^{February/March 2006}

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Teaching Literary Language

To me, the real question is not whether the study of literature and literary language is useful for students who will likely never major at university in literary studies - it emphatically is - but rather the more difficult question of deciding how and when to call attention to the language in the text. In practice, for example, I notice that I tend to draw students' attentions far more frequently to metaphoric use of language and other tropes which relate closely to the ideas in the text than i do, say, spending time on rhyme, rhythm, and meter. In part it may be that I simply have not found an engaging way to teach poesy which does not fall back on the teacher parsing lines and students dutifully - and often unsuccessfully - marking stress points and rhyme patterns. Secondly, I see rhyme, rhythm, and meter as the stuff of artifice. Poetry, it must be remembered, is written to sets of rules which have been developed as part of the conceit of the poet's purpose: it is not the most effective way to express an idea (well, actually, sometimes it is - perhaps as a result of the extra effort the poet has to bring to bear working within an artificially confined form) but how well they can do so within the limits imposed by the genre. Writing poetry is a game played by mutually agreed-upon rules. This does not limit the value of poetry: at its best it is the embodiment of form and function. It does, however, make the language of poetry highly artificial. People speak, write, and think symbolically: in metaphor. Despite some claims to the contrary, people do NOT naturally speak in iambic pentameter. 

Perhaps it's because poetry often tries to work below the level of idea, at the intuitive, subconscious (if there is such a thing) level. Do assonance and alliteration have an effect on the reader/listener? Absolutely. Can we identify, analyze, discuss, and even reproduce those effects? Sure, with proper attention.

Perhaps it's the L2 factor coming into play, but I do not find teaching poetic elements to my students very satisfying. And if the teacher isn't happy with a lesson, you can bet the students aren't, either.

And yet I can't deny the effect a well-wrought turn of phrase can have on the audience.... And there's so much brilliance in poetry. How can we make it meaningful to students who are working at what the US Government defines as "limited working proficiency:"

"... in general insufficiently experienced with the language to draw inferences directly from the linguistic aspects of the text."

^{January, 2006}

Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu! Happy New Year!

In the Chinese calendar, 2006 is the year 4703 and is called the Year of the Yang Red Fire Dog. According to Janarrdhana Guptha at Buzzle.com, it will be a peaceful year on the international front, with lots of positive developments environmentally (though not including, apparently, a Green Party victory in the recent Canadian federal elections), flourishing careers and spirituality, and "the notion of collective mankind marching towards an inspiring New World Order." There will also be, however, "earthquakes of awesome proportions," typhoons, volcanic eruptions, nuclear disasters, and accidents in mass transit. All of which means Tokyo could be an interesting place to live in the next twelve months. 

 

Rumi and I made the most of the calm before the storm by getting out  of Tokyo as much as possible during our winter holidays. We took an overnight trip to a mountaintop hamlet on the outskirts of the city, and spent a couple of days with her parents in snowbound Niigata.

The secret to getting away from the crowds in Tokyo is to do one thing while everybody is busy doing something else. Case in point: from December 31^st to around January 2^nd, the mountaintop hamlet of Mitake is awash in new year’s revelers who worship at the 2,000 year-old summit shrine and watch the first sunrise of the new year break like a red egg over the skyscrapers of distant Shinjuku. On December 30^th, however, the place was practically deserted. At our thatch-roofed minshuku, traditional Japanese-style inn, there were only about 3 other couples. in the whole hamlet there wasn’t much more than the 150-odd residents and a cat with only three feet, all of whom make their living from Tokyo escapees. At night we walked a haunted road to the cable car station for a look at the stars above and the lights of Shinjuku below. By day we followed a path past the 1.000 year old cedar and summit shrine, and dropped into a replanted slopeside forest of young cedar burnt gold by the winter sun. The trail followed a streambed of moss-covered boulders laid bare by the thin trickle of water this time of year, without much snow in this part of Japan even at altitude. We scrambled up a stone wall and drank stream water with a man from the village laying in a supply for his coffee shop – which we never did find. We hiked along the glacier-green headwaters of the Tamagawa River where it flows out of the Okutama Mountains range, and watched kayakers dart in the current. Local climbers splayed themselves across chalk-covered boulders. We dropped 1-yen coins at pathside shrines, and rang a copper bell at a deserted temple before catching a train back to the city.

Tokyo doesn’t get much snow. The worst of the winter weather which blows across the Sea of Japan from Siberia and Mongolia and the like is blocked by the mountains which separate the densely populated Kanto plain from the rice growing plain of Niigata. On days when it’s clear and sunny in Tokyo – that’s most days in winter – it’s overcast and raining or snowing in Niigata. That might not be fair, but shoganai as we say here: it can’t be helped. The mountains that separate Niigata from the Kanto region, incidentally, hold popular ski and onsen resorts, and provided KAWABATA Yasunari with a setting and funiki, atmosphere, for his novel Snow Country.

  Snow country is less than two hours by shinkansen bullet train north of Tokyo. It is also where Rumi grew up, and so for oshogatsu new year celebrations we board a train from a sunny platform in Tokyo, tunnel through the mountains and ski resorts of snow country – the setting for the novel – and emerge in a countrified, if not gentrified, part of Japan on the stormy Sea of Japan coast. This year has been a record one for snowfall, and even as we watched the scenery zip past the train window at 200km an hour I was transported back to Hokkaido and the Toronto of my youth. The snow in Niigata is not as light and dry as it is in Hokkaido, but it’s still a fine, clean powder that doesn’t turn to black, crusted mush as it does, like, two hours after falling into the streets of Toronto. For three days we visited with Rumi’s family, stayed at an onsen resort, and toured the countryside in whiteout conditions as strong winds blew across the open rice paddies in a constant horizontal blizzard that wiped out roads and turned farmhouses into steep-pitched islands in a storm-tossed sea of white.

^{December, 2005}

 

Christmas Tradition

Merry Christmas, all you elves and reindeer! Hope everyone is on the good side of Santa's list this year.

 

Rumi and I continue to invent a Christmas tradition of our own in this snowless city without much holiday cheer. We started with a Christmas Eve dinner of mashed potatoes and chicken cooked in red garlic paste we brought back from Portugal. Christmas morning, we began with the newest addition to our celebration, opening the stockings which were hung around the 25-inch TV on which we watch so many videos. This year Rumi got the Lomo fisheye camera that she asked for, and I received a Wenger Swiss Army watch to replace the Kenneth Cole Animation Network watch which appears to have short circuited, or anyway is eating batteries faster than I go through Christmas oranges. We followed breakfast with a Japanese lesson on how to use -na adjectives and -i adjectives alone, together, and in contrast. After a short nap, we went for traditional Christmas shiatsu massage in Ebisu.

 

All in all, a wonderful Christmas day, and a great next step in our globalized holiday tradition.

Hope all is well in Canada and the US and Japan and Korea and Germany and Borneo and wherever else Santa finds you on this magic spinning ball adrift in the cosmic sea.

 

^{November, 2005}

 

The Teaching Life

Once again, term projects have been read and assessed, final exams made and graded, and report cards written.

 

Great Moments in Blogging

I discovered How Conor Is Spending All His Money while browsing through an old discussion thread at the BootsnAll Tavel Community BBS. Most of Conor's recent posts are from Stateside, but he writes very well about even such mundane trips as visiting his kid sister at Swarthmore College. While visiting friends at Penn State Conor also gains some insight into the teaching life. It's left me with a warm glow and a new way to think about how lucky I am to be doing what I love best: reading and writing, thinking about reading and writing, and teaching to a group of students who are not just - for the most part - kind and polite, but also interesting people.

 

^{October, 2005}

 

The Writing Life

Slowly, slowly, I am carving time out of my day to write again. In September I finished a draft of Bringing Home the Tofu, the sequel to "Snow Country" that I've been trying to finish for the last three years. This month, I started to scribble in my notebook to the question "why I've stopped writing daily blogs," and have found myself writing deeper and deeper into the relationship between writing and the expat experience. More to come on this topic.

 

OCD

Recently, I've figured out something that should have been obvious (but then, the obvious is easy to overlook, like car keys or the love of a good woman): for those of us with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a good start to the morning sets the tone for the whole day. If I do a 20-minute set of yoga first thing, I catch myself doing little stretches throughout the day. If I start by writing, the thoughts which chatter like monkeys in the back of my mind all day focus on the next sentence, paragraph, or stanza, while the rest of my consciousness deals with the stresses and aggravations of life during daylight hours: work, finances, the thin spot slowly creeping up my scalp, so that when I next sit down at my writing desk it's as if I never left. If, on the other hand, I jump straight into the day, convinced that the important tasks to fool around with yoga or writing, or if I'm lazy and log on to my email, which inevitably leads to at least a half-hour of aimless surfing, my mind, desperate for a purpose, fixates on some minor annoyance or potential future problem, and obsesses on that topic until, by the end of the day, I'm  fatigued from tilting at windmills.

Available Light: Spain

Recently I downloaded a copy of Photoshop Elements 3 (just in time for them to release Elements 4, as it happens), and have been playing with it as I prepared a slideshow of images from last summer's trip to Spain and Portugal. PS Elements seems to me back-end loaded: there's a lot of power in there, but it's hard to know how to get the most out of it. For now, I mostly use the crop and "Quick Fix" features, which are about on par with Picasa 2.1 (see below). In any case, I've posted a slideshow, which requires the free download Adobe Reader, from Spain at www.exitbooted.com/availablelight/spain05.pdf. The nighttime revelry pictures were taken in a small town on Mallorca, which hosts a "Dance With the Demons" night once a year. Next up: pictures from Portugal

Available Light: Tokyo

Also recently, I've started to play with digital cameras. I recently got my hands on a used Konica Minolta A1, and have been shooting with abandon on weekends. I've posted some of the more interesting results on Available Light: Tokyo. Look at Night Apple, Spider Web, Shinjuku Trees, and Power Lines. Next up: some scanned images from a recent day trip to Yokohama.

^{September, 2005}

Going to the Country

One of the perks of living in what is, arguably, the biggest metropolitan region in the world is... wait for it... getting out of the world's biggest metropolitan region on a long weekend, along with several million other urbanites fleeing by the trainload to their hometowns like so many cherry blossoms scattering in the wind. If cherry blossoms moved by train. And had hometowns.

On a recent long weekend, Rumi and I headed by train to her family home in Niigata prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast. First on a shovel-nosed Max double-decker shinkansen, a train which slides out of Tokyo's concrete sprawl and into ripe green rice paddies, long tunnels, and mountain resort towns like Yuzawa, famous as the setting for  Kawabata Yasunari's novel Snow Country. Next on a two-car local train, the kind that seems to run on every country line, where Louis Vuitton handbags and dark suits were replaced by casual two-pieces of indeterminate fabric and purchased at the local Aoyama clothing store. We trundled past more rice paddies and patches of cabbage the size and shape of Alien egg pods while a trio of teenage girls (un)dressed to the nines for a weekend even deeper in the country, and the obasans sitting on either side held their noses at the mist of hair fixer that floated around the trio's heads.

For three days we lived like country lords, first rolling out futons in Rumi's mother's tea room, then sleeping in Western-style beds at the Akakura Kanko Hotel, an off-season ski resort where sulfurous onsen water plays out of a four-tier fountain and the grass of the ski slope is golf-course smooth. We drove around rural Niigata sucking on sweet soy sauce candies and listening to the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack and play-by-plays of a Japanese chess match on the onboard entertainment/navigation system.

Our first stop was the Iwanohara Vineyard, which has a stone cellar behind rusty iron doors which remind me of some of the clubs I used to hang out in Toronto, and which produces prize-winning reds. The best of the lot, medium bodied and 2700 yen a bottle, tastes of blackberry, wildberry, and sweet potato, with a soil perfume - or so the judges' write-up explained.

Nojiriko is the second largest lake in Niigata, a deep-blue drop of water in the surrounding highlands of Myoko, Kurohime, and Madarao mountains. This is cottage country, Japanese-style: swan boats and a torii gate; windsurfers and summer homes. It has also been, apparently, a popular summer retreat for foreign missionaries since the late Taisho period at the start of the last century. This would explain why, as Rumi and I sat at an outdoor table having coffee, a perfectly enunciated "Hail Mary full of grace" came from the neighbouring table of Japanese speakers.

Other places we visited were off the map, or at least off the English-language Internet: the suspension bridge at Naenoro-toki waterfall; Imori-ike pond, with its resident population of salamanders and, along the trail we followed, at least one basking snake.

A pleasant diversion from workaday Tokyo.

The Hard Way

Mark Jenkins is a regular contributor to Outside magazine which, for those of you don't know, is the Rolling Stone of adventure travel: a hip and literate lifestyle magazine about subjects which - until its recent yuppie-fication - were considered dubious in mainstream culture. Tim Cahill is a founding editor. So is Jann Wenner. 'Nuff said.

Jenkins is also the kind of guy who make for a really cool older brother. He's tough, smart, and a fearless adventurer, who is man enough to cuss when Mom isn't in the room but not afraid to admit that he was shit-scared on his first lead climb. As a writer, he's also not afraid to use words that send even this English major and high school teacher surfing off to a dictionary web site (I like www.onelook.com best). I discovered today that Jenkins has his own web page, with links to some of his shorter writings from GQ and Outside. It's called, appropriately enough, www.thehardway.com. Check it out the next time you're in the mood for some inspirational, straight-talking, adjectivally rich adventure writing.

^{August, 2005}

I am back!

... in two senses. First, I have returned to Tokyo after two months (!) of study and travel in Spain and Portugal. Second, I am once again revisiting this whole business of writing online.

 

Home Sweet Tokyo

... and it is hot hot hot and wet wet wet. Mooshiatsui, we say in Japanese. It's the kind of heat that makes your shoes stick to the pavement, but you sweat off a nicotine patch. The kind of weather that raises moths to the size of songbirds, and makes your skin itch as if something were growing on it. In this fecund, saturated air shrine flowers look plastic - and plastic flowers in front of the supermarket look real.

Still, it's good for the cabbage gardeners, I guess. More kimuchi, anyone?

Spain & Portugal

As I said, I am back from my summer adventure: two months of study and travel in Spain and Portugal. A few observations:

"Palma de Mallorca is paradise." Yeah, yeah. There are people who will say the same thing about Los Angeles but, as Rumi says, LA is a place that makes your brain smooth. P de M is also a place to erase all the canals on your cerebrum. Visually, Mallorca is striking: dusty olive groves and sandstone cliffs that drop into the wine dark Mediterranean. Island light that starts out gentle but by noon is nuclear in intensity. A place of primary colours. This is, after all, where Joan Miro chose to settle down and paint in his last years of life, and where he produced many of his most striking paintings and, in one case at least, tapestry, with bold yellows (the sun? sandstone?), blues (the sea, of course), greens (olive trees and scrubby pines), and reds (sandstone? the sun?).

The island's interior looks more promising. The clear light brings out a spectrum of reds and browns on the arid hills and fields. Hiking and climbing in the Tremontana is supposed to be glorious, but not in mid-30's temperatures and high humidity every day. Still, the highlights of this trip were visiting the tiny monastery village of Valledemosa, and attending a "night of the demons" festival in a neighbouring village (I will post pictures soon).

There is something relaxing about a place where, for most people (I was doing three grad courses in six weeks, and rarely was not being a student) there is little else to do other than lie on the beach with the other beautiful people, and watch cruising yachts patrol like sharks along the horizon. A place to read The Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, and eat the fruit at the bottom of a pitcher of sangria.

But it's not for everyone. As John the guitarist once told me, there are New York people and California people. I guess I'm a New Yorker (Toronto, actually, but let's not quibble. we hardly know each other...).

 

Galicia, on the northwest coast of Spain just above Portugal, is famous for the pilgrim's cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, and for having the worst weather in Spain. I fled here when classes were finished to escape the relentless sun and heat, only to find more of the same. All of Spain and Portugal, in fact, were constantly under the heat lamp as the Iberian peninsula continues to suffer through the worst heat wave and drought in recorded history.

Galicia is off the beaten track for North American and Japanese tourists, so most of the people I saw were other Europeans, and most of them were Spanish families on vacation, or solitary pilgrims traveling by bike, on foot, or by horseback, to S de C.

Highlight: eating fried chorizo sausages and pimiento al patron (small green peppers cooked with garlic and seasoned with rock salt) at a plaza-side table.

 

This was my first trip to Portugal, and all I have are general impressions from traveling by train and bus south from Galicia, with a three-night stopover in Porto on my way to a rendezvous with Rumi in Lisboa (Lisbon):

 

Portugal is poorer than Spain. You see it in the worn shopfronts and neon signs from the 1930's, and in the gypsy children who sneak into cafes to beg for spare change when the staff aren't looking. For some reason the downtown city centers of both Oporto (Porto) and Lisboa reminded me of Chicago in the early 1980's, when I used to make trips there with my mother to visit her family. It has a similar funiki (Japanese for "atmosphere"): a working class aesthetic, too busy making a living to be beautiful. 

 

That said, Lisboa preserves the monumental glory of its past (it was the richest city in Europe in the 1500's, during the Age of Discovery) with a curator's intensity, and the Manueline style of church decoration, which incorporates elaborate vegetal details in its traditional Catholic motifs. As Rumi pointed out, this may be where Antoni Gaudi got the inspiration for his flamboyant mix of catholic orthodoxy and, among other things, bowls of strawberries, best seen in the awe-inspiring Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Highlight: eating pasties de nata (egg tarts) in the cool shade of some park trees on a blistering afternoon. The Manueline style of the Monastery of Jeronimos in Belem.

Fun fact: Portuguese sailors, when returning from their voyages to Africa, India, and beyond claimed that the Tower of Belem appeared on the horizon like a beautiful woman in a flowing dress. I've seen the Tower for myself and... it looks like a ship. At high tide, it's completely surrounded by water. Those were some very, very lonely sailors.

Fun fact jr.: the first King of Portugal re-captured the castle at Coimbra from the Moors by disguising his soldiers as cherry trees which, as Dave points, out, makes for an interesting costume option at Halloween.

"Rice defines who we are."

Michael Shuman has written an interesting article in Time Asia about efforts to preserve a traditional way of life in South Korea and Japan, two countries which have abandoned an agrarian lifestyle and industrialized in a single lifetime.

 

"Tokyo rose from its ashes like some gorgeous, Disneyfied phoenix."

Donald Richie first came to Japan in the 1940's as part of the postwar occupation army. 60 years later, he is still writing about the city, as it was then and is now. "Lust for Life" is Richie's elegy to Asakusa, Tokyo's postwar entertainment district.

 

Paradise Lost

For years now, foreigners in Japan have been waxing nostalgic about the decline of culture in Japan. Alex Kerr first wrote about the changes he's witnessed in the country sice the 1970's, in his erudite little book Lost Japan, followed a few years later by Dogs and Demons. In his essay "Retreat to the Past," Kerr reflects on the changes in the remote Iya Valley where he first settled - and the changes in himself.

 

"Some scholars believe that our love of spectacular landscapes may be less the product of sentiment than of natural selection. As early as 1.5 million years ago, they argue, our ancestors were genetically imprinted to favor views like this: a valley with hunting grounds; grass to attract animals; a river with clean water; trees for ambush and escape. According to this "woodland-mosaic hypothesis," we are drawn to the patchwork of nature. Just as trout stalk the seam between two currents, we reach for the borders between states of being."

I'm not big on fishing stories myself, but this quote from Patrick Symmes' essay A Peaceful Angle: fly-fishing Mongolia , in the September issue of Outside magazine, is worth preserving. And maybe thinking about some.

 

"tea and copy duty."

Hannah Beech on the plight of women in the Japanese workforce - and the economic and social consequences of okusan ("person at the back of the house") thinking.

 

"... we can look down at the Earth as if we were moonlighting gods."

Pico Iyer's essay on the magic of flight.