrical structure was very different from those in Chinese poetry. But haikai did have many things in common with kanshi, most importantly perhaps the fact that many of the people who wrote haikai also wrote kanshi, and emulated the bunjin lifestyle.

One conspicuous instance of the close relationship between kanshi and haikai was the emergence of the kanshibunchô, of the middle of the 17th century, a literary, elevated style that drew on kanshi for its models. This was most closely associated with the Danrin school of haikai, but its most well-known proponent was Matsuo Bashô himself, who composed in this style during his early years. The following Bashô hokku is a good example. It opens with a headnote in Chinese, a quote from the Tang poet Li Bo (701-762), "In times of sorrow, one learns reverence for wine. In times of poverty, one realizes the sacredness of pennies:"

under the blossoms, the floating world
my sake is white
my rice is black

hana ni ukiyo waga sake shiroku meshi kuroshi

The speaker is poor, as his sake is milky with lees and his rice has not been adequately milled. The awareness of his poverty causes him to have a keener appreciation of cherry blossoms as emblematic of the sadness of life even as he sits down to his meal. While the sentiment of the verse is not unusual in Japanese poetry, its language is quite striking. Even without the Chinese headnote, its parallel structure (white sake, black rice) recalls kanshi. It is also far more blunt and intellectual than the oblique, highly nuanced verse at which Bashô excelled in his later years: the meaning of the poem is expressed with little ambiguity, and it offers the reader the challenge of figuring out the source of headnote and the delight of the poet's cleverness in reworking it into this context.

Into the Light

2005-12-17T12:30:00.000-04:00

Weblog Yahantei takes to the air for the next ten days, crossing clouds toward the sunrise beyond the cold grey sea. We hope to make updates, possibly with pictures, but we don't know whether that will be possible.

We wish everyone a peaceful and safe winter holiday.

Listen to BBC Radio 4's Tsunami Memorial broadcast either live on the radio on December 17, from 8-9 pm (BST) or later through the Radio 4 website.

Buson and Chinese Poetry IV

2005-12-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Been reading through Eri Yasuhara's dissertation on Buson's haishi, called Buson and Haishi: A Study of Free-form Haikai Poetry in 18th Century Japan (1982). If you're interested in haiku, and have read most of the easily available books out there but want to learn a bit more, I really recommend it. College or university libraries can get dissertations with no problem, but if you are not affiliated with such a library, ask your public library's reference desk for some help. Dr. Yasuhara's writing is really wonderful for its sheer clarity, and she covers a huge amount of information that isn't available anywhere else in English. I just loved reading it, even though it was on microfilm and I seldom use microfilm.

Title of my talk:

"Haikai and Kanshi: Yosa Buson's Haishi" (I know that's pretty unspectacular, but I hope it is at least serviceable)

Here's how my talk starts:

Yosa Buson (1716-1783) was famous for both his painting and his poetry. In a period of Japanese history when the impact of Chinese discouse was prarticularly strong, Buson presents an especially interesting subject for study. The genre of painting with which he is most commonly associated is nanga (literally, "southern" painting), a Japanese form of Chinese literati landscape painting. Whie he did not write kanshi (Japanese poetry in Chinese), his haikai verse is often compared to Chinese poetry; indeed, no less an observer than Ueda Akinari described Buson's verse as "kanagaki no shi", Chinese shi poetry written in Japanese.

While the majority of Buson's poetic output took the form of conventional haikai--he composed about 2,800 hokku (17-syllable verses) and participated in some 120 linked verse sequences, he also wrote three verses that were highly unconventional and exceptional--Hokuju Rôsen o itamu [Mourning for the Sage Hokuju] (1745? published 179?), Shunpû batei no kyoku [Song of the Spring Wind on the Kema Embankment] (1777), and Denga ka [Yodo River Songs] (1777). While haikai was typically short and kept to the 5-7-5 or 7-7 syllable structures that had formed the foundations of Japanese poetry for centuries, these three verses follow entirely different and largely unprecedented formats: they mix phrases of standard Japanese poetic vocabulary with relatively straightforward literary Chinese, and these are combined with hybrid passages that bring together elements of both.

How are we to read Buson's haishi? What sorts of insights can they offer into not only the development of Japanese poetry in this period, but into the way that Japanese artists and intellectuals like Buson understood the relationship between Japan and China? I will argue that Buson's haishi offer a glimpse into a way of conceptualizing China that emerged during the eighteenth century--of China as home, rather than Other, a site of nostalgia and longing for an imaginary past.

Concepts of landscape and human beings' place in it were fundamental to haikai. The genre's greatest proponent, Matsuo Bashô, was quoted as saying "One cannot have confidence in the fûryû (poetic sensibility) of those who do not know some part of the Tôkaidô [Great eastern highway] (Honchô monzen). His most famous works are poeticized accounts of journeys, like Nozarashi kikô [Record of a weather-beaten skeleton] and Oku no hosomichi [Narrow road to the interior]. That Bashô was able to make such a close identification beween travel and haikai was facilitiated by the improvements in travel-related infrastructure (bad phrasing I know) that were made during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate. Once extremely dangerous and restricted, travel in the 17th and 18th century began to take on a different character, and was accessible to a different class of person. Travel especially for the purpose of pilgrimage--often more like modern tourism than expressions of religious devotion--came within the reach of increasing numbers of commoners. Historian Peter Nosco has argued that these changes led to a new way of conceptualizing Japan, a change in attitude that people--that is to say, commoners--had in their ideas of Japan as a nation. He argues that a new "spatial orientation" began to become more general in Japan. a view of the country that "transcended the boundaries of village, kuni (province) and sub-region as a whole.

Nosco argues that this is connected to another change in this period—a concept of Japan as a place that was part of an international order. It is common to characterize the spatial orientation of Japan as one of "center and periphery," with two focii—a cultural one in Kyoto and a political one in Edo, beyond which radiated circles of kuni and regions. Beyond this, however, "periphery" in the early modern period extended to include Ezo, the Ryûkyû Islands, Korea, and beyond them, China. Even the most distant area included in that periphery, China, was space that has lost its foreignness; it was an idealized place, one that the Japanese only imagined through texts and paintings. As Nosco writes, "China began to function less as someplace 'real' and more at the level of metaphor, as an expression of that which was deemed to be mature, wise, rational, and grandiose—a perfect Other against which a new sense of Japaneseness could be constructed."

Buson and Chinese Poetry III

2005-12-11T14:43:00.000-04:00

Some more thinking about Buson and Chinese poetry. I'm giving a paper at the upcoming MLA conference about the topic, and these are some of the things I'm thinking about.

I'm going to be talking not about Buson's hokku (i.e. 5-7-5 syllable poems, what is normally called haiku today). Rather, I'm going to concentrate on his haishi, free-form verse in a haikai style.
I'm still working out the details yet, and I will try to write them out on the blog as I do. For the moment, here's what I know:

A. Buson wrote three haishi.

Mourning for the Sage Hokuju
Song of the Spring Wind on the Kema Embankment
Yodo River Songs

B. All of these focus on longing and loss; nostalgia, for a better word. (1) is an elegy for an older friend/patron who died when Buson was in his late 20s. It's not clear when he wrote it--perhaps at the time, perhaps years later. (2) and (3) are especially interesting insofar as he takes a female point of view to write them. In (2) he describes meeting a servant-girl who is on the way home for her one holiday a year; moved by her charm, he composes a poem series as if was speaking in her voice. (3) is a dialogue between a courtesan and her client; the courtesan urges her client/lover to stay with her, the client/lover demurs, the courtesan speaks of her sadness.

I say (2) and (3) are "especially interesting" but in fact all three are equally interesting--and extraordinarily powerful, too. They have a haikai-esque quality to them, that's certain, but they also owe a great deal in their form and their evocativeness to Chinese poetry.

It's my job to somehow make sense of this.

More to follow.

Buson and Chinese Poetry II; Housebling

2005-12-06T18:01:00.000-04:00

1. Buson and Chinese Poetry II

Still thinking about Buson and Chinese poetry. I'm reading a book now called Kanshi to haiku by YOSHIKAWA Hatsuki, which is no help at all for the paper I'm trying to write. (Its unhelpfulness is not because of any deficiencies in the book itself--it's a fine book.) But here's a Buson verse and the Chinese poem to which it alludes, for what it's worth:

spring rains
beneath the bridges
at Shijô and Gojô

shunsui ya Shijô Gojô no hashi no shita

Shijô and Gojô are streets in Kyoto. Some pictures of Kyoto's Kamogawa river and its bridges today are here.

The poem is by early Tang poet LIU Tingzhi (651-679). For the full text of the poem and information about the poet go here. It's in Japanese, but there's some nice pictures.

Beneath the bridge, spring waters flow,
Across the bridge, splendid youths pass.
Horses' neighing carries beyond the blue clouds.
People's shadows shimmer within the green waves.
Polished by the waves, jewels become as sand,
Wrapped in blue clouds, brocade turns into mist.
Charming willows are trees that wound the heart.
Charming peach and pear trees have blossoms that touch your soul.

(It goes on another 20 or so lines but maybe I'd best end the butchery here. At least it gives you an idea of how different Chinese poetry is from haiku. Corrections from anybody out there who is better informed about Tang poetry are welcome. )

Visit 300 Tang Poems for some great Tang poems: Chinese + nice English translations.

2. House Bling

This blog links you to pictures of houses in the UK that have been garishly decorated for the winter holidays.

The spirit of haiku is to rejoice in the changes of the seasons, including annual celebrations. While English speakers commonly associate haiku with restraint and Zen-like austerity, plenty of haiku was tasteless, too, back in the day. So I can't help but think that housebling is no less haiku than highly sensitive evocations of snow and shigure (intermittent rains).

The nights are even longer now. The bling reminds us.

Rui Magone on the Chinese Examination System

2005-12-03T23:56:00.000-04:00

Professor Rui Magone of the Free University of Berlin came to give a talk at Emory on Tuesday. The title of his talk was "Poetic Justice: Literature in the Civil Examinations of Imperial China." It was a really interesting overview of an incredibly complicated and long-lived institution that shaped Chinese social, political, and cultural life for centuries.

Pre-modern China was governed by an enormous bureaucracy, and in order to become a bureaucrat you had to make it through a torturous hierarchy of examinations. The people with the least ambitions were content with passing local exams; really toughminded and dedicated ones with resources at their disposal could work their way up through regional all the way to the imperial metropolitan exams.

The main focus of the examinations was literature: the Confucian classics, mainly poetry, history, and ethics. For the most part, "practical" knowledge--i.e., knowledge about the actual business of running the government--was not addressed.

This was the focus of Dr. Magone's talk; or as he put it, "the question of why belles-lettres instead of scientific knowledge, dominated the examination discourse of imperial China;" as well as "the paradigm according to which the civil examinations were responsible for the ultimate collapse of the Chinese empire."

The talk was particularly interesting because Dr. Magone told us lots of details about what it was like to actually be a candidate for these examinations. He showed pictures of the kinds of little "cells" that candidates had to sit inside to take the exams; he explained the elaborate procedures for attempting to ensure fairness (the stakes were extremely high for candidates, and cheating and corruption were rampant). He showed us pictures of the actual exam papers, and explained how candidates composed their answers. One person he talked about took the same exam about 10 times, and didn't pass until he was 42.

Keep an eye out for Dr. Magone's book on this subject--he's an excellent speaker, so I imagine he must be a terrific writer too.

Dr. Magone's web page (in German) is here. Also, here is a link to his courses (most of it in German too, but there are pictures), which sound absolutely amazing. He does things like have his students dress up in costumes and go to the local Chinese garden to read classical Chinese literature out loud. In his class "Tour de Chine," he focuses on a different province every time, taking you on a tour through both the geography and history of China at the same time. Wow. I'd love to be a student in a class like that.

It's Kara's birthday today! Weblog Yahantei wishes her a great year!

Thanksgiving Art

2005-11-30T14:21:00.000-04:00

Here are two photographs taken with my camera by Miss Brenna Imperati.

Brenna and Devin are our nieces here at Weblog Yahantei. I wish I had some photographs of these two clever and accomplished young ladies, but Auntie is not quite as good a photographer as Miss Brenna is, so their art will have to speak for them.

Miss Devin made the one on top and Miss Brenna the one on the bottom.

The Weblog Yahantei team were delighted with the snow and with the cherry pie that appeared on this happy occasion. We look forward to more masterpieces like this in the future.

Pat Morita; Memoirs of a Geisha

2005-11-29T15:49:00.001-04:00

1. Noriyuki Pat Morita

Pat Morita died on November 24.

His experience as a Japanese American actor working in the US is the subject of a New York Times editorial by Lawrence Downes, called "Goodbye to Pat Morita, Best Supporting Asian". Access to NYT articles can sometimes be a bit complicated, so here is a part of it that caught my eye. It is more a comment on the climate the US media creates for Asian actors, rather than on the work of Mr. Morita himself.

Mr. Miyagi remains everybody's idea of a positive character. Who can forget "wax on, wax off," his wise counsel linking car care to karate? But still, it bother me Miyagi-san so wise, but find so hard use articles, pronouns when talk.

I don't know much about Mr. Morita's life, though it was always my impression that, as Mr. Downes puts it, "he was a man of uncommon decency and good humor."

We will miss you, Mr. Morita.

Wikipedia article
NYT obituary

2. M o a G

I am not a fan of Memoirs of a Geisha, but a lot of students really like it. Many say that it is the reason that they got interested in learning more about Japan. To all of you, but especially the latter group, I recommend you read literature by actual Japanese writers--even actual geisha!--because it's amazing stuff and might give you insights into things that you wouldn't get otherwise.

A film adaptation of the novel is about to be released. The novel has long been the subject of controversy, perhaps most notoriously as regards the case of IWASAKI Mineko's repudiation of the book. Controversy related to the film, however, has also emerged, with some people in Japan dissatisfied with the inauthenticity of its representations of geisha and others with the fact that many of the characters in the film are actually portrayed by Chinese actors. Critics in China have also complained about this, some quoted making very intemperate remarks indeed. Others prefer not to comment, hoping it will just go away, and still more are interested in it for the insight it gives into the ways foreigners imagine Japan.

This article from Yahoo news gives a nice overview.

On the other hand British people I know (a certain one in particular especially) complain all the time about the cheesy way Hollywood depicts Britain, British people, etc., so a charitable view would regard this as merely more of the same.

Journey North

2005-11-22T12:04:00.000-04:00

Weblog Yahantei is taking a holiday for Thanksgiving. We're going for a very long drive, and wish everyone else who is traveling this week a safe and happy time.

Here are some verses from Asahi in the meantime. The first one I liked a lot because it's something I've become familiar with. My house is underneath some huge oak trees (along with pines and dogwoods) and the patio in back is covered with acorns. They are not all bad, because they bring out the chipmunks, but along with everything else, and the recent winds and rain, it's a lot of work. But they also can offer an occasion for a poem:

Caps off
acorns race down
the plaza

--Michael CORR

I liked this one too. "Sweet olive" is another name for osmanthus, whose voluptuous fragrance I extolled in a September post. I don't smell it as much anymore, but there's a big sasanqua in the yard, with flowers I first mistook for some kind of rose. Anyway, when the tiny white blossoms of the sweet olive fall, they turn a dull gold beneath the plant.

Sweet olive
ending with golden carpet
Come out, sasanquas

--TACHIBANA Kennosuke

Getting colder here. Enjoy the last of November.

Buson and Chinese Poetry

2005-11-17T13:36:00.000-04:00

Now I'm reading a book called Buson to kanshi (Buson and Chinese poetry); it's by Narushima Yukio, published by Kashinsha in 2003. The book is pretty focused, I have to say; it's more or less a list of Chinese poets whose verse Buson drew on in his haikai, with the relevant poems included and discussed. I am starting with the afterword, because I usually find afterwords and prefaces more interesting than the actual specifics (unless I want to know more about a particular specific, in which case of course it becomes interesting).

Narushima starts his discussion by quoting from Buson's Preface to Shundei kushû. Here's the bit; it's my translation. I'm going to include a little more of it than Narushima does, so it makes sense. In order to follow it, you have to know that "zoku" means "vulgarity, ordinariness" etc. "Rizoku" is getting away from zoku. Shôha is Buson's friend and disciple; the place he lived, Shundei-sha, was his second house:

I went to visit Shundei-sha Shôha at his second house in the west of Kyoto. Shôha asked me a question about haikai. I answered, "Haikai is that which has as its ideal the use of zokugo, yet transcends zoku. To transcend zoku yet make use of zoku, the principle of rizoku, is most difficult. It is the thing that So-and-So Zen master spoke of: 'Listen to the sound of the Single Hand,' in other words haikai zen, the principle of rizoku." Through this, Shôha understood immediately.

He then continued his questions. "Although the essence of your teaching must be profound, is there not some method of thought that I could put into use, by which one might seek this by oneself? Indeed, is there not some shortcut, by which one might, without making a distinction between Other and Self, identify with nature and transcend zoku?" I answered, "Yes, the study of Chinese poetry. You have been studying Chinese poetry for years. Do not seek for another way." Doubtful, Shôha made so bold as to ask, "But Chinese poetry and haikai are different in tenor. Setting aside haikai, and studying Chinese poetry instead, is that not more like a detour?"

I answered, "Painters have the theory of 'Avoiding zoku:' 'To avoid the zoku in painting, there is no other way but to read many texts, that is to say, both books and scrolls, which causes the qi to rise, as commercialism and vulgarity cause qi to fall. The student should be careful about this.' To avoid zoku in painting as well, they caused their students to put down the brush and read books. Less possible still is it to differentiate Chinese poetry and haikai." With that, Shôha understood.

So, a bit of faux Zen gibberish from Mister Buson, but this is maybe the most frequently-quoted passage of anything in his entire oeuvre. There's a hell of a lot going on here.

I'll keep my comments now, though, to what interests Narushima. That is, not surprisingly, is the identification of haikai and Chinese poetry. He points out that in the passage that begins "I answered," Buson is alluding to the famous Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, perhaps the most influential (Chinese) painting treatise that ever made it to Japan. I am not sure it was received in China, but my guess is that it was very influential there also.

(Remind me that I want to do some follow up on that. Narushima mentions something about it in the context of Ogyu Sorai's disciple and Tokugawa Yoshimune. Seems very interesting. He also points out that Ike no Taiga was quite fond of this book.)

What, asks Narushima, did Buson learn from Chinese poetry? Two things, he says, in some sentences that are going to be devilishly difficult to translate but I'll take a crack at it anyway:

One of these is the world of Chinese verse as the poetic ("poesie") and the other is language as a means of expression. It may be better to say the fascination of language. Either way this was not only something where, measured on the basis of how much it broadened and deepened the extent Buson's own poetic artistry, could not be done without, but something that played an important role in polishing his poetic spirit so that he achieved a greater level of mastery and established a more colorful verse style.

Whew!

What Buson learned from the work of these these foreign poets was none other than the fact that haikai (shi=poetry) is not something that simply depicts the things of reality, but is rather something that, stirring the wings of imagination into flight, causes the poetic spirit to journey in limitless world of the fictive.

Goodness. Perhaps it doesn't really sound so overheated in the original.

He cites some verses here, which I will leave you with today:

willow leaves, fallen
clear stream, withered
stones, here and there

yanagi chiri shimizu kare ishi tokoro dokoro

I'm feeling melancholy
so strike the fulling block--
but stop it, now

uki ware ni kinuta ute ima wa yamine

A fulling block was used to soften cloth, and hearing its sound on an autumn evening was evocative of sorrow. Fulling blocks were archaic in Buson's time, but continued to be mentioned in poetry. Here is a picture of a character in a Noh play using one. In Buson's verse, the speaker doesn't want to overdo it.

plowing the fields
without moving
the clouds disappear

hatake utsu ya ugokanu kumo naku narinu

Simon Singh's Universe

2005-11-12T09:54:00.000-04:00

I went to listen to a lecture by Simon Singh last night, sponsored by Emory's Department of Physics and Astronomy. I've been getting very interested in science fiction recently, so it was nice to make a little visit to the realm of science fact. Dr. Singh is an absolutely brilliant speaker--the lecture was a huge amount of fun. He talked about the Big Bang theory, and was equally at home with complicated cosmology, Led Zeppelin, and Calvin and Hobbes. Not least among his tricks was the incandescent something he did with two forks and a pickle. His mastery of the medium of Powerpoint was also very impressive.

He mostly talked about the history of the Big Bang theory. Of course in order to talk about it, he had to explain it somewhat, and I found this very instructive. He made it sound very simple, which obviously it is not. I was interested not only in what he said in order to make it comprehensible, but how he said it. Despite his obvious sophistication, he constantly alluded to popular culture, and turned extremely mundane artifacts into powerfully persuasive metaphors. At first I thought that this lecture must have been something he spent quite a bit of time preparing, because it was so full of aptly-chosen illustrative devices. Listening to his responses in the Q & A afterwards, in which he responded to every question in a way that interwove sciency tech-speak with cocktail-partyish funny anecdotes, I stopped being so sure. He seems to have made a habit of thinking about hard, remote things in terms of the easy and immediate. He presents them both simultaneously, in a way that neither cheapens the hard thing nor distorts or denigrates the easy one.

Finding dignity in the everyday, revealing the essence of the stars that is present in the objects of ordinary life--what could be more like haiku?

Visual Culture; Fans; National Cinema

2005-11-10T16:45:00.000-04:00

Scavenging for things to work on in my spring semester classes.

Next semester I'll be teaching two classes. One is a freshman seminar on East Asian studies, more or less a general introduction to some of the "great books" or "classics" of East Asia. The other is on the interactions between literature and visual culture in Japan. Links to what I've done in these classes in the past are available on my homepage: C A Crowley's homepage.

In today's post I have some fairly random items; a miscellaneous collection of things as they've come up.

1. Visual culture

This article here strikes me as pretty reactionary and atavistic: Rescuing Art from "Visual Culture Studies". It gives me some ideas about the anatomy of resistance to recent ideas about the visuality and its relationship to "art." It's a very tidy summation. I haven't read it carefully enough to have any specific words of insight; at the moment I'm just thinking, what a scary world this must be for someone like the author of this article.

2. This leads me to thinking about sacredness in general, and the possessive attitude that comes with familiar territory.

Here's something I was reading yesterday, from a book called Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins. The book is about fan culture, specifically, about the communities that spring up around television shows, what makes them "cult," and so on. Doesn't have anything directly to do with classical Japanese literature, but it struck me that haikai and haiku are both extremely participatory, collaborative, and self-policing, and I wanted to think a bit about how this works.

The book does a nice job of tracing the progression people go through from being a casual consumer of a text or group of texts to a "fan." It was interesting because the thing that appeared to hook people in most was the promise of community. These communities develop their own culture; they regulate the behavior of their members and create specific acceptable ways to read and interpret the texts they revere. A quotation from Chapter 2, "How Texts Become Real," interested me. It's by Umberto Eco:

What are the requirements for transforming a book or movie into a cult object? The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan's private sectarian world...I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that, or whether it has a place in either of my classes. Now that I look at it it makes me want to review the chapter. Basically something happens and the audience takes charge of the text, so much so that they get all hysterical when the producers of the text do something that contradicts the set of rules they've developed for it. The fan-audience and the producers have a dramatically different relationship with the text.

Incomplete thoughts here: sanctity of the text. "Cult" implies sacredness: it's an object of reverence. Competition over who controls the text. Breaking it apart into its constituents as a kind of devotion. What are its parts? Nah, not coming up with anything that interesting to write about it right now but it's something to return to, to keep working on.

3. National Cinema

Thinking about the visual culture class as "Japanese visual culture." Something else I'm reading is called Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, edited by Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi.

Jinhee Choi's "National Cinema: The Very Idea" is good for a number of reasons. It's a clear and well-expressed explanation of a lot of things that will be very helpful for discussing texts in general (not just film). Also, it would be a good model for students in thinking about writing their papers.

Books it refers to:

Stuart Hall, David Held, Tony McGrew. Modernity and its Futures. (Cambridge: Open University Press, 1992).

Noel Burch. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

Emiko Miyashita: a shortcut toward home

2005-11-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

I got a postcard from Emiko Miyashita yesterday. It was a nice surprise. I met Ms. Miyashita at the HNA conference and hadn't realized I'd made any impression on her. So I was very pleased to get the card.

Ms. Miyashita is a haiku poet and translator. She is a wise, gracious, and well-spoken person. Here is one of her haiku:

silencing the cricket
a shortcut
toward home

One of Ms. Miyashita's most recent books is The New Pond: An English-Language Haiku Anthology (Hokumeisha, 2002). This book is interesting because it's translations of English-language haiku into Japanese. It shows the difficulty of moving between the two languages. There are two Japanese versions of each poem in English: one, a haiku (5-7-5 syllable poem) that strives to capture something of the sense of the original without being a direct translation and then a paraphrase of the original that is in some ways closer or more exact.

I recommend it for people who are interested in understanding the differences between English and Japanese haiku. However, you have to be able to read at least some Japanese in order to follow that part of it. Alternatively, it has a lot of very good poetry in it (including some efforts to come to terms with the tragedies of September 11th, 2001) in both English and Japanese.

Here's one from the book that I particularly liked. It's by Robert Major. As autumn grows deeper, night seems to grow deeper with it.

No one lights a lamp--
just our voices in the dark
as night descends

Happy Bonfire Night to everyone celebrating it.

Education About East Asia Under Threat in the UK

2005-11-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

This is the text of an article in the October 27 edition of the Financial Times, written by Dr. Peter Cave of the University of Hong Kong. No copyright infringement is intended.

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, is fond of talking about the opportunities offered by the rise of Asian giants such as China and India. Yet is Britain itself preparing adequately for Asia's growing importance? Not in the field of education, at least.

Few readers of the FT will need to be convinced of the huge role that China will play in the 21st century. Even so, it can still be a shock to go there and encounter the evidence of change on the ground. Some parts of Beijing and Shanghai could be Tokyo. Brand name shops offer designer goods at London prices. Last year, amid the classical gardens of Suzhou, I enjoyed coffee at £1.80 a cup in a stylish cafe whose menu was only in Chinese. Wake up and smell, is the message.

Nor can the rest of Asia be neglected. Fifteen years of stagnation in the Japanese economy has led many outside Asia to transfer their interest from Japan to China. To assume that Japan is subsiding into insignificance would be foolish, however. In fact, the political changes over the past decade may well signal a more assertive Japan on the world stage. The painful choices that Japan faces are resulting in a new politics marked by real policy debate and party discipline, showcased by the recent general election with its portentous landslide victory for the decisive and flamboyant Junichiro Koizumi. The rise of the rest of east Asia will only increase Japan's importance as a major international player.

All this ignores the other superpower, India, not to mention the Koreas or south-east Asia. Yet how is the next generation being prepared to deal with this new reality by the British education system? It is not. In fact, British universities have beencutting back on their east Asia programmes. Last year, the closure of Durham University's Department of East Asian Studies went ahead despite a storm of protest, the latest in a series of cuts that has seen the disappearance of Japanese Studies centres at Stirling and Essex. Now comes the news that the School of Oriental and African Studies plans to replace its specialist librarians in Chinese and Japanese with more junior staff.

In the competitive environment created for universities by successive governments, these cuts and closures make a kind of perverted sense. Governments want efficient and concentrated use of resources and try to achieve this by rewarding excellent research and high student numbers. The system rewards individual universities for ignoring thenational interest and pursuing their own, by getting rid of what is expensive or outside the fields where their most outstanding research is being done. As a result, Asian Studies has been hit by a double whammy. First, it is a relatively expensive area to fund and its student numbers are not high, partly because of the difficulty of learning Chinese or Japanese. Second, it is a small area
that can easily be hit hard by a few closures of departments whose research is very good, but not at the exemplary level that alone attracts significant government funding.

The twist in the tail is that even as such cuts and closures are going ahead, some universities, such as Bristol, are setting up new east Asian programmes. The trouble is that such programmes need to put in place a fresh infrastructure that takes years or decades to build. This scrap-and-build approach to higher education is wasteful and inefficient, besides being terrible for morale among east Asian experts.

The situation at school level is possibly even worse. The crisis in modern language teaching overall has been laid bare, as enrolments plummet in the wake of the decision to make languages optional at GCSE. It remains to be seen whether the government's National Languages Strategy willenable enhanced abilities in Asian, as well as European languages. In particular, there is a strong argument for introducing Chinese on a much expanded scale at schools, perhaps even from primary school. Who can doubt that in 25 years time, Britain will need people who can use Chinese and are well educated in the nuances of Chinese culture? But if we want those people in 2030, then we cannot afford to wait before setting up the systems to educate them.

The government has declared that special help will be given to subjects of national importance in higher education, including Asian Studies. This must be delivered. Britain needs a national educational strategy to prepare us for the rise of Asia in the coming century. Otherwise, 2030 will find us asking why we weren't ready.

Being a Good Teacher

2005-11-01T11:16:00.000-04:00

This is by Peter C. Beidler. I got it from "Tomorrow's Professor," a mailing list maintained by Rick Reis of Stanford University. He's involved with the Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning . You can get good advice about teaching at their website; click here to e-mail a request to subscribe to "Tomorrow's Professor."

1. Good Teachers Really Want to Be Good Teachers

Good teachers try and try and try, and let
students know they try. Just as we respect
students who really try, even if they do not
succeed in everything they do, so they will
respect us, even if we are not as good as we want
to be. And just as we will do almost anything to
help a student who really wants to succeed, so
they will help us to be good teachers if they
sense that we are sincere in our efforts to
succeed at teaching. Some things teachers can
fake. Some things teachers must fake. We have,
for example, to act our way into letting our
students know that we can't think of any place we
would rather be at 8:10 on a Friday morning than
in a class with them talking about the difference
between a comma splice and a run-on sentence. An
acting course is a good preparation for a life in
the classroom because it shows us how to pretend.
Our students probably know on some level that we
would rather be across the street sipping a cup
of Starbucks coffee than caged up with 24
paste-faced first years who count on our joyous
enthusiasm and enlivening wit to be the cup of
Starbucks that will get them ready for their 9:10
class. But they will forgive our chicanery, even
if they suspect that we are faking our joy. They
will know it by the second day, however, if we
don't really want to be good teachers, and they
will have trouble forgiving us for that.
Wanting-really, truly, honestly wanting-to be a
good teacher is being already more than halfway
home.

2. Good Teachers Take Risks

They set themselves impossible goals, and then
scramble to achieve them. If what they want to
do is not quite the way it is usually done, they
will risk doing it anyhow. Students like it when
we take risks. One of my own favorite courses
was a first-year writing course in which I
ordered no writing textbook for the course. On
the first day I announced, instead, that my
students and I were going to spend a semester
writing a short textbook on writing. It was, I
said, to be an entirely upside-down course in
which the students would write lots of essays,
decide as a group which ones were best, and then
try to determine in discussion what qualities the
good ones had in common. Whenever we hit upon a
principle that the good essays seemed to embody
and that the weak papers did not, we would write
it down. Then we eventually worked our
discovered principles into a little textbook that
the students could take home with them. It was a
risky course. It was built on a crazy notion
that first-year college students in a required
writing course could, first of all, tell good
writing from less-good writing, and, second, that
they could articulate the principles that made
the good essays better. My students knew I was
taking a risk in setting the course up that way,
but because they knew that my risk was based on
my own faith and trust in them, they wanted
me-they wanted us-to succeed.

We teachers have something called academic
freedom. Too many of us interpret that to mean
the freedom from firing. I suggest that we
should interpret it rather as the freedom to take
chances in the classroom. I love taking risks.
It keeps some excitement in what is, after all, a
pretty placid profession. I like to try things
that can fail. If there is no chance of failure,
then success is meaningless. It is usually easy
enough to get permission to take risks, because
administrators usually like it when teachers
organize interesting and unusual activities. For
some risky activities it may be best not to ask
permission, partly because the risks that good
teachers take are not really all that risky, and
partly because it is, after all, easier to get
forgiveness than to get permission. Teachers who
regularly take risks usually succeed, and the
more they succeed the more they are
permitted-even expected-to take risks the next
time. Taking risks gives teachers a high that is
healthy for them and their students. It makes
good teaching, good learning.

4. Good Teachers Never Have Enough Time

Just about all of the good teachers I have known
are eternally busy. They work 80-100 hour weeks,
including both Saturdays and Sundays. Their
spouses and families complain, with good reason,
that they rarely see them. The reward for all
this busy-ness is more busy-ness. The good
teachers draw the most students, get the most
requests for letters of recommendation, work most
diligently at grading papers, give the most
office hours and are most frequently visited
during those office hours, are most in demand for
committee work, work hardest at class
preparations, work hardest at learning their
students' names, take the time to give students
counsel in areas that have nothing to do with
specific courses, are most involved in
professional activities off campus.

For good teachers the day is never done. While
it does not follow that any teacher who keeps
busy is a good teacher, the good teachers I know
rarely have time to relax. The good teachers I
know find that they are as busy teaching two
courses as teaching three. They know that they
do a much better job with the two courses than
the three because they give more time to the
individual students, but they also know that for
a responsible teacher the work of good teaching
expands to fill every moment they can give to it.
They might well complain about how busy they are,
but they rarely complain, partly because they
don't want to take the time to, partly because
they don't like whining. Actually, they seem
rather to like being busy. To put it more
accurately, they like helping students-singular
and plural-and have not found many workable
shortcuts to doing so.

7. Good Teachers Try to Keep Students-And Themselves-Off Balance

I have learned that when I am comfortable,
complacent, and sure of myself I am not learning
anything. The only time I learn something is
when my comfort, my complacence, and my
self-assurance are threatened. Part of my own
strategy for getting through life, then, has been
to keep myself, as much as possible, off balance.
I loved being a student, but being a student
meant walking into jungles where I was not sure
my compass worked and didn't know where the
trails might lead or where the tigers lurked. I
grew to like that temporary danger. I try to
inject some danger into my own courses, if only
to keep myself off balance. When I feel
comfortable with a course and can predict how it
will come out, I get bored; and when I get bored,
I am boring. I try, then, to do all I can to
keep myself learning more. I do that in part by
putting myself in threatening situations.

A couple of decades ago, I developed a new
teaching area-an area I had never had a course in
when I was a student: Native American literature.
It would have been more comfortable for me to
continue with the old stuff I knew, but part of
what I knew is that I detest stagnation. I
rashly offered the department's curriculum
committee a new course. When they rashly
accepted it, I was off balance, challenged by a
new task in a new area. I now teach and publish
in Native American literature regularly.

In 1988 I began to feel that I was growing
complacent teaching the privileged students I
have always taught at Lehigh University-mostly
the children of upper middle class white
families. It was getting too comfortable, too
predictable. I applied for a Fulbright grant to
teach for a year in the People's Republic of
China. When the appointment came through, I was
scared, but I signed the papers and not long
after went with my wife and four teenaged
children to Chengdu in Sichuan Province to take
up the teaching of writing and American
literature to Chinese graduate students. I have
never felt so unbalanced in my life-teaching
students who could just barely understand me,
even when I was not talking "too fast." It was a
challenge to teach such students to read the
literature of a nation most of them had been
taught to hate and to write papers in a language
that was alien to them. And that was only part
of the unbalance. The rest was riding my bicycle
through streets the names of which I could not
read, eating with chopsticks food that was almost
always unrecognizable and often untranslatable
because nothing quite like it grew in my native
land. Never have I felt so unbalanced for so
long a time, but never have I learned so much in
so short a time.

I have noticed that good teachers try to keep
their students off balance, forcing them to step
into challenges that they are not at all sure
they can handle. Good teachers push and
challenge their students, jerking them into
places where they feel uncomfortable, where they
don't know enough, where they cannot slide by on
past knowledge or techniques. Good teachers, as
soon as their students have mastered something,
push their best students well past the edge of
their comfort zone, striving to make them
uncomfortable, to challenge their confidence so
they can earn a new confidence.

9. Good Teachers Do Not Trust Student Evaluations

Neither do bad teachers. But there is a
difference in their reasons for distrusting them.
I have noticed that good teachers, when they get
really good evaluations, don't quite believe
them. They focus instead on the one or two
erratic evaluations that say something bad about
them. They good teachers tend to trust only the
negative evaluations: "I wonder what I did wrong.
I suppose I went too fast, or perhaps I should
have scheduled in another required conference
after that second test. I wish I could apologize
to them, or at least find out more about what I
did wrong." The not-so-good teachers also do not
trust student evaluations, but they distrust them
for difference reasons. They tend to trust the
positive evaluations but not the negative ones:
"Those good evaluations are proof that I
succeeded, that my methods and pace were just
about right for these students. The others just
fell behind because they were lazy, because they
never bothered to read the book or study for the
exams. Naturally they did not like my course
because they put nothing into it. Besides, how
can students judge good teaching, and anyhow,
what do they know? Anyone can get good student
evaluations by lowering their standards, being
popular, and by pandering to the masses." Good
teachers tend to discount the positive
evaluations, however numerous they may be;
less-good teachers tend to discount the negative
evaluations, however numerous they may be.

10. Good Teachers Listen to Their Students
Shortly after I read Professor Levi's statement
that no one has ever defined what makes a good
teacher, I asked the students in my undergraduate
Chaucer course at Baylor University (where I was
a visiting professor during 1995-96), to write a
sentence or two about what, in their own
experience, makes a good teacher. The responses
ranged widely, but I sorted through the pieces of
paper on which they wrote them and put them in
different piles. Then I combined the piles into
ones that seemed to be generically related. Then
I combined the piles into ones that seemed to be
generically related. Three quarters of their
responses fell into two piles. The first of
those I call the "A" pile, the second I call the
"E" pile.

In the "A" pile I found words like "accessible,"
"available," and "approachable." Here are some of
the sentences they wrote in response to my
question, "What makes a good teacher?" I have
edited them slightly, mostly to put them into
more parallel constructions:

Good teachers

are available to assist students with
questions on the subject, and they show concern.

do not have a lofty, standoffish attitude.

can interact with a student on an individual basis.

want to know each individual student.

give time, effort, and attention to their students.

are personable, on your side.

are willing to be a friend to students.

are actually interested in the students.

are actively involved with their students.

are first friends, then educators. The
friend encourages, supports, and understands;
the educator teaches, challenges, and spurs the student on.

In the "E" pile I found words like
"enthusiastic," "energetic," "excited":

Good teachers

love what they teach and convey that love to the class.

have both an enthusiasm for and an
encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.

have such an obvious enthusiasm for what
they do that it is contagious and their
students pick up on it.

have a desire to learn, and for others
to learn, all of the exciting things they have
learned.

are obviously excited about teaching.
When a teacher enjoys teaching, it is usually
obvious, and that enjoyment is passed on to the
students. The classes I've had with teachers who
loved the subject they were teaching are the ones
I've enjoyed the most, and the ones I've been the
most eager to learn in. A teacher who isn't
enthusiastic can ruin even the most fascinating
of subjects.

These students are English majors at a Christian
university in Texas. Their answers might well
not ring as true for computer science majors at
MIT in Massachusetts. The point is not that all
good teachers must be available to their students
and enthusiastic about what they teach-though
that is surely not bad advice for anyone aspiring
to be a good teacher. The point is that good
teachers listen to what their students try to
tell them about what makes a good teacher.

Hey, I've done it! Good teachers are those who
want to be good teachers, who take risks, who
have a positive attitude, who never have enough
time, who think of teaching as a form of
parenting, who try to give students confidence at
the same time that they push them off balance,
who motivate by working within the students'
incentive systems, who do not trust student
evaluations, and who listen to students. Who
says no one has ever defined what makes a good
teacher?

But wait. The trouble with good teachers is
that, finally, they won't be contained in a
corral labeled "good teachers." The trouble with
exciting teachers is that they are almost always
mavericks, trotting blithely off into some
distant sunset where no one can brand them. The
trouble with inspiring teachers is that they
won't stay put long enough to be measured,
perhaps because they know that if they did they
would be expiring teachers.

Damn.

Farewell, Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

2005-10-31T19:23:00.000-04:00

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.

Autumn Poems from Asahi

2005-10-31T10:50:00.000-04:00

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.

Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve

2005-10-29T23:46:00.000-03:00

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.

Leavetaking Moon

2005-10-25T11:15:00.000-03:00

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.

Haiku Guest Lecture

2005-10-22T17:32:00.000-03:00

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.

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki III

2005-10-17T20:01:00.000-03:00

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!

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki II

2005-10-17T15:44:00.000-03:00

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.

Reading Masterpieces of Kabuki I

2005-10-17T12:34:00.000-03:00

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.

E-Mailing a Professor, DIY Planner

2005-10-17T10:16:00.000-03:00

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.

Pictures from the HNA Conference

2005-10-16T21:16:00.000-03:00

This was where the meetings were.

Below is where the food was.

Nice weather, right?

A Morning Glory; Another Book Review

2005-10-14T09:53:00.000-03:00

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.

Today, Some Anonymous Work

2005-10-10T16:40:00.000-03:00

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

More from Clueless

2005-10-09T11:12:00.000-03:00

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.

From Clueless

2005-10-07T17:38:00.000-03:00

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.

The Garage, the Public Library

2005-10-06T16:38:00.000-03:00

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.

Pause for Thought

2005-10-05T12:53:00.000-03:00

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

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks III

2005-10-01T21:40:00.000-03:00

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.

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks II

2005-10-01T16:09:00.000-03:00

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.

Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks I

2005-10-01T13:01:00.000-03:00

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.

Review for Early Modern Japan Journal

2005-09-29T21:46:00.000-03:00

I'm doing a review of a book called Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson by John M. Rosenfield, published 2003 by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. The review is for Early Modern Japan Journal. This is an important book; Professor Rosenfield is a major scholar of Japanese art history, and of course Buson is a major Japanese artist, so this is a very welcome resource to have. It's a lovely book, with lots of illustrations. It does not try to offer a comprehensive discussion of the full range of Buson's paintings; rather, it chooses two motifs--as the title suggests--and uses them as the basis of an exploration of Buson, his life, and his work as both a poet and a painter. It's not terribly long: the text takes up less than sixty pages, with a few more given to brief appendices and bibliographies. However, it addresses a number of topics that are central to understanding Buson and his work, and while it does not explore them in great depth, it offers a lot of valuable insights.

The topics are:

Biography (Buson's life and reputation; his interactions with the haikai community, and other cultural groups)
Poetic pictures (Mynah bird pictures, the Nagasaki school of painting, literati painting, and 'poetic vision')
Poems and pictures combined (that is, haiga; Bashô and haiga, Buson and haiga, and the haikai imagination)
Indexical imagery (Rock motifs)

The introduction starts by saying "This small book explores the ways by which the Japanese poet and painter Yosa Buson (1716-1784) portrayed a realm of profound beauty and rich invention...Much of Buson's artistry is accessible to foreigners. His outlook and vocabulary are straightforward ones of shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, and fishermen. His imagery is often that of immediate experience: of stepping barefoot into a freezing stream, of trudging uphill against the wind, of reading by the dim light of an old paper lantern. His paintings and verses express the emotions of sensitive, thoughtful persons everywhere....[b]ut his intellect (and that of his friends) had been shaped by Chinese and Japanese cultural traditions of great antiquity, and he also emplyed complex, highly coded allusions which present-day audiences find arcane and obscure." This seems to me a pretty fair assessment. Rosenfield invokes Haruo Shirane's term "haikai imagination" (see HS's book on Bashô, Traces of Dreams) to sum up what Buson was doing (JR defers explanation of this until a later chapter, so I will too). JR's task is to reconcile contrasting aspects of Buson: his literary sensibility that was informed by Chinese and Japanese traditions at once, the conflict of high and low culture in haikai, and, of course, the competing and complementary media of poetry and painting. This is what's behind talking about both birds and rocks--two kinds of imagery, corresponding to a two-sided artist.

He proposes to explore "three ways in which this artist deployed the expressive resources of picture and verse." He explains that each of these three discussions was originally directed at a different audience, and that they differ in "intelligibility" to people of the present day:

Poetic paintings. These are not conventional nanga paintings, but "innovative imagery closely linked to haikai." This seems reasonable. Buson's near contemporaries detected haikai-ness even in his Chinese-style paintings. Presumably this haikai-ness could be more or less dominant. It's something to think about.
"Works intended for haikai audiences." Haiga, basically. Pictures+poems.
Simple, spare paintings that look a lot like haiga except they don't have inscriptions. JR notes that these are very rare.

JR points out that types 2 and 3 require a lot of commentary before a viewer would understand them, and his book addresses this. Buson's style is extremely "unsystematic " and inconsistent, and thus present especially extreme challenges to the would-be interpreter. "The lack of inner consistencey in style and symbolism in Buson's paintings is yet another symptom of the extreme pluralism that beset Japanese culture nearing the end of its traditional social and political order."

This last sentence is pretty compelling and more or less is the central idea of the book. My first impulse is to be persuaded by it, the first part of the sentence at least. It's very nice to be offered some kind of tidy explanation of Buson's complexity or as the TV interior decorators say of haphazard decor, "eclecticism." I almost agree with it. The second half of the sentence, "Japanese culture nearing the end of its traditional social and political order" makes me a bit less comfortable--it seems to veer a bit close to a theory of intelligent design, if that's the right way to describe it. It's easy to see the symptoms of chaos after the chaos has broken out, and imagine that there's a connection. If things are breaking down, might not artists reflect this in their work by creating more order than less? is one point. But another is, when an artist is living in the twilight of an era, can he or she actually be aware of it? Who can tell the difference between twilight and dawn, if you don't have a clock or a compass?

This is what I'm thinking.

HNA Conference

2005-09-27T18:51:00.000-03:00

I'm back from the Haiku North America conference. It was held last week from Wednesday to Saturday night. It was a very full program that combined lecture-style presentations, workshops, and performances, as well as various kinds of opportunities to compose and talk about writing haiku in English. It was all pretty new to me--I don't really think about "haiku" much, so the weekend was full of surprises, but everyone was really nice and incredibly serious about writing so it was very interesting indeed. It made me aware of many things--particularly about translating haikai--that had never occured to me previously, so I was very glad to have had the chance to take part.

The site of the conference was Fort Worden State Park, miles away from everything on an island "on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula"--it felt every bit as remote as that phrase suggests. Sleeping arrangements were a bit more basic than I'd anticipated--I chose the "dorm" style lodging which turned out to be an unregenerated military barracks, and though I'm rather ascetic by nature (or cheap, I should say) anyway, I found it a bit uncomfortable. I don't think all HNA conferences (I believe they are biannual) are quite so austere in this way. I think many of the other attendees were able to enjoy the scenery and the fresh cool air, and so I imagine it was a good choice of venue overall.

I plan to post some pictures here, and type up the paper I gave and post that. I'm not sure what will become of this paper, but I'll try and turn it into something useful.

On Authenticity, Again

2005-09-19T22:56:00.000-03:00

Some things that come up when thinking about authenticity and haikai:

1) The presence of the past
2) The friction between high culture and low culture
3) Experience viewed/drawn through the filter of literature
4) Appeals to authority

One thing I notice when I read contemporary writing about haiku in English is that there was a single unified view in the past. In fact there was quite a bit of diversity.

I'd like to talk about the ways that Buson differed from Bashô, even though he claimed to be returning to Bashô. And in the process, I'd like to find out about the ways that poets today view the poets of the past, if they see themselves as part of a tradition, if they think it's important to break from a tradition, how important do they think originality is in haiku.

Buson was unlike Bashô in the sense that:

1. He was not a traveler. He did travel a bit, and in some cases did so in conscious awareness that he was retracing Bashô's footsteps, but he did not make a home of travel the way Bashô did.

2. He was a painter. This made him different from Bashô in several ways, the two main ones being that a) he was involved in a commercial enterprise [despite having to pose as an amateur] and b) he was much better at haiga than Bashô was. I think what's important about this, particularly with regard to point a, was that he had a complicated relationship with his identity as a professional.

3. He was not particularly spiritual, or deeply religious. He laced his writings with Zenlike quotations, but these were more like figures of speech than anything really pious.

4. His hokku are a lot different from Bashô's, They're much more dreamy and fantastical as a whole. Bashô was better at creating the impression of transparency in his verse. Maybe they were every bit as fictional and invented as Buson's were, but they leave you with a much different feeling.

This is interesting because Shiki called Bashô subjective and Buson objective. But Buson wasn't so much objective as detached, like a narrator recounting a story at a distance. Not necessarily something he witnessed, but nevertheless something that made for a good story.

I notice that I am doing something here that is more or less a haiku cliche, comparing Bashô to someone and letting the difference be the focus. Of course Buson and Bashô make a good pairing for this sort of exercise. I can't help but feel that both are diminished by the process. However, one of the reasons we know about Bashô now is because Buson helped us think a certain way about his (Bashô's, I mean) role in haikai, so it is worth the effort to explore a bit about how Buson is doing something very unlike the poet he called for everyone to imitate.

Authenticity in Buson's Haikai

2005-09-17T20:53:00.000-03:00

Thinking about the HNA conference, and the topic, which is authenticity.

My talk is about Buson and authenticity.

Authenticity After Bashô: Buson's Ways of Transformation and Transcendence

Authenticity was one of Yosa Buson's central concerns. A leading figure in the 18th century effort to reform haikai, the Bashô Revival, Buson advocated a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashô as a way to recapture authenticity in an age where the genre's popularity threatened to reduce it to the status of a frivolous pastime. However, his own poetry and way of life was very different to that of Bashô. This talk explores the ways that Buson used the legacy of his predecessor in order to invent a new voice that was authentic for his time, and reflects on how his approach might offer an example of ways that modern haiku poets might engage more fully with the work of poets of the past.

I had written something a long time ago about Onitsura's Hitorigoto, which was all about authenticity, or as he called it, makoto. Makoto is pretty much the thing people most remember about Onitsura--he has a lot of good hokku, but the presence of the great star Matsuo Bashô in more or less the same era not only blinds everyone with its brilliance but also acts as this massive gravity sink, pulling everyone's attention into an orbit from which it is virtually impossible to escape. But Onitsura was thinking about authenticity a lot, as was Bashô, and while Bashô came up with lovely formulations like "learn about the pine from the pine" and "seek not after the ancients, seek what they sought" (the last is something that Kûkai came up with--an ancient if there ever was one).

So anyway, authenticity was something that was much on the mind of many haikai poets in the late 17th century. Much of that has to do with what else was going on then--that is to say, the rise of trashy fads like maekuzuke where people didn't have to know much or be very good to do something that was like haikai. People like Onitsura and Bashô really felt this keenly--it was cheapening their genre. And although they struggled against it, for the next few decades, fifty years more or less, the trashy stuff became increasingly popular.

What I'm Working On These Days

2005-09-17T11:25:00.000-03:00

A couple of presentations for the Haiku North America 2005 Conference.

I'm also working on a book review for Early Modern Japan Journal. The book is John Rosenfield's Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson.