The notion that the moon voyages provide us assurance of enough to eat exposes the shallowness of our intellectual confidence, for it is based upon our growing inability to distinguish between training and education. Training is a process of conditioning, an orderly and highly efficient procedure by which a man learns a prescribed pattern of facts and functions. Education, on the other hand, is an obscure process by which a person’s experience is brought into contact with his place and his history. A college can train a person in four years; it can barely begin his education in that time. A person’s education begins before his birth in the making of the disciplines, traditions, and attitudes of mind that he will inherit, and it continues until his death under the slow, expensive, uneasy tutelage of his experience. The process that produces astronauts may produce soldiers and factory workers and clerks; it will never produce good farmers or good artists or good citizens or good parents.

Berry again, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony, pp. 98-99, early 70s.

I tried to nick the opening about the moon landing as not timely, but it’s inclusio, as he ends with the process that produces astronauts. It’s a military process, that is, a factory process. Good for some things– anything that needs cramming– not for most.

…I guess we were what’s sometimes described as working class aristocracy – book-lovers, engaged in an artisanal kind of skilled labour – but we never had money. I found this background was a great impediment, especially in grad school, because it meant while I usually knew far more about, say, the Oresteia than the bourgeois students, I was completely lacking in professional manners.

Orwell, too.

Then “Discipline and Hope,” with this gem:

“The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy.” (pgs. 115-16)

From Berry’s second essay collection, A Continuous Harmony. This lecture appeared in 1971, and it still describes too well right now, from his distrust of the distended political middle to his appeal to Jeffersonian ideals. These contrast greatly with the process exemplified in Graeber’s work. Berry again:

The entire social vision, as I understand it, goes something like this: Man is born into a fallen world, doomed to eat bread in the sweat of his face. But there is an economic redemption. He should go to college and get an education– that is, he should acquire the “right” certificates and meet the “right” people. An education of this sort should enable him to get a “good” job– that is, short hours of work that is either easy or prestigious for a lot of money. Thus he is saved from the damnation of drudgery, and is presumably well on the way to proving the accuracy of his early suspicion that he is really a superior person.

Ten years ago today I set foot in Japan for the first time. I had forgotten it’s been so long, but last weekend, looking for a sketchbook, I found my journal with “3.08.’01-3.21.’01″ on the cover. Ten years is a nice reminder that things get as close to whole as they can. Plus I can roll out some photos.

Rather than share stories, like the arrests or the one with the double-six pack and the rubber ducky, or wallow in nostalgia for Kratie’s ramen shop with the Motown jukebox, instead I have this, a thought on traveling capped with a story:

Unlike some people with a deep interest in the place, I first went to Japan by chance. I didn’t want to move there. I’d never really wanted to travel at all, and as a kid in the back pew I feared God would make me a missionary somewhere humid. Yet by chance in college, my town had a sister city. I made some Japanese friends and got into the language. Then two other friends left to teach there. When one had a spare ticket, I scraped together some cash, took off from my dead-end job, and found myself in Nagoya.

An unexpected gift: the trip cut me loose. I had lived much of my 20s paralyzed, for reasons I will never understand, but I got free when I got off the plane. Two breezy weeks of parties, puking in an elementary school bathroom with a traveler’s flu, struggling up a mountain in a Daihatsu clown car, and sushi by the river, all whisked by. Then I had a moment in the check-in line for my return flight. Nagoya’s no Changi, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the scope of the place, connections to everywhere, like I was inside the lens when it zooms to wide, or on the edge of the world stretching all the way out. When I got home Japan felt more real than home. Bumbling around two nowhere towns for two weeks threaded the place into me, so for the first time in my life I was tangled not just in the barbed wire I’d grown up with.

Of course, Japan’s an island of peaks and lowlands. My two friends had transformed, escaped the traps in their old lives, and found brilliant new ones in a brilliant new country. Those two weeks live vividly in my memory, still a high point in my life. In my journal, I wrote it down in lyrical prose mawkish enough that I’d like to pat younger me on the head and flick the thing into the ocean. In my defense, it was Spring, when the sky pukes cherry blossoms.

But then the rainy season kicks in, followed by summer in the lowlands’ thick, stagnant air. You get maybe a week of nice fall colors before the bitterly humid winter. And you get a visa and a job and there’s paperwork and boneheaded managers and piles of laundry, and when you get deathly sick on your birthday your girlfriend takes care of you, cleans your apartment even, but you both secretly know you’ll go your own ways after dragging out the fights in a couple of months. Japan’s not brilliant or new, just another place you find yourself despite how foreigners like me have rubbed it down with glitter. I should have learned to welcome entropy by that point in my life, but I still had notions.

After my contract ended I went back to traveling, from Osaka to Chiba to Shikoku to Kurume.

Traveling you see the world and wear yourself out. I was trying to exhaust the possibilities and myself; I had come to Japan to transform, to escape the traps in my life, armed with someone else’s country and an elaborate script of self-mythologies. So I worked on farms and burned through cities. When my visa expired, I left, worked and saved, and came back. When it didn’t work I did it again.

I still didn’t know that change comes not with noise, effort, and action, but quiet. Fortunately, traveling a lot means you’re trapped with yourself and the noise in your head. So there are just two options. One’s to hear it and stop listening, which I still didn’t know to do. The other? Muting it for the people you meet.

I met dozens and dozens of people. Curious locals on the train, foreigners standing out in the crowd, mad farmers needing a hand, friends of friends of friends welcoming me as I passed through. I always knew I’d go my own way, so our interactions had the sharpness of a camera’s flash. Dark, but light engraving silver with shocked smiles in fierce detail, but dark again. Everything disappears, except for its moment when it just is, when it’s eternal.

(Eternity being “a quality of”, not “a length of.”)

Some people I met just briefly, like the eloquent gentleman from New Orleans in a Tokyo bar. Others became friends, like Miho, my next-door neighbor I never talked to until I had moved away. We all shared moments like eating salmon belly at Pikolo or taking out a tree stump, having an awkward conversation in the Angel Detector (Gautel & Karaïndros, 1992-97), watching Buffalo Daughter in a haze after talking over future plans at a bar. And I seem to have talked to everyone about future plans, mine and theirs, because everyone I met seemed indeterminate. Some were foreign, like the two-meter Mancunian, some local, like Yuki, a photographer biding time as a hosteler. Everyone was moving on. We all knew that the soil back home let you grow in just one or two directions, fenced by accidents of geography; transplanted, it seemed possible to go not anywhere, but everywhere, like kudzu metastasizing across the South. Fortunately, such world-eating drive eventually consumes itself. Then we’re left with our selves as we are, with our valuable wounds and the ties we share.

Speaking of ties, at some point in Japan I heard a Chinese folktale about the “red string of fate,” probably on a TV drama. It ties you to your soul mate, and has become quite the cliché in Asian pop. Maybe different colored threads should tie you to everyone else. Maybe they stitch up the wounds too. At the very least I like to think of one person’s life as the weft threading through others’ lives. Whether you’re the weft or the warp depends on your perspective, and the shape of the whole, whether a tapestry or just rags stitched together in a frayed mess, remains mysterious. Still, I miss everyone I’ve met, even when I’ve not kept up. How strange that we ever met in Japan, that we have fragments like this (click it) scattered through our lives:

To end, I hope I take this with me.

Back in Shikoku, a few years after I’d set foot in Japan, I had a grand day out with a young woman from London. Nothing scandalous–Andy came along. She’d helped run this nonprofit farm for a couple of years, and he and I had stopped by to work for a few weeks. One day we got sick of the rural grind, so we went to dig some bamboo shoots for dinner.

Bamboo’s a miracle, really– it grows anywhere, vigorously, in culms stronger than their weight in steel. If you get to them early, they’re delicious. But you have to dig around the big culms just so. We walked a few hundred meters to a precarious grove and dug around just so.

No shoots. Eventually we asked a neighbor to save us from ourselves. He explained the only time-honored and sensible way of digging shoots. His father’s father had dug this way, take no ko, Japanese tradition, etc etc. He made no sense. Some other neighbors, looking to escape whatever chores had trapped them, came over. Turns out his way was wrong, because each farmer had his own time-honored and sensible way of digging for shoots. They made even less sense. So we all agreed it was a bad day for digging and went our own ways.

Walking home, Andy, Gin and I sat down in the middle of the road. We weren’t tired or anything. We could see rainclouds gathering on the other side of the valley, just over the ridge. It got a touch dark, and then, with wind in the trees and the bamboo, for reasons I will never understand and always cherish, the three of us fell asleep.

…

I’ve been updating my neglected art page, with a couple of short films and some city photography. Look, enjoy; more’s to come as soon as I get organized, which could be a while.

Alexandria, fire, books:

The Library of Alexandria has burned twice before, once, partially, when Julius Caesar made his landing in Egypt in 48 BCE, and again, with devastating effect, in late antiquity. The first burning was probably a mistake, the second the result of religious fanaticism, most probably the same fanaticism that killed the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia in 415 CE for daring, as a woman, to profess philosophy. Hypatia’s murderers called themselves Christians, but their real creed was an ancient cult of destruction that precedes every known religion, every state, every political system. We pin that cult now on the Germanic tribe of Vandals who sacked Rome in the year 455, but we can read its violent traces just as clearly in prehistoric times. Blind rage cannot understand anything as complex or beautiful as Rome, or a library, or even a person, an animal, a book, a tree, a work of art—but blind rage can make these intricate systems stop, and the ability to make things stop has served many of our kind since time immemorial as a fine substitute for learning, experience, scientific method, artistic creation, philosophy. Destruction, too, can count as hard work.

The final selections for HU’s Best Criticism 2010 is here; my own shambling, fairly ridiculous justification for my selections is here. Other people’s choices are at the bottom of the main post.

Final Thought:

In the introduction to David Ohle’s excellent Motorman, Ben Marcus asks why it disappeared after publication:

Visual artists have critics, ostensibly, while innovative writers have, for the most part, reviewers, whose job it is ever more frequently to determine the cost-benefit of purchasing the book, using heart-crushing standards such as beachtime, readability, difficulty, sameness, narrative drive, and superficiality (more, please!). Or they are hen-pecked jacket copy plagiarists, dutifully paraphrasing publicist’s pitch letters in their newspapers. But rather than remark on the obvious cultural conditions (or lack thereof) that have rendered many artistic writers (as opposed to, uh, other kinds of writers) marginal, based on their low sales– The people don’t lie!– while visual artists, who might not sell what they make to even one person, can work at the limits of their art without the overt burden of audience pleasure (read: Snickers and Cheez Doodles) in mind, it seems better to be pleased that this book is back in the hands of people who might read it for themselves.

Comics artists seem to be visual artists trapped by reviewers, or by the market demands behind reviewers. Still, Motorman’s a great book.

Ng Suat Tong invited me to sit on the jury for the Hooded Utilitarian’s Best Comics Criticism of 2010, along with some writers who both write and read more prolifically than me. I’ll have my personal list in a bit, but until then he has a smart, precise rundown of both our process and the field:

You have to be pretty stupid to write at length about comics online. With a bit of luck, comics scripting can be turned into a lucrative career [or a film deal-- my note]; writing about comics online, hardly ever. The best criticism takes time and frequently pays next to nothing. In other words, comics criticism requires a special kind of insanity… No surprise then that the attrition rate has been heavy. It wouldn’t take too long to name the various comics critics who began their “careers” in the 80s and who remain active in the field today. The history of comics criticism is littered with the corpses of writers who used to write about comics. The resultant toll on experience has had a damaging impact on the art form.

Read the rest at HU and scrap in the comments.

So I am terrible at self-promotion, as I am flying out to Oklahoma tomorrow to speak at a fine university for a few days on East Asian cinema and the vernacular of sustainability in Japan, about which more later. If you’re in Shawnee (not Pawnee, home of the world’s largest Dick Tracy mural) or environs, and better organized than me, drop by for the lectures. I have no idea when they are, and I haven’t even packed my suitcase.

So I leave you with this, which I am trying but failing to incorporate into one of the lectures. It is just about my favorite thing…

…a video from YouTube, already exiled from the land of entropy, in which Team Aomori uses their abilities of curling to get a rice cooker to a young salaryman. And coffee. Sorry you can’t watch it, blame stupid copyright enforcement.

Zeitaku!

Tony Crunk, a colleague I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years, has finally gotten online.

It’s long overdue, as he is in fact a poet you should know. His first book Living in the Resurrection won the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in ’94. It is very, very good, one of those books that captures something in particular about a place in time. I’d say more, but it’s poetry, Sam Beckett & all that.

I’m on his back to include a selection of recipes. Why not? Until then we have his children’s books with readings. That should tide us over.

Visit his site, read samples of his work, listen to him doing some readings. There’s a really nice video interview linked on the “Railroad John” page where he’s talking about his childhood in the 270 before it was the 270, before one’s area code became a form of taxonomy. That vast expanse down near & past Hoptown, which I have never explored despite my best efforts, boasts towns with names like “Monkey’s Eyebrow,” “Cerulean,” and “Boaz.” And fair “Benton,” with its epic “Tater Day[s]” since 1843.

But not Birmingham. Birmingham’s under water. Oh, and that’s his new book on the upper left, which may or may not have anything to do with Birmingham. Get it!

Oursins in the garden:

Parallel with oursins on the map:

(From Luc Moullet’s “La Cabale des Oursins,” a favorite little film)

“Sea urchins,” naturally. Or unnaturally. The shape just naturally arises, unless you’ve got to make it yourself:

ABCDE, and thanks to NIPPaysage for the works in the first place.