Discoveries: Arts and Culture

The author is Kaneko Nobuhisa..../ I had never realized there were so many cats in Ukoyo-e prints... This is a charming book, which I thoroughly enjoyed but am not lending, as it is abit precious; in Japanese and English. I have owned it for some time and have not read it, so sheltering in place, with the absence for the first time in my life, of a cat to keep me company...it is a balm. .   The chapters are as following:  1.  Cats: complex but cherished family members II.  Kuniyoshi's non-cat work III.  Secrets of a Cat Painter IV.  For like minded folks who need only a cat to be happy V.  Okoma's great adventure. The Cat's Tale VII.  The irresistible allure of Kuniyoshi's Cats.   Kuniyoshi is typically known for his "samurai warrior" prints.  However, Kuniyoshi loved cats.  He was surrounded by cats.  He gave his cats posthumous Buddhist names like humans. The cats were portraits of affection and observ...

Holland Cotter, in  “Lessons in Constructive Solitude" observes that   Thoreau used his self-quarantine at Walden, to pursue an intensive course in self education.   In the present pandemic moment, there’s plenty to learn from standing still.” // An intensive course in self education:   “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”   The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far – readhing, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India”… I would add, China. Many studies have been done on Thoreau in China…I traced his Chinese references while living there.   “ In a letter to a friend he wrote: “ The Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things.  To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi .”   He made his life at Walden one of those intervals.”   Cotter goes on to say, “(Interestingly, ...

I also finished Stephen Addis’s book on Japanese humor.     My favorite:  Taking a nap/looks more refined/ when holding a book.                                                         Addis reminds us that humor is a means to cope in society.   Discords between a stratified controlled society and actual human behavior releases tension and acceptance and tolerance through humor which uplifts and affirms life. The varietals include:   parody, satire, absurdist, sexual, puns, gender, wit, caricature, and visual.    There are two forms: haiku and Senryu .    Haiku is literary playfulness, and extends itself into waka (57577) and Renga or linked verse.  ...

Translator,  Hiroaki Sato  indicates she is indebted to Robert Fagan for supporting her project. The Princess is the Princess who haunts the reader, in the Hut in the Genji who converts first to being a priestess and then a nun.  There a re three 100 poem sequences indicated as A, B, and C, and then a section of Other (miscellaneous poems).  She wrote 400 poems.   Reading these poems encouraged me  in that I was dismissing my lyrical poetry of late, as forlorn, and listless, and only about nature….but her poems are wistful, and filled with longing and perhaps loneliness and deeply steeped in natural references.  The Princess died of breast cancer.   Like the Sumerian princess, poet and priestess, about whom I wrote, Enheduanna, Princess Shikishi, a princess, became a priestess for the Kamo Shrine parallel to the grand shrine of Ise,   and a poet. Her poems are luminous oftentimes filled with tranquil beauty and sadness, a...

A friend's return to Japan through Donald Keene's Contemporary Lit anthologies, prompted me to read Donald Keene's illuminating appraisal of  Yoshimasa and The Silver Pavilion.  I visited the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, though it is not Silver, nor was it ever silver, but wood, as this was not the Golden Age of the Golden Pavilion.  Yoshimasa and The Silver Pavilion. Ginkaku-ji  The Creation of the Soul of Japan. Donald Keene.    The imperial line from which Yoshimasa  descends includes the emperor of the Gold Pavilion Kinkaku-ji.  Yoshimitsui.  about which Mishima writes, and about which Philip Glass wrote the score to the film.  These are performed beautifully on piano by the Japanese pianist, Maki Namekawa.  Yoshimasa was considered a failure as a 15 th c. shogun emperor, because he was inept in war strategy and battles. He retires to zen monastery.   He accomplishes being a patron of those most advanced in the...

Terry Tempest Williams and I met at a conference on Nature writing in Key West, in which Peter Matthiessen and Annie Dillard participated, at least in my memory...though the latter two may have been in other places...it was a great place for the conference, gathering for sunsets each evening, visiting the house of Ernest Hemingway, biking the inlet, still remain in my memory. This book portrays her ferocity which she makes beautiful in the spirit of the writing and the passion with which she has defended Native Americans and our Great West environment.  A collection of essays through time, perhaps inspired by the year she spends at Harvard University,  they range from letters to her father, to the death of her husband(mainly)'s dog, and  her brother's suicide.  She documents protest marches, the naming of historical places, especially one most contested, which Trump has reversed. She tracks the history of monuments. She travels to China and visits the Bai minority...

Finished this book in three days, which is pretty amazing for me, with fiction, but this well written novel held my attention. I finished reading A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Dara Horn, and do not find it recorded here.  Software Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do.  When she visits the Library of Alexandria as a tech consultant, she is abducted in Egypt’s post revolutionary chaos, with only a copy of the philosopher Maimonides’ famous A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED.  Led to read this book, by having read Peter Hessler’s The Buried (Egypt then and now…archaeology and the revolution), I was not disappointed but totally enhralled by her strategizing and well crafted novel. Her jealous sister takes over her husband and daughter when she has to send a death video.  One anticipates this as in the beginning, when children, Judith leaves her in a pit, into which the children have made her crawl and take away the ladder, an act ...

This has an introduction by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.  I once knew Colin so his interest in Fermor makes great sense given all the travel books he has made about his journeys, though he also writes fiction. So, for anyone wanting to go this route, Here are my notes.  They need more editing, but I need to move on, just now.  Apologies.  P 89 “The only authors he had heard of were the same ones who seemed to have gained a unique foothold throughout Central Europe, in German translation or Tauchnitz: Dickens,  Wilde and H.G. Wells, then, after a gap, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham,  Charles Morgan, and rather surprisingly, Rosamond Lehmann.  Their bugbear, because of  Arms and the Man was Bernard Shaw .”  P 69  She was as pale as a water sprite or an etiolated  Rossetti  heroine.  P 59 rose bushes, hundreds of thousands of them, …Kazanlik is one of the chief places in the world for attar of ...