tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83246599561952544262024-02-07T03:14:45.966+00:00Damian Flanagan's BlogDamian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-43905716119382620092022-03-30T11:45:00.001+01:002022-04-05T11:02:02.068+01:00That Which Nourishes the Soul<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzQCyEiyJAPiUXPNW-WLMPMGOR3Fl5Fzt-g1qAKgPMCieHkHxLnC3XLjzCj_kOeWnYw7hRt-2FUaw0f1bBk8uVWdRP1AAltYQixJ7fvclgyNu5PoDll6u5xa4yofHfPSkvJav4Ek8hq3_LYIkVi1LQGUUV-lGeSNIMae9X_TSBvty9Dg1hlDV79Q/s600/F984093F-B840-4261-82C3-B5C56D3E9D36.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzQCyEiyJAPiUXPNW-WLMPMGOR3Fl5Fzt-g1qAKgPMCieHkHxLnC3XLjzCj_kOeWnYw7hRt-2FUaw0f1bBk8uVWdRP1AAltYQixJ7fvclgyNu5PoDll6u5xa4yofHfPSkvJav4Ek8hq3_LYIkVi1LQGUUV-lGeSNIMae9X_TSBvty9Dg1hlDV79Q/s400/F984093F-B840-4261-82C3-B5C56D3E9D36.jpeg"/></a></div><p>During the ongoing trials of the prolonged Coronavirus crisis, it’s been well recorded that many people, imprisoned indoors, have turned to food for comfort. The Japanese use the word “coronabutori” for the phenomenon of piling on the pounds due to Corona restrictions.<p>
<p>I was suddenly reminded of a little piece called “That Which Nurtures the Soul” which I translated for Yoshimoto Banana (the popular Japanese novelist) to be presented at the Milan Expo at 2015. The Expo had the theme of “Feeding the World” and invited 104 women authors from countries around the world to write on the subject of “nourishment” by means of stories, memories, essays or recipes. <p>
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<p>I seldom do translations and I can’t actually remember why I agreed to do this one. I was surprised to hear this piece was singled out by the organizers to be read by Yoshimoto Banana at the opening ceremony. <p>
<p>I never attended the Expo and later discovered that the conference was embroiled in considerable controversy. The organizers did a variety of odd things, including asking women to write exclusively about food as a bizarre form of “female empowerment”.<p>
<p>To be honest, Yoshimoto Banana’s piece had little impact on me at the time. But rereading it, with its meditation on the connections between being personally sick with flu, having family members die around you and finding a reconnection with life at a time of sickness through a rediscovery of the zest and flavours of food, I think it’s a piece that resonates in the age of Covid-19. <p>
<p><p>
<p><b>That Which Nourishes the Soul</b> <p>
<p> I succumbed to the flu for the second time in a short period just as my father fell into a near-unconscious state. My temperature rose to as high as 42 degrees, and I couldn’t walk or even stand up. <p>
<p> Faced with the realisation of my dad’s imminent passing my appetite disappeared, and even when I did eat, I couldn’t taste anything. <p>
<p> It sounds unbelievable, but even when I tried to cook something the pan seemed too heavy, and I just couldn’t move it. Wow, such things do happen, I realised. <p>
<p> My elder sister usually comes and looks after me when I’m like this, but she also fell ill. Shivering in the wintry cold I lay in bed with an empty stomach and didn’t think about anything. I just don’t care, I thought. My husband fretted and bought various treats he thought I’d like on his way home from work, but I was unable to eat any of them. <p>
<p> A friend’s mother worried about me and sent over some miso soup she had made full of vegetables and pork. Finally I could taste something. My stomach suddenly warmed up. The soup was delicious. I sensed keenly that this was the flavour that had nurtured my friend since childhood, and I was grateful that the soup’s power was being extended to me. <p>
<p> I was gifted the strength lent by someone else’s mother. <p>
<p> In their house this soup had an everyday, familiar flavour, nothing unusual about it; it was exactly as it was meant to be. But this elemental flavour had been infused into the very flesh of these family members, making them have the same feeling about home: their souls were constantly reset by that food giving them a sense of belonging to one place. <p>
<p> I wasn’t brought up in their home, so I felt no nostalgia for it. But when I think of that soup’s flavour, even now I almost want to cry. The way the vegetables were sliced, the amount of miso, the quality of broth – there was something special about their mother’s unique, endlessly repeated way of making it that will disappear with her when she quits this life. There was lots of that unique, intangible ingredient contained within the soup. <p>
<p> Once I’d eaten the soup I gradually regained my health and was able to go and visit my father. <p>
<p> However, I was only able to eat a little every day, so I was somewhat unsteady on my feet. <p>
<p> Near to the local hospital where my father was a patient, there was a famous soba-noodle restaurant. <p>
<p> The soba shop had been there in front of the hospital for years, and I remembered it fondly because we always went there as a family when I had medical tests or if we had to visit someone in the hospital. <p>
<p> At least I should be able to eat some soba, I thought, and one of the staff kindly drove me over. The completely plain kake soba had a flavour unchanged since my childhood: those slender noodles in that intense broth. Laughing and talking as normal with the person who had driven me there, we ate the noodles together. I felt a keen sense of gratitude for this person caring about me and helping at such a difficult time. <p>
<p> Then I thought. <p>
<p> I never would have believed when I was little that I would be coming to this restaurant in such a distressed state. <p>
<p> Whenever I went to that restaurant, Mum or Dad was always there with me. Usually it would be the whole family of four, me with my elder sister. We would eat a variety of noodles and laugh and chat and banter. We’d worry about the person we had been to visit and talk about the situation together. Compared with those days, I thought, how wretched I feel now. <p>
<p> But a new strength I had never known before began to well up inside me. Whatever happened I would take proper care of Dad until his death. In my wretchedness there was a taste of truly becoming an adult. So let’s eat, I thought, then I’ll go and visit Dad. He was still alive; I had to give him encouragement. <p>
<p> In this way good food gave me strength and provided sustenance for my soul. I think that’s the way it should be. <p>
<p> During this period I found I particularly appreciated the taste of food. It’s probably because I wasn’t eating with dulled senses, as I would usually, so when I did occasionally put something into my mouth I clearly noticed the flavour and attempted to extract its strength. I noticed the stew my husband made; the delicate flavour of the Pad Thai specially made for me by a friend who works at a Thai restaurant and, because I was weak, deliberately made using a smaller amount of oil than usual; the powerful soup made by the kind man who runs a small ramen shop nearby, using lots of seaweed and fish in an uncompromisingly strong broth; and the sweet tomato sauce of the Italian restaurant opened by a former secretary who went out of her way to deliver it to our door. <p>
<p> Flavouring all of them was a warm, smiling humanity and concern for me. <p>
<p> Dad passed away, Mum passed away, but I am still alive. Now when I eat my older sister’s cooking I eat it with memories of my family. I eat happily, feeling as if we were all eating together even though it’s just me and my sister. And when I do, I feel strangely energised. <p>
<p> Perhaps it’s because of this that, since that time, no matter what I am doing, I would never think of eating food without seeing the face of the person who made it. Such food has a taste without a soul. <p>
<p> The soul, too, requires food. <p>
<p> And I wish to give food to my soul. <p>
<p> (Copyright Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Damian Flanagan)<p>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-60435563097966332402022-03-29T09:47:00.000+01:002022-03-29T09:47:04.068+01:00The Literary Ghost of “The Orient’s No.1 Elevator”<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Lpco6S_iLq_irfulnivU6ZoDN8ebhU6pLNowGCeJ_uKgsVhiCQEvEZZwFa3I_fjWuiPYM7X6XTmTjm2eKFrGUAgTEPfQOlVRK9r4piA65kSc-uyDEqF3_WFPQwI8xuRcaXMkZf5iGGvq0RDglFPIjG5ndKGFgl5dT7lMzi6vV8gJ3-hZsWmNdks/s1036/8931690E-2FF0-4E55-BAC4-538813720DD4.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="1036" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Lpco6S_iLq_irfulnivU6ZoDN8ebhU6pLNowGCeJ_uKgsVhiCQEvEZZwFa3I_fjWuiPYM7X6XTmTjm2eKFrGUAgTEPfQOlVRK9r4piA65kSc-uyDEqF3_WFPQwI8xuRcaXMkZf5iGGvq0RDglFPIjG5ndKGFgl5dT7lMzi6vV8gJ3-hZsWmNdks/s600/8931690E-2FF0-4E55-BAC4-538813720DD4.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p> I love it when people stumble on some piece of writing from years ago and make a sudden new connection with it. Last night I happened by chance to be glancing through my junk email and came across an interesting message that had somehow ended up there. <p>
<p> A photographer, Stan Gielewski, had come across an article I had written for the Japan Times in 2016 about a mysterious object called “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator” which used to briefly exist - over a hundred years ago - in a town called Wakanoura in central Japan and sent me a letter about it. He wrote:<p>
<p>“Searching for the exact time when it was built, I just came across your writing about the elevator in Wakanoura…I used to know Wakanoura like the back of my hand. I was lucky to find and preserve a few large format photos from that period, and a few are directly related to this elevator. I took a quick snapshot of one with my phone a while back, and I thought I'd share it with you.<p>
<p>It's a view of Wakanoura taken from the top of the elevator, so this has to be Wakanoura around 1912. I decided to share it with you as even very few Japanese know about that elevator. I spent a lot of time talking about the old Wakayama with like-minded locals and antique shop owners, and they have never seen photos like this before.”<p>
<p>Here then is the historical photograph, from around 1912, he sent me. The elevator pictured was a bizarre, short-lived historical curiosity, but also occupies a significant place in Japanese literary history. To explain that story, let me quote a section of my 2016 article:<p>
<p>“Over a century ago, Wakanoura, a small coastal town near the city of Wakayama, was at the top of the list when it came to places of outstanding natural beauty and amongst the top tourist destinations in central Japan.<p>
<p>So renowned was Wakanoura that “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator,” one of the first steel elevators in Japan, had been constructed there to allow visitors to ascend a hilltop and take in the impressive vistas. Yet today Wakanoura is largely forgotten, and the fabled elevator long gone.<p>
<p>This lost history is brought to life in the first half of Natsume Soseki’s novel “Kojin” (“The Wayfarer”), serialized from 1912 to 1913, in which a well-to-do Tokyo family makes a visit to the Kansai region and decides to escape the summer heat in Osaka by visiting Wakanoura; “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator” occupies a memorable place in the plot.<p>
<p>Soseki, whose novels were serialized in both the Kanto and Kansai editions of the Asahi Shimbun, had made a lecture tour of the Kansai region in 1911. After his return to Tokyo, he incorporated a Kansai setting into his novel “The Wayfarer” — perhaps a nod of recognition to his fervent Kansai readership: he had not forgotten them.<p>
<p>Soseki himself visited Wakanoura in August 1911, before giving a lecture, “The Enlightenment of Modern Japan,” in Wakayama City.<p>
<p>“Last night I stayed in Wakanoura,” he said during the lecture. “When you go to Wakanoura there are a variety of things to see like Sagarimatsu, Gongen-sama and the Kimii-dera Temple. But I also saw the elevator described as “The Orient’s First to 200 Feet Above Sea Level” constantly taking sightseers up and down from the back of my lodgings to the top of the stone hill. Actually I too, like a bear in a zoo, was put inside the metal bars of a cage and lifted to the top of the mountain.”<p>
<p>Soseki was the latest in a stream of famous visitors to Wakanoura that stretched back more than 1,000 years.<p>
<p>One of the earliest documented visits was taken by Emperor Shomu in 724. He visited Wakanoura and admired the string of islands collectively known as Tamatsushima, which are celebrated in the “Manyoshu,” the eighth-century collection of Japanese court poetry. Since then, the sea has retreated and only one of those islands, Imose Yama, still remains.<p>
<p>The Sandankyo bridge leading to Imose Yama — commissioned in 1621 by Tokugawa Yorinobu, the 10th son of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu— was depicted by the famous ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige.<p>
<p>But I was curious to learn more about the curiosity known as “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator.”<p>
<p>I turned back to Soseki’s “The Wayfarer.” In his novel, Wakanoura — and the elevator — is not only a scenic backdrop but it is used by Soseki to explore his wider ideas about human will.<p>
<p>From the beginning of his writing career, in 1905, Soseki had been engaged with German philosophical thought, considering how our will, intellect and emotion interact. He often used the image of a cliff as a symbol of “willfulness.” In “Gubijinso” (“The Poppy”), a wilful character is metaphorically described as throwing the weak-willed down a cliff, and at the beginning of Soseki’s 1910 novel “Mon” (“The Gate”), the timorous protagonist is described as living at the bottom of a cliff.<p>
<p>In “The Wayfarer,” a haughty intellectual called Ichiro has doubts concerning his estranged wife, Nao, and is determined to find out whether she is secretly in love with his brother Jiro. His over-reaching willfulness and confidence in his intellect means he simply must know what desires his wife is hiding. When the whole family spends a few days in Wakanoura, Ichiro attempts to use his brother as a detective and persuades him to make a day trip to nearby Wakayama with her and report back with observations of his sister-in-law.<p>
<p>In order to have a private conversation with Jiro about his scheme, Ichiro travels with him in “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator,” remarking Hamlet-like that, in a similar way to the elevator cage, the whole world is a prison. The next day, carrying on the conversation at Kimii-dera Temple, Ichiro asks his brother to investigate Nao.<p>
<p>When Jiro travels with her to Wakayama for the day, the greater will of Mother Nature overwhelms Ichiro’s schemes: a storm prevents them returning and they must spend the night together in Wakayama. Far from accessing the hidden secrets of Nao’s affections, Ichiro is now led to complete distraction wondering what has transpired between his brother and his wife.<p>
<p>In Soseki’s imaginative universe, “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator” becomes a symbol of the limits of human will when pitted against the grand will of the universe, represented by the landscape and climate of Wakanoura itself. <p>
<p>If you take the 90-minute train ride from Osaka to Wakanoura, you are heading to one of the former great scenic spots of Japan, but also a site where a philosophical battle once played out in one of Japan’s literary classics.<p>
<p>The elevator is long gone — and is hardly remembered. After making repeated enquiries, I eventually discovered a photo of it on display in the Tamatsushima Shrine.<p>
<p>When I asked what had become of the contraption, I was told that it had been torn down for its metal in 1916, during World War I. It seems the elevator was built in 1910 and only existed for a mere six years. Soseki would have appreciated the irony that an object that he had deployed as a metaphor of overbearing wilfulness had enjoyed such a brief existence.<p>
<p>Consider what has happened to all those beautiful natural vistas that Wakanoura was once famous for. Today, those views are interrupted by urban sprawl — a chief reason why the area is not today as famous as it once was. <p>
<p>Industry, a particularly human brand of wilfulness, has affected the traditional natural beauty of Wakanoura and imposed itself on the landscape.<p>
<p>Many people think that to have a profound travel experience, you should traipse to some scene of unchanging natural beauty, such as Amanohashidate in Kyoto Prefecture, a sliver of land ranked as one of one of Japan’s three scenic views, or Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, another of the country’s three most scenic views. For centuries, poets have written about them and artists have painted them.<p>
<p>But Wakanoura offers a more intriguing study: It has become a sharp juxtaposition of changing and unchanging elements — of temples and shrines arguing for a renouncement of the world, and industries in the process of shaping the world.<p>
<p>If you wish to get to the bottom of the eternal, epic battle between human wilfulness and the will of nature, then pack a copy of Soseki’s “The Wayfarer” and head to Wakanoura, still haunted by the ghost of “The Orient’s No. 1 Elevator.””<p>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-92209886626496363492022-03-26T21:24:00.006+00:002022-03-26T21:44:57.708+00:00In Search of a Ukraine of the Mind <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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And so, we are all Ukrainians now. We fly Ukrainian flags, making all the best
shows of support as we can, and sending messages to the warzone from afar.
<p> I’ve never been to Ukraine - though for reasons that will become apparent below I’ve
long wanted to go - and I have no particular Ukrainian friends. And yet, this is
not the first time I have found myself observing a shocking world crisis in a Ukrainian frame of mind.
<p>
<p> I’d like to take you to a time 20 years ago and to a
place 8000 miles away from Ukraine and offer you a slightly different take on
the national destiny of Ukraine. Sometimes if you want to understand the
particular historical characteristics of a culture, you have to step out of the
country and observe how its people fare when placed in completely alien cultures.
<p>
<p> If you want to understand Ireland and the Irish psyche of the 19th
century - the obsession with land and festering sense of grievance - then
observe what happened to the Irish in North America. No more insightful work on
Ireland has ever been written than Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind”. You
can also understand a lot about Ukraine by looking at the fate of Ukrainians in
the Americas.<p>
<p>In the late summer of 2001, I was in Winnipeg, Canada for a couple
of weeks and became quite fascinated by the large Ukrainian communities who had
settled in Manitoba from the 1890s onwards. Over 180,000 people in Manitoba are
of Ukrainian descent - they are one of the biggest ethnic groups of that vast,
beautiful, under-visited province of Canada - and their influence is everywhere
felt. <p>
<p>There are Manitoban country towns with onion domed churches and perogies -
Ukrainian potato dumplings - are a preeminent part of Manitoban cuisine. In
downtown Winnipeg, you can even find a Ukrainian Cultural Centre, which despite
its relatively modest size, is the largest in Canada.<p>
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the answer is that they were specifically targeted as an ethnic group, inured to
the harshness of Ukrainian winters, and therefore considered best suited to be
the hardy pioneers who would cultivate the remote wastes of Canada. Some of the
Ukrainian villages in Canada attest to the fact that the settlers in the late
19th century were dropped down in the freezing middle of nowhere, provided with
little in the way of tools or supplies, and asked to fill the prairies with
wheat. <p>
<p>The casualty rate was predictably high. I seem to recall staring at a
photo in one of those Manitoban villages that showed a picture of Ukrainian
settlers who had no contact at all with the outside world for the first three
years of their settlement.<p>
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<p>All of these things greatly excited my interest. Manitoba is such a fascinating
smorgasbord of diverse, isolated communities - of Mennonites, Icelanders, Metis
and Native American tribes - that I felt that, in another life, like another
Grey Owl (pictured right, aka Archibald Belaney from Sussex who disguised himself as a Native
American) I could spend many years wandering amongst its moose, forests and
spectacular prairie sunsets. <p>
<p>Once I visited a summerhouse on the shores of Lake
Winnipeg and discovered a residence filled with research books on Native
American customs and artifacts, and recognized within myself a pull to retire
into such a place of worldly retreat. <p>
<p>But I soon discovered that my fascination
with the Ukrainian settlers was not generally shared by the Manitobans, not even
by those many people who were themselves of Ukrainian descent. Many of the
Ukrainian villages of the prairies spoke only Ukrainian, but the common pattern
seemed to be that the children raised in such places shed both Ukrainian
language and identity as soon as they found their way to the big city. <p>
<p>That made
a certain sense of course. The Ukrainian villages of Canada were associated with
a primitiveness and backwardness, and harking back beyond them - to the Ukraine
of the nineteenth century and twentieth century - was a land associated with
pogroms, famines, warfare and genoicide. Why wouldn’t you wish to discreetly
shed that identity and embrace instead the life of a cultivated, urbane
Canadian? <p>
<p>And yet I felt acutely the contrast with my own ancestors, the Irish -
a worldwide diaspora who had themselves escaped a land of grim poverty, famine
and civil strife - but who tenaciously held on with the utmost pride to an Irish
identity for many, many generations after their last ancestor had pushed off in
rags from an Irish quayside. In the immortal words of Shane MacGowan, <p>
<p>Where e’er we go, we celebrate<p>
The land that made us refugees
<p>
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<p>While not quite sharing my enthusiasm, my Manitoban friends indulged my
fascination with everything Ukrainian and took me to both the settler villages
and the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Winnipeg (pictured left), where I purchased an 800 page
“History of Ukraine” and some items of Ukrainian folk dress.<p>
<p>(Until at least my
mid thirties, my daily, hippyish apparel was enlivened by traditional clothing
from around the world - the colourful garments of the hill tribes of Vietnam was
a particular favourite. And so it seemed not in slightest bit strange for me to
start walking round Winnipeg in a Ukrainian folk shirt, causing my more
fashion-conscious friends to wince and cover their eyes. This was an era before
the sin of “cultural appropriation” became a prime social media offence.)<p>
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<p>Then, whilst I was soaking myself in everything Ukrainian in Manitoba - an idyll
far away from my usual existence - I awoke one morning to the news that two
planes had crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York. The outer world had
noisily broken into the quietude of my Canadian summer and suddenly the world
began to change. I had been due to fly to Chicago and spend a few days there on
the way home, but now all flights were grounded and so instead I moved into a
room at the Fort Garry Hotel (pictured right), the city’s most famous historic hotel, and waited
to see how things played out. <p>
<p>I was sitting up in a room looking out over the
infinite expanse of the prairies, with my Ukrainian folk shirt and my thick
volume of “The History of Ukraine” on the bed. On the rolling news of
television, world events were all concerned with a shaken, newly paranoid and
apoplectic United States and its relationship with Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia and Israel. There was talk of a new Pearl Harbour: this was the axis on
which the world turned.<p>
<p>Long-forgotten Ukrainian settlers in Manitoba were my
backwater of a backwater, as far away from the then fastly unfolding news feed
of world history as you could possibly imagine. My Ukrainian themed bedroom of
the Fort Garry hotel was I suppose my equivalent of the lakeside summerhouse
devoted to Native American culture, a kind of mental retreat from the world. It
never occurred to me then that the axis of world history would turn once more
and the time would yet come when the position of Ukraine would focus the world’s
interest. <p>
<p>I passed some very happy days at the Fort Garry Hotel and my Manitoban
friends continued to keep me entertained and one night took me to the cinema. I
can’t recall now what movie we saw, but what stays vividly in my mind is that an
advert ran in French and the girl next to me suddenly began reciting something
in beautiful French. It is of course part of Canada’s cultural settlement and
constitutional arrangement that the nation is bilingual and to succeed in many
civil service careers in Canada, being bilingual in French and English is
considered essential. <p>
<p>Yet what struck me was that here we were in the prairies
of central Canada, a long, long way from Quebec, in a place where Francophone
speakers were very small in number (about 3% of the population of Manitoba speak
French) and yet the French language was being enthusiastically promoted and
embraced, even as the Ukrainian language was left to quietly wither and die.<p>
<p>This thought returned to me last week when I saw images of President Putin at
the head of his long table with the French President Macron at the other end,
discussing the future of Ukraine. The French and the Russians were it seemed the
“alpha” cultures that were going to decide the fate of a “beta” culture like
Ukraine. Macron meant well of course, but there seems something deeply wrong
about a world that treats a nation like Ukraine as second rate in this way.<p>
<p>Yet
it also occurred to me, when I spent time in Canada 20 years ago, that there was
something peculiar about a nation that promoted one minority language over
another in this way. Walking around Winnipeg, I found myself at one point in the
French Quarter where an elderly lady immediately greeted me with a “Bonjour” on
the street. <p>
<p>The Quebecois pride in their Francophone culture is famous the world
over - despite the fact that they have been divorced from France for over 250
years. The French themselves meanwhile are well known for their insistence that
the French language and culture must be preserved to the nth degree, setting up
academies to police foreign intrusions into the French language, demanding that
all EU papers be published in French, and delighting in the fact that population
growth in Africa may yet make French the most spoken second language in the
world. <p><p>
<p>I couldn’t help contrasting during my sojourn in Winnipeg how the
Francophones sit proud and noisy at the head table of world culture, while the
Ukrainians have quietly made themselves invisible and kept their heads down. <p>
<p>I
guess the Ukrainians have been the way they are because of the centuries of
cultural suppression they received from the Russians, both under the Czars and
the Communists. When flights eventually resumed in 2001 and I, with regret, quit
the Fort Garry and returned to the UK, I wondered if I would ever get round to
reading my doorstop “History of the Ukraine”. But as chance would have it, I
fell badly ill and was bedridden for a few weeks and ended up reading every last
page of it.<p>
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<p>I wish I could tell you now I can recall much of what I read, but nearly all of
it has long since drifted out of my head. The chief thing I recall are the
debates that raged in the 19th century about whether Ukrainian was actually a
separate language to Russian, or merely a form of Russian. In turn, this debate
over language had great significance when it came to determining whether the
Ukrainians were actually a separate nation or not to the Russians - a subject
now of monumental importance to world security. <p>
<p>There has been a long history of
the Russians attempting to suppress by whatever means at their disposal - from
intellectual sophistry to campaigns of terror by famine and sword - Ukrainian
national ambitions. But that suppression of cultural and linguistic pride seems
to me to also be in evidence if you examine the psyche of the Ukrainian
descendants of Canada. <p>
<p>I’ve read over the last few weeks many analyses of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine that regret that NATO was so provocative towards
Russia as it expanded its borders, instigating a siege mentality and sense of
existential angst in the Russians. “Don’t we remember the Cuban missile crisis?
Would America like to see Russian or Chinese missiles arraigned against it on
its very border?”<p>
<p>I take on board those arguments, but I don’t agree with them.
People who talk about having Ukraine as a useful “buffer state” with Russia seem
to me to fall into a 19th century mentality of believing there are God-given
“great powers” and then a variety of minor states that don’t count for much.
Russia might have the forest of nuclear missiles and an unhinged belligerence -
granted a very significant consideration - but I don’t see why Russia should be
treated as a nation of far greater importance than Ukraine, just as I don’t see
why the Ukrainian language is in some way intrinsically less important than
French. <p>
<p>The world has been awash for years now with black-and-white ideas about
“privilege” and “race” as if the world can be reduced to facile simplicities,
ignoring the complexities of geography, culture, history, language and
individual personality. <p>
<p>But in reality, relatively forgotten peoples like the
Ukrainians of Manitoba, while not banging the drum of victimhood, demonstrate
the nuances and considerable psychological complexities of a particular cultural
inheritance. <p>
<p>I’m often a sceptic of so-called “multi-culturalism”, especially
when it seeks to undermine existing cultures and historical traditions. But in
certain contexts, it is welcome. Although I’ve not been back to Canada in the
last 20 years - and some of the nation’s lurches under Trudeau into woke
celebrations of “peoplekind” are excruciating - the shift from a bicultural and
bilingual sensibility into a more multifaceted “multi-culturalism” seem overdue.<p>
<p>One way of perceiving the current Ukrainian War is of Russia facing up to its
own long overdue reckoning with a modern world that is not going to put up with
monocultural bullying any more.<p>
<p>The resolution of the current crisis in Ukraine
can not just be a return to the Old Order where Russian security concerns are
considered paramount and the Ukrainians must quietly acquiesce. It’s high time
that the Russians yielded some of their seats at the high table of world culture
and found a space for the Ukrainians as well. <p>
<p> I want to see the Ukrainians
sitting at the end of a long table making decisions on their own cultural
destiny…I for one am quite prepared to seat myself at the end of that long table
and have that discusssion with them. And I still have the Ukrainian folk shirt to wear for the occasion. <p> <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR-O03gRbnVhxd8XUoAZPAPUsHigeiPL9c4iOQ9m_hohGPzlNlKsT93zoSzflsnxDMRq8kyUPapAFgbch4EyJpHc07P9Nd2T_DwhIzve2aqDPiCcmfGko5zNlgL2bzouBEPIFka5NBEG9m3LTLcEMRSUJMavcH2TwGNZJina6kN0l4tcAZdjM7o6g/s300/87C5B84D-3E40-4EA3-AB9A-933FD6DC166A.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR-O03gRbnVhxd8XUoAZPAPUsHigeiPL9c4iOQ9m_hohGPzlNlKsT93zoSzflsnxDMRq8kyUPapAFgbch4EyJpHc07P9Nd2T_DwhIzve2aqDPiCcmfGko5zNlgL2bzouBEPIFka5NBEG9m3LTLcEMRSUJMavcH2TwGNZJina6kN0l4tcAZdjM7o6g/s320/87C5B84D-3E40-4EA3-AB9A-933FD6DC166A.jpeg"/></a></div>
Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-6506263617187915092019-02-03T15:51:00.002+00:002019-02-03T15:51:57.658+00:00Stan Laurel's Last Laugh on Charlie Chaplin <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijt2DaZWL4UeAYP7I_aBgDZDcLTYKMnvOw_W6VT1zyZ4NxLpw1kGNY59mO9CAqG-GRpTwo3a797bfBo-nexjRUUvJUFt7rstLL8EoAqP0ZXc4gLfy2gIlgm_c2FOy2_dmV7vXEl40sLgY/s1600/stan+laurel+charlie+chaplin+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijt2DaZWL4UeAYP7I_aBgDZDcLTYKMnvOw_W6VT1zyZ4NxLpw1kGNY59mO9CAqG-GRpTwo3a797bfBo-nexjRUUvJUFt7rstLL8EoAqP0ZXc4gLfy2gIlgm_c2FOy2_dmV7vXEl40sLgY/s640/stan+laurel+charlie+chaplin+2.jpg" width="640" height="363" data-original-width="298" data-original-height="169" /></a></div><br />
As their boat, the Cairnrona, steamed towards America in 1910 and land mistily appeared, a 21-year-old English music hall star ran towards the railings, took off his hat and exuberantly shouted, <br />
<br />
“America, I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips—Charles Spencer Chaplin!”<br />
<br />
Closely watching him on deck, and gently mocking him, was his friend and fellow member of the Fred Karno Company - about to excitedly embark on a tour of American theatres - Stan Laurel. For a couple of years afterwards, Laurel - just a year younger than Chaplin - acted as Chaplin’s understudy and shared rooms and ideas with him. (Pictured together at centre of picture above). <br />
<br />
By 1913, Chaplin had been recruited by Mack Sennett to start working in the dream factories of Los Angeles, and by 1916 was the most famous man in the world, earning an astonishing salary of $10,000 (equivalent to at least $250,000 today) a week. He had realized his self-prophecy in an incredibly short period of time. Laurel only made a first tentative transition into Hollywood in 1917. Once there, he made repeated attempts to contact his old friend “Chas” Chaplin, who had sent him a signed photo but failed to answer any of his phone calls. <br />
<br />
By the 1920s, Chaplin thought himself beyond Vaudeville skits, aspiring to create not simple “comedies”, but major works of art that would blend social commentary, psychological insight, balletic movement, pathos, tragedy and humour. He would write the scripts, perform, direct, produce, write the music and choreograph. There was just one problem. His amusingly quixotic tramp character was superlative at wandering solo into situations of rigidly defined social conventions and creating comic chaos. But to truly transition the character into the realms of great art, he needed to engage a broader range of emotions and give the tramp a central relationship. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXzzi_KTM3tFcC9NqAB_5Xn-sonl7VqprBBy7PiwnDWrodGETBjZJfWh8y1wG06SvBXa7Nxsag3PECI6xSjHhXScHCRfo9NdWvm3wQhUse1o5TBZ8Et0gaVGSynYzgBgvMstwzqMiILtI/s1600/Chaplin+in+City+Lights.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXzzi_KTM3tFcC9NqAB_5Xn-sonl7VqprBBy7PiwnDWrodGETBjZJfWh8y1wG06SvBXa7Nxsag3PECI6xSjHhXScHCRfo9NdWvm3wQhUse1o5TBZ8Et0gaVGSynYzgBgvMstwzqMiILtI/s320/Chaplin+in+City+Lights.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="260" data-original-height="195" /></a></div>His 1921 feature film, “The Kid”, for example, was a sensation, pairing the solitary tramp with 4-year-old waif, Jackie Coogan. His greatest masterpiece, “City Lights” (1931) paired the tramp with a beautiful blind flower seller (picture right). In “Modern Times” (1936), Charlie and his wife are the representatives of the victims of the Great Depression. Yet for all the efforts made to reach out and connect with our deepest human emotions, it never quite worked. For all his undoubted genius, there was a sense of solitary coldness both about Chaplin and his tramp alter-ego, as if the emotions of the films were contrived, inviting accusations of sentimental mawkishness and artificiality that has always dogged Chaplin’s reputation. <br />
<br />
The emotional honesty and charm Chaplin never quite managed would actually be something eventually brought to the screen in the classic Laurel and Hardy films of the 1930s. The new film, “Stan and Ollie”, with a deft script and lauded performances by Steve Coogan and John C Reilly, tells the story of Laurel and Hardy touring Britain in the twilight of their careers in the 1950s. <br />
<br />
The film mentions on several occasions Chaplin, and starts the action in 1937 with Laurel’s quest for artistic freedom and some of the financial rewards enjoyed by Chaplin, leading to a rancorous falling out with his producer Hal Roach. Yet it doesn’t quite have space to explore the significance of what Roach referred to Laurel’s “Chaplin Complex”. <br />
<br />
It’s impossible to over-estimate the awe with which Laurel watched Chaplin’s star soar and his genius unfold in one masterpiece after another throughout the 1920s and 1930s, or how acutely he felt the sting of the snub offered him by Chaplin - that he, Stan Laurel, was not even worthy enough of a call back. Laurel desperately wanted to effect the kind of artistic achievement, and garner the recognition, that belonged to Chaplin, and it was this impulse which set him obsessively directing, working on ideas, writing and editing through the 1920s and 1930s, while Hardy went off and enjoyed the gold club. <br />
<br />
Only in 1936, when Laurel and Hardy were worldwide stars, and Laurel bumped into Chaplin while on their respective boats (Chaplin’s yacht was far grander than Laurel’s modest fishing boat) did Chaplin finally welcome Laurel for a chat, as if the two men could now be back on terms. <br />
<br />
Laurel was not however mentioned once in Chaplin’s autobiography - but then Chaplin also failed to mention his second wife, Lita Grey, with whom he had two sons. In all respects, it must have seemed in the final reckoning as if Laurel had lost out to Chaplin. He had far less money and grandeur, had a less diverse body of work, had less artistic control over his work. Yet Laurel and Hardy achieved something which all his life Chaplin had quested for and yet never found - a warm-hearted on-screen relationship that made a true and lasting, empathetic connection with the audience. <br />
<br />
If you want to get to the heart of the enduring genius of Laurel and Hardy, it is less to do with their “comedy” (much of their work teeters on the brink of “tragedy”) but rather on the fascinating appeal of their relationship. They are both intriguing, amusing characters in their own right, but brought together they achieve a synergy that is beguiling. It’s how they work off each other, animate, frustrate and endear themselves to each other that is a fascinating dynamic to witness. <br />
<br />
Perhaps where Chaplin went wrong was in the relentless, ruthless logic of his thought. Chaplin paired the tramp with people there was some logic to his being, motivated by a sense of assumed parenthood in “The Kid” or sexual attraction to young women in “City Lights” and “Modern Times”. But there was no logic or necessity to the pairing of Laurel and Hardy. If anything it was flagrantly illogical, given their constant mishaps and bickering. <br />
<br />
Yet no matter how spectacular the spats or fiascos, there was an underlying, irreducible mutual warmth, a <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-pvFcy2N8wOUHVH7ok2fyaSCmodyuCcWx7lmDl3sSkwQWzfRWIem0wXmOcv0gd1fWmAYGL5EPPYc7GcP4RZ9ilQrhhCKVJMZQwWnr1reeuxmFB0GjxB89NKuWwaz7eyg7Iw4pah1Tlm0/s1600/laurel+and+hardy+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-pvFcy2N8wOUHVH7ok2fyaSCmodyuCcWx7lmDl3sSkwQWzfRWIem0wXmOcv0gd1fWmAYGL5EPPYc7GcP4RZ9ilQrhhCKVJMZQwWnr1reeuxmFB0GjxB89NKuWwaz7eyg7Iw4pah1Tlm0/s400/laurel+and+hardy+2.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="660" data-original-height="371" /></a></div>fundamental camraderie that kept them together. The comforting notion that, no matter what happens, the two will never part is what drew audiences towards them and gave their films an emotional, artistic heart that has never dimmed. It’s perhaps for this reason that, as noted at the end of the new film, Laurel refused to appear alongside any other performer after Hardy’s death in 1957, despite continuing to write new material for Laurel and Hardy. <br />
<br />
For the brilliant, coldly logical Chaplin, it made eminent sense not to return the calls, or offer any extensions of assistance, to his discarded friend, the still-struggling Stan Laurel in the 1920s. But for the generous, open-hearted Laurel, it made equal, gloriously illogical sense to have his phone number freely available to one and all in the West Los Angeles phone book in the 1960s, personally responding to the letters of everyone who wrote to him and inviting round for a chat and the sharing of comic ideas aspiring talents like Dick Van Dyke and Jerry Lewis who rang him out-of-the-blue for advice. <br />
<br />
Both Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin wanted to make people laugh, and both of them wanted to touch people emotionally. But Chaplin, the comic “conqueror of the world”, was somehow a bright, remote star, while Laurel and Hardy exuded an immediate, spirit-lifting warmth. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-63407158315421529212018-11-23T23:07:00.000+00:002018-11-23T23:07:11.549+00:00Comic Book Shakespeare Might Be All the Shakespeare You Need<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcW-6URR8k1FrUdXVSRBLm_1wCwEwtPlP0A7MiLC55eVYS0g2PPtY6bQHUS7AB1Pm5zFB900TgFazUF_ccr9xSwg3mG5W9sk2mqyiTETEP0zRViYXtQIjh9W9iRgUqjD9mrRr2_I-hr1U/s1600/IMG_2330.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcW-6URR8k1FrUdXVSRBLm_1wCwEwtPlP0A7MiLC55eVYS0g2PPtY6bQHUS7AB1Pm5zFB900TgFazUF_ccr9xSwg3mG5W9sk2mqyiTETEP0zRViYXtQIjh9W9iRgUqjD9mrRr2_I-hr1U/s320/IMG_2330.jpeg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a></div><br />
We hear a lot about the decline of traditional education, but my 10-year-old son knows all about <i>MacBeth </i>and <i>The Merchant of Venice </i>and has talked so much recently about <i>Hamlet</i> that his 8-year-old sister started getting into it too. <br />
<br />
Precocious brats? Not at all. They have not of course read Shakespeare’s plays, they’ve just read children’s adaptations of them, which tell the stories in easy reading children’s vocabulary (retold by Andrew Matthews, illustrated by Tony Ross). Some might see that as dumbing down, but I see it as a brilliant leap forward. In fact it may well be the most important education about Shakespeare they ever receive. <br />
<br />
I was about 12 when I first slow-read in class at school a Shakespeare play - <i>MacBeth</i>. In fact I can’t quite remember now whether we read all of it or just bits of it. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibIK5bsnZ_CCnxWd26ZFCUPNsk2Zk3eK4b4vw2HryoUiTKpXmTLQEAYTGxT4SaNXJMDpu4SYGRNS4OvOHF9lbFQMq3yO2DN_4j_yr394-6P4KNZ_Hs4sTaVP7SSeBDbQ1wuM6YPxYRCM8/s1600/branagh-henry-v.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibIK5bsnZ_CCnxWd26ZFCUPNsk2Zk3eK4b4vw2HryoUiTKpXmTLQEAYTGxT4SaNXJMDpu4SYGRNS4OvOHF9lbFQMq3yO2DN_4j_yr394-6P4KNZ_Hs4sTaVP7SSeBDbQ1wuM6YPxYRCM8/s320/branagh-henry-v.jpg" width="320" height="286" data-original-width="434" data-original-height="388" /></a></div>I do know that when I was 15, I read at school the whole of <i>Henry V</i> and loved it. To this day, I can recite with gusto the entire Chorus soliloquy that opens Act 1. Our class at school were even lucky enough to be taken to Stratford to watch a youthful Kenneth Branagh (pictured right) performing the lead role.<br />
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I should say that this imbued in me with a lifelong love of Shakespeare, the majesty of his poetry pulsing through me, but actually things played out differently. I opted for all science A Levels, wallowed in equations and formulae, and came into contact with no other Shakespeare. <br />
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I might have read for pleasure <i>Don Quixote</i>, Thackeray and Hemingway, but whenever some Shakespearian reference cropped up, I can still recall my sense of ignorance.<br />
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Once, a maths teacher made some reference to Desdemona and asked us what play he was referring to? I ventured, “King Lear?” Or, another time, in my first year at university I can remember some arts student made a joke that referred to <i>Hamlet</i> in some way and my laughing along, without a clue as to what he was talking about. <br />
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But who cares if you don’t know about these things? In the film of Willy Russell’s play <i>Educating Rita</i>, he has some ghastly pretentious arts pseud say to the gullible Rita, “Wouldn’t you just DIE without Mahler?” Isn’t the same true of Shakespeare? Would we die without Shakespeare? Most of the world gets on without him just fine. <br />
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Yet what redolently stays in my memory as a youth is not only my embarrassment about not understanding all these Shakespeare references, but how it affected my confidence as a whole. I felt in some way not properly educated and slightly intimidated by artsy others. <br />
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An important point to consider is not so much whether reading Shakespeare is going to propel you forward, but whether general ignorance about him and all the myriad cultural references to him holds you back. Rather than going on about Shakespeare enriching your life, maybe we should think more about the way he excludes and dare I say oppresses people?<br />
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As it happens, at the belated age of 21, I switched my university speciality to English and finally caught up on all the reading I’d missed. During the next two years, I systematically read, watched or listened to every single one of Shakespeare’s plays. Finally I could banish my Shakespeare hang up. <br />
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I love Shakespeare and I never tire of revisiting his works and feel fantastically inspired and stimulated by them. I enthusiastically recommend them to one and all. But they are not for everyone or even perhaps a majority of people. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgO3EdtYWVyv0on7j2yj8SYfIP_6ASlxtm0bnxTw4kerVXzLHZ2GunUpr0dUPKSgHFWjp6OhhQLk-vebEEi5IxzsxItTZCJqQR2r1rHpRPdKuDsbOcQ0XFqYAawpna-pZyFWVRCcYq54o/s1600/ken-dodd-as-malvolio-in-twelfth-night-at-the-liverpool-playhouse-in-november-1971-620-928981657.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgO3EdtYWVyv0on7j2yj8SYfIP_6ASlxtm0bnxTw4kerVXzLHZ2GunUpr0dUPKSgHFWjp6OhhQLk-vebEEi5IxzsxItTZCJqQR2r1rHpRPdKuDsbOcQ0XFqYAawpna-pZyFWVRCcYq54o/s320/ken-dodd-as-malvolio-in-twelfth-night-at-the-liverpool-playhouse-in-november-1971-620-928981657.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="615" data-original-height="409" /></a></div>I would hate those people to go through life feeling somehow excluded and inferior because of it. When they recently showed Ken Dodd as Malvolio (pictured left) in his garters, or you see Al Pacino as Shylock or kabuki versions of Hamlet, there must be a lot of people who just zone out and shy away.<br />
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But actually to stop feeling excluded, they don’t have to read the plays, they simply need to be briefly acquainted with the plots. <br />
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It might be that my kids will later go on to get the Shakespeare bug and be thrilled to read and watch all the plays. But it might equally be that iambic pentameter is not their thing. But whichever way, they are certainly not going to be nonplussed about these things in the way that I was. <br />
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At age 10, <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>MacBeth</i> is already old hat for my son. Bring on <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Othello </i>and <i>As You Like It</i>. They’ll be competing against <i>Asterix and the Normans</i>, Tom Gates, Captain Underpants and Harry Potter. It’s not exactly canonical reading: it has to entertain with a cracking yarn or will be on the childhood reject pile. It’s the best possible grounding in Shakespeare you could hope for. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8fZqn6kQC_bP_RpXJX-VMKlqWw411BpTjFgQii2tnMpP9s4x_lRHZxeNB6Sxgvo5L8z7xGf5GgzITQfpdxNEvX8fWTMgf7JykK8QwsVhS1E9Oh7sPvIxSzUeJeAJohGx59R2RAqGNMR4/s1600/IMG_2333.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8fZqn6kQC_bP_RpXJX-VMKlqWw411BpTjFgQii2tnMpP9s4x_lRHZxeNB6Sxgvo5L8z7xGf5GgzITQfpdxNEvX8fWTMgf7JykK8QwsVhS1E9Oh7sPvIxSzUeJeAJohGx59R2RAqGNMR4/s320/IMG_2333.jpeg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a></div>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-62674781977065257722018-11-18T16:52:00.000+00:002018-11-18T16:53:47.412+00:00Yukio Mishima's Epic Battle Against Time (Ahead of the anniversary of the “Mishima Incident” on November 25, here is a reproduction of an article I wrote three years ago, which is no longer available online). <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3SsSnwJ-ALOFyrT-IbzDr-7sFyc8B9sw2nASF1CrfWuYuACg4ZmqvIxLV7xq52x1YpbecQlMJE59YtVNIl2AFQcKt9iN0AIXj62PFS-KBWZAtOUv9uBKodzIMx237ZaZ52yRqJ1ugME/s1600/Mishima+at+desk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3SsSnwJ-ALOFyrT-IbzDr-7sFyc8B9sw2nASF1CrfWuYuACg4ZmqvIxLV7xq52x1YpbecQlMJE59YtVNIl2AFQcKt9iN0AIXj62PFS-KBWZAtOUv9uBKodzIMx237ZaZ52yRqJ1ugME/s640/Mishima+at+desk.jpg" width="640" height="448" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="210" /></a></div><br />
What do you think of when you hear the name "Yukio Mishima"?<br />
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A dazzlingly prolific writer with more than 30 novels, 70 plays and umpteen volumes of short stories, essays and memoirs to his credit? A movie actor, martial arts enthusiast, body builder, political campaigner and world traveler? Or perhaps the man described by Yasunari Kawabata, winner of Japan’s first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, as the kind of genius who comes along once every 300 years?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9A40RtzW-2JDvo3fOIWefl3nmSODjh0ZCzGasJ9y2Sg3rHSdnFFFkPO1fby_R2FPAVEiuibgaMcAEkfAN-YfsXTr2K-y5gWzDhdUPgyGMYTAhiK8cCmMTtjSpEXenz41BHxGGPByg5g/s1600/mishima+with+sword+and+watch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9A40RtzW-2JDvo3fOIWefl3nmSODjh0ZCzGasJ9y2Sg3rHSdnFFFkPO1fby_R2FPAVEiuibgaMcAEkfAN-YfsXTr2K-y5gWzDhdUPgyGMYTAhiK8cCmMTtjSpEXenz41BHxGGPByg5g/s320/mishima+with+sword+and+watch.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="464" data-original-height="713" /></a></div>Chances are, though, your associations will be somewhat different. Probably you will recall a man who died on Nov. 25, 1970, by an act of "seppuku" (excruciating ritual suicide) after the failure of a bizarre coup attempt known as the "Mishima Incident."<br />
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How to make sense of a man of so many different aspects, a literary man of such finesse and sensibility capable of actions of such extreme violence?<br />
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In the many thousands of pages of analysis that have been afforded to Mishima's death, inevitably the one object that commands the most attention is his 17th-century sword. Yet when I set about writing my biography of Mishima, I wished to demonstrate that the most telling object in his life is actually one that has passed unnoticed: Mishima’s watch.<br />
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Mishima’s interest in watches and clocks, and timekeeping in general, was a lifelong obsession. In the late 1960s, Mishima spoke of how he would loiter in front of shops on the Ginza displaying expensive watches and salivate at the thought of them.<br />
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<b>SILVER WATCH AWARDED BY THE EMPEROR</b><br />
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Crucially, in 1944, when Mishima, as a youth of 19 had been nominated top of his class at the elite Peers School in Tokyo, he had been taken to the Imperial Palace and in a formal ceremony awarded a silver watch by the emperor himself. From that day on, almost as if he had received an imperial decree, Mishima always adhered to the most precise keeping track of time and was utterly unforgiving in any lapses in observance of time by others.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJs2ZRKgVNa5P4fLghFARdP4ayviGfWms6TBAU3nT92H-9r47KMQ5H_JL2Qbw-vftsvkXQZDDHih-Tu31TcvINNrMrYzO3rN4XtQk7ofWol8InVOwQ2vgC9yD7UtxQGtIclYe1hMf_nU/s1600/mishima+and+watch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJs2ZRKgVNa5P4fLghFARdP4ayviGfWms6TBAU3nT92H-9r47KMQ5H_JL2Qbw-vftsvkXQZDDHih-Tu31TcvINNrMrYzO3rN4XtQk7ofWol8InVOwQ2vgC9yD7UtxQGtIclYe1hMf_nU/s400/mishima+and+watch.jpg" width="330" height="400" data-original-width="530" data-original-height="642" /></a></div><br />
Despite being an enormously prolific writer, Mishima was famous for never having missed a deadline. No party was so entertaining that Mishima would not leave it in order to be back at his desk at midnight so that, as was his regular routine, he could continue writing until dawn. If you had a dinner date with Mishima and you were more than 15 minutes late, Yukio would be gone, having ordered dinner for you and left a sarcastic note in his wake.<br />
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Why was Mishima so obsessed with being on time? Partly it was the keenest manifestation of his general fastidiousness, but it also stemmed from the difficulties of his adolescence when, faced with a hostile father who violently opposed his knack for writing, Mishima had to secretly compose his manuscripts throughout the night while his father slept. Precise time management was the only means by which Mishima could keep his dream of becoming a writer alive.<br />
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The symbol of this obsessive devotion to strict time management was the watch. In his memoir about his sexual relationship with Mishima, the gay writer and teacher Jiro Fukushima describes the first time they went to a hotel room together in 1951. The next morning Mishima could not find his watch and - in the manner of Bruce Willis’ character in "Pulp Fiction" - turned over the entire room in search of it.<br />
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Mishima's scrupulousness regarding the observance of time was the foundation for all his musings about the nature of time itself. Having been born in 1925 and spending the first 20 years of his life in an oppressively nationalist and militaristic country, Mishima suddenly found himself spending the next 20 years in a largely Westernized state, committed to peace and relentless economic growth.<br />
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The politics of Mishima’s final five years, from the age of 40 onwards, were a conscious attempt to try to find resolution between this temporal disjunction, which ran like a seam through the center of his life.<br />
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Mishima’s wrestling with the concept of time was at the heart of many of his literary works. In his major novel, "Kyoko’s House" (1959), for example, Mishima pronounced that his ambition was nothing less than to "define an age" and in subsequent novels such as "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea," the sea appears as a symbol of transcendence beyond historical time.<br />
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In his final novelistic tetralogy, "The Sea of Fertility," his self-proclaimed "life work," Mishima consciously thought about what device he could use to produce a great novel unlike anything that had been written before. Mishima desired to supersede historical time and found the answer in the Buddhist notion of reincarnation.<br />
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A MAN WHO DID NOT LIKE WAITING <br />
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And so we come to the day of the "Incident" itself. That morning, Mishima had arranged for the last part of "The Sea of Fertility" to be handed to his editor. Mishima had been planning the precise unfolding of the day for months, had rehearsed minute by minute how everything would occur. But it didn’t all go to plan.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPuWBiSGfRUQj0Il5Jbgy6cG83HYn4xCdBlfrDuK9pLiGSI8Sg5L2dxHvS6uKXJ-FhMQesl2etnZdofPTthP9DkNxB_w7V7GsypjBF2Hp0a0PhrqdjTBrgR-cl31ZGcUQZ8hDNsv-hxoM/s1600/mishima+on+balcony.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPuWBiSGfRUQj0Il5Jbgy6cG83HYn4xCdBlfrDuK9pLiGSI8Sg5L2dxHvS6uKXJ-FhMQesl2etnZdofPTthP9DkNxB_w7V7GsypjBF2Hp0a0PhrqdjTBrgR-cl31ZGcUQZ8hDNsv-hxoM/s320/mishima+on+balcony.jpg" width="269" height="320" data-original-width="206" data-original-height="245" /></a></div>When Mishima appeared on the balcony to make his speech, he could be seen repeatedly checking his watch. In the words he spoke, he referred to how much he had "waited" - and waited and waited. Now he could wait no longer: Mishima was a man who did not like waiting.<br />
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Mishima’s final act before plunging the blade into his abdomen was to take off his watch and give it to one of his acolytes. This act, more than any other, was the sign that Mishima was shuffling off his mortal coil.<br />
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A career that had begun with the gift of a silver watch from the emperor ended with the divestiture of a watch in the name of an idealized emperor.<br />
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In the end, Mishima strangely succeeded in the impossible - in stopping time. When news of the Mishima Incident spread across the nation, everyone stopped, open-mouthed and stared at TV screens. The media frenzy that followed the Incident was unprecedented.<br />
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Mishima had managed to transcend earthly time to reach a form of immortality. Looking back now to make sense of that extraordinary life, it is Mishima's intense battle with time, and its dramatic conclusion, which should most command our interest: for Mishima, the true emperor was time itself.Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-52086111466266832332018-11-15T10:49:00.000+00:002018-11-15T11:14:22.742+00:00My German Adventures with the Japanese Philosophers of Nothingness <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvaPbfhmSb5UoJoipAZB6SGBuoMlSu3uxpfkMOp_LuzNrfsnNQwMFfalrZbODIefbCvNCJ_VC2WTujq1ZkJNzPidK2mCJJU1ZHt7AjQbHFDEsajo5ere_XbaHq2yQvZhrXB2ToeRW9XY4/s1600/Hildesheim+12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvaPbfhmSb5UoJoipAZB6SGBuoMlSu3uxpfkMOp_LuzNrfsnNQwMFfalrZbODIefbCvNCJ_VC2WTujq1ZkJNzPidK2mCJJU1ZHt7AjQbHFDEsajo5ere_XbaHq2yQvZhrXB2ToeRW9XY4/s640/Hildesheim+12.jpg" width="640" height="516" data-original-width="341" data-original-height="275" /></a></div><br />
If you ever fancy having a truly disorientating experience that will challenge you and provide a mental adventure like no other, rather than travelling to some remote corner of the globe, you might try doing what I did last September and attend a 4-day philosophy conference. On Japanese philosophy. In Germany. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitWlUGn3F8l9e6DuLSUKgXjmUDkTMzcLiSLa_qpTdiEJRXPtt3F-_BEl_GtTF7sGrJk1xIC6R0FZAdyv0y5fD418YM3YE7IdcIzrPMiJpMuBuXk_ZJ4G_uT8uBVegFzUYNVsbR5DKIu5U/s1600/Hildesheim+13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitWlUGn3F8l9e6DuLSUKgXjmUDkTMzcLiSLa_qpTdiEJRXPtt3F-_BEl_GtTF7sGrJk1xIC6R0FZAdyv0y5fD418YM3YE7IdcIzrPMiJpMuBuXk_ZJ4G_uT8uBVegFzUYNVsbR5DKIu5U/s200/Hildesheim+13.jpg" width="153" height="200" data-original-width="290" data-original-height="378" /></a></div>Surrounded by the golden autumnal fields of a pretty, historic and rustic campus on the edge of the small town of Hildesheim, near Hanover, I felt like I had arrived in some strange parallel universe where I did not speak the language but could discern that everyone greeted each other with the word “Hei..degger” ever five minutes. <br />
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Was I a Neo-Kantian or a Heideggerian? I dunno, truth to tell I don’t really understand the question. Many years ago, I dimly recall listening to a Japanese audio book called “Dare de mo wakaru Haidegaa” (“The Heidegger Anyone Can Understand”) but contrary to the title, I didn’t understand it or simply forgot what it had to say.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1xNuWfdxzBanHT_QHiPEqmUjrzVPNmwpTDyThK3uBNu4rrMf2xwitAl6_VYLoKml-lylm61x9fuqo1n_Re_6S5xVr9WWUFhUSyXXj7Z-ummCVR81yQ7GlAYI0ZMUkHMHgWyXElMMlK1M/s1600/Hildesheim+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1xNuWfdxzBanHT_QHiPEqmUjrzVPNmwpTDyThK3uBNu4rrMf2xwitAl6_VYLoKml-lylm61x9fuqo1n_Re_6S5xVr9WWUFhUSyXXj7Z-ummCVR81yQ7GlAYI0ZMUkHMHgWyXElMMlK1M/s320/Hildesheim+3.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="720" data-original-height="960" /></a></div>My knowledge of Western philosophy is patchy. I’m all over Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Bentham, and good old J. S. Mill. But I’m pretty clueless about Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Bergson and many others. <br />
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Further, this conference (run by ENOJP, the European Network of Japanese Philosophy, a friendly group of international scholars), was going to be all about the connections between Japanese philosophy and European philosophy. And about Japanese philosophy I am almost completely ignorant. If Heidegger was terribly important to all the aspiring philosophers from around the world gathered in Hildesheim, then I soon discovered that his super-revered Japanese philosopher counterpart was Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945, pictured top), founder of the Kyoto School (referred to in a 2007 book by James Heisig as the “Philosophers of Nothingness”). <br />
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Slightly below Nishida in the Japanese philosophy pantheon, are his follower Keiji Nishitani (1900-1990) and other philosophers such as Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), Teturo Watsuji (1889-1960) and Kiyoshi Miki (1897-1945). I found I was initially at sea with Nothingness and could not easily get a grip on the paddles. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOquv-_F3nXCZxa6DzUxbRcbF1my6gYOYyEqaHbWCAlTfeaCovq1So0W_-Q_HfUJ98577fR_N6-Q5rDgN-ezsJG03bHJCkdDdOW9Rc5mZ3p6nruxTa_O1g1VkKCgPGhgUwPNFAZKX83hc/s1600/Hildesheim+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOquv-_F3nXCZxa6DzUxbRcbF1my6gYOYyEqaHbWCAlTfeaCovq1So0W_-Q_HfUJ98577fR_N6-Q5rDgN-ezsJG03bHJCkdDdOW9Rc5mZ3p6nruxTa_O1g1VkKCgPGhgUwPNFAZKX83hc/s320/Hildesheim+2.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="720" data-original-height="960" /></a></div>As someone noted to me though, conferences like this - many of which are open to people with only a tangential interest in the subject - are a great way to travel and make interesting new friends. Previous ENOJP conferences have taken place in Barcelona, Brussels and Paris, with Nagoya planned for next year, and talk of Brazil after that. Not only was it taking me to areas of the brain I had never visited before, it was also taking me to strangely beguiling places: Hildesheim is an alluring picturesque town I would have never come to on my own. Staying at the well-appointed Bergholzchen Hotel on a hill overlooking the town, I breathed in the fine vistas of wooded parks and splendidly historic church spires and asked myself again: what exactly was I doing here? <br />
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The conference started with some earnest but largely impenetrable papers by PhD students and recent postdocs. There were keynote talks on connections between Japanese philosophy and feminism, gender, identity politics, Islam, linguistics, even sports studies and my brain soon entered into the philosophy zeitgeist and started racing with thoughts on the connections between philosophy and lots of other subjects. How for example was philosophy connected to literature (a subject I tend to be on far safer ground with than philosophy)? I always think of philosophy as coming up with some interesting theories, which literature then attempts to put into practical experiment. <br />
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On Day Two at the conference I attended a session on the philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji and learnt that one of his key concepts was “Between-ness” (“aidagara”). If I’ve understood it correctly, the idea is that none of us are just individuals but exist in a state of inter-dependence and “becoming” with other things that give us a sense of self, and that this is particular characteristic of Japan. Watsuji apparently gave some examples from the “Hagakure”, a classic work celebrating what would become known as “the way of the warrior”, as well as the acting theory of the Noh dramatist Zeami (c.1363 - c.1443) and the theology of the great Buddhist preacher Shinran (1173 - 1263).<br />
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A professor of philosophy however raised his hand and objected to a continued discussion on the “history of ideas”, rather than the concept of “between-ness” itself. A few times during the conference I discovered that a pet peeve of certain philosophers is “history of ideas”. Philosophical concepts are supposed to be “eternal truths”, analogous to scientific truths or mathematical equations, so in that sense the background from which they sprang is irrelevant. The only thing that really matters, they think, is whether the ideas work as a coherent system. <br />
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If philosophers have issues with “history of ideas”, I soon discovered that an even greater bugbear of many philosophers is psychology, which is in many ways its arch-rival. When I hear that Watsuji concocted his theory of “between-ness”, rather than see it as “eternal truth”, I’m inclined to consider what was going on in Watsuji’s inner mind and private experience to make him think in such a way. But to some philosophers, such psychoanalysis is a loathsome, existential threat to their whole endeavour, frequently denounced as being reductive and irrelevant. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLIr5uQ2gO6ZmvJ_UkMawB64HmPlmF4rCRU-p1sVfI9w5XKYwI_jSwAECaVJ9ypkIVfxgZ0uCQhLgNnSkR6wAKcKYfHMRAlIJuM4PhvrkPZuwucgAvUiis4IpX7eDlNOF9kfdgMXstPco/s1600/Hildesheim+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLIr5uQ2gO6ZmvJ_UkMawB64HmPlmF4rCRU-p1sVfI9w5XKYwI_jSwAECaVJ9ypkIVfxgZ0uCQhLgNnSkR6wAKcKYfHMRAlIJuM4PhvrkPZuwucgAvUiis4IpX7eDlNOF9kfdgMXstPco/s320/Hildesheim+4.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="720" /></a></div>While mulling these deep concepts, I was most pleased to observe that the philosophers conformed to their Monty Python stereotype of drinking like fish and laughing uproariously at the social events laid on each evening. Between the tea and lunch breaks, and the night-time carousing, I managed to meet and chat with just about everyone of the dozens of people attending. <br />
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The philosophers gathered one evening for a panel discussing the potential for engagement between Western philosophy and Zen. One philosophy professor argued that while philosophy was the “logical reflection on existence”, it could yet communicate with Zen and either exert logic on it or receive from it a kind of critique of itself. <br />
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It seemed to me that his definition of philosophy was not quite correct, that philosophy was surely not just “logical reflections on existence” and that thinkers like Nietzsche had kicked down the door to the irrational but academic philosophy had not really followed him there and it was art, not academic philosophy, that had truly explored the potential of this. Indeed, many artists had immediately grasped the connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy of the irrational and Zen. <br />
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At the final plenary session of the conference, a philosopher - who was like many others impressively fluent in English, German and Japanese - gave a talk on the Japanese star figure, Kitaro Nishida. There was a lot of talk of “first first person” and “eternal present”. I drowsed through most of it. An American turned to me afterwards and pronounced it brilliant. “I’m glad you got something out of it”, I said groggily. <br />
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After four days of listening to many hours of talks, I must confess that not a single philosophical concept made a strong impression on me. Yet I had learnt a lot of things. For one, I’d gained a roadmap of where Western and Japanese philosophy is up to at the moment and who I need to go off and read (Heidegger! Nishida!).<br />
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I’d also closely observed the world of academic philosophy. On the evening of the final day, I sat at a cafe in the main town square next to the professor at Hildesheim who had given the best talk, an inspiring, inter-disciplinary vision for the future of philosophy (10/10 on my mental scoresheet).<br />
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“Have you ever written any articles for newspapers?” I enquired. <br />
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This question was so left-field for the philosopher that I had to repeat it two more times before he understood it. I explained that many of the concepts and ideas of Japanese philosophy might be of interest to a wider audience if communicated effectively. <br />
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“I never read newspapers”, he responded. “I have not time.” It seemed as though he thought reading newspapers a very peculiar and frivolous thing to do. As as for writing newspaper articles how would that advance his academic career? <br />
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I can’t say I returned from my four day adventure with the philosophers enlightened, but I did have my sense of values thoroughly challenged and shook up. I bought a book on Kitaro Nishida by his famous disciple Keiji Nishitani and started reading it. Will I too become a neo-Nishida-ian? Only time and some moment in the eternal present will tell. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5XXK637GAkJhz009i4vGB96XSkpNZwjgeTo7WFEwBRr3OMRoACWDhEg7JI4VkfdVquxSElm_6CqHCyN2CkP8Qw99WgUGTnLR7K3wPSywNjMAHJ2kreDgajamyKG3hqWvvd926zggIrGg/s1600/Hildesheim+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5XXK637GAkJhz009i4vGB96XSkpNZwjgeTo7WFEwBRr3OMRoACWDhEg7JI4VkfdVquxSElm_6CqHCyN2CkP8Qw99WgUGTnLR7K3wPSywNjMAHJ2kreDgajamyKG3hqWvvd926zggIrGg/s320/Hildesheim+1.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="720" /></a></div>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-28301014325784584782018-05-03T21:06:00.003+01:002018-05-03T21:06:39.080+01:00The True Meaning of Local Democracy <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho62hXOg1n05fJ9dEJedIXic52MJwwmYsriIL0d9QHVRa77YtaSw5XxDw7Vwy4w5pzrkMOTlbwjRxMH4p-YxS2P9tXJfqIQsVJP2bHeKj_5hp_OSPtiCSf3vn5rOstHlykS8-215cmIh4/s1600/Party-Rosettes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho62hXOg1n05fJ9dEJedIXic52MJwwmYsriIL0d9QHVRa77YtaSw5XxDw7Vwy4w5pzrkMOTlbwjRxMH4p-YxS2P9tXJfqIQsVJP2bHeKj_5hp_OSPtiCSf3vn5rOstHlykS8-215cmIh4/s320/Party-Rosettes.jpg" width="320" height="180" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="450" /></a></div><br />
On a broad, leafy avenue linking the popular suburbs of Fallowfield and Chorlton in South Manchester, there is a seemingly infinite array of political party placards - every single one for the same party. Labour, Labour, Labour...<br />
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You wouldn’t think that Labour would have to campaign too hard in these parts - they currently hold 95 out of the city’s 96 seats and between 2010 and 2016 held all 96. Yet through the door come multiple Labour leaflets, while in many areas of the city, the Conservatives mount no active campaign at all. <br />
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In fact, for many years the Conservatives struggled to find anyone who would stand as candidates in the wards of England’s second city. You would have to be a complete mug, it seems, to even try. <br />
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I am one of those mugs...In many parts of England, standing as a Conservative may be the safe, establishment thing to do: not in Manchester, where there has not been a Conservative councillor in over 25 years. Here it feels like you are a reckless and gutsy guerrilla fighter. <br />
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I am running in the ward of Didsbury East, on paper at least the type of place where you might imagine the Conservatives would flourish. It has plenty of Edwardian and new-build mansions and is beloved by the chattering classes. <br />
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Yet I can’t think I have seen a Conservative placard on display anywhere in Didsbury, or indeed any part of Manchester, in the last 20 years. <br />
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I wonder if any academic studies have been undertaken on what the “tipping point” is that support must fall to before it becomes socially unacceptable to display a placard. Actually, not just socially unacceptable, but positively dangerous - inviting a torrent of doorstop abuse or your car being keyed. <br />
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It was going to be interesting trying to root out those “hidden Conservatives”... I announced to my 8-year-old daughter that I was going out campaigning, but she got the world “campaign” mixed up with “champagne” and started telling me how she tried some once but she thought it was fake (it was sparkling apple juice), all of which left me nonplussed. When I asked her if she would like to join me on the campaign trail, she enthusiastically responded, “Are we going to do that champagne thing now?”<br />
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I rather like the idea of going “champagning” rather than “campaigning”, though I suspect the connection of the word campaign to champagne might be premature. I personally hand delivered 2500 Conservative leaflets, and was amused by some of the responses. “Haven’t seen any of these in a while”, said one retiree. When I put the leaflet in one letterbox, a furious young man with a beard raced down the street and shouted at me, “Don’t put this **** in my letterbox!”<br />
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But there were numerous positive responses too. When a dog barked furiously at me as I passed one carefully tended garden, its owner hushed it with, “Be quiet, it’s the Conservatives!” Another lady stopped me on the street and told me how delighted she was that the Conservatives were back campaigning in Didsbury. <br />
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When I bumped into a LibDem delivering leaflets on the same street, I jokingly offered to deliver his leaflets for him, while noting there was a bin nearby. <br />
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What I take most from this process of walking up to hundreds and hundreds of doorsteps over many hours, so that my feet are quite blistered, is the importance of the democratic process itself. Like many people I tend to get irritated by endless political leaflets coming through the door, and admit I have sometimes in the past transferred them directly to the recycling. And in my campaigning too, some people in Manchester when offered a leaflet, refuse to take it when they see it is from the Conservatives. <br />
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Yet I think they are making a mistake, not because I want them to vote Conservative, but because they fail to appreciate how difficult it is these days to get minority parties to mount any kind of campaign in areas they don’t consider “winnable”. Pretty soon, people in Manchester just get used to the idea that Labour will win without their bothering to vote - after all the national turnout in local elections is around 30% - and the only possible alternative is the LibDems.<br />
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But this type of thing is a travesty of true democracy. I consider it my mission as I pound, solo, Manchester streets not just encouraging Conservative voters, but offering everyone a true democratic choice. It is appalling that Manchester has slid into being a one-party state - where none of the business of government is scrutinised by any kind of opposition in the Town Hall - and yet noone appears to be remotely bothered about it. <br />
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Just to be completely even-handed about these things, I wish to also tell you that it pains me that a few miles south, where family members live in the wealthy area of Bramhall in Cheshire, Labour never mount any campaigns or push any leaflets through the letterbox. <br />
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Do people in Manchester seriously think that 95 out of 96 councillors being Labour is a good thing? Or that people in Cheshire have no need to even read what Labour campaign promises might possibly be made to them? Whatever your politics, don’t you think that councils are likely to be better run, more diverse and democratically legitimate with some other parties represented? But no, in a “powerhouse” Northern city all they do is put up placards: Labour, Labour, Labour...<br />
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I personally take no glee in seeing different parts of the country dominated by one party or another, and then rather than attempting to make a comeback in areas where they have been rooted out, funnelling all resources into utterly dominating areas they already control. <br />
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The worst travesty - of which all parties are guilty - is treating local elections as national elections, concerned only by the end of the night with the grand totals of seats won and lost and what that spells for Westminster. But really, that type of thing is of much lesser importance. What really matters is that every party is fully represented and campaigning and engaging with the public in every local area. That is true local democracy at work. <br />
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What we have at the moment is a system that is grotesquely distorted, broken, and profoundly undemocratic. <br />
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For me, it will be a triumph not so much if I get elected, but if I have managed to connect with thousands of people in a ward in which they had come to think that there were at best two choices, that the Conservatives simply did not care about them and that it was hardly worth voting. I have put myself forward in order to offer a viable, important third option - whether they choose to take it is far less important than their actually having it. <br />
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If just some of the people of Manchester appreciate this revival of the more genteel, less world weary and less polarized politics of yesteryear, then I will truly consider my “campaign” to be worthy of “champagne”.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_DOT_fK-87dSeJgmteX8re7z53b4-IJj1xt6P2HbEg6MnLlfKCLYKEDP-yhS8loDUgnBF-qVbneFcVr0lUw59FNs_EBx5o1RPjNjwwyXrsmQOAvdfyCQ4zFqDTAmYFarui3AhO9OOoqY/s1600/champagne-cheers-glasses-splash-isolated-black-background-35409744.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_DOT_fK-87dSeJgmteX8re7z53b4-IJj1xt6P2HbEg6MnLlfKCLYKEDP-yhS8loDUgnBF-qVbneFcVr0lUw59FNs_EBx5o1RPjNjwwyXrsmQOAvdfyCQ4zFqDTAmYFarui3AhO9OOoqY/s320/champagne-cheers-glasses-splash-isolated-black-background-35409744.jpg" width="226" height="320" data-original-width="636" data-original-height="900" /></a></div>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-80916872816471439152018-04-19T15:51:00.000+01:002018-04-19T15:51:52.307+01:00A Tantalising Glimpse into a "Rogue" Soseki<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3y7S4aK5_T87ErF0gbl1f_dE64uEIM-Qwt_3orsLkg6jEFIH8nIv3CSMpW9ZR7P2h6O_0eRX7ilD3GTrGEk8QmorLzFKBDVChECDoAgPh9U9nh-yqoUKRUATXRORswKWXt-eqxYBxb2Q/s1600/Soseki+Postcard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3y7S4aK5_T87ErF0gbl1f_dE64uEIM-Qwt_3orsLkg6jEFIH8nIv3CSMpW9ZR7P2h6O_0eRX7ilD3GTrGEk8QmorLzFKBDVChECDoAgPh9U9nh-yqoUKRUATXRORswKWXt-eqxYBxb2Q/s640/Soseki+Postcard.jpg" width="640" height="420" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="630" /></a></div><br />
There has been a truly fascinating and important discovery in the world of Natsume Soseki scholarship, one which begins with the tiniest of inscriptions...<br />
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According to the April 4 evening edition of the Asahi newspaper a postcard has emerged sent by the Japanese engineer Nagao Hanpei to a Japanese scholar of German literature then living in Berlin called Fujishiro Teisuke. The postcard depicts Robbie Burns and the Burns cottage in Ayr, Scotland and is co-signed by a “Natsume Kinnosuke” (the real name of Natsume Soseki). The card specifically indicates being in Edinburgh on November 1 1901.<br />
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Why does any of that matter? It has always been thought that during the two years Soseki spent in the UK between October 1900 and December 1902, apart from a single night spent in Cambridge at the very beginning and a stay of a week or two in Pitlochry, Scotland at the very end, Soseki never left London. But this postcard potentially explodes that idea.<br />
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About Soseki’s first year in London we have a pretty detailed knowledge because Soseki kept a diary. But a year in, the diary entries dry up and what he actually got up to becomes mysterious. This is just after the time that Soseki ceased his weekly sessions with his Irish tutor William Craig and became isolated and neurotic, obsessed with writing his “Theory of Literature”.<br />
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To adopt the parlance of “Apocalypse Now”, Soseki was about to “go rogue”, famously reputed to have sent his employers at the Ministry of Education in Tokyo a blank sheet of paper as the annual report on his progress. The gossip amongst the Japanese in London meanwhile, telegrammed back to Tokyo, would soon be that Soseki had “gone insane”.<br />
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Now suddenly we see Soseki pop up in Scotland and Edinburgh, one year ahead of schedule...<br />
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For me this opens up far more interesting possibilities. For example, I’ve always strongly felt that Soseki must have visited Manchester Art Gallery - above all art galleries, including the Tate in London, it is the art works contained there that most powerfully connect to Soseki’s later writings. Yet there is no proof that Soseki ever visited Manchester - indeed, quite the reverse, it has always been firmly believed that, with the above two exceptions, he never left London.<br />
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But now we have a glimpse of another “rogue” Soseki, failing to report on his movements, who could potentially have visited many places in the UK we simply do not know about. However if we look at the pattern of Soseki’s earlier and later life, then we can see that an impulse to travel, particularly as a form of alleviating stress, is a consistent feature.<br />
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The secret life of Soseki’s dark year in the UK, when he went metaphorically “up river”, is a mystery that still throws up tantalising clues and glimpses into the enduring enigma of Soseki.Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-37942349759747093662017-11-09T09:54:00.000+00:002018-04-19T15:52:54.091+01:00Wandering a Psychological Ice Palace <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBWeyTUyn_iQyoxy0K-hlFkTGm8yXAWoSFRW33hrH3QFm7ewx9b8-HNC2f3XdLAeqWwsphDbdMfbUurjMssBdfrrJQOAuUDJiL26MIUFy-isVdaNNHteP3ZEXe8Ep428lC_JUwWPGsZQ/s1600/Ice+Palace.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBWeyTUyn_iQyoxy0K-hlFkTGm8yXAWoSFRW33hrH3QFm7ewx9b8-HNC2f3XdLAeqWwsphDbdMfbUurjMssBdfrrJQOAuUDJiL26MIUFy-isVdaNNHteP3ZEXe8Ep428lC_JUwWPGsZQ/s640/Ice+Palace.jpg"></a><br />
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In the northern hemisphere we are approaching the coldest part of the year so I thought I might talk about a couple of favourite novels called 'The Ice Palace' and 'The Birds' by the great Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas: <br />
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It is winter time in Norway. At the edge of a rural village a waterfall has frozen and been transformed into an ice palace, an awesome structure of icy caves and cliffs. In a classroom at the local school, there is a new arrival, an eleven-year-old girl called Unn. She is quiet and enigmatic and so she is regarded with suspicion by her new classmates. But suddenly she forms a mysterious bond with a popular girl called Siss.<br />
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Siss invites Unn to the home where she lives with her aunt. It is almost as if there is a kind of strange telepathy between the two girls and an immediate intimacy. Unn has a secret that she wishes to share with the other girl, but Siss begins to feel uncomfortable and leaves. They will never meet again. The following day, Unn sets out to the ice palace on her own and becomes lost inside it. Then the search for her begins...<br />
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The Ice Palace, the novel published in 1963 by Tarjei Vesaas, is a work like no other. Broodingly written in a beautiful prose that demonstrates a powerful economy with words, it explores a difficult and fascinating subject: the mindset of children on the edge of puberty. The children are presented not as immature minors, but rather in their own terms, as persons not yet dulled into set patterns of behaviour, and capable of sudden impulsive acts that conform to their own sense of logic. More so than adults they are intuitive and expressive and alive to the mysteries of the world around them. We feel exactly what it must be like to be eleven-year-old girls interacting with one another, but we also explore how one person can enter into another's consciousness like an eternal presence, whose physical disappearance will haunt her for the rest of her days.<br />
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Tarjei Vesaas was born in Vinje in Telemark, Norway, in 1897. His family were farmers who had lived in the same house for over 300 years, and a strong sense of place and age-old tradition are central to the setting in many of his novels. Vesaas attended a local folk school and then in the 1920s travelled abroad, mainly in Germany, before returning to live in his native region from 1927 onwards. His wife Halldis Vesaas was also a writer.<br />
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Themes such as psychological isolation, guilt and death frequently recur in Vesaas' works. His 1957 novel The Birds, for example, tells the story of a mentally handicapped 37-year-old man called Mattis. He lives with his sister Hege who is slightly older and looks after him. Mattis is constantly aware of being a burden on his sister, who tries to make ends meet by knitting sweaters and encourages her brother to go out and find some work. He begs for work on a neighbouring farm and is asked to help thinning out turnips, but is humiliated by his inability to do the work properly.<br />
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Vesaas depicts Mattis in such a way that we see that although he is incapable of doing many basic tasks, of even forming his own thoughts into intelligent conversation, he is by no means lacking in thoughts. He has an innate feeling for the natural world – and indeed it is a great theme of Vesaas that it is those who are isolated from the ordinary adult world like Unn in The Ice Palace and Mattis in The Birds who most vividly connect to the primeval forces of nature.<br />
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It is almost as if the people in the ordinary adult world have had their senses numbed by the round of work and social interaction. When a woodcock flies over Mattis' house, it is for him an event of great significance which is entirely incomprehensible to his sister. A local boy hearing about the woodcock comes and pointlessly shoots it – yet only Mattis perceives this as a great tragedy, an affront to the majesty and beauty of the natural world.<br />
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Both The Ice Palace and The Birds are full of dark and mysterious symbols. In The Birds two wilted aspen trees are referred to by the people in the village as Mattis-and-Hege, but though both brother and sister are aware of this, they try to keep this insulting information from the other. When lightning strikes and one of the trees falls, Mattis panics that this is a sign that one of them will soon die – but which one of them will it be? <br />
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Vesaas' stories are both beautiful and deceptively simple. Reading about the ice palace, for example, almost makes one wish to head up into the north of Norway to find one. It is as if there exists in the frozen wastes something pure and powerful and wonderful, which is solid and yet appears almost as a mirage and then suddenly melts and disappears. It seems a metaphor for the very process of life itself – we wander around a psychological palace with many chambers. But perhaps we are most alive to its power and majesty, its deepest mysteries, not when we are adults but rather in the far-off days of our childhood when everything was new, when we acted on instinct and experienced everything with fresh eyes. When it made just as much sense to wander off on one's own to explore a frozen waterfall as it did to sit in a class and learn everything second-hand and written down. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-29588878699529657452017-06-19T22:02:00.000+01:002017-06-19T23:49:35.790+01:0012 Books to See the UK Through Brexit Albeit that the recent UK General Election has now delivered a "strong and stable government", it's going to be a long 2 year slog through the Brexit process which formally began today. <br />
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It's going to be 1940 all over again: Britain alone, clinging on valiantly against the odds, facing the combined might of the Continent. We will fret whether we are going to survive at all, but secretly we will be rejoicing at having a chance of another long-overdue "finest hour" to triumph over the doom-sayers. <br />
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We are going to need to have some fine reads by our side to keep our peckers up and keep Britannia safe and sound. Here are my 12 essential reads to see us through.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGTrqRNAFV7nGAjwJeGjTSwz6pe-APcy_3u18T56vyXZ_YlWU9lIP4r6IJ2BFndwYo3t5bNTpSPF3a4s2bsg59YDTiqQHUWKGQVsJLfUlqGzmZWHJJcrk4ZMnPxK5NH01Faw8cdnP5C0/s1600/John_Stuart_Mill_by_London_Stereoscopic_Company%252C_c1870.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGTrqRNAFV7nGAjwJeGjTSwz6pe-APcy_3u18T56vyXZ_YlWU9lIP4r6IJ2BFndwYo3t5bNTpSPF3a4s2bsg59YDTiqQHUWKGQVsJLfUlqGzmZWHJJcrk4ZMnPxK5NH01Faw8cdnP5C0/s200/John_Stuart_Mill_by_London_Stereoscopic_Company%252C_c1870.jpg" width="159" height="200" data-original-width="1274" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div>1. "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill. (1859)<br />
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Listen Frau Merkel and Monsieur Macron, when Mill (pictured left) wrote this eternal paean to freedom, Bismarck was cranking up his political career in Prussia and the French Second Empire was yet to collapse into the chaos of the failed revolution of the 1871 Paris Commune. Mill preferred a more gentle, quintessentially British approach to liberty - not something to be attempted in fits and starts, but something that infuses the whole culture of the land and its people. Wave a copy with pride and send one to Herr Juncker.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEe_Y-7os3DtQYJDBvkJVQC-hadg9x60FGsiK-u18zEwWRK-uSTtpKG3I7DNptMR8T0QLqL-ln4GVKdj7ZQ0Or5Aah0so4wKudhyapl65drcYQ8_34N6b-s79J59pNVwYiAr99qJ-jXMk/s1600/Good-Bye_to_All_That.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEe_Y-7os3DtQYJDBvkJVQC-hadg9x60FGsiK-u18zEwWRK-uSTtpKG3I7DNptMR8T0QLqL-ln4GVKdj7ZQ0Or5Aah0so4wKudhyapl65drcYQ8_34N6b-s79J59pNVwYiAr99qJ-jXMk/s200/Good-Bye_to_All_That.jpg" width="132" height="200" data-original-width="256" data-original-height="388" /></a></div><br />
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2. "Goodbye to All That" by Robert Graves. (1929)<br />
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We fought for European freedom on the battlefields of the Somme and Passchendaele and look what thanks we got...Robert Graves called it right in 1929. We're disillusioned with getting embroiled in the continent and we'll happily give up residency rights - just so long as we can retire on Mallorca and all the other sweet Mediterranean islands.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxeD58-mJWosSj56dgw7xRV4BrAvr5Ml68ZXNAuQWpaY_OcTMS0Dp2XWsPW5dSGRBEje4AdNIA1Uj7zgE0MyrS_BuAhAX1SnHVdVHT1IH4tsgNJUsZ_fivrido032M9pLYwn1l-lrtZI/s1600/1984first.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxeD58-mJWosSj56dgw7xRV4BrAvr5Ml68ZXNAuQWpaY_OcTMS0Dp2XWsPW5dSGRBEje4AdNIA1Uj7zgE0MyrS_BuAhAX1SnHVdVHT1IH4tsgNJUsZ_fivrido032M9pLYwn1l-lrtZI/s200/1984first.jpg" width="135" height="200" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="446" /></a></div><br />
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3. "1984" by George Orwell. (1949)<br />
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Orwell had it precisely: Britain should never have been part of "Eurasia" and always belonged to "Oceania". We were always going to get back to the open sea...Now we are out of the way, the EU can get on with a stream-lined supranational state with an unquestioned Big Brother president. Let's have a double think about sex crimes though. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVGwbvqlJOXArqK0BPbxgV_txevWcDGW7UC_z0gLD2iUfuUjpSxiu4OIQjwPN1rw0a4LmFe8UkEqr3L0MVSwHtYx7zi0AH7gVpLStu4JNFQ4KJrCm6CZSGMlMrOj2T8tWBm4E23DgzDG8/s1600/TrialKafka.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVGwbvqlJOXArqK0BPbxgV_txevWcDGW7UC_z0gLD2iUfuUjpSxiu4OIQjwPN1rw0a4LmFe8UkEqr3L0MVSwHtYx7zi0AH7gVpLStu4JNFQ4KJrCm6CZSGMlMrOj2T8tWBm4E23DgzDG8/s200/TrialKafka.jpg" width="136" height="200" data-original-width="232" data-original-height="341" /></a></div><br />
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4. "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. (1925)<br />
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Joseph K wakes up one morning and finds himself threatened with a gruelling legal process. He bitterly grumbles about it, and yet races obediently to the court hearing though not even summoned....Joseph, why don't you just tell them all to take a flying leap? The trial exists not so much in reality as in Joseph K's own obeisant mind...No deal better than a bad deal? You better believe it. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj14nYypi_yOrtoiqLHyEq1TNi4zIBboYyM2eguvuAuPDsTSgrCdpQldM1eO9Q3X23P8CK7Iah0mwosUdpE2xGpbq_PCaGrDrMHnEl2PF-9Bhzv5MXvWsgYAosb6588RmiiUEuz3s5TwhE/s1600/thomas+hardy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj14nYypi_yOrtoiqLHyEq1TNi4zIBboYyM2eguvuAuPDsTSgrCdpQldM1eO9Q3X23P8CK7Iah0mwosUdpE2xGpbq_PCaGrDrMHnEl2PF-9Bhzv5MXvWsgYAosb6588RmiiUEuz3s5TwhE/s200/thomas+hardy.jpg" width="137" height="200" data-original-width="186" data-original-height="271" /></a></div><br />
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5. "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy. (1874)<br />
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OK, so Hardy Country can be excruciatingly tedious and lead you fumbling for your passport and the next flight to the continent. But hey, there's something comforting about all those rolling green fields and timeless English ways. Grim and occasionally depressing? Sure, but in a comforting British sort of grumbling, miserable way.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd1TouPAbqlB-gyCP7jn4Gv_ynI0NB4GcMdHuVdcaeQ5T8Sj_fc8nD7AlY5h5y8o4AuVHG2PKKCJOGrRSR-5a07KNUin5C6CmgwNMZ3oTxuUGYwihCgC0479TX_vh0mnA5WJnMu4QKd7s/s1600/WhiskyGalore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd1TouPAbqlB-gyCP7jn4Gv_ynI0NB4GcMdHuVdcaeQ5T8Sj_fc8nD7AlY5h5y8o4AuVHG2PKKCJOGrRSR-5a07KNUin5C6CmgwNMZ3oTxuUGYwihCgC0479TX_vh0mnA5WJnMu4QKd7s/s200/WhiskyGalore.jpg" width="127" height="200" data-original-width="220" data-original-height="346" /></a></div><br />
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6. "Whisky Galore" by Compton MacKenzie. (1947)<br />
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Who even cares if we don't get a trade deal? We've got all the stuff the French want anyway. If we can't sell them our Scottish whisky, we can drink it all ourselves. How wonderful would that be? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdoesw6qtdn0QZPXg3xyXGoL9x4gN4xJMYvIUs6Afz7tE0FBd6321xJj3RefCftXcLuY17lqShDJPOBnkapIP5H5JubHlcOIF-pfCHJepIJIygq823OyjYYMq8LU-Dk_KcQ3Fz55bf2Gc/s1600/CasinoRoyaleCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdoesw6qtdn0QZPXg3xyXGoL9x4gN4xJMYvIUs6Afz7tE0FBd6321xJj3RefCftXcLuY17lqShDJPOBnkapIP5H5JubHlcOIF-pfCHJepIJIygq823OyjYYMq8LU-Dk_KcQ3Fz55bf2Gc/s200/CasinoRoyaleCover.jpg" width="133" height="200" data-original-width="199" data-original-height="300" /></a></div><br />
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7. "Casino Royale" by Ian Fleming. (1953)<br />
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You think the negotiations are going to be difficult and that we are going to have to hold our nerve? Thankfully we have just the man for the job. Just make sure his martini is very cold and very strong. It's Bond against Le Chiffre: stylish courage pitted against underhand bureaucracy. Just hold on to your vital parts if they sit you down in a chair with the seat cut out...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs2I87GUUPymnkT1kb9e3dzv4EH_TpMs-3HOAuPC7kYjpdUVfYn82T4znRYkAL3fpXlHxMBMrPuszyVHSwHvnVLZnV_f2tmH9yhnrFJnKedT4TevGo_sik7gN8cjD8blcWY4jEeevZHZo/s1600/Frankenstein_1818_edition_title_page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs2I87GUUPymnkT1kb9e3dzv4EH_TpMs-3HOAuPC7kYjpdUVfYn82T4znRYkAL3fpXlHxMBMrPuszyVHSwHvnVLZnV_f2tmH9yhnrFJnKedT4TevGo_sik7gN8cjD8blcWY4jEeevZHZo/s200/Frankenstein_1818_edition_title_page.jpg" width="116" height="200" data-original-width="367" data-original-height="631" /></a></div><br />
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8. "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley. (1818) <br />
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Mary Shelley could see it all coming when she jotted down this Gothic horror by a lake in Switzerland 200 years ago. Stitch together a lot of discarded limbs of European states and pump some political currents through them and this is what you get: a rampaging EU monster that is going to take some stopping. We should perhaps try and arrange the Brexit negotiations near the North Pole and lure the EU team into the icy wilderness. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI77fs7MOzbbq60bMyMyNM2RjEg-iTvpn8k-xLdequFCrzXftHtzvHe6O_gCy3g4mMujjdmOUo3h5hcDH6nkhHk7A6tHYuo3brSckKjrrTiWHYUua_PMjCk08cSet8nE6Y7sPV0zxQ0gE/s1600/VictoryNovel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI77fs7MOzbbq60bMyMyNM2RjEg-iTvpn8k-xLdequFCrzXftHtzvHe6O_gCy3g4mMujjdmOUo3h5hcDH6nkhHk7A6tHYuo3brSckKjrrTiWHYUua_PMjCk08cSet8nE6Y7sPV0zxQ0gE/s200/VictoryNovel.jpg" width="134" height="200" data-original-width="220" data-original-height="329" /></a></div><br />
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9. "Victory" by Joseph Conrad. (1915)<br />
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Let's not get carried away. Conrad meant the title of this book ironically (he was one of those Polish migrants turned British gent after all). But still we need something to give us a bit of vim and remind us of the glorious British Empire and trade routes throughout the world, before we got hung up on this whole European project. Did someone say "Robinson Crusoe"? Never heard of it. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiovRXNGXWd9hxFaJ13AFi60PWX3GVPS4arJ1OBy2YZxGUaS2_HtlJ12fXUA3K9kCPaDhji9y7BH-o6QuHRH9ZrWwRUlo1rQn4l27FgtssuVZeDpXrFCRtj7Lq9rn-bvKJZbtdVWOrtP4/s1600/Viles_Bodies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiovRXNGXWd9hxFaJ13AFi60PWX3GVPS4arJ1OBy2YZxGUaS2_HtlJ12fXUA3K9kCPaDhji9y7BH-o6QuHRH9ZrWwRUlo1rQn4l27FgtssuVZeDpXrFCRtj7Lq9rn-bvKJZbtdVWOrtP4/s200/Viles_Bodies.jpg" width="169" height="200" data-original-width="220" data-original-height="261" /></a></div><br />
10. "Vile Bodies" by Evelyn Waugh. (1930) <br />
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Whatever happens we have to retain our sense of humour. After all, we don't actually make anything any more. We just do the finance, make costume dramas and export comedians. We have to make sure that they don't put import tariffs on comedy or we are sunk. If all else fails we must flatter them in such a cunning, idiosyncratically British way that they don't even grasp that we are are having a hilarious joke at their expense. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaWm5wZP_EtdJD1kOcQplYi-ZkpRbVGqv-n1CK4we2__nRijcSEpQ_VPfRgkLAmuQ4ubuGTh_HZrgPlKjeSEUxKldxkv4a-9HROCY_C1AVU8JDWLUCcecLQMOCqpViHpgvrixZBFOE8s/s1600/Octavio_Paz_-_1988_Malm%25C3%25B6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaWm5wZP_EtdJD1kOcQplYi-ZkpRbVGqv-n1CK4we2__nRijcSEpQ_VPfRgkLAmuQ4ubuGTh_HZrgPlKjeSEUxKldxkv4a-9HROCY_C1AVU8JDWLUCcecLQMOCqpViHpgvrixZBFOE8s/s200/Octavio_Paz_-_1988_Malm%25C3%25B6.jpg" width="145" height="200" data-original-width="644" data-original-height="888" /></a></div><br />
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11. "The Labyrinth of Solitude" by Octavio Paz. (1950) <br />
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Why is Mexico and and its people so very different to its neighbour the United States, Paz (pictured left) pondered. Hmm, because they have different cultural influences and histories, he concludes. But that's fine. Solitude is the new cool. Soon everyone will want it and Britain will be the go-to minotaur in the labyrinth. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGrRJEf3erQYZQLw8T93ocAtWCTf9eCgaCJWPg2l3-0LRg5E_RWZR1RgLML_fBizZhyphenhyphenhAgIRawp2wCf4XjOPxcOoGrKFWZHWxjyX-X4BGxVIK4P0e8ApvOWFkaQExFu4hZxVWlHp-2sDA/s1600/Crimeandpunishmentcover.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGrRJEf3erQYZQLw8T93ocAtWCTf9eCgaCJWPg2l3-0LRg5E_RWZR1RgLML_fBizZhyphenhyphenhAgIRawp2wCf4XjOPxcOoGrKFWZHWxjyX-X4BGxVIK4P0e8ApvOWFkaQExFu4hZxVWlHp-2sDA/s200/Crimeandpunishmentcover.png" width="130" height="200" data-original-width="255" data-original-height="391" /></a></div><br />
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12. "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (1866)<br />
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You've done the crime, now do the time. Why did you murder that kindly old lady who never listened to a word you said and bossed you about anyway? You crazy, crazy people. Get down on your knees and repent. We need the whole world to see that the EU does not take expressions of autonomy and individualism lying down. <br />
Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-51132106064969154582017-04-20T10:56:00.000+01:002017-04-20T11:29:21.561+01:00George Sand's Comical Evisceration of Mallorca<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd1e5IgEgsAxpxqtOGRj5CiP3EB-ecThCWeLqRGCnvWQdWDTG1MP7T3WcGl5HflX7U_gPyvkBCTHScdjgEt4-XojufnMFpjMxngYVQ2VeP5O4hAiwhUkJKVQsukLBjRivwHnZZtRhUdbA/s1600/A+Winter+in+Majorca.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd1e5IgEgsAxpxqtOGRj5CiP3EB-ecThCWeLqRGCnvWQdWDTG1MP7T3WcGl5HflX7U_gPyvkBCTHScdjgEt4-XojufnMFpjMxngYVQ2VeP5O4hAiwhUkJKVQsukLBjRivwHnZZtRhUdbA/s400/A+Winter+in+Majorca.jpg" width="300" height="400" /></a></div><br />
Over Easter I spent two weeks travelling around the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. For many British people, this is the very first place they visit when they venture overseas, but it took me a few decades to make the pilgrimage. <br />
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Unquestionably the most famous couple to have ever resided in Mallorca were the French novelist George Sand (1804-76) and her lover, the pianist Frederick Chopin (1810-49) who visited the island between November 1838 and March 1839. They eventually moved to the monastery in the beautiful mountain top town of Valldemosa, today a mecca for tourists. Sand's account of her travels, "A Winter in Mallorca" (1842), is sold throughout the island in a variety of languages. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpakQqWr5DvWcPI7VHspgXess4eI5sJKDB1LenQ7YK7WJOL0Gg-zxafrMCaqrerxNmM8RxOf05161ENsJrKocix6HK5ZvFvAUxgXI8nEyeyattawVnrpnEKn6eHMDOoMcfuOfxungiUL8/s1600/Chopin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpakQqWr5DvWcPI7VHspgXess4eI5sJKDB1LenQ7YK7WJOL0Gg-zxafrMCaqrerxNmM8RxOf05161ENsJrKocix6HK5ZvFvAUxgXI8nEyeyattawVnrpnEKn6eHMDOoMcfuOfxungiUL8/s320/Chopin.jpg" width="240" height="320" /></a></div>Such vintage travel books can often be a considerable bore, but I thought I would give George Sand - whom I knew little about - a go and I am glad I did: "Winter in Mallorca" is a gem, a true travel classic. However it is considerably different to what you might expect. For one thing, Chopin (pictured right) is never actually mentioned, only obliquely referred to as Sand's sickly companion. Secondly, Sand is corruscating and often hilariously rude about the Spanish in general and the Mallorcans in particular, about whom she has scarcely a kind word to say. <br />
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In Sand's depiction, the Mallorca of 1838 is a savage, primitive place where the locals can be sniffed before they appear as they reek of olive oil and garlic and where the only thing that is cultivated properly on the island are the pigs (the only livestock allowed to be exported). There are no lodgings at all to be found in the capital Palma (population 36,000) because tenants have to provide their own windows which take six months to make. <br />
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The Mallorcans are depicted as keen to fleece foreigners of every penny they have and very reluctant to offer any hospitality, despite constantly pretending otherwise. Sand caustically writes, <br />
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"One cannot look at a picture, touch a piece of material, or lift up a chair, without being charmingly told: 'Esta a la disposicion de Usted.' [It is at your disposal'] But beware of accepting so much as a pin, for that would be an intolerable indiscretion."<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbU23hQ_UDaVsUhMfi0GHpZ2rP8HhzlKqoHdYphngNwPbfT7zA2jQ08TFGZSl1UdprVWetFT0RgtBRAIF6qL82qV5BOZDc2THdZ_MlsYp-gXA1xhO405ZuGxLsiCv69TYq4T2Gd1Hjzk/s1600/View+from+Chopin+Monastery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbU23hQ_UDaVsUhMfi0GHpZ2rP8HhzlKqoHdYphngNwPbfT7zA2jQ08TFGZSl1UdprVWetFT0RgtBRAIF6qL82qV5BOZDc2THdZ_MlsYp-gXA1xhO405ZuGxLsiCv69TYq4T2Gd1Hjzk/s320/View+from+Chopin+Monastery.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div>Arriving at the hill-top monastery (pictured from approach road, left), Sand's most complimentary words are reserved for the housekeeper who she remarks "had once been good-looking". But the chambermaid is "the arch-witch of Valldemosa" and another young girl "a dishevelled little monster".<br />
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At the beginning of this book - which is today enthusiastically promoted in tourist outlets across the island - Sand tells us that, "The Spaniard is ignorant and superstitious; consequently he believes in infection, fears illness and death, lacks in faith and charity. Being miserable and overburdened by taxation he becomes greedy, selfish and deceitful in his dealings with foreigners." <br />
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As for Mallorca, the whole island is riven with corruption, cronyism and the psychological imprint of medieval practices. "When one asks on what a rich Majorcan spends his income in a country lacking all luxuries and temptations, the answer is to be found in a specially set aside wing of the house, filled with good-for-nothing loafers of both sexes, who after spending a year in service to their master, have the right to be lodged, clothed and boarded for the rest of their lives." <br />
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From the above, it might sound as if Sand simply rucked up in Mallorca and spewed out invective in all directions, but in fact there was a greater architecture of ideas at work. Sand believed passionately that France had evolved through the Revolution and the Napoleonic years into a socially advanced state that was far superior to Spain, still striving to free itself from the oppressions of the Inquisition, which had been abolished only a few years earlier. She saw France as a land of forward-looking art and industry, and Spain as a land of peasant superstition and corruption. Her greatest contempt is reserved for the unthinking or venal servants of the Catholic church in Spain, the hypocrite monks or blood-thirsty priests. <br />
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From a historical perspective, it's extremely revealing to understand what a cultural and developmental chasm divided France and Spain back in 1840. When we think today of European colonialism of the 19th century, we tend to think of the European nations as imposing themselves on other continents by virtue of industrial technology. But if you read "Winter in Mallorca", then it's plain to see that huge "development gaps" existed at the heart of Europe itself - Sand regards the large island of Mallorca, only 250 miles off the French coast as an uncivilized, savage place. <br />
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But instructive as Sand is about history, she is also insightful about so many universal constants of life. When Sand asks herself, "Why travel?", she provides this response: "Who amongst us has not, at some time, selfishly dreamed of forsaking his affairs, his habits, his acquaintances and even his friends, to settle in some enchanted island and live without worries, without responsibilities, and above all, without newspapers?" <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivn1rC302DpN5MSAZ5Tessz3meZrpiQ8PkqDduSjogu3D_Lfe7r9-vftVw3IcsWDA9XQevx28cGqQNBgnpvR6HgQXqW6B9SzGIBBok2_gV9ijrARSo0TOgDKlwMY6vx2mv41y1c76Nybo/s1600/Chopin+statue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivn1rC302DpN5MSAZ5Tessz3meZrpiQ8PkqDduSjogu3D_Lfe7r9-vftVw3IcsWDA9XQevx28cGqQNBgnpvR6HgQXqW6B9SzGIBBok2_gV9ijrARSo0TOgDKlwMY6vx2mv41y1c76Nybo/s400/Chopin+statue.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></div>Sand was of course a most extraordinary woman. Married and with two children, she left her husband and embarked upon some "wild" years, before hooking up with Chopin (statue of Chopin in front of the old monastery at Valldemosa, above). She sometimes wore men's clothes and smoked cigars. Her affair with Chopin came to a nasty Woody Allen-Mia Farrow style end ten years later when she accused Chopin of having long been in love with her daughter (Sand had travelled to Mallorca with her two children and Chopin). In her life she found time for affairs with a host of famous artists including Jules Sandeau, Prosper Merimee, Alfred de Musset, Pierre-Francois Bocage, Charles Didier, Felicien Mallefille, Louis Blanc...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHc_9q24JncFNL1T6QLuY4kTzATvtT6QQb38fkLAW8qc9pfK4vVB5JLq-kXR36Y1p2wMqURzXjrq7C4tvPiFm_oGE3Ka-WTHcFFgUitOht9lx5VMwr9OBKGRSdkQJFxwbv1EXVJ3cNDU0/s1600/george+Sand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHc_9q24JncFNL1T6QLuY4kTzATvtT6QQb38fkLAW8qc9pfK4vVB5JLq-kXR36Y1p2wMqURzXjrq7C4tvPiFm_oGE3Ka-WTHcFFgUitOht9lx5VMwr9OBKGRSdkQJFxwbv1EXVJ3cNDU0/s320/george+Sand.jpg" width="240" height="320" /></a></div>But what would Sand (pictured left) have had to say to our current age, as we often shy away from criticizing ignorance and superstition for fear of offending sensibilities, even if the result is chronic social oppression? Sand was quite happy to have the grandest historical monuments torn down if it meant that in doing so people were eternally freed from the tortures - both of body and mind - of the Inquisition. We perhaps in the world today need more fearless free-thinking women like her.Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-41317395925553556592017-04-17T12:24:00.000+01:002017-04-22T00:38:50.872+01:00The Man Who Came After Soseki<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8IS7Ku2HF3Xnpjxv0BSpltgOzlRoyT2gQ920YxYYqpTxkrEHob5FCOhC24omUEqa0X5i9DNdaMPdLKSZU3Beh4Tcg-KGPBtGTqdXmYS_h13PM5mP0xzkI5KJJAn9shnyUgPLe1sxjln4/s1600/John+Lawrence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8IS7Ku2HF3Xnpjxv0BSpltgOzlRoyT2gQ920YxYYqpTxkrEHob5FCOhC24omUEqa0X5i9DNdaMPdLKSZU3Beh4Tcg-KGPBtGTqdXmYS_h13PM5mP0xzkI5KJJAn9shnyUgPLe1sxjln4/s400/John+Lawrence.jpg" width="256" height="400" /></a></div><br />
The wonderful Dr. Laurence Williams, who teaches English Literature at Tokyo University, posted an intriguing picture a couple of days ago of the grave at Zoshigaya Cemetery of his name-sake predecessor at Tokyo University, "Dr. John Lawrence", together with an amusing commentary. It seems that Tokyo University still lovingly tend the graves of their former professors, which is touching. <br />
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I hope Laurence won't mind if I write a few words of my own about "Dr. John Lawrence" who taught English literature at Tokyo University from 1906 until his death in 1916. <br />
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John Lawrence may today be an almost completely obscure figure, but he played a fascinating role in Japanese literary history. It's fairly well known that in early 1903 the great Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) - having been groomed for the position with two years study in London - took over as lecturer in English Literature at Tokyo University from the renowned Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). The appointment met with vociferous opposition of Hearn's students, who were hugely disappointed that the popular Irish writer was being forced out. <br />
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Despite being initially regarded with suspicion, Soseki soon turned things round and began to attract his own devotees at Tokyo University, even if his lectures were dauntingly analytical compared to Hearn's more artistic approach. Yet Soseki found his teaching burdens at the university increasingly onerous. He was also a lecturer at the First Higher School (a kind of proto-university and feed college for the super-elite Tokyo University): indeed his first wish had been to be a full professor at the First Higher College, but instead he was merely offered lectureships at The First Higher School and Tokyo University. <br />
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Soseki taught at Tokyo University alongside a foreign lecturer called Arthur Lloyd and, in a more minor capacity, a precocious literary scholar and poet called Ueda Bin, a Hearn protege brought in to quell the resentment at Hearn being released. The Japanese government's masterplan to replace Western scholars like Hearn with native talents like Soseki and Ueda Bin appeared to be working fine. <br />
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But soon everything started falling apart. For one thing, Soseki was increasingly turning against teaching and being an academic: in July 1906 he turned down a professorship at Kyoto University. Soseki wanted to be his own man and speak with his own voice and began pouring out creative works. He wanted out of Tokyo University, but since Soseki had been sent as a government paid scholar to England for two years, he felt rather guilty to just abandon his position. But if some distinguished foreign scholar on a full professorship was to come in to take his place...<br />
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At this point, the faculty decided to appoint John Lawrence, an associate of Professor Ker at University College, London, an expert on Medieval Lecture whose lectures Soseki had attended while in London in 1901 (Soseki did not think much of them). When Lawrence arrived in Tokyo in September 1906, he was 55 years old and spoke no Japanese. He had a wandering academic career that had seen him study and work in Paris, Berlin and Prague. He was taking over teaching duties from the greatest intellect of modern Japan: Soseki formally quit in February 1907. <br />
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More than that, Soseki's colleague Ueda Bin also quit in November of 1907 to go and study in Europe. The English faculty suddenly had no Japanese teachers at all and the chief responsibility for teaching lay with Japan-rookie, John Lawrence. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPuyUYDEMA0TVKw6fuOLukbs7VdEu5M8rtO3-tQe4gd1c-QnXhGrG3MDTF4WIFY5TLtU2O0s7fPvsa9VBr10LSGqZC4pcGqDStqU5FCldyqdhvntim79jYJA8HmDva2f8WyTFQMKHWzos/s1600/sanshiro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPuyUYDEMA0TVKw6fuOLukbs7VdEu5M8rtO3-tQe4gd1c-QnXhGrG3MDTF4WIFY5TLtU2O0s7fPvsa9VBr10LSGqZC4pcGqDStqU5FCldyqdhvntim79jYJA8HmDva2f8WyTFQMKHWzos/s400/sanshiro.jpg" width="139" height="400" /></a></div>Just to add to the mayhem, it turned out that John Lawrence wasn't actually any good at literary criticism, indeed didn't do criticism at all. Lawrence belonged to the "old school" who believed that teaching about literary works consisted not in analyzing them with a fresh eye, but rather in drowning oneself in the minutiae of linguistic and historical details. (I think we all know a few scholars like that today...)<br />
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If you enter the world of Soseki's 1908 novel "Sanshiro" (pictured left), in which a student from Kyushu comes to Tokyo University to study English literature, there are clear references both to the fuss surrounding Soseki taking over from Hearn against student protest a few years earlier, and to the current style of classes under John Lawrence. Soseki indeed parodies Lawrence in a description of a class in which Sanshiro learns the Anglo-Saxon etymology of the word "answer". <br />
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Lawrence's speciality was such matters as Gothic (an extinct Germanic language) and Icelandic. There is a hilarious account in Nogami Toyoichiro's novel "Mina" of a character based upon him reading a Robbie Burns poem with his students and being asked what the Scots word "stroan't" meant. To his mortification, Lawrence had to explain it meant "urinated". <br />
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Unlike Hearn and Soseki, Lawrence published very little, but although he was not particularly admired by his undergraduate students, he was free of the occasionally abrasive personalities of Hearn and Soseki, whose creative impulses were at odds with the strictures of academia. Lawrence by contrast was perfectly suited to university life. He introduced seminars to the English Faculty, though students were required to pass exams to participate in them and only the most linguistically gifted students were accepted into his inner circle. But he would be treasured by a generation of top flight scholars of English literature, such as Saito Takeshi, who would go on to dominate critical studies over the following half century. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHNxGeTApBUqMdRBRN7Psao7eL-vPK_19RN9IVb_272jWCQDR4jjQM7fB4MjLm5742JCem13p5rk29tMWB4qtE5NXVuBBkjizq2XAGURHkwJz351S0w2NKrsbFsxIK2_6uMkEP2HkKiw/s1600/Kume_Matsuoka_Akutagawa_Naruse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHNxGeTApBUqMdRBRN7Psao7eL-vPK_19RN9IVb_272jWCQDR4jjQM7fB4MjLm5742JCem13p5rk29tMWB4qtE5NXVuBBkjizq2XAGURHkwJz351S0w2NKrsbFsxIK2_6uMkEP2HkKiw/s320/Kume_Matsuoka_Akutagawa_Naruse.jpg" width="320" height="227" /></a></div>The genius short story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke and playwright Kume Masao - two of Soseki's closest later disciples - were also graduates of the department under Lawrence. They are pictured here, Kume left and Akutagawa second right, alongside their fellow Tokyo University students future novelist Matsuoka Yuzuru second left - who went on to marry Soseki's eldest daughter - and the future writer Naruse Seiichi on the right. The four of them founded a literary magazine, "Shin-shicho" (" A New Trend of Thought") together.<br />
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The calibre of the teaching staff at the English Literature department of Tokyo University - boasting figures like Hearn, Soseki and Ueda Bin - was unsurpassed anywhere in the world. It was an extraordinary poisoned chalice for John Lawrence to be asked to take over from such huge talents. <br />
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Touching as it is that Tokyo University still tend the graves of their former professors, I can't help thinking the university should take greater pride in its exceptional literary heritage. Might I suggest it sometime run a symposium when it both celebrates and explores the story of English literature at Tokyo University and how it transformed the literature of modern Japan? Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-35969958529417210132017-02-20T14:43:00.000+00:002017-02-20T14:47:07.245+00:00Natsume Soseki: Literary Revolutionary or "Ego" Maniac? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQBywWBIueFr2cMMDyBQHWw5WPsHxFgffIJ626KtRcMa5CjC9R2oakKnXzYdHXWntUusG3N7gb66ONyI4E9tx26nwuqQ9GUXdQ-URRYL-O_yhoDyjfK7bTpNvAxLT2yS-17e-vpeXbib8/s1600/Soseki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQBywWBIueFr2cMMDyBQHWw5WPsHxFgffIJ626KtRcMa5CjC9R2oakKnXzYdHXWntUusG3N7gb66ONyI4E9tx26nwuqQ9GUXdQ-URRYL-O_yhoDyjfK7bTpNvAxLT2yS-17e-vpeXbib8/s400/Soseki.jpg" width="272" height="400" /></a></div><br />
I've noticed I am sometimes cited in articles about the great Japanese author Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) - particularly in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth. Last month there was an article about the Soseki android which quoted me in connection with Soseki's experiences in London and last week Nippon.com ran a lengthy feature and I was referred to as a proponent of Soseki on the world stage.<br />
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It's always nice to get a mention in these pieces, but I have to slightly shake my head at the way, in pieces originally written in Japanese, all the tropes about Soseki being a writer obsessed with "egoism" and striving to transcend "self-centredness" in his final works are often repeated. <br />
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The article on Nippon.com about Soseki ("Japan's Foremost Modern Novelist") - translated from Japanese into English, French, Russian and Spanish (there have been 1800 shares in Spanish alone) - firmly tells you that he was an author obsessed with "egoism". What it should tell you is that the Japanese - struggling with their Confucian traditions - are fascinated with the subject of "egoism" and project their own obsessions onto their "readings" of Soseki. <br />
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What "egoism" means in this context is that Soseki is treated as the embodiment of traditional self-sacrificing Japanese values attempting to come to terms with the rampant individualism of Europe and America whose influence was sweeping across Japan in the early 20th century. Soseki in other words is meant to offer a quintessentially agonized "Japanese" response to "Western" self-centred modernity. <br />
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I used to regard this "reading" of Soseki as the hopelessly antiquated perspective of conservative, unimaginative commentators from 50 years ago, bolstered by bureaucrats at the Japanese Ministry of Education determined to foist their old-fashioned Confucian values on the populace at all costs. <br />
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In the youthful enthusiasm of my thirties, I was determined to show how banal such ideas were. Soseki was in fact, I fervently argued, a literary revolutionary and a radical - his literary genius lay in the fact that he synthesized the cutting edge psychological ideas of William James with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the satire of Swift and Sterne. He was fascinated by the connections between dream, memory and our perception of the present; between the ways visual art and literature interconnect; he wished to apply the latest scientific and sociological theories to literature. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiax0STVguV0K5aQqHbW7byFC3hzDo48tW0hZIlwQxxpbwZqdurCR_Z6I2JeY7K8LsNx1ZDgZ3N9f1e1H6E-OaRuxVNoTSvqDUeCsVQmlnGAmLw5s6DVWlSRcen0eiLZ5O-bQBtQpbnIeM/s1600/nihonjinga.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiax0STVguV0K5aQqHbW7byFC3hzDo48tW0hZIlwQxxpbwZqdurCR_Z6I2JeY7K8LsNx1ZDgZ3N9f1e1H6E-OaRuxVNoTSvqDUeCsVQmlnGAmLw5s6DVWlSRcen0eiLZ5O-bQBtQpbnIeM/s200/nihonjinga.jpg" width="144" height="200" /></a></div>I even published a couple of books in Japanese, "The Natsume Soseki the Japanese Don't Know" (pictured right) and "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" to show that the prevailing Japanese notions of Soseki being obsessed with "egoism" and "self-centredness" were nonsense. And, predictably, they sank almost without trace... At about the same time, the Korean-Japanese writer Kang Sang-jung published a book about Soseki called "The Power of Wavering". It sold over a million copies. Its theme? Soseki was a writer obsessed with egoism...<br />
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These days, older and wiser, rather than seeing the whole "Soseki and egoism" trope as a nefarious plot of the conservative establishment, I simply recognize it as something which has deep appeal in Japan.<br />
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Soseki was a highly intellectual writer, hugely well-read and channelling diverse Western influences as well as numerous Japanese and Chinese influences (rakugo comic monologues, Noh theatre, haiku and Chinese poetry among them). In Japan his career is usually described as having two movements: a "humorous" early phase (1904-1908) that encompassed comedies such as "Botchan" and "I am a Cat"; and a second "serious" phase from 1909 to 1916 which covers his supposed "egoism" obsession culminating in such works as "The Wayfarer" and "Kokoro". <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMc8D3OssWl__AA0drC-QgTutazMGNSaHZ0Q1U2tiybUAgy7-YiI_z-2SBAb3fJ9nkAgNbJGyLPd7xe7tXtRTooVdwgU-4MubZIGamjcx-bnQxNUSJnlibpx-QBZu6H60Mf4AtbgjwDqw/s1600/Natsume_Soseki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMc8D3OssWl__AA0drC-QgTutazMGNSaHZ0Q1U2tiybUAgy7-YiI_z-2SBAb3fJ9nkAgNbJGyLPd7xe7tXtRTooVdwgU-4MubZIGamjcx-bnQxNUSJnlibpx-QBZu6H60Mf4AtbgjwDqw/s400/Natsume_Soseki.jpg" width="281" height="400" /></a></div>In fact, looked at another way, the chief characteristic of Soseki's early phase is not so much "humour" as an obsessive contemplation of the connections between visual and literary art; and the chief characteristic of the second phase is a wrestling with German philosophical ideas. But for the general readership in Japan - largely unfamiliar with the mostly British art and German philosophy that Soseki was contemplating - it's not surprising that those works become "read" in an entirely different fashion. <br />
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"Egoism" is a subject of keen interest in Japan, particularly when they think of the Meiji era, when Japan was opening itself up to Western influences. In the previous Edo period, the age of the "samurai" (literally, "one who serves"), the ideal had been to give yourself up in devotion to your feudal lord. But in the social revolution of the Meiji era (1868-1912), completely new Westernized concepts of "self" were created. Soseki has become enshrined in Japan as the author who contemplates the perils of this modern "egoism". <br />
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Naturally, as a man of the Meiji era, Soseki does indeed, on occasion, touch upon these subjects such as in his public talk "My Individualism" (1914). But in most of his novels "egoism" is no more an accurate description of his subject than applying it pointlessly to any author would be (Is "Hamlet" a study in "egoism"? Is "Moby Dick"? Or "Don Quixote"?) <br />
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My point here is not to argue the toss about a specific interpretation of Soseki but to show how certain cultures perceive particular writers in often bizarrely fixed terms. We are I think always aware that if we read a writer in translation then we miss many of the nuances and flavour of the original, and that is surely true. But we also tend to think that the nation from which a writer has sprung is likely to have far greater insight into him or her than amateurish interlopers from overseas. Yet the reality is that when you read the critical "readings" of the Japanese on Soseki - while they are superlative on untangling Japanese influences - they often throw far more light on the nature of the Japanese themselves than they actually offer insight on Soseki. <br />
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When I published my books in Japanese on Soseki, I would be amused to read online discussions along the lines of "Can foreigners actually understand Soseki?" The acute irony is that a writer like Soseki - steeped in so many ways in Western culture and philosophical thought - is one that the Japanese themselves have the greatest difficulty in fully understanding. <br />
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But the broader point is to always bear in mind that national perceptions of authors are necessarily limited. Shakespeare has had a far more thrilling and diverse career in Germany, Japan and countries around the world than he has ever had in Britain. One of the most unfortunate tendencies of recent years (perhaps under the fear of "cultural appropriation") is that foreign authors are often introduced in stilted introductions by someone from the culture from which they sprang. Such notions - sincere in intention - are deeply mistaken. <br />
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By all means aspire to read authors in their native tongues and listen to what the critical consensus on them in their homeland is. But also do not forget to apply the utmost scepticism to such "readings". <br />
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In this anniversary year, there have been a variety of events, writing competitions and newspaper features which aspire to project Soseki as a "world author". Yet too often this "world-wide projection" is perceived in terms of translation into foreign languages and comparison of Soseki with other great world writers as a point of national pride. A far harder concept for the Japanese to grasp is to understand how their traditional readings of Soseki might be, well, mis-readings. The "globalization" of an author consists not just in exporting indigenous critical ideas, but in the homeland having the courage to revise their own traditions and let go of the concept of "ownership" of even their most-beloved national author. <br />
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Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-77789287281945733292017-02-16T13:25:00.000+00:002019-02-03T15:25:06.212+00:00The Pre-Raphaelite Dreams of L S Lowry <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvqMbRYRrz_t8hWOAunrqwT742dHwx90tWkMpW-FFqPxDR0O-6v5X3ZEGMDPF6rlZGa7pG68_CkhAwdNkDr4hKmMs3q57jWsJ45N6Cc1ouViS9nT-anVCWKF68QDVx4cy18-frvOp-bQ0/s1600/Going_to_Work_-_L_S_Lowry.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvqMbRYRrz_t8hWOAunrqwT742dHwx90tWkMpW-FFqPxDR0O-6v5X3ZEGMDPF6rlZGa7pG68_CkhAwdNkDr4hKmMs3q57jWsJ45N6Cc1ouViS9nT-anVCWKF68QDVx4cy18-frvOp-bQ0/s400/Going_to_Work_-_L_S_Lowry.png" width="400" height="299" /></a></div><br />
I'm a fan of the Mancunian painter L S Lowry (1887-1976) - famous for his depiction of grim, industrial scenes inhabited by matchstalk-like, working class figures ("Going to Work" (1943) pictured above, Common Domain) - and quite often take visitors to the Lowry Art Gallery in Salford. I've consequently walked through the exhibition of Lowry's works, and sat through the film of Lowry's life, on many occasions. <br />
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Yet there are many conundrums about Lowry which continue to rattle around my mind. One of these is the fact that Lowry - who worked as a rent collector, lived with his mother and had throughout his life no sexual relationships - used to keep on his bedroom wall the luscious painting "Proserpine" (1873-77, pictured below, Common Domain), a portrait of voluptuous Jane Morris, by Rossetti. On the surface, it would seem that Lowry's art - unflinching about ugliness and unadorned - was a rejection of everything that the work of the Pre-Raphaelites - sumptuous, unworldly and romantic - stood for. Yet Lowry deeply loved that art. <br />
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It's hard to exaggerate how besotted Lowry was with the Pre-Raphaelites. When he acquired wealth in the latter part of his life in the 1950s and 1960s, Lowry began buying Rossetti originals and eventually owned twelve of them, which adorned the living room, stairs and bedroom of his home. (A version of "Pandora" he owned sold long after his death for £2.6 million.) He also founded and became president in 1966 of the exclusive Rossetti Society: members were required to own a Rossetti. <br />
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We tend to think of "influence" as meaning either a conscious imitation of another's work or an equally strong reaction to it. Yet it is hard to untangle the impact of the beautiful world of the Pre-Raphaelites in the grim visions of L S Lowry. Was it that he kept this world of beauty and longed-for sexual loveliness as a treasure in his inner heart while painting a bleak reality that was the exact opposite? Rather than seeing his treasuring of Rossetti as an inner contradiction, were these paintings talismanic props that allowed him to be so unromantic and unflinching in his own work? <br />
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But the other week by chance my 7-year-old daughter participated in a school assembly about Lowry which presented a fact which was new to me and made me sit up. Lowry had not, as I carelessly assumed, grown up in the working class areas that he later painted, but in the declining, still-beautiful suburb of Victoria Park in Manchester, filled with splendid Victorian mansions. (Lowry himself lived in modest circumstances amongst them). I was startled to discover that Lowry had grown up only about 200 metres from where my own office is located. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMYyy_Xqic9OPfVAL6GWWF7U44mjvCyQ1vVmhAAZOYZnscqE5hzih7-WzClwhnf1po6RihgKDN-H4sUm5dV8YIZSl4uoF2dFhuwt6PcbKRJXM2jiex5My1tRT6j8lLGc4972kPxcrcL_g/s1600/Charles-Halle-Ford-Madox-Brown-House-Victoria-Park-Manchester.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMYyy_Xqic9OPfVAL6GWWF7U44mjvCyQ1vVmhAAZOYZnscqE5hzih7-WzClwhnf1po6RihgKDN-H4sUm5dV8YIZSl4uoF2dFhuwt6PcbKRJXM2jiex5My1tRT6j8lLGc4972kPxcrcL_g/s320/Charles-Halle-Ford-Madox-Brown-House-Victoria-Park-Manchester.JPG" width="320" height="224" /></a></div>On this same street lived for a period (1883-87) the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, a painter who impinged on Lowry's consciousness above all others. Lowry claimed that as a child of five he had been taken to see Brown working on the Manchester Murals in Manchester Town Hall and he always claimed Brown as the painter he most admired. (Lowry, it should be pointed out, had a wide and deep interest in art history, was very knowledgeable about French Impressionism having been tutored by Pierre Adolphe Valette, but also owned the works of contemporary artists like Lucian Freud and Jacob Epstein, and admired Magritte.) <br />
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Lowry must have walked past most days Brown's former dwelling, the once-handsome Addison Terrace (pictured above, Wikicommons), and later hung in his own home a copy of Brown's famous painting "Work" (pictured below, one of the originals is in Manchester Art Gallery).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwrJaB1EtcYKNlmiUl5lTxUPDj2JLiQ2V3vl7wovuUeGw4jB_RIvorX-ZhSNHsZQmawBibadbaN1YfLfqsOGrmU7tV41ebg91pWovkqMEf3I9zfZUONKttmvvV9jtxS5M7H9Dcl_Tuq0/s1600/Ford_Madox_Brown_-_Work_-_Bright.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwrJaB1EtcYKNlmiUl5lTxUPDj2JLiQ2V3vl7wovuUeGw4jB_RIvorX-ZhSNHsZQmawBibadbaN1YfLfqsOGrmU7tV41ebg91pWovkqMEf3I9zfZUONKttmvvV9jtxS5M7H9Dcl_Tuq0/s400/Ford_Madox_Brown_-_Work_-_Bright.jpg" width="400" height="284" /></a></div><br />
The imaginative universe of Lowry's youth was therefore informed by these Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose works were so esteemed at the end of the Victorian period and which filled the city's art gallery. The Pre-Raphaelites would later be bitterly attacked and derided for living in an ivory tower and blinding themselves to the industrial world around them, preferring to live in a medieval idyll. But more reasonably considered, the Pre-Raphaelites wished to create a counterpoint of beauty to what the poet Blake famously described as the "dark, satanic mills". <br />
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Manchester Art Gallery was a rapturous, beautiful inner sanctum that transported you away from vistas of Dickensian bleakness and Lowry carried this influence into his later life and recreated this balance, between the beauty of the paintings on his walls and the bleakness of the canvases in his studio, within his own home. <br />
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But that does not I think quite explain the enduring influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on L S Lowry. As a young man Lowry had himself attempted to draw pretty pictures of some of Manchester's grand buildings. He must have felt considerably intimidated by the technical skill of beloved masters like Ford Madox Brown and it was only when he turned to painting industrial scenes that he finally found his own "voice". <br />
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The fact that Lowry kept within his own home Brown's painting "Work" - a rare depiction of working class labourers in the aesthetic dreams of the Pre-Raphaelites - shows that "influence" is most properly understood not so much in terms of conscious imitation or rejection, but rather in finding the seeds in something we love which will allow our own unique talent to germinate and flourish. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-69949404427023167892017-02-13T20:00:00.000+00:002017-02-14T08:15:12.968+00:00Walls, Guns and Gates: How the US and Japan Construct Their Different Senses of "Homeland Security" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdAbkWbFNICNzka5SUb1pQ9H_feufKhuMAq9SXFH1CRdR4Z2RVJO5UEjmcEyR4kWAscRpqbBdqt_nVhwVwrTZbccbIYfEPPYz4u0EA_-7D4GTObKiD3o-7ZebPpY94SLZF0wDBh4QOhb4/s1600/Wyatt_Earp_gun_Red_Dog_Juneau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdAbkWbFNICNzka5SUb1pQ9H_feufKhuMAq9SXFH1CRdR4Z2RVJO5UEjmcEyR4kWAscRpqbBdqt_nVhwVwrTZbccbIYfEPPYz4u0EA_-7D4GTObKiD3o-7ZebPpY94SLZF0wDBh4QOhb4/s400/Wyatt_Earp_gun_Red_Dog_Juneau.jpg" width="400" height="305" /></a></div><br />
You may have noticed that there has been an awful lot of comment of late about the coast-to-coast wall the new American president is planning on building along the Mexican border. Just about anyone who has ever had a wall has weighed in with their warnings: we have heard about how ineffective the Great Wall of China was, how painfully divisive the Berlin Wall. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc8_zmX6qjSpcUzwDarctMP4YULMr6ouTt5Ck1K56nj9MQjfUL_qbbsWr9WRuUrT92P4ttgIjQjX9eRvxGKmxlcqc2nV_GDpyyZ_24VxydXFnrJq1S23RqNAoI6qhxiCOU2djVCTzU9DY/s1600/Hadrian%2527s_Wall_west_of_Housesteads_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc8_zmX6qjSpcUzwDarctMP4YULMr6ouTt5Ck1K56nj9MQjfUL_qbbsWr9WRuUrT92P4ttgIjQjX9eRvxGKmxlcqc2nV_GDpyyZ_24VxydXFnrJq1S23RqNAoI6qhxiCOU2djVCTzU9DY/s320/Hadrian%2527s_Wall_west_of_Housesteads_3.jpg" width="320" height="213" /></a></div>If there are walls that invites meaningful comparison, then it is perhaps the walls (from England to North Africa) the emperor Hadrian constructed around the Roman empire in the 2nd century. Concerned that the empire's boundaries were ill-defined and porous and that the empire risked being dangerously over-stretched, Hadrian decided to shore up its boundary. <br />
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Most historians agree that he did a good job of helping to ensure the empire flourished for another century or so, though in end the "walls" were to sow the seeds of ultimate downfall. As I was often reminded as a child, "There is no such thing as staying still: if you are not going forward, you are going back." If the empire had committed itself to not expanding any further, it was only a matter of time until it began to contract and fall apart. <br />
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In the case of America, the country has been defined by its seemingly limitless expansion and the ability to absorb and assimilate huge numbers of immigrants. The frontier was constantly being pushed back from the Appalachians to California, and to Hawaii, Alaska and beyond. When they ran out of land, in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, they headed into space. <br />
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But now, under President Trump, America is pulling back from relentless expansion to "make itself great again". Like the Roman Empire under Hadrian, such a policy might well shore things up for decades to come, but ultimately it will sow the seeds of decline. If you are not going forward...<br />
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The point about the Mexican border wall however is not so much what the wall will practically achieve, but how it will affect the psyche both of Americans and the rest of the world. It will be a symbol of the limits of American power as well as an exclusionary snub at those placed on the other side of it, a powerful cultural divider between WASPish North America and Hispanic Central America (picture below of current border between San Diego, left, and Tijuana, right). <br />
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You will doubtless have heard many counter-arguments why the wall will not work: immigrants will arrive in the US in planes that fly over it or else the circulation of workers from Mexico back and forwards will cease causing Mexican workers to actually stay in the US - so the wall will be counter-productive. <br />
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But such arguments fail to take into consideration the psychological impact of the wall. It sends out a very clear message that the US strongly wishes to keep out illegal immigrants, indeed is less inclined to immigration at all. In that sense - regardless of whether you think that immigration is a good or bad thing - the wall will surely have an impact.<br />
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The ultimate psychological cause of the demand to build a wall however has nothing to do with Mexican immigration at all - it is part of a displaced psychological response, responding to a desire to make Americans feel safe. Ever since 9-11, Americans feel vulnerable to foreign threats on their home soil, something they had hardly felt in the previous two centuries. After thousands died in horror in New York - constantly replayed and analysed on television - a nagging fear that something like this might happen again seeped into the national psyche. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioS8mRlPfs5F0jJ8LlsjUiNvcDxvJDksRtIucbYS60lYoSF1yGSqQ7r0ZjdQuxYKvIr2fRmj6IyAwT5umoIFdg1RocauDMctN2CbamSNqwW-z9LuqvUrB4wgoKNT7jLgDcGY3L85yNIa8/s1600/Gun+shop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioS8mRlPfs5F0jJ8LlsjUiNvcDxvJDksRtIucbYS60lYoSF1yGSqQ7r0ZjdQuxYKvIr2fRmj6IyAwT5umoIFdg1RocauDMctN2CbamSNqwW-z9LuqvUrB4wgoKNT7jLgDcGY3L85yNIa8/s320/Gun+shop.jpg" width="320" height="183" /></a></div>There are overwhelming statistics - including from that leading thinker Kim Kardashian - showing irrefutably that many thousands die each year from American-on-American gun crime while deaths from foreign terrorists can usually be counted on your fingers. If you wish to make America safer, so the undeniable logic runs, you reform the US's insane gun laws. <br />
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But such arguments do not address the deep-seated psychological needs of those Americans who would feel "safer" with a large wall along their southern border and a gun to protect themselves in their glove box. No amount of blathering about statistics is going to change that psychology, which is rooted in the national psyche. <br />
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In the debate in the US about gun laws, the importance of the right to bear arms as enshrined in the constitution (an embodiment of resistance to the British) is constantly repeated, but perhaps more important in the national psyche is the connection between the open frontier, an endless expanse filled with unknowable threats from native Americans, outlaws and wild animals, and the right to bear arms. <br />
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If Americans begin to feel that the "endless frontier" has been closed off will they gradually come to relinquish their dependence on guns as well? I'm not so sure. Once concepts such as these become deeply engrained in a culture, it can sometimes take centuries to remove them, no matter that the logical need for them has long since disappeared. The Americans are no more peculiar in their dependence on guns than other nations are on their own indigenous means of how to feel "safe". Let me give you an example of this: Japan. <br />
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Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, with miraculously low levels of crime and no guns whatsoever. Japan indeed is often paraded - for example by Carl Sagan back in the 1980s in his ahistorical mystic mush "Cosmos" - as a land where people actively renounced the gun in the 17th century. That's kinda right, Carl, because guns made Japan's rulers feel insecure to the threat of insurrection. But what did they bring in instead? A system of "gates". And the gate system still rules Japanese psychology to this day. <br />
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A few weeks ago I gave a lecture at a college in Tokyo and stayed for a few days. The college has a compact and very pretty campus and everybody was kind and helpful to me. But upon arriving I had to fill in a form detailing what I would be doing each day. Curfew I was told - when I had to be back inside the campus gates - was 8.30pm. <br />
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When I strolled down to the gate on the first day, a very flustered guard fretted about which gate I had entered from. Trying to shake her off I remarked I was just going for a little stroll to the train station whereupon the alarmed official enquired exactly how long I was going to be. It's impossible to imagine this kind of intrusiveness in the "Land of the Free". <br />
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An awful lot of people were involved in monitoring me from office assistants to security guards. What exactly was it all for? <br />
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But there is something quintessentially Japanese about this obsession with monitoring and observing who and what comes through gates. Power was maintained in the Edo Period (1603-1868) by keeping the family members of feudal lords hostages in the capital and ensuring that no guns could be smuggled in. The gated barriers were an important means of inspecting whether hostages were attempting to escape and arms were coming in - a sure precursor of rebellion. (Edo Period checkpoint officials depicted below). <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Iur6AorBmhBrfPu-dTu1mWeLY0ACpeI99A1diJTlh6kMUjQ55_tLISU3vtefz9ApqbI5UsAynAhr2tElCJGISQROcwySLvq8lUwFExB35Yke1YIzxdXJJDXH6bmo1E5DdOeu4_VwxsI/s1600/sekisho+inspection.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Iur6AorBmhBrfPu-dTu1mWeLY0ACpeI99A1diJTlh6kMUjQ55_tLISU3vtefz9ApqbI5UsAynAhr2tElCJGISQROcwySLvq8lUwFExB35Yke1YIzxdXJJDXH6bmo1E5DdOeu4_VwxsI/s400/sekisho+inspection.jpg" width="400" height="267" /></a></div><br />
So, for centuries in Japan, gated barriers became a crucial means of exerting political power. Take, for example, the most famous of all Kabuki plays, Kanjincho (The Subscription List), where the entire drama centres on whether a group of rebels will be able to pass through a gated barrier as they flee north. The play is set at the end of the twelfth century, but during the Edo Period when the play was actually written, such gated barriers were in place the whole length of the country as a means of monitoring people and maintaining control.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih325qs4Qn6bS0gYAmMSEpWBtMKZFRN5tgsqDlo67i_vZNfVrmcpg1hZ1Gqf2Cmujkv5vwv2oCmIZra2OgO6kg0VUChyphenhyphen6f_jB1MNI7YEhqdDXehhZbtWXpwGcybH-s5R7LEy9cJrjNzYo/s1600/640px-San-mon_gate_in_Zenkoji_temple_at_Nagano_city_Japan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih325qs4Qn6bS0gYAmMSEpWBtMKZFRN5tgsqDlo67i_vZNfVrmcpg1hZ1Gqf2Cmujkv5vwv2oCmIZra2OgO6kg0VUChyphenhyphen6f_jB1MNI7YEhqdDXehhZbtWXpwGcybH-s5R7LEy9cJrjNzYo/s200/640px-San-mon_gate_in_Zenkoji_temple_at_Nagano_city_Japan.jpg" width="200" height="150" /></a></div>In Japan, there really is no escape from "gates" of one form or another. If you wish to turn your back on the vanities of the temporal world and enter instead the world of serenity afforded by religion, then you need to pass through, both literally and figuratively, the temple gate. <br />
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One of the great Zen classics, full of absurd riddles intended to show us the intrinsic absurdity of our existence, is called "The Gateless Gate" ("Mumonkan"), as if the book is striving towards the impossible - a world without gates - as unthinkable to the Japanese as a world without guns is unthinkable to the Americans. Indeed the Japanese obsession with gates spreads its tentacles to every aspect of Japanese culture. <br />
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The word for an introduction or primer on any subject is called a "nyumon" (literally "entering the gate") and if you know nothing about a subject then you are a "mongaikan" (literally "someone outside the gate", a layman). <br />
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So central is the word "gate" to Japanese thinking that at least 50 kanji pictograms incorporate it. Indeed there is even a film called "Gate of Flesh" ("Nikutai no Mon", 1964) implying that the world of sensuality has to be entered via a gate. The word "gate" lurks deep in the Japanese psyche. <br />
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Do you feel more comfortable living in a society where you have more personal freedom but counter-balance your sense of insecurity by carrying a gun or do you prefer no such risk but where there is far more intrusive monitoring of your daily activities, where you have to submit to the control of gate-keepers? <br />
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The real point is to understand how each society constructs its own particular sense of "safety" and to psychologically untangle it. Americans are not going to give up their guns and their wall because of statistical truths. People who constantly harp on about such things simply fail to have insight into human and national psychology. <br />
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By all means abandon the ruinously expensive plan for a wall and take the guns out of American life. But just realize that you are going to need to carefully put something back to preserve an important, albeit illogical sense of "safety" in the national psyche. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-80914531581155225172016-11-13T01:44:00.000+00:002016-11-13T01:44:17.953+00:00Nietzsche, Humour and the Great War <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9njMtrbBeWtjKV3nJvrXbIolMJ4Iyi9ezxHXeowf3WES1Yrhh3XBZMAWZQVwM18a6wCIrlKmz53oFSTV7Q9gg8qSFQ-dh31ab5YCGHwyonzAt7K-ZP3sIy6KoyNMbaRKPhyA07BfO_rk/s1600/Tower+of+London+poppies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9njMtrbBeWtjKV3nJvrXbIolMJ4Iyi9ezxHXeowf3WES1Yrhh3XBZMAWZQVwM18a6wCIrlKmz53oFSTV7Q9gg8qSFQ-dh31ab5YCGHwyonzAt7K-ZP3sIy6KoyNMbaRKPhyA07BfO_rk/s400/Tower+of+London+poppies.jpg" width="400" height="203" /></a></div><br />
Yesterday, on the anniversary of Armistice Day, I like so many others in the UK observed two minutes of silence at precisely 11am in memory of all those who lost their lives in the wars. This coming together as a nation in a moment of intense solemnity to remember their sacrifice seems fitting, the least we could do. But is there perhaps a very different way of ‘remembering’ what happened in those wars and what meaning this should impart to our modern lives? <br />
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When I was a child, I recall casting my eyes around the volumes of my school library and there looming large and ominous before me was a series called The Causes of the Great War. I can’t remember how many volumes there were – perhaps a dozen or so – and opening them one would discover hundreds of pages on the European alliances of the nineteenth century, the imperial rivalries over Africa, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the infringement of Belgium neutrality. Unfurling in front of me in black ink and on yellowing pages were the causes of the First World War in all its bewildering complexity. <br />
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I asked my grandmother, who was born in 1898, whether she could remember the war breaking out. My grandmother had been born in Northern Ireland, left school at age 9 and by the age of 16 was working in a mill in a small border town. I asked what the local people at the time said was the cause of the war. ‘The King and the Kaiser had fallen out over land’ was her compact reply. <br />
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There was in that sentence a very Irish wisdom, as if Irish farmers had grasped the reins of world politics. Yet thinking about those ten words in comparison to all the millions upon millions of erudite words in the library, I was inclined to think that my grandmother’s answer grasped the nettle of the problem: The King and the Kaiser had fallen out over land. <br />
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These days I incline towards a more radical view. I think the war was partly caused by a lack of humour in both the Germans and the British and an acute failure to understand some profound insights into the human condition. I think, for example, that one reason the war broke out was because the peoples of Europe failed to get the jokes of that much maligned and misunderstood philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (pictured below). <br />
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It’s of course not possible that one philosopher can, on his own, move history. And yet we have all heard how Nietzsche’s ideas of the Superman were later twisted by the Nazis and turned into a doctrine of a master race. But even before the rise of the Nazis, Nietzsche was being blamed for all of Germany’s ills. At the time of the First World War, for example, a host of books in Britain declaimed him for a philosophy of maniacal selfishness that led the German people to think that they could trample on their neighbours with impunity. <br />
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All this would have been abhorrent to Nietzsche himself. He was the ultimate individualist; his whole philosophy was concerned with encouraging people to forge their own unique identity. The idea of forming people into regiments acting in complete obedience to a Kaiser was contrary to the spirit of everything Nietzsche ever wrote. And far from thinking that the Germans were superior, Nietzsche once acidly remarked that just dining next to one of his fellow countrymen was enough to give him indigestion.<br />
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So why was Nietzsche so misunderstood? And why did he keep receiving the blame for the disasters of the twentieth century, starting with the First World War? <br />
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One reason – as is reasonably well known – is that the all-pervasive nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mutated with Nietzsche’s philosophy and produced a Frankenstein’s monster. Nietzsche’s philosophy of assertion of will was all about emancipation of the individual, but when those ideas were transferred to the nation itself, they became the very opposite of everything Nietzsche intended. <br />
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Nietzsche’s philosophy is essentially a sensible guide to how to live your life. Be strong, he is saying, don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed with pity or you’ll never get anything done in life. Yet when transformed to a national level it very quickly degenerated into a philosophy of hate that was totally opposed to everything that Nietzsche had preached. It was used as a convenient propaganda tool by the British against the Germans, claiming that here was a country that was trying to be stronger than its neighbours and imposing its will upon them and always expanding its borders. <br />
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But I said that one cause of the First World War was a failure to understand Nietzsche’s jokes. How so? We don’t I think in the English speaking world appreciate how marvellously humorous so much of Nietzsche’s writing is. There is the image of the forbidding German philosopher with his enormous moustache and his deep, dark ponderings on the nature of existence, his mind full of Sturm und Drang and Wagnerian overtures. Yet in reality, Nietzsche was a great comic writer. Not perhaps laugh out loud funny, more along the lines of comic depths that slowly sink in. One problem is that much of the humour simply doesn’t translate into foreign languages leaving the English reader to take Nietzsche’s ideas - brilliant as many of them are – a bit too literally. <br />
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Take for example the famous concept of the Superman, the so-called higher man. In German the term is Ubermensch, but what you might not know is that this is a bit of a joke on Nietzsche’s behalf. One of the constant themes in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra is that people should always be striving to become better, more accomplished people in life. Zarathustra was written in the 1880s and being a man of the Victorian age, Nietzsche was surrounded by lots of starch-collared professors and other dignitaries full of pompous pride about their achievements, who liked to cling to their titles and station in life. We are all too familiar with this type of person in the world today, people blowing their own little trumpet. <br />
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The ‘uber’ in ubermensch did not come from any idea of a master race controlling subjugated, weaker men and women; the ‘uber’ is wordplay, a pun on the German word for crossing over – ‘ubergehen’. The ‘ubermensch’ is the person who is always trying to cross over to the other side, evolve, improve himself. That is the higher person whom we should try and emulate. It’s a pun, a bit of amusing wordplay, not a reference to some Germanic master-race. That this little witticism should have been twisted to produce misunderstandings that would lead humanity down the road to the Somme and Auschwitz is almost too disturbing to contemplate. <br />
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Another famous phrase coined by Nietzsche is ‘The Last Men’ or in German ‘Die letzten Menschen’. When you start reading about a world populated by ‘The Last Men’ at the end of Also Sprach Zarathustra you begin to think that you are reading a sci-fi fantasy describing an apocalyptic vision of the future where the only survivors of the human race are the scary ‘Last Men’. <br />
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But what Nietzsche is really saying is that ‘The Last Men’ are the opposite of the ‘Ubermensch’. The Ubermensch is always trying to improve herself, because she knows she can and should do better. However the ‘Last Men’ think they know everything there is to know, they’ve already reached the last stage of their development, they just want to sit back on their laurels and see things tick over the way they always have. We all know people like this – people who won’t try anything new because they fear to fail, who are full of arrogance about their own achievements. They are ‘the last men’. <br />
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But where’s the joke? I didn’t get it for a long time. Then in a minor attempt at ubermensch behaviour, I went to brush up my schoolboy German at a night class. We were listening to a taped recording of one of those impossibly unrealistic conversations between a Herr and Frau Muller when I suddenly heard one of the voices say ‘Das ist das Letzte!’ Literally, ‘That is the last one!’ I asked the teacher what the phrase meant. Apparently it is an idiom meaning ‘That’s the pits! That’s as low as it gets!’ So finally I understood Nietzsche’s joke. The last men were the pits because they think they know it all and have nowhere else to go.<br />
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All of Nietzsche’s writings are littered with such wordplay and much of it is impossible to translate. But there are many other central ideas, whose humour is misunderstood even when there is no barrier of translation. Take for example the famous line ‘the Death of God’. If you were talking about any other philosopher before Nietzsche they would not be writing of the ‘Death of God’ but of the ‘non-existence of God’. Yet the ‘Death of God’ has a quite different meaning. Non-existence is a dry observation of empirical reality. The ‘Death of God’ is an intrinsically humorous, satirical comment on the death of a supposedly ‘immortal’ being. Such a being used to ‘live’ in the beliefs of the religiously minded, but now science and the Theory of Evolution has bumped him off. It’s humour, but the phrase also tells you that the exterior world is a construct of your own mind. <br />
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You might think that what I am saying here is that Nietzsche expressed his ideas in a humorous fashion, but actually I wish to say something very different: for Nietzsche, humour was intrinsic and essential to the idea itself. If you take humour away from the idea – as countless academics and intellectuals have done when discussing Nietzsche in arch solemnity – you have misunderstood the idea itself. <br />
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Many philosophers, like Bertrand Russell who suffered from the delusion that the world could be grasped through logic and rationalism, dismissed Nietzsche because he wrote in such a way. But actually Nietzsche is the greatest of all philosophers because he grasped a profound truth: the human condition is an intrinsically humorous one. To get to the heart of humanity you have to express that humour. Nietzsche here reaches the same conclusion as Zen philosophy that saw humour – expressed in riddles and comic drawings – as the best means of getting to the very heart of what it meant to be human. <br />
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Already by the time of the First World War, Nietzschean thought was perceived in Britain as being the brutal, egomaniacal engine behind German militaristic expansion. Marshalled against it was supposed to be the free alliance of the nations conjoined in the British empire, whose soldiers were, until 1916 at least, all volunteers pitted against the German conscript army. <br />
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Yet the reality is that a familiarity with Nietzsche’s writings would have immediately revealed that Nietzsche had no time at all for nationalism and militarism. The problem was that his writings were mostly being read by exactly the kind of smug ideologues that he loathed. <br />
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In their propaganda war against the Germans the British needed an ‘axis of evil’ to make as a target and with it Nietzsche and his concept of the ‘ubermensch’ was portrayed as fuelling a belief in German superiority. His talk of the ‘last men’ meanwhile was portrayed as a dark threat to wipe out existing civilization and leave it as rubble. He became known as the man who thought of the ‘master-race’. It was almost as if there was a deliberate desire on the part of the British to misunderstand individuals like Nietzsche and through him to vilify the German threat. <br />
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And the ultimately irony is that by misrepresenting Nietzsche’s ideas in this way and using it as a propaganda tool against the Germans, the Nazis eventually started believing the twisted misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s ideas and believing that they truly were the ‘master-race’. <br />
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The disastrous twinning of nationalism with Nietzsche’s individualistic philosophy is generally understood, but equally important was the way in which humour was stripped from Nietzsche’s ideas and imported into the zeitgeist in grim seriousness. A widespread belief in the solemn destiny of the nation was a crucial part of the cocktail of ideas that fuelled the outbreak of war. Ironically today, when we ‘remember’ the wars, we abide by this obeisance to seriousness, solemnity and the nation: the very things that caused the wars in the first place. <br />
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But I think that if we wish to avoid war, we should remember what Nietzsche really had to say and recall his celebration of the individual, his advocating of permanent self-improvement, his love of life and belief in embracing danger and dangerous thought. But above all, we need to ‘remember’ his focus on the profoundly humorous heart of the human condition and never lose our own ability to perceive the intrinsic humour in the world around us. <br />
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I like Nietzsche’s jokes. And I find many of Nietzsche's ideas liberating. But had Nietzsche lived a little longer and seen the way his philosophy was twisted by nationalism and grim ‘seriousness’ – the very things he most despised - into the horrors of the twentieth century, I suspect he would have probably thought that the joke was very much on us. <br />
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Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-51810954380307337402016-10-30T12:22:00.001+00:002016-10-30T12:23:23.868+00:00The Finest Hour of Lady Smith of Badajoz<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiel_HjZN8GdGeb8ezGD_8epNkim9I-MkXu9xValSEj6q_6bimWrsIQLsM55eif5Efm1ddP6_pdiQdeNWmSdvCtY0y_W-Gx0hQpefxZKaMGp-MlBEAWGVuZwxrk7N_tj3dtVhCdjkggA0/s640/blogger-image-1106139486.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000"><br><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiel_HjZN8GdGeb8ezGD_8epNkim9I-MkXu9xValSEj6q_6bimWrsIQLsM55eif5Efm1ddP6_pdiQdeNWmSdvCtY0y_W-Gx0hQpefxZKaMGp-MlBEAWGVuZwxrk7N_tj3dtVhCdjkggA0/s640/blogger-image-1106139486.jpg" style="border: none;"></font></a></div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">For the last week I've been travelling in southern Spain on the trail of Harry Smith (1787-1860), a famous soldier statesman of the British Empire who was the most famous resident - marked by a blue plaque - of a property in the UK I am currently restoring. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Smith had a quite incredible life that took him on a breathless odyssey from campaigns in Uruguay and Spain to America, France, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa and India. He somehow managed to be the man offering a truce at the Battle of New Orleans to being a brigade commander at Waterloo, and distinguished himself in the Sikh Wars before ruling Cape Colony. He even seems to have been one of only 40 men who broke into the White House during 1814 and ate President Madison's dinner (roasted meats and the finest madeira wine on an elegantly laid table) before burning down - on his general's orders - the White House (an act Smith referred to as 'barbaric').</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I thought the best place to start my research on Smith was by reading his autobiography, written intermittently over many years so that one chapter starts 'written in Glasgow in 1824' and the next, 'Commenced at Simla, Himalayas, 11th Aug. 1844'. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0bNonWaS46UZobsuOTxFILsZpTO2xit84WB6r9Y5bSMpBFllUgEdF0g7dTAIkAZLjfT37Z5hfA7cyUntkR28MmXbYpdZQLcm4TuGEVgotdftWa0ijafI8AC9JulhLvPjiJv8rQi5mg1Q/s640/blogger-image-59612902.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0bNonWaS46UZobsuOTxFILsZpTO2xit84WB6r9Y5bSMpBFllUgEdF0g7dTAIkAZLjfT37Z5hfA7cyUntkR28MmXbYpdZQLcm4TuGEVgotdftWa0ijafI8AC9JulhLvPjiJv8rQi5mg1Q/s640/blogger-image-59612902.jpg" style="border: none;"></font></a></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In only the first 40 pages, Harry is involved in the Battles of Montevideo and Colonia (1806) and imprisoned in Buenos Aires; he is nearly wrecked at sea on the return home, then is shipped to Gothenburg in Sweden, then sent to fight in the Peninsular War in Spain against the Napoleonic forces. He rounds up 20 bandits in the interior of Spain, campaigns in one bloody siege after another, is sent home to England and back to Spain again. He has a shrapnel ball lodged in his foot, which makes him lame, and is sent to Lisbon to convalesce and finally endures excruciating surgery to have it taken out.</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">From that point on however, Smith led a charmed life...As the Peninsular War dragged on in endless tactical manoeuvres, of offensives and retreats across a dizzying array of landscapes, Smith's fellow officers are killed one after the other, introduced on one page as a 'fine fellow' and mortally wounded on the next (sometimes while they are actually talking to Smith). In one instance, one of his injured comrades gets angry at the insolent remarks of a landlord, whereupon 'the carotid artery must have been wounded, for it burst out in a torrent of blood, and he was dead in a few seconds, to our horror, for he was a most excellent fellow'. Smith meanwhile sails through the action unhurt, while others fall like flies around him. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Smith was extraordinarily lucky not just in war, but in love. The war narrative spills into one of the most famous romances of the early 19th century when at the bloody fourth siege of Badajoz in 1812 he meets the love of his life, a young Spanish girl called Juana (pictured top). </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Left orphaned at the age of barely 14 with only an elder sister at her side when Badajoz is stormed by blood-thirsty and lustful British troops (image below), she is placed under the protection of the elite 95th Rifles Brigade and immediately captures the heart of Brigadier-Major Smith, aged 24, who married her several days after meeting her. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_of7EYc0eXD_ic3w-g2jlaTUyzLxR0Mta9PtdxqGGWXPa89s_qOdNzmx-IqhuKwk06dy8j_p-0lmU7tHZfmNXgt51Lx-OZlEIzIpCRW5iausLe1WdOtRcHSWv-9HDE6SV0FYnbBn3v7Q/s640/blogger-image--786579401.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_of7EYc0eXD_ic3w-g2jlaTUyzLxR0Mta9PtdxqGGWXPa89s_qOdNzmx-IqhuKwk06dy8j_p-0lmU7tHZfmNXgt51Lx-OZlEIzIpCRW5iausLe1WdOtRcHSWv-9HDE6SV0FYnbBn3v7Q/s640/blogger-image--786579401.jpg" style="border: none;"></font></a></div></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The couple would become virtually inseparable and she would travel with the Brigade for the rest of the war and - highly unusually for the era - travel with Smith on his adventures throughout the world over the next 50 years, eventually lending her married name of 'Lady Smith' to three towns in Canada and South Africa. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It's historically curious though that Smith's fascinating autobiography was first published in 1901. Why would the memoirs of a man who died in 1860 be first published 41 years after his death? </span><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">By the mid-19th century, Smith was a figure famous throughout the British Empire, lauded by the Duke of Wellington in the House of Commons and fondly known to Queen Victoria. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, he was fading into obscurity. Then something happened which made him of great interest round the world once again...</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1899, the Anglo-Boer War broke out in southern Africa and the British suffered the humiliation of seeing the towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley besieged by Boer forces. The fate of these three towns dominated the news in Britain as the country every day waited and prayed for the news that they had been relieved. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS2fY5BLSIAv3Dj2Dtcg7Oz01e59PmdQGL5_R7WOGE_vG4WmO9o-_p5wo7GZLLhHwi8h5tD0RxL_4fhsHbKvfLviP_3wTY7GlYBhb3xGdEDMsd5Ricl-UOdvHNh_pITLQS-7vWtGSAtzM/s640/blogger-image-145717696.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS2fY5BLSIAv3Dj2Dtcg7Oz01e59PmdQGL5_R7WOGE_vG4WmO9o-_p5wo7GZLLhHwi8h5tD0RxL_4fhsHbKvfLviP_3wTY7GlYBhb3xGdEDMsd5Ricl-UOdvHNh_pITLQS-7vWtGSAtzM/s640/blogger-image-145717696.jpg" style="border: none;"></font></a></div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">As Ladysmith became a focus of international attention, people began to ask, 'Who exactly was this "Lady Smith"? And why was there a town in southern Africa named after her?" To answer this upsurge in public curiosity, the long-forgotten autobiography of her once famous husband, Sir Harry Smith - formerly the governor of Cape Colony (1847-52) - was rushed into publication. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Yet if the British public expected to find in 'Lady Smith' a quintessential English heroine, they were in for a surprise. For 'Lady Smith' was not English at all, but a Spanish girl whose original name was Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon. </span></div><div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There is considerable irony in the fact that the Spanish woman who lent her name to this famous siege town in southern Africa was herself the most notable survivor of the terrible siege at Badajoz in Spain 90 years earlier. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">While the life of Harry Smith has partly inspired Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' novels and TV series, his wife has had more unexpected historical echoes. Juana's memory lives on for example in the name of the group, 'Ladysmith Black Mambazo', who have become an iconic representative of South African music and who sang with Paul Simon on his 1986 Graceland album and accompanied Nelson Mandela to Oslo in 1993 to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">When in 1940, the historical novelist Georgette Heyer told the story of Juana Smith in her romance, 'The Spanish Bride' (still in print today), she published at a time when Britain itself was under siege. Juana became part of the zeitgeist of 'The Finest Hour' and readers found in her grit and determination, resonances of the determination of the British to stand up to the Nazi onslaught. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It's a remarkable, unpredictable worldwide imprint for a 13-year-old Spanish girl escaping the chaos of war back in Badajoz, Spain in 1812. As I walk the streets of Badajoz today I'll be curious to find out whether this unassuming Spanish town (picture of alcazar below) remembers the legacy of one of its most famous daughters, with a strange capacity to reemerge into historical focus whenever the age requires her. </span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR-SfZhzvhlo4hOZqTZVAI3uOqdDPtfDAymT4gccOEv5aLGraonDma_9dbtZM3pVLTfapDXuFEblwOR2nMzjA1CAUKXpbJbVMo8tTwfX7W2RlOvxYow_76yO78gAyBsadhNb_FqGAoMuY/s640/blogger-image--1620969223.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR-SfZhzvhlo4hOZqTZVAI3uOqdDPtfDAymT4gccOEv5aLGraonDma_9dbtZM3pVLTfapDXuFEblwOR2nMzjA1CAUKXpbJbVMo8tTwfX7W2RlOvxYow_76yO78gAyBsadhNb_FqGAoMuY/s640/blogger-image--1620969223.jpg" style="border: none;"></font></a></div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div></div></div></div>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-58014810993075365952016-10-15T22:13:00.000+01:002016-10-15T22:13:01.363+01:00The Laying of Odds on Murakami, Critics and the Nobel Prize <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-M6hay1ZbP8Oh59PepBlD2LzROF3kR0Ej21pTA-r9g_VnXRBrHzyMpOtyrSV9uM02pf4V7pjbCDZ1aD5M-BF3e2eSQGKLlN04DyQaFxpFW60XziXiKhz_Osqa_DoN_djleTXFklvtTo/s1600/HarukiMurakami.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-M6hay1ZbP8Oh59PepBlD2LzROF3kR0Ej21pTA-r9g_VnXRBrHzyMpOtyrSV9uM02pf4V7pjbCDZ1aD5M-BF3e2eSQGKLlN04DyQaFxpFW60XziXiKhz_Osqa_DoN_djleTXFklvtTo/s400/HarukiMurakami.png" width="400" height="329" /></a></div><br />
The announcement on Friday of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan has led to much opining about the connections between literature and pop music. I'd like to discuss that intriguing subject on another occasion, but just for the moment I've been thinking more about the connection between literary stallions and bookmakers...<br />
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Haruki Murakami (pictured above) - the perennial bookies' favourite in the UK - failed yet again to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Whatever the literary merits of this, there is an interesting linkage to be made between the betting on the Remain camp (favourite with the bookies while failing at the polls) in Brexit and Murakami constantly being the bookies' favourite while not winning. <br />
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As with Brexit, being the favourite leads to the impression that the bookmakers are making a judgement call, whereas in fact they are just reflecting the 'weight of money'. Which leads to the fascinating question: who is it that bets on winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature? At first sight, it seems a very odd mix of literature and betting.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAtssqknrAO0qlVryXZbuM_evRXBBz00Z2RIyXlK2zjeSWlxP_tSsrdkQGgLNgaUhV4Q_gTKMcg9UI72_tHTdUZ3Xm8FjZlAV1o9FIlfKXbEohHIhDWCbRR9sRHGbaq-zBOuPdWEXafVs/s1600/bookmaker-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAtssqknrAO0qlVryXZbuM_evRXBBz00Z2RIyXlK2zjeSWlxP_tSsrdkQGgLNgaUhV4Q_gTKMcg9UI72_tHTdUZ3Xm8FjZlAV1o9FIlfKXbEohHIhDWCbRR9sRHGbaq-zBOuPdWEXafVs/s400/bookmaker-1.jpg" width="400" height="249" /></a></div><br />
Murakami being the year-in-year-out favourite (4-1, this year) represents not an assessment by any informed pundits, but presumably a desire by the millions of Murakami's fans in the West to have their reading tastes sanctioned by their author winning the ultimate accolade. <br />
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If Murakami did win, it then raises the question of whether the constant pressure of this 'weight of money' made an impact (conscious or unconscious) on the judges - so far it seems to have not the slightest impact. <br />
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Rather than reveal the tastes of the Nobel Committee however, Murakami constantly being favourite and yet not winning tells us a percentage of his fans 1. Like to have an online bet (I can't see them going to a high street bookies); 2. Have disposable wealth (We knew that already...); 3. Are not very streetwise (given that they keep on losing). <br />
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Surely this demonstrates the dangers of the ill-experienced wagering through sentiment rather than market insight? Well, you can look at it that way, but I would like to offer a different insight. <br />
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Literature and betting might appear at first to be two totally incongruous activities. Reading literature is a profoundly internalized, ultimately vague and lingering activity: you are never entirely sure how it affects your thought processes both now and into the future. Betting, by contrast, is entirely externalized, with a short thrill of uncertainty followed by complete clarity, win or lose. It seems to me to be entirely natural to wish to offset your internal literary musings with a punt on a bit of external reality. <br />
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The Nobel Prize indeed offers a potential opportunity for a flutter to those millions of people who have no interest in sport or the naming of royal babies. The Nobel Committee should perhaps be applauded for offering a gambling outlet for all those who fill red wine and book clubs up and down the country. <br />
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But even without betting on the big prizes, there is another means of externalizing your internal literary musings in a risk-laden endeavour: it's called 'criticism'. Whenever I put down my feelings on a subject and publish an article or upload a blog, I always feel like I am taking a risky punt: there's a certain mix of thrilling unease and anticipation as you wait to see what reaction your critique will garner. It's a highly unpredictable endeavour. Some of your bets will come romping home garlanded with praise; others will sink without trace or be the butt of ridicule and scorn. <br />
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I know a few people who are habitual (if not compulsive) gamblers, who can not get through a week without laying a bet. But I've rather come to recognize the same quality in myself, just transferred to a compulsive need to keep sending into the world little essays of criticism. Many people erroneously think I indulge in journalism, talks and blogs for the fabulous riches and worldwide fame they afford, but I assure you that it is the compulsive intellectual gambler inside me that whips me onward. <br />
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Once, back in my Cambridge days, my English supervisor - like me, a devotee of Nietzsche - gave me a gem of wisdom I've never forgotten: 'all great essays take risks'. Many people think that to write critically on a subject involves rational analysis and a summation of what has gone before. But what's truly essential is the ability to think creatively and to offer new insight. <br />
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If criticism does not challenge consensus, then it is pointless. Great criticism takes risks and flies in the face of convention. When it succeeds it manages to build a new consensus around its new tracks of interpretation. <br />
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The Nobel Prize is in many ways the ultimate statement of critical appreciation. Yet, paradoxically, when it merely represents a 'critical consensus' on a writer, it ceases to function as 'criticism'. In this sense, although I do not necessarily agree with the appraisal of Bob Dylan, at least the Nobel Committee are actually functioning in a critical capacity by advancing a new appreciation of Dylan's work. They have taken a punt, even as they have frustrated the bets of the legions of Murakami fans. <br />
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Anyone who is a critic is at heart a gambler. When Natsume Soseki published in 1907 his revolutionary 'Theory of Literature', he was criticized in some quarters for offering a profoundly scientific analysis of literature. But literature is not science came the critique. That's true, Soseki responded, literature is not science, but that's not to say literary criticism can't be scientific. <br />
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Soseki too was gambling big time on his radical criticism, but despite the fact that 'logic', 'emotion' and 'will' form the cornerstone of all his cultural analysis, he curiously neglected to see how 'wilfulness' - the desire to assert oneself, embrace danger and challenge convention - is just as essential a part of being a critic as 'rationality'. <br />
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So, in short, I have every sympathy for the Harukists laying their bets on the Nobel Prize. Because although literature and gambling might seem far apart ('The Nobel Prize is not a horse race', Murakami himself is supposed to have sniffily remarked), literary criticism and gambling are actually profoundly connected. <br />
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When it comes to your intellectual life at least, I think you should live dangerously and bet the house. Over the coming weeks, I'll be advancing new literary theories to challenge the consensus. It will be interesting to see whether my horses get over the line first or I am left seriously out of pocket...<br />
Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-85461478619838689722016-10-10T14:32:00.000+01:002016-10-10T14:32:45.247+01:00Of Love and Letters <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmMd9g8JTlNjppf0koK4sOrCtu4CbLM9gRwQ6AGCgJzsALpNC3ER_x3Dy8nN4BQKSUfViscGUkjNGlTpyqGNCZyz-7xWfoH2LUr5NZFTXqKi9ZofaIfiF9ZpfrpPLLUsAR4v8IpC7glNY/s1600/Harunobu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmMd9g8JTlNjppf0koK4sOrCtu4CbLM9gRwQ6AGCgJzsALpNC3ER_x3Dy8nN4BQKSUfViscGUkjNGlTpyqGNCZyz-7xWfoH2LUr5NZFTXqKi9ZofaIfiF9ZpfrpPLLUsAR4v8IpC7glNY/s640/Harunobu.jpg" width="489" height="640" /></a></div><br />
When it comes to the pictures of the Floating World (Ukiyo-e), I've discovered through bitter experience that I am a man of firm likes and dislikes. Throughout my late twenties and early thirties, this picture above, 'The Love Letter' by Suzuki Harunobu (c.1725 - 1770), hung on the wall of the modest 'one room mansion' I used to rent in Kansai in central Japan. <br />
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I can't quite remember where I first came upon it, but in classic student fashion, I had no funds to frame it and hang it gracefully, but rather attached it directly to the wall with blue tack at the corners. It would periodically fall off and I would have to re-press it firmly to a slightly different section of wall, leaving brown thumb marks on the corners of the poster and bluish, frayed marks on the wall. <br />
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When I finally came to move home in my mid thirties, the poster alas did not survive the move: it was far too grimy for the pristine walls of my new palace and into the bin it went. Having now entered the 'Harunobu-less' years of my life, I began to pang for ukiyo-e and would periodically find myself excitedly visiting exhibitions and leafing through books. My mind being confused however, I would forget that it was Harunobu whose poster I used to gaze on every day and I would misremember that it was by another famous ukiyo-e artist, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) instead. But whenever I looked at Utamaro's pictures, I would be disappointed - they appeared to me to have less finesse, beauty and warmth - until I finally recalled that it was never him that I liked in the first place, but rather Harunobu. <br />
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Harunobu, Harunobu, Harunobu. I had to remember it was him that I liked, but then I forgot again and sat through Mizoguchi's film "Utamaro and His Five Women" (1946, thought by some to be a masterpiece - not in my opinion) and wondered once again what I had ever seen in Utamaro, until I finally recalled that I had misremembered it once again. Damn Utamaro! <br />
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Clearly I needed Harunobu back in my life. As recipients of my Facebook feed will be aware, I have been engaged in a restoration project of late on a 19th century mansion in the UK. One of its rooms I am naming the 'Arthur Waley Room' in honour of the great scholar, translator and popularizer of East Asian literature. This room will contain a writing desk and so it was a no-brainer what picture I would wish to have hanging over it: 'The Love Letter' by Suzuki Harunobu (in an even larger, framed version this time round). <br />
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In the ten years I spent looking at this picture while I was researching literature in Japan, a particular set of interpretations fixed themselves in my mind. As I will explain in a moment, this view was partly based on a misinterpretation of the picture, but I'll tell you first what particular meaning this picture of two people simultaneously reading a letter had for me and why I would wish to have it hanging over a writing desk. <br />
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Firstly, it reminded me that what you write should be capable of being read and re-read. It should be composed to last and to be mulled over. Second, it reminds me that the perspective of each person reading what you have written is different (which doesn't necessarily stop me winding up people of every possible stripe with ill-considered remarks). <br />
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Thirdly, it reminds me that if you communicate your passion on a subject, it will be of interest not just to your 'intended' audience, but to all kinds of other readers as well. In fact, it is this unintended 'secondary' readership that always provide me with the greatest thrill as a writer - those people in the farthest reaches of the world, or people with no particular interest in the subject, who somehow or other come upon what you have written and find their own interest sparked by it. <br />
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During the ten years I gazed at this picture in my room in Japan, I mostly spent my time at a Japanese university, preparing for a standard academic career. I contemplated the life of publishing articles in academic journals, producing books of academic research, tutoring graduate students - all very worthy and noble - but not, I concluded, one for me. I wanted to write things that would find not just the pre-ordained, 'intended' audience but reach out for that secondary, unintended readership. I wanted the scroll of scholarship to unfurl and land in unexpected, fascinated hands.<br />
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But when I came to order the half-remembered print after a 10 year gap, I suddenly discovered that it had a quite different meaning to what I had always assumed it to have. Knowing it only by its English title of 'The Love Letter', I had carelessly assumed it to be a picture of two female courtesans reading the same love letter, intended for the girl at the top, but also being read with interest by her friend under the blanket. <br />
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When I looked up its Japanese title however, I was startled to see it was 'A Man and a Woman Reading a Letter by a Kotatsu [A blanketed table])' The figure under the blanket is a man - you can also tell this from the hairstyle, which often reveals much information in ukiyo-e prints. This rather changes the dynamic of the picture and adds a sharp satirical edge.<br />
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But now, more than ever, I'm feeling this is a suitable picture to have hanging over a writing desk: reminding me than even the most familiar works of art have the ability to suddenly radiate in an unexpected light according to a new critical interpretation laid upon it. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-5832967695276849002016-10-09T10:55:00.000+01:002016-10-09T10:55:12.438+01:00All Aboard the Mishima Express<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDmrvEU_uqMbMPupdm1Jgm2xShhd1tMoHmR6Iv_eFTT3KpdzTGHb68d357ghLdox3T1ack8ztdxaqyNDnjxqOypS0T-ASbMxCP3oJ9oT2A6A2bkk_Yi7AwRYT3MXInY9iG1LPFrO4MOCQ/s1600/Train+to+Mishima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDmrvEU_uqMbMPupdm1Jgm2xShhd1tMoHmR6Iv_eFTT3KpdzTGHb68d357ghLdox3T1ack8ztdxaqyNDnjxqOypS0T-ASbMxCP3oJ9oT2A6A2bkk_Yi7AwRYT3MXInY9iG1LPFrO4MOCQ/s400/Train+to+Mishima.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></div><br />
In Japan they have a variety of exotically decorated theme trains dedicated to famous writers. For example, in Iwate in north-east Japan, there is the 'Night on the Galactic Railway' train dedicated to the memory of fairytale author Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). Or else on the island of Shikoku, there is a 'Botchan' train, based on the famous story by Natsume Soseki, which will take you round the city of Matsuyama where 'Botchan' is set.<br />
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I was thinking however that they have surely missed a trick in not having a Yukio Mishima-themed train that will take you to the city of Mishima, near Mount Fuji. (Geekish note: Yukio Mishima's real name was Kimitake Hiraoka and he took the pen-name of 'Mishima' from this very town in 1941.)<br />
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In Japan if a train is bound for somewhere they add the suffix 'yuki', so the Mishima-bound train is known as the Mishima-yuki train. This would afford the ineffable daily pleasure to the announcer of being able to pronounce that, 'This is the Mishima yuki Mishima Yukio train' which would surely elicit a smile every time.<br />
Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-47986234057561489752016-10-05T17:00:00.000+01:002016-10-05T17:00:30.744+01:00Both Awful and Wonderful? It must be "Yabai"...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr6_6WyCFCv0WeMnabJoKg_03W1w8IPpv4YY1WvHNxh-Is4fIG4YnNN47yfjMeZqLyUI_fEX7hJA1DCLCtMOmf7us3FFXyv9P5NsByFaY2eKQ9nUmlFtbTz5z8ArcPf03kcxPv7c-IoPc/s1600/yabai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr6_6WyCFCv0WeMnabJoKg_03W1w8IPpv4YY1WvHNxh-Is4fIG4YnNN47yfjMeZqLyUI_fEX7hJA1DCLCtMOmf7us3FFXyv9P5NsByFaY2eKQ9nUmlFtbTz5z8ArcPf03kcxPv7c-IoPc/s400/yabai.jpg" width="400" height="400" /></a></div><br />
About 15 years ago, I remember having a conversation with an Irish bartender in Osaka about the Japanese word "yabai". The word was originally used by Japanese criminals as indicating the threat of imminent capture by the police but had entered common parlance as representing something you did not like the sound of. I droned on that it was quite a difficult word to translate into English. My Dublin friend, with characteristic impatience for such pretentious blather, immediately cut me short and remarked that what "yabai" really meant then was "F*** that!" - which both made me laugh and stays in my mind as the best possible translation.<br />
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But reading a newspaper a few days ago I was shocked to discover that while I wasn't paying attention, "yabai" has completely changed its meaning. It seems that even 10 years ago, 70% of teenagers had switched to using "yabai" as meaning "terrific" or "wonderful".<br />
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It's interesting the way that words have the capacity to completely transform their meaning. In English, the word "sick" has undergone the same transformation from negative to positive meaning. And if you go back far enough, you discover that the most bland-seeming words like "nice" apparently once had the meaning of "terrifying".<br />
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What people seek from language is not necessarily clarity of meaning: language often represents the restlessness of the human condition, constantly seeking to invert and subvert that which has gone before. It's easy to become numbed to the fact that some of the words we use are a previous generation's ironical inversion of what they received from their forebears. When you attempt to adhere to fixed definitions of meaning, you alas lose sight of the way that language is in a constant state of rebellious evolution.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJWZ5K-BobzT7zAubPmWdT4XhS8HCY5Ds4zNeqNsY9_hmGPJFTDgzIHOgh743KLtIBRdwNy0wkHxWztCLVR0UOvkGjI9ujFf_DgI0vfs8pTAxL7LW5aCOm3yAW17E_Wjs3mCzDLckr4E/s1600/yabai2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJWZ5K-BobzT7zAubPmWdT4XhS8HCY5Ds4zNeqNsY9_hmGPJFTDgzIHOgh743KLtIBRdwNy0wkHxWztCLVR0UOvkGjI9ujFf_DgI0vfs8pTAxL7LW5aCOm3yAW17E_Wjs3mCzDLckr4E/s400/yabai2.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></div>Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-79642589289602174992016-08-06T10:18:00.000+01:002016-08-06T10:22:09.026+01:00Why Hagakure is Japan's Strangest Book<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGFMTmxtTzO3AlSUQn80RVrcX46sBU6wZoADq5MVcGJk6uz7Jecg0ROF_QAdcRTAIKDg0oBRtTuLyW5iIwe5vVMoA1sUcrl_0XOvzIdHw8-rcwF7dTdRJgPLxlm1V16Yy5bBjBgf7Flhk/s1600/Hagakure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGFMTmxtTzO3AlSUQn80RVrcX46sBU6wZoADq5MVcGJk6uz7Jecg0ROF_QAdcRTAIKDg0oBRtTuLyW5iIwe5vVMoA1sUcrl_0XOvzIdHw8-rcwF7dTdRJgPLxlm1V16Yy5bBjBgf7Flhk/s400/Hagakure.jpg" width="275" height="400" /></a></div><br />
I recently ran a three part series in The Japan Times on Bushido (the Samurai code) and referred in Part Two to the Hagakure. As it is the beginning of the Rio Olympics this weekend, I thought I might offer a closer reading of this Bushido classic: Japan's Gold Medal candidate for 'Strangest Book Ever Written'. <br />
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Around 15 years ago, Hagakure enjoyed a small vogue amongst young men in the West due to its prominent role in the dire Jim Jarmusch flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). This film is set in the US and is about a hitman called Ghost Dog (played by Forest Whitaker) who receives the names of his targets from a Mafia goon by carrier pigeon landing on the rooftop where he lives. He is obsessed with the Hagakure and the portentous quotes from the book that dominate his thoughts are framed and voiced over at regular intervals throughout the film.<br />
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As a sincere believer in the 'Way of the Warrior', Ghost Dog attempts to live and die by the samurai code, requiring him to wipe a slew of Mafiosi who threaten the gangster who once saved his life. Jarmusch, like Tarantino, attempts to enfold the whole world into his films and piles into this one not only Italian Mafiosi and classics of Japanese literature such as Akutagawa’s Rashomon, but rappers, an exclusively French-speaking ice cream man, Chinese restaurants and The Wind in the Willows. It is the author of Hagakure however who tops the ironical ‘personal thanks’ in the credits. <br />
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Ghost Dog is really a very silly film, where too often ‘quirkiness’ tips into self-indulgence and cliché (particularly in its depiction of Italian Mafiosi), but it does have a few interesting aspects. One is that Ghost Dog regards Bushido as a complete value system to live his life. He even has the symbol from the front cover of the book embossed on the back of his jacket and constantly wears it as a medallion. At one point in the film, he passes another young man on the street wearing a cross as a medallion – as if two equal and complete value systems had met.<br />
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Another idea, somewhat buried in the film, and only obvious through Jarmusch’s pretentious thanks in the end titles to ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ is that Ghost Dog is a modern Quixote, attempting to live by a code of chivalry in an unchivalrous age. This is a perceptive observation about the way many Westerners relate to the code of the samurai and indeed to Japan itself.<br />
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And finally there is the pairing of gangsters with Bushido, which might seem weird, but to my mind is entirely apt, as the samurai were in fact the world’s ultimate gangsters, living by strict codes precisely because they had arisen due to the collapse of the authority of central government and were notorious for internecine conflicts and blood-letting. <br />
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But back to Hagakure…<br />
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Hagakure means ‘In the Shadow of Leaves’ indicating that the author was giving a whispering insider’s account of the subject. It is a collection of commentaries on Bushido (or, more precisely, what would later be called 'Bushido') by Yamamoto Tsunetomo who was a senior retainer of the Saga Clan in northern Kyushu in the far west of Japan. The commentaries were collected by Tsuramoto Tashiro and are based on his conversations with Tsunetomo between 1709 and 1716.<br />
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Hagakure was only published in full however in the twentieth century once the samurai themselves had long since disappeared. It was particularly prized as Japan turned to the extremes of nationalist and militaristic sentiment in the 1930s.<br />
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Hagakure divides opinion even in Japan between those who feel, like Yukio Mishima (who was a great fan of the book and wrote his own commentary on it), that Tsunetomo offered the most piercing insights into Bushido and those who feel that his opinions were completely crazy.<br />
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Yamamoto’s position is best summed up with the thought that, for the samurai, loyalty to the master is everything and that he must be prepared to instantly give up his life for his master at any time. Yamamoto even criticized the famous Forty-Seven Ronin. They took nearly two years to avenge their master’s death (before being ordered by the Shogunate to commit seppuku themselves), but according to Yamamoto they should have immediately attempted assassination on their master’s enemy even if such an attempt was doomed to failure. <br />
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A refrain throughout Hagakure is that the samurai must repress self-interest. ‘People think that they can clear up profound matters if they consider them deeply, but they exercise perverse thoughts and come to no good because they do their reflecting with only self-interest at the centre’, Yamamoto bewails. <br />
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Instead one must give obeisance every morning to one’s master, one’s ancestors, patron deities and guardian Buddhas. But amongst them the master is all-important. ‘For a warrior there is nothing other than thinking of his master.’<br />
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It is instantly obvious why this text appealed to Mishima so much and gave him such inspiration. Rather like Mishima’s tips on behaviour for so-called ‘modern samurai’, the text switches suddenly from lamenting the lack of skill at beheadings and cowardice (instead of resolve to commit suicide) to some handy tips on manners. ‘It is because a samurai has correct manners that he is admired’, Yamamoto points out, and proceeds to warn that one should not yawn or sneeze in front of other people.<br />
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Sometimes Tsunetomo reminds us of the sayings of his father Yamamoto Jinemon who said that you should look your listener in the eye, not put your hands in your pocket and throw away books after reading them. According to his father, a samurai with no group and no horse (i.e. a wandering samurai or ronin) was no samurai at all. Also, according to Yamamoto pere, a samurai should rise at four in the morning, bathe and arrange his hair daily, eat when the sun comes up and retire when it becomes dark. Mishima took none of this advice, routinely going to bed when the sun came up after writing throughout the night.<br />
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The whole book is washed with the hues of nostalgia and longing for an age before peacetime brought a general corrupting mood of idleness, luxury and triviality. ‘It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material possessions...Every morning, the samurai of fifty or sixty years ago would bathe, shave their foreheads, put lotion in their hair, cut their fingernails and toenails rubbing them with pumice and then without fail pay attention to their general appearances. It goes without saying that their armor in general was kept from rust, that it was dusted, shined, and arranged.’<br />
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Yamamoto advises us to look for models of politeness, bravery, proper way of speaking, correct conduct and steadiness of mind. We are told that ‘a person who does something beyond his social standing will at some point commit mean or cowardly acts…one should be careful with menials and the like’. And yet, in a characteristic contradiction, we are told, ‘As for a person who has risen from the humble, his value should be prized and especially respected, even more than that of a person who was born into his class.’<br />
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Self pride and luxury are to be avoided; attaching cloves to your body will stop you being affected by colds; it is better to have some unhappiness when you are still young to stop you becoming giddy; drinking a decoction of the feces from a dappled horse is the best way to stop bleeding from an injury received by falling from a horse; look for the single purpose of the present moment as loyalty is also contained within single-mindedness; apply powdered rouge carried in your sleeve if your complexion is poor.<br />
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Intertwined with all of these ideas runs the constant refrain about preparing for death, dreaming of dying in battle or committing seppuku. ‘The way of the samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death, considering whether it will be here or be there, imagining the most sightly way of dying, and putting one’s mind firmly in death.’ But there is, it seems, a silver lining. ‘With martial valor, if one becomes like a vengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die.’<br />
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A highlight of the book is its description of various Sicilian-style revenge killings among the samurai. Often these would start as drunken brawls in bars, or sometimes be over nothing at all, and yet end up killing lots of innocent people. For example, a boy accidentally steps on a ronin’s foot while putting on his sandals. The ronin instantly kills him and his grandmother. The boy’s uncle then kills the ronin, but is in turn killed by the ronin’s younger brother. Another uncle, a Buddhist priest, then plans to kill the ronin’s younger brother, but kills the ronin’s father instead…and all this over treading on someone’s foot.<br />
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The samurai were also pretty nasty in their tortures. This is the punishment meted out to one robber: ‘all the hairs on his body were burned off and his fingernails were pulled out. His tendons were then cut, he was bored with drills and subjected to various other tortures. Throughout, he did not flinch once, nor did his face change color. In the end his back was split, he was boiled in soy sauce and his body was bent back in two.’<br />
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Once Yamamoto gets going with his tales of revenge killings and seppuku, there is really no end to them. There are tales of adultery leading to seppuku; of fathers acting as kaishakunin (assistants who behead the person committing seppuku) for their sons; of revenge killings leading to seppuku; of retainers crucified for not finishing off a fight or banished for intervening.<br />
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The slightest slip could lead to your death. One retainer is scolded for daring to put gold coins before his lord: ‘To place such base things before a person of importance is the extremity of carelessness’. (Given that the samurai class were created in the first place by ambitious warlords annexing land and appropriating taxes for themselves, and hiring gangs to protect them, this absurd denial of their own covetousness is truly breathtaking).<br />
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At this point, we get more handy tips from Yamamoto pere: ‘If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured.’<br />
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Tsunetomo relates how a samurai was dismissed from trial for having the bravery to cut down opponents of his clan and thereby uphold the way of the samurai and Tsunetomo gives us many instances of exemplary retainer behaviour such as the samurai who rushes into a burning house to save his lord’s treasured genealogy. The samurai dies in the flames, but when his corpse is found, it is discovered that he has cut open his stomach and put the genealogy inside.<br />
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Tsunetomo was very enthusiastic about the recuperative, blood-clotting powers of horse feces, but surprisingly very down on the value of tactics. ‘On the battlefield, once discretion starts it cannot be stopped. One will not break through to the enemy with discretion. Indiscretion is most important when in front of the tiger’s den. Therefore, if one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts, and there would be an end to the matter...there are no military tactics for a man of great strength’.<br />
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We are shrewdly told that ‘one should not show his sleeping quarters to other people. The times of deep sleep and dawning are very important’ and that ‘underwear should be made from the skin of a badger’.<br />
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There are occasional flashes of wit between the samurai:<br />
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Matsudaira Izu no kami said to Master Mizuno Kenmotsu, ‘You’re such a useful person, it’s a shame that you’re so short.’<br />
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Kenmotsu replied, ‘That’s true. Sometimes things in this world don’t go the way we would like. Now if I were to cut off your head and attach it to the bottom of your feet, I would be taller. But that’s something that couldn’t be done.’<br />
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However the odd snippet of humour is far outweighed by general insanity, with lots of tales of heads being cut off and invocations to always think of your master.<br />
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'The warriors of old cultivated mustaches, for as proof that a man had been slain in battle, his ears and nose would be cut off and brought to the enemy’s camp. So that there would be no mistake as to whether the person was a man or a woman, the mustache was also cut off with the nose. At such a time the head was thrown away if it had no mustache, for it might be mistaken for that of a woman. Therefore, growing a mustache was one of the disciplines of a samurai so that his head would not be thrown away upon his death.'<br />
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In Yamamoto’s view, boys should be taught valour, forbearance, politeness and etiquette. For girls however, the most important thing is chastity. They should be always kept six foot from a man, never look them in the eye, or receive things from them by hand. And heaven forbid that they ever go sightseeing or on trips to a temple.<br />
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Yamamoto is firm in the belief that all identity should come from the clan. All worship and respect should be given to clan elders and ancestors rather than such things as Buddhism, Confucius or famous warriors of other clans. ‘One worships the head of whatever clan or discipline to which he belongs. Outside learning for retainers of our clan is worthless.’<br />
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One should serve the clan, even committing seppuku whenever required by the lord, is Yamamoto’s message. In this way, Yamamoto vows never to be outdone in the Way of the Samurai.<br />
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Albeit that Hagakure has found fans in such people as Yukio Mishima and Jim Jarmusch, and is undoubtedly a superb illustration of an extremist samurai mindset, there is surely no question that Yamamoto is insufferably pompous. There is no real consideration of why you should devote your life to your lord – this is merely an a priori assumption, endlessly reinforced like a Buddhist priest chanting a sutra. <br />
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A while back I was watching Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and istening to the declarations of the Nazis at the Nuremberg rallies (‘We know of nothing but to follow the Fuhrer’s order and show our loyalty!’) and Hitler’s own declaration that the spiritual tenets of National Socialism would be like that of a religious order, you can see that the guiding principles of fascism and the more extremist samurai – the blind cult of loyalty, the yearnings for militaristic order, the nostalgia for the past, the xenophobia – had a good deal in common.<br />
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The resurgence of Bushido in the 1890s, accompanied by Nitobe Inazo's book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) <strike></strike>becoming an international bestseller, clearly created in Japan an intellectual framework in which fascism and dictatorship could quickly take root (ironically this development was not foreseen by the internationally urbane Nitobe Inazo, who was horrified by Japan storming out of the League of Nations in 1933 after the Lytton Commission’s critical assessment of Japan’s culpability in the invasion of Manchuria. Nitobe died shortly thereafter in Canada.) <br />
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I appreciate Hagakure in the same way as I appreciate Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films – as a fascinating insight into what is now a barely comprehensible mindset. Yet while delighting in its Gothic nastiness, I can’t but help feel that if is this is the Way of the Samurai, I won't be joining Ghost Dog and his pigeons on the rooftop anytime soon.Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-65971649235706654262016-06-16T11:16:00.000+01:002016-06-17T11:56:33.591+01:00Ryotaro Shiba, 'Gone With The Wind' and Ireland <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPapX8eeicQj4Wp3UTRddW23lvKT0A7TaSGUjxMA6BNS5kKlGpqsJHPPZNCTyMmZ1vxsRYY47lZrGFTUcdXw2ntjBgsqM-2evzzml5_gufT-iBXkRijDp3g02bECorPrzzIQ4NkUdKo18/s1600/Ry%25C5%258Dtar%25C5%258D_Shiba_drawing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPapX8eeicQj4Wp3UTRddW23lvKT0A7TaSGUjxMA6BNS5kKlGpqsJHPPZNCTyMmZ1vxsRYY47lZrGFTUcdXw2ntjBgsqM-2evzzml5_gufT-iBXkRijDp3g02bECorPrzzIQ4NkUdKo18/s640/Ry%25C5%258Dtar%25C5%258D_Shiba_drawing.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The other week I happened to hear that the novelist Minae Mizumura and her distinguished American translator Julie Carpenter were coming to the UK to attend the Bradford Literary Festival so I invited them over to have a look round a Georgian property I am currently restoring. I recommended to them a classic book called 'Irish Journey' ('Airurando Kiko') by the prolific Japanese historical novelist and travel writer Ryotaro Shiba (1923-96, pictured above).<br />
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Shiba is a wildly popular Japanese author whose long historical sagas such as 'Ryoma Sets Out' ('Ryoma ga Yuku') and 'Clouds Above the Hill' ('Oka no Ue no Kumo'; co-translated into English by Julie Carpenter) have sold 21 and 15 million copies respectively. I must confess that I have never read either of these best-selling books, but I am attracted to Shiba's voluminous travel writing - contained in a series called 'On the Road' ('Gaido o Yuku') - which describe both his journeys within Japan and to destinations across the world. <br />
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Despite its title, the two volume 'Irish Journey', written in the late 1980s, actually spends much of the first volume in England, as Shiba mills about London and Liverpool, before finally crossing over to Dublin. What Shiba correctly appreciated was that to understand Irish history, you first have to grasp how it stands in counterpoint to English history. Shiba discusses such things as the historical difference between the clannish nature of Celtic society and the centralised power of the English state, making the Irish susceptible to invasion and subjugation, while still retaining their distinctive identity. <br />
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One of the great interests of the book is noting the way a Japanese writer observes Britain and Ireland. For example, Shiba picked up on the way that the waiters in London always say 'sir' to him, but the waiters in Dublin never do. Many of his observations are so fresh it's sometimes hard to tell whether they are insightful or absurd. In Liverpool, Shiba speculates whether the city, situated at the basin of the river Mersey, derives its name from 'River Pool' (the Japanese language has only one sound for both 'r' and 'l' so this blurring is more obvious to a Japanese person, but I must admit it's something that never occurred to me before.) <br />
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When Shiba finally gets out to the West of Ireland and the Famine Road, he looks down at the sea and ponders why there was such a terrible famine when there were fish in the sea and such delicious seaweed to eat. Perhaps a fatuous observation, but one that highlights the profoundly different culinary heritages of two island nations like Japan (whose cuisine is based around a profusion of fish) and Ireland (where the potato was king and where fish was always considered a poor substitute for rarely eaten meat). And of course back in the 1850s the seaweed wrap had yet to be invented...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOk0hmfpGjwQkg1Agnyysy-4k3wpEls0lMQCEYO-K_l63vk2GCI0b-FBIKzqGtSFJPOB_69eIELa5HhnU12D51JbtAD7WjyQRvoxLdi_c6k62CSWJiM1_WERmUq1bZ-qvqULilWgPPbg/s1600/Quiet_Man%252C_The_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOk0hmfpGjwQkg1Agnyysy-4k3wpEls0lMQCEYO-K_l63vk2GCI0b-FBIKzqGtSFJPOB_69eIELa5HhnU12D51JbtAD7WjyQRvoxLdi_c6k62CSWJiM1_WERmUq1bZ-qvqULilWgPPbg/s400/Quiet_Man%252C_The_01.jpg" /></a></div>Shiba was particularly interested in the resonances Irish culture had around the world and discusses for example the Irish roots of the great Western director John Ford, who would return to depict his parents' birthplace of Galway in the 1952 film The Quiet Man (poster, pictured left).<br />
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It's of course well-known that festering grievances about dispossession of land in Ireland between Irish natives and British settlers would be exported and play out on the much bigger canvases of the new worlds of America and Australia throughout the 19th century. Since the establishment of Anglo-Scots settlement in Ulster in the 17th century, the native Irish had been pushed back to poor quality bog lands of the West of Ireland ('To Hell or Connaught') and from there suffered yet more dispossession and famine and so emigrated in their droves in the 19th century. <br />
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The bitterness about land dispossession in Ireland lingered long in the memories of Irish emigrants to the New Worlds of America and Australia. Many of the stories which we today think of as quintessentially American or Australian - such as the sagas of Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County War in the US or Ned Kelly in Victoria, Australia - are at heart the stories of Anglo-Irish rivalries. It might also be noted in passing too, the fact that many dispossessed Scots and Irish suffered brutality in their native lands sometimes led in turn to their meting out brutal treatment to the Aborigines and Afro-American slaves in the lands they moved to.<br />
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I'd never quite realised until I read Shiba's book however just how crucial the Irish dimension is to 'Gone With the Wind' (though since the heroine is called Scarlett O'Hara perhaps this should have been obvious). <br />
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As a child, I always found the much-lauded film of 'Gone With the Wind' frankly boring. I could muster no sympathy for the fiddle-dee-dee, spoil-brat heroine and had not the slightest interest whether she finally hooked up with Ashley, Rhett Butler or whoever. It seemed to me the American Civil War equivalent of a Jane Austen novel - and I don't mean that as a compliment.<br />
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More interesting than the film itself seemed to be the stories surrounding it such as the famous quest by producer David O Selznick to cast the right actress as Scarlett O'Hara (eventually given to relatively unknown English actress Vivien Leigh, pictured above, after just about every Hollywood leading lady from Lana Turner to Paulette Goddard had tried and failed to land the part). Or there was the fuss about the prissy Hayes Code censorship exerted on Rhett Butler's parting line, 'Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn', demanding that the emphasis be bizarrely placed on the word 'give' rather than 'damn'. <br />
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Once in my early twenties I made a road trip with my sister from Key West in Florida up to Atlanta, Georgia. As we approached the city I picked up a copy of 'Gone With the Wind' in a store and read the first 50 pages in the car. What has always stayed with me is the extraordinary description of blood-red earth around Atlanta. If you were reading this on your sofa in the UK or California, you might tend to think that this was a trope - that the soil is described as red because of the blood-letting in the Civil War which is about to begin. But what's worth noting is that the soil around Atlanta is literally, strikingly red. <br />
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Still, I have to admit that after I left Atlanta, the book mark went in Mitchell's novel and I never returned to it. But after reading Shiba's commentary on 'Gone With the Wind' I began to see the book and the film with entirely new eyes. <br />
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The most important line in the film is not the iconic 'frankly, dear, I don't give a damn', but the words of Scarlett's first-generation Irish father to his daughter at the beginning of the film when he teaches her the importance of their land-holdings at their farm at Tara: land is the one thing that truly matters, he says, 'because land is the only thing that lasts'. That blood-red land, even before the Civil War starts, has a blood-soaked heritage harking back to land dispossession in Ireland. In the film, Scarlett's father is depicted as a sort of cod Irishman, a twee leprechaun, but there is true cold steel in those words: we have lost everything before and we are never, ever going to let that happen again. <br />
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But spoilt American Miss Scarlett does not understand that blood-soaked legacy of the land even though her very name alludes to it: the farm name 'Tara' crucially refers to the ancient site of the Kings of Ireland.<br />
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It's only when Scarlett has lost everything - her mother, her husband, her daughter - when the war itself has been lost and Atlanta burnt to the ground, that Scarlett, seemingly without hope, begins to hear her father's words echoing inside her head. Crucially, she still possesses the land and with that, everything is indeed not lost. This final scene of 'Gone With the Wind' can have a trite 'I Will Survive!' feel to it, but it really is communicating something powerful. This is the moment that Scarlett O'Hara actually comprehends who exactly she is, she finds her true inner Irishness and where she came from. What is lauded as a 'great American novel' is also on a more profound level a contemplation of the very nature of Irishness and its enduring effects. <br />
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When I heard that Minae Mizumura was also visiting Ireland on her recent trip, I became positively insistent that she read Shiba's 'Irish Journey', and I'm pleased to say she took me up on it. There's a particular phrase that Shiba used to describe the Irish which I have never forgotten. He said that the essence of Irishness was 'Hyakuhai Fumetsu' (百敗不滅), which literally means 'To be defeated a hundred times and yet be indestructible'. <br />
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There is surely no work of art which better captures this quality of 'hyakuhai fumetsu' than 'Gone With The Wind'. Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324659956195254426.post-74347237786694636252016-04-26T21:07:00.000+01:002016-04-26T21:07:54.209+01:00The Death of EuroTo Brexit or not to Brexit, that is the question...<br />
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Today I was leafing through a book of myths and came across this piece called 'The Death of Euro' and was struck by how uncannily prescient it seemed to be. I felt as if it could almost have been written yesterday... <br />
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<i>In the beginning, the universe was dark and Chaos roamed the earth. The gods grew weary of their strength and fell to fighting with one another. Marcus rushed out of a forest and slew Francus and declared his hatred for Rubus. For three long winters, he tortured Rubus and starved and bludgeoned him so that his howls reached up into the heavens and caused cataracts in the sky. Pondus hid in a corner and prayed and waited. Then on a golden chariot Dolarus descended from the clouds and swept Pondus into his embrace. The two gods charged forth at Marcus, who tired and blood-soaked with the battle against Rubus, was overwhelmed and slain. And Rubus then exacted a great punishment on the body of Marcus. And then the universe was quiet once more. <br />
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But gods may never be slain forever, and Marcus stirred once more, and now wooed Francus whom he had slain and their sister god Lira and the three gods danced in a circle and embraced and constructed a great tent around them. And all whom the gods had once slain from the northern lands and the warm southern sea came together and washed their blood-soaked hands and kissed and made love to one another in the tent. And then they made a great fire and Marcus and Francus and Lira and many other gods stepped into the fire and were consumed in a blaze of light as a new great god was born who all bowed down and worshipped. And this god of gods was called Euro. <br />
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Pondus had slipped into the tent before Euro was born, but his body had not been caught in the flames that had extinguished Marcus and Francus and many other gods, and now when he first laid eyes on the beast god Euro emerging like a dragon-phalanxed phoenix from the bodies of his fathers and mothers, Pondus ran into a corner of the tent and cowered in fearfulness. But Pondus was alone. Pondus wanted to be part of Euro and enter into his body, but he feared to do so for he still clung to his own life. And the Heavens rang with laughter as they watched Pondus shiver in the darkness. <br />
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Now outside the tent Dolarus, god of Victory, ruled supreme in the West and in all the lands of the earth and did not fear Euro for he saw the mischief which Marcus and Francus and Lira had caused to the peoples of the Earth, and when Pondus cried to him for protection, he laughed and ordered Pondus to run back and enter into the body of the beast, that Pondus might best serve Dolarus if he gave up his life and entered into the spirit of Euro. But still Pondus feared and secretly wished that Dolarus might yield him protection from Euro for such a beast god had never existed in the firmament before, a god with a hydra head and the belly of a horse and the feet of a duck. But the voices in the heavens told Pondus to wait and see what new shapes the beast god Euro would assume, and from that he might know whether he too should enter into the beast. So Pondus waited in a corner of the tent and watched the new god begin to metamorphose. <br />
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Euro first assumed the shape of a bear and roared forth in a rage. And the bear grew larger and larger until everyone in the heavens said that such an enormous bear could not grow any further, but on and on and on it grew, and Pondus quaked in fear, and felt all life draining away from him, but swore that he would never enter into the body of a bear. Then night came. And when Pondus awoke, he saw that the bear god was no longer writhing, but slowly shrinking. Then Pondus looked again and saw the features of Euro seemed more like a bull than a bear that the head was ox-shaped and the claws on the feet were slowly turning into hoofs. And of all animals Pondus loved the bull the most for he loved to ride a bull and he had heard the words of a prophet telling him that he would be swooped up in the clutches of a great bull who would entrance him and together they would sweep into the sky and take away Dolarus' golden crown and subjugate all the peoples of the world. <br />
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Pondus watched and waited and the voices of the universe were in a torment, and there were voices shouting that Euro looked most bear-like and that Pondus should 'beware!' and fly with all dispatch out of the tent and into the forest because the bear would surely eat up Pondus; and there were voices in the firmament telling Pondus that no, the features of the beast were more bull-like than bear, and that the bull was the animal on which Pondus would ride in triumph across the whole world. <br />
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Pondus thought that he would go mad and that every part of his nature would be cleft in two by the voices shouting for him to go in or out of the beast. He shivered with fear and watched and waited as the bear's claws extended towards him. And somewhere in the features of the beast, in a shape neither bull nor bear, Pondus thought he spied the features of Marcus, whom once he had slain, but who had lived to be born anew in the innards of the beast. <br />
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(My translation from Old Norse; illustration by Karen McCann)<br />
Damian Flanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09673207892262934298noreply@blogger.com0