OSE.025

Potorous gilbertii

2011-01-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

In January 2010 I realised that I was about to get a lot of time to read books. I was starting a new job that would involve almost four hours of commuting to London and back every weekday, and as I had accumulated a lot of books (largely of the late eighties sketch comedy tie-in sort), I decided to read them all.

I set myself a target of 100 new books (new to me, not newly published). This figure was chosen because (a) it didn't seem too hard, and (b) because I had heard Tony Martin give an interview on RRR in which he said he had done the same thing. (He had to read a few slim comics on December 31st, but had hit the target.) As Tony is a relatively busy man, I though that with a dedicated four hours per day I could hit one hundred with no problem.

Eager for punishment, I then decided to watch 100 new films as well (again, new to me, not newly released). This works out at two entire books and two entire movies per week, every week. It was exhausting.

It didn't help that at first I just read whatever I wanted, including re-reading old favourites (which were ineligible for the count). It didn't help that I crammed in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It didn't help that by November I was reduced to watching abysmal movies on Youtube for which the copyright had slipped through the cracks (Wake Me When the War is Over is one that will never leave my film- and caffeine-addled psyche). However, it did help that my wife is into movies and suffered through a lot of these with me. It also helped that she works as a freelance from home, so I would often stagger in after work to see her in the middle of a particularly intense piece of concentration, and know it would be better for all concerned if I scurried into the corner with a book.

Assessing what was a movie and what was a book was sometimes surprisingly difficult. The Cremaster series: are they all movies? One of them's three hours long, so surely it's a movie. But one's forty minutes long, is that a movie? And if it is, does that mean a 45 minute episode of Doctor Who is a movie? McSweeney's: is that a book? Is a collection of short stories a book? What if the same collection is published in magazine format? The Earthsea novels, are they all separate books if I read them in one volume? (This particular question went unanswered, as I couldn't be bothered finishing even the first book of the series.)

The most interesting discovery was that 100 books and 100 movies is just too much to take in, if one aims to live a happy life. This made me realise that I have a demonstrably finite number of books and movies left to watch in my entire life (I am 31). At 50 books and movies per year, assuming my eyes remain serviceable for another forty years, I'll get to read another 2000 books. This sounds like a lot. But it is probably the number of books we own. I could spend my time from now to the grave just re-reading everything I've deemed worthy of keeping. As for movies, there's just too much crap. My favourite film of the year was probably The Magic Christian, which most likely only shows how skewed one's critical sense becomes when forcing all this cinematic meat through the wringer. I also got confused in April and again in November so ended up watching 102 movies anyway. Of these, 35 were from Britain, 28 from the United States, 9 from Australia, 9 from France, 8 from Japan, and 13 from 'Other'.

Was it a massive waste of time? Yes. Was it a lot of fun? Yes. Will I be reading another Tim Winton book? No.

The list in full (italicised are those I had read/watched before but earned a second look):

JANUARY 2010:

MOVIES:

1. Floating Weeds, 1959

2. The Road, 2009

3. Precious (Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire), 2009

4. The Millionairess, 1960

5. The End of Summer, 1961

6. A Prophet, 2009

7. Ugetsu Monogatari, 1953

BOOKS:

1. Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, David Sedaris (ed)

2. The Clumsiest People in Europe, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer

FEBRUARY 2010:

MOVIES:

8. The Proposition, 2005

9. Burma VJ, 2008

10. The Trial of Tony Blair, 2007

11. Fine, Totally Fine, 2008

12. Seven Samurai, 1954

13. UHF, 1989

14. A Single Man, 2009

15. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1954

16. Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009

BOOKS:

3. Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol 2, Ivor Cutler

4. Japanese for Travellers, Katie Kitamura

5. On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho

6. Islomania, Thurston Clarke

6a. Barcelona Plates, Alexei Sayle

7. The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel

8. A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, Margot Norris (ed)

9. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

10. Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide, Jane Walmsley

11. How to Read Joyce, Derek Attridge

12. Codebreaker, Stephen Pincock

MARCH 2010:

MOVIES:

17. Micmacs, 2009

18. The Colour of Pomegranates, 1968

19. Sodom and Gomorrah, 1963

20. The Night We Called it a Day, 2003.

BOOKS:

13. Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi, Annie Caulfield

14. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Student Guide, Vincent Sherry

15. Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey

16. Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut, James Marcus

17. That Was the Week That Was, David Frost & Ned Sherrin (eds)

18. Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotiation, Umberto Eco

18a. Introducing Joyce, David Norris & Carl Flint

19. Fat Chance, Simon Gray

20. The Bed-Sitting Room, Spike Milligan & John Antrobus

APRIL 2010:

MOVIES:

21. The Juniper Tree, 1990

22. Alice in Wonderland, 2010

23. Goshu the Cellist, 1982

24. Cremaster 1, 1995

25. Cremaster 2, 1999

26. I Am Love, 2009

26. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, 2009

27. Cremaster 3, 2002

28. Cremaster 4, 1995

29. Cremaster 5, 1997

BOOKS:

21. Language and the Internet, David Crystal

22. Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, Steven Pinker

23. Attacks of Opinion, Terry Jones

23a. Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, Michael Palin

23b. Ulysses, James Joyce

23c. Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

MAY 2010:

MOVIES:

30. The Tulse Luper Suitcases 1: The Moab Story, 2003

31. Cathy Come Home, 1966

32. Four Lions, 2010

33. Ben Elton Live: the Get a Grip Tour, 2007

34. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974

BOOKS:

24. Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988, Michael Palin

25. By Hook of by Crook: A Journey in Search of English, David Crystal

26. Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris, Lucian Randall

27. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: (Not) The Screenplay, Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni

28. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, Ian MacDonald

29. The Art of Coarse Acting, Michael Green

29a. Time Bandits: A Screenplay, Michael Palin & Terry Gilliam

30. The Brain-Dead Megaphone, George Saunders

31. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier

32. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

33. Extreme Europe, Stephen Barber

34. Eunoia, Christian Bok

35. The Best American Non-Required Reading 2002, Dave Eggers (ed)

36. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, Dave Eggers (ed)

JUNE 2010:

MOVIES:

35. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, 2009

36. Serenity, 2005

BOOKS:

37. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004, Dave Eggers (ed)

38. Things the Grandchildren Should Know, Mark Oliver Everett

39. Spike & Co, Graham McCann

40. Granta 108, Special Issue: Chicago, John Freeman (ed)

41. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Dave Eggers (ed)

41a. 253, Geoff Ryman

42. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Film Tie-in Edition, Douglas Adams

42a. In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje

43. Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!, Kenzaburo Oe

44. A Quiet Life, Kenzaburo Oe

JULY 2010:

MOVIES:

37. Lennon Naked, 2010

38. The Kentucky Fried Movie, 1977

38a. The Fisher King, 1991

39. Stiff, 2004

40. Toy Story 3, 2010

41. XXY, 2007

42. Inception, 2010

43. Gran Torino, 2008

BOOKS:

45. The Wild Highway, Bill Drummond & Mark Manning

46. English Passengers, Matthew Kneale

46a. Appendix Appendix, Ryan Gander & Stuart Bailey

47. Eucalyptus, Murray Bail

48. San Sombrero, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner & Rob Sitch

49. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

AUGUST 2010:

MOVIES:

44. The Cove, 2009

45. Gainsbourg, 2009

45a. Ed Wood, 1994

46. Sherlock: A Study in Pink, 2010

47. Sherlock: The Blind Banker, 2010

48. Sherlock: The Great Game, 2010

48a. Pleasure at Her Majesty's, 1976

48b. The Mermaid Frolics, 1977

49. The Secret Policeman's Ball, 1979

50. The Illusionist, 2010

51. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1984

52. The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, 1982

53. The Nugget, 2002

53a. Paprika, 2006

BOOKS:

50. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern 13, Chris Ware (ed)

51. Islam for Beginners, N. I. Matar

52. Introducing Hinduism, Vinay Lal & Borin Van Loon

53. A Fortune-Teller Told Me, Tiziano Terzani

54. I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch, Simon Napier-Bell

55. Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001, N Hornby & B Schafer (eds)

56. The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire, Bridget Griffen-Foley

57. Who Killed Channel 9?, Gerald Stone

SEPTEMBER 2010:

MOVIES:

53b. Four Lions, 2010

53c. Porco Rosso, 1992

54. The Snow Queen, 1957

55. Hancock & Joan, 2008

56. The King and the Mockingbird, 1980

57. Candy, 1968

58. The Secret Policeman's Third Ball, 1987

58a. The Secret Policeman's Biggest Ball, 1989

58b. Amnesty International's Big 30, 1991

59. Remember the Secret Policeman's Ball?..., 2004

BOOKS:

58. Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003, M Groening & P Bresnick (eds)

58a. The Underground Man, Mick Jackson

58b. Five Boys, Mick Jackson

59. Sahara, Michael Palin

60. A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro

61. Heavier Then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, Charles R Cross

62. Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade, Jonathan Clements

63. And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer

63a. The Weeping Women Hotel, Alexei Sayle

64. That Eye, the Sky, Tim Winton

65. The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave

66. Minimum of Two, Tim Winton

67. Absolutely - The Words, P Baikie, M Banks, J Docherty, M Hunter, G Kennedy, J Sparkes

68. The Beekeeper, Maxence Fermine

69. Eleven, David Llewellyn

70. The Fire Gospel, Michel Faber

71. Malvinas Requiem, Rodolfo Fogwill

72. The Ventriloquist's Tale, Pauline Melville

OCTOBER 2010:

MOVIES:

60. Finisterre, 2003

61. Kokoda, 2006

62. I Now Pronounce You Vince and Ralph, 2004

63. The Brush-Off, 2004

64. Away From Her, 2006

65. Don't Look Now, 1973

66. Crying with Laughter, 2009

67. The Madness of King George, 1994

68. On the Beat, 1962

69. Mona Lisa, 1986

70. High Hopes, 1988

71. Steve Coogan: The Man Who Thinks He's It, 1998

72. Extraordinary Rendition, 2007

73. Enter the Void, 2010

74. Dawn of the Dead, 1978

BOOKS:

73. Flight of Black Swans, Laura Fish

74. Strange Music, Laura Fish

75. The Land where Stories End, David Foster

76. Travel Writing, Peter Ferry

77. Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg

78. The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club, Peter Hook

79. The Clay Dreaming, Ed Hillyer

NOVEMBER 2010:

MOVIES:

75. Whale Rider, 2002

76. Down Among the Z Men, 1952

77. The Magic Christian, 1969

78. Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992

79. Kenny, 2006

80. Junkers Come Here, 1995

80a. The Tulse Luper Suitcases 1: The Moab Story, 2003

81. The Tulse Luper Suitcases 2: Vaux to the Sea, 2004

82. Night Tide, 1961

83. The Brother from Another Planet, 1984

84. Never Let Me Go, 2010

85. Wake Me When the War is Over, 1969

86. Irina Palm, 2006

87. Youth Without Youth, 2007

BOOKS:

80. Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker

81. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, D Eggers & M Groening (eds)

82. The 47 Ronin Story, John Allyn

83. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

84. Gasping, Ben Elton

85. What the Censor Saw, John Trevelyan

86. Mutants, Armand Marie Leroi

87. [manuscript of novel due for publication June 2011]

88. McSweeney's 19, Dave Eggers (ed)

89. Waltzing Materialism, Jonathan King

90. I, an Actor, Nicholas Craig (aka Nigel Planer)

91. My Life as Me: A Memoir, Barry Humphries

92. Miracles of Life, JG Ballard

DECEMBER 2010:

MOVIES:

87. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, 2006

88. The Edge of Heaven, 2007

89. The Tulse Luper Suitcases 3: From Sark to Finish, 2004

90. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007

91. Primeval, 2007

91a. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007

92. Submarine, 2010

93. Frozen River, 2008

94. The Manxman, 1929

95. Steal This Movie!, 2000

96. Maybe Baby, 1999

97. The Music Room, 1958

98. Blame it on Fidel, 2006

99. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, 2008

100. The Tree, 2010

BOOKS:

93. Oblivion: Stories, David Foster Wallace

94. Understanding Jihad, David Cook

95. Old Flames & A Month in the Country, Simon Gray

96. The Irrational Knot, George Bernard Shaw

97. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, D Eggers & S Stevens (eds)

98. The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien

99. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov

100. Cloudstreet, Tim Winton

Lasiorhinus krefftii: MICMACS A TIRE-LARIGOT

2009-11-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

Before leaving Australia, seven years ago, I met a small group of bloggers in Canberra through one of my friends. Sadly I left the country before getting to know them particularly well, but even now I read their blogs, creeped out as they undoubtedly would be by this fact. Okay - I read two of the blogs, because one of them got dooced around 2005 or something, and the fourth was the partner of the third, who also disappeared. But the two I continue to read have had interesting enough experiences; without spelling things out, one of the blogs has been published in book form in the UK, the US, Australia and has been translated into, of all things, Scandiwegian. The other blogger seems to run her blog at a far more cards-close-to-her-chest level, and was, of late, posting reviews of movies at a horror film festival in Melbourne.

A year ago, I went to the London Film Festival to see one movie ("Not Quite Hollywood"). The ticket itself was £11, which in itself is the most expensive cinema ticket I've ever purchased (trumping an entire semester at the ANU Film Group as it was around 2000) - and then the train was another £17. On the upside, as I left the Leicester Square Odeon after the screening, I walked into Benecio del Toro as he arrived for the premiere of Che.

I mulled over these two slivers of fact and decided: as the Brighton CineCity festival starts today, and the prices (from free to £5.15) are affordable, I thought I'd see every film that took my fancy and write up a review. Because as you can tell, I appear to have lost all semblance of the talent I once had for English composition. How's that for a clunky paragraph or three?

So, Y&I decided to stroll down to the Duke of York's Picturehouse (the best cinema in Brighton, and perhaps coincidentally the longest-running cinema in the world; it has been a cinema since 1910) to join the throngs for the opening night: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's MICMACS A TIRE-LARIGOT ("Micmacs"). The film sounds intriguing from the write up - precisely focussed character studies in a bizarre ensemble - but it could go either way. Fortunately, I enjoy either way - Delicatessen (successful, entertaining) or The Million Dollar Hotel (failure, fascinating). But it was not to be, because every Francophone in East Sussex had decended on the Duc de York's and we had not bought tickets in advance.

We grumbled a bit, and bought advance tickets for Jim Jarmusch's THE LIMITS OF CONTROL, Wojciech Has's SANATORIUM POD KLEPSYDRA ("The Hour-Glass Sanatorium"), and Wojciech Has's REKOPIS ZNALEZIONY W SARAGOSSIE ("The Saragossa Manuscript"). In a striking bid for individuality (or more accurately, a desire to submerge our individuality by running back to the warm embraces of our homelands), Y got a ticket for Miyazake Hayao's 崖の上のポニョ ("Ponyo"), while I went for Warwick Thornton's SAMSON AND DELILAH. Reviews to come of these films, and many more!

Here's the MICMACS trailer (sorry, can't find it in English):

Agrotis infusa

2009-10-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

Due to an impending move, I am culling a few of my heavy books, including one which I had actually never read before, "Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia" by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. So I finally set myself to the task, and the book was fascinating, particularly as I had never really read anything before about Central Asia, apart from a few of the appropriate Lonely Planets when planning to break a Trans-Siberian train trip for a few weeks in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 2004. In the end, just a few weeks before finalising the train tickets, there was some civil unrest in Tashkent and so I stayed on the train for about three straight days from Irkutsk to Moscow.

There's an intriguing explanation of the wonderful term bashi-bazouk, the Captain Haddockian insult and Peter Gabriel B-side:

"Before 1876, nobody had heard of Batak, a mountain village in Bulgaria, a country whose aggreived Orthodox Christians had since 1396 been under Ottoman rule. In the 1870's, Bulgarian discontent swelled into rebellion. Turkish reprisals were swift and ferocious. To augment the regular army, the Turks hired tough mercenaries known as bashi-bazouks, and these irregulars - butchers and brigands in the eyes of Bulgars - fell murderously upon Batak and scores of other villages. Reports of massacres drifted to the chanceries of Europe, a cause of embarrassed concern to Britain's Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. It had been Disraeli's policy to shore up the declining Ottomans as a counterweight to an aggressively expanding Russian Empire. With premature nonchalance, he dismissed the Bulgarian reports as "coffee-house babble.""

This serves as introduction to our exuberantly Manifest-Destiny-monikered hero, Januarius MacGahan, who reported on the horrors committed by the bashi-bazouks, stirring up general disgust in Britain and Russia at the deaths of Christians, and causing the Russian invasion of Turkey and the beginning of the Crimean War.

---

In 1904, Francis Younghusband was in Lhasa orchestrating a treaty of sorts between China, Tibet and Great Britain. Two of the nine points of the convention (designed to safeguard British trade interests in Tibet by removing tariffs) were the following:

"(6) Tibet was to pay an indemnity of 7.5 million rupees (£500,000) for the dispatch of armed troops to Lhasa, payable in seventy-five annual installments; (7) as security for the indemnity, the British were to occupy the Chumbi Valley until it had been paid and until trade marts were open"

As the seventy-fifth year would have been 1979, the year of my birth, it is interesting to posit the kind of world I may have been born into; a bizarre 1979 where Tibet was forbidden to parlay with foreign powers without the permission of the British Empire; a Lhasa full of dull Church of England chapels and an Old Etonian Dalai Lama.

---

"Tournament of Shadows" is admirably even-handed, though its Americanity bleeds through in its similes: Sandhurst is unhelpfully glossed as "the British West Point".

---

"When the All-Knowing and Unchangeable Dalai Lama triumphantly returned to his capital in 1913, Lhasa for the first time since the eighteenth century was entirely free of Chinese soldiers and officials. De facto, Tibet was a self-governing state, and so remained until its invasion by Chinese Communists in 1950."

---

pages 558-59:

"Harry Hodson's reticence about Sir Olaf Caroe was understandable. He had no wish to speak ill of a deceased colleague, and his allusion to maps inplied that he knew what we knew. Acting on his own authority, Caroe attempted by legerdemain to turn cartographic water into wine, his aim being to buttress India's North-East Frontier.

"In 1913-14, an earlier Indian Foreign Secretary, Sir Henry McMahon, convened a conference at Simla to resolve the matter of Tibet's disputed frontiers and political status. As related in Chapter 17, China flatly rejected McMahon's territorial proposals, and Tibetans agreed on condition that Britain would secure Peking's assent to the overall Simla bargain, which never happened. McMahon's "strategic frontier" was all but forgotten until 1935, when Olaf Caroe, a middle-level official in New Delhi, "rediscovered" it in old Foreign Department files. Contending that the Tibetan signature gave the McMahon Line arguable legitimacy, Caroe persuaded the governments in New Delhi and London to begin treating it as India's de facto frontier, and to depict it on official maps. He urged doing this discreetly, "with the avoidance of unnecessary publicity!"

"There was a problem. McMahon's frontier modification had not been entered in the 1929 edition of C. U. Aitchison's Collection of Treaties relating to India, the official repository for such agreements. Caroe arranged for a substitute version of the Aitchison volume to replace all original copies. The altered text in the new version - still dated "1929" - represented the Simla Conference as a success and listed the McMahon Line as one of its agreed achievements. However, two or three copies of the authentic Aitchison escaped Caroe's recall. One was discovered at the Harvard University library in 1963 by a British diplomat and visiting fellow, Sir John Addis. By comparing the original and the doctored version, Addis showed that a key piece of evidence that India was using in its border dispute with China was a forgery.

"By then, the Chinese had long since marched into Lhasa, where in 1951 its officials had taken possession of the Tibetan Foreign Bureau. There they found the old Simla documents and consulted with Tibetans involved with border negotiations. Writes the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya in The Dragon in the Land of Snows (1999), "As far as the McMahon line was concerned, the Chinese learned that their views were identical with the Tibetans." Since Lhasa's conditions - Chinese approval of the overall accord - had not been met, the Simla agreements were moot.

"In New Delhi, however, the thinking was very different. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, a lifelong opponent of British rule, India adopted a "forward policy" as robust as any advocated by his imperial predecessors. [...] Regardless of Chinese maps, Nehru informed Parliament in 1950, "Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary," adding "and we will not let anybody come across our boundary." [...] Whatever the misgivings within the government, the press and politicians all but unanimously cheered Nehru for resolutely defending what was now deemed hallowed Indian soil."

The book will be released into the wild this weekend.

Myrmecobius fasciatu

2009-07-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

I recently paid a pound for a remaindered book entitled "Japanese Studies" - rather than being a general guide to any particular aspect of the language, examination proves it to be a collection of "papers presented at a colloquium at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 14-16 September 1988". The colloquium was set up by the British Library and the contents cover a fascinating range of issues relating to the collection of Japanese books. Some of these are particular to the time and place; studies on the collecting habits of European libraries following a general 1980s recognition that Europe rather lacked in scholars of Japanese. Some papers deal with the physical aspects of fifteenth century manuscripts, some on the methods of cataloguing texts in non-European languages in a way that computers can understand (CJK cataloguing having only been "tested" in the British Library at this point).

Here's some trivia from the book that I found intriguing:

"J R Black was born in 1827 in Scotland and educated there. In 1854 he arrived in Adelaide Australia on the barque Irene with his wife and a female servant. In 1858 his son Henry was born in Adelaide. After several failed business ventures in Australia James Senior took his family to Japan in the 1860s. The exact date is not known as different sources give the arrival date as 1862, 1863 and 1864. By 1865 James was editor of the Japan Herald. In 1867 his second son James Reddie Black II was born and in 1869 his daughter Elizabeth Pauline followed. In 1870 he published the first number of The Far East one of the oldest English-language newspapers in Japan, issued in 1866. In 1876 his wife took his first son to England to be educated and James went to Shanghai. In 1879 he returned to Yokohama in ill health and died in June 1880 and was buried in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery. James Black is remembered for his contribution to journalism in Japan, especially in the introduction of the editorial into Japanese journalism in 1866. The file [from the Harold S Williams collection held at the National Library of Australia] contains details of the mariage of J R Black II and the death of his mother, the subsequent history of J R Black II and his presidency of the Kobe Club but perhaps the most interesting part of the file is that devoted to Henry James Black, the son born in Adelaide who became a traditional Japanese storyteller, took a Japanese name, Ishii Buraku, married a Japanese wife, was adopted by her family and died in Tokyo in 1923. The file describes some of Henry's performances one of which depicted the night-time streets cries of the Tofu man, the Soba man, the blind masseur with his flute, the fish vendor, etc."

["Australia and Japan - the Harold S Williams collection". Pauline Haldane, Asian Collections, National Library of Australia]

The collection has also corrected a long-standing misconception of mine. I once knew a person of Brazilian (i.e. Portuguese-speaking) background called Santos, and one day when I walking around Nagasaki I found a street called Santos-dori (サントス通り). Knowing the history of missionary activity in the area, I guessed that this street had been named after a priest called Santos. As Nagasaki is perhaps the most Western of all Japanese cities, this seemed pretty likely to me (most Japanese cities do not even name their streets). It now seems far more likely that the street is named after Sanctos, which I think is Latin for 'sacred'. Between 1590 and 1614, missionary literature (Kirishitan-ban) was produced - the first books ever printed with movable type in Japan. One of these was a translation into romaji by two Japanese Christians, and was called Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi (サントスの御作Xのうち抜書). (X representing a kanji I must have once known: four strokes above a horizontal, under which is the Yen sign and then 木 - help! The whole is rendered much more inpressively in the original as SANCTOS NOGOSAGVEONO VCHINUQIGAQI.)

["The Japanese collection in the Bodleian Library". Izumi K Tytler, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Ms Tytler goes on to point out that the Bodleian collection has been greatly assisted by grants from a major corporation ("the establishment of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies") and a shall we say unusual politico-religious group ("a recent major donation is the benefaction made twice by the Soka Gakkai International and amounting to 3,300 volumes, which has enabled the library to strengthen its holdings in various fields, including Buddhism, philosophy, history, and literature"). Love the use of the Oxford comma there!)]

"We are also the proud owners of a set of Meiji zenki sangyou hattatsu-shi shiryou in some 950 volumes. Everything after volume ten is a supplement and the whole still lacks an index so it is hardly, if ever, used. It is hoped to persuade someone in Japan to undertake the compilation of one so that this wealth of material does not remain the yellow-bound white elephant it is at present."

["A note on the Japanese collection of SOAS". Brian Hickman, School of Oriental and African Studies. Apart from guessing that zenki is an archaic rendering of denki, I have no idea what this 950-volume is about.]

"The library collection is, as one might expect, strong in social sciences material and books published since the 1950s. [...] Major series held include Meiji zenki sangyou hattatsu-shi shiryou and Nihon gaikou monjo."

[Resources for Japanese Studies in the Centre for Japanese Studies Library, the University of Sheffield". Valerie R Hamilton, Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield]

"In the early 1890s Western art, particularly oil painting, was enjoying a resurgence of popular interest. The first wave of enthusiasm had been in the 1870s, culminating in the establishment of the Technical Art School in 1876 where the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi taught the basics of Barbizon painting. There followed a sharp reaction against Western style art in the 1880s, with the beginnings of the Nihonga 日本画 movement and the widespread renaissance of Nanga 南画 painting. [...] By 1896, however, the times had changed [...] For at least two decades the Western style artists of Japan were loosely divided into groups: those associated with Asai Chuu and Koyama Shoutarou who had studied Barbizon style painting in the 1870s at the Technical Art School and those associated with Kuroda [Seiki] and Kume [Keiichirou] who had studied in Europe in the Impressionist-influenced plein-air style.

"The colour purple became a focus of controversy which had an indirect influence on the books which are to feature in these notes. Raphael Collin had taught Kuroda and Kume to use purple pigments for shadow effects, a striking contrast to the somber browns Fontanesi had taught. 'Purple' and 'brown' became buzz words in the Japanese art world, denoting 'new' and 'old' approaches to oil painting."

["Shasei ryokou (写生旅行) and the 'sketch tour' books of the early twentieth century". Scott Johnson, Kansai University, Osaka]

And this blast from 1988:

"The use of electronic media is, however, hampered by the fact that Japanese texts contain many thousands of different characters, which, with their complicated pattern, require a huge pattern memory, a high resolution screen and consequently a high resolution dot printer for output. In recent years due to the progress in VLSI design, cheap Japanese word processors have appeared. Even so, the input of kanji texts into the computer will always be more expensive than that of alphabetic scripts."

["Computerised information sources in Japan for academic studies". Ulrich Wattenberg, German Society for Information and Documentation, Tokyo]

Taeniopygia guttata

2009-06-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

I am currently on page 1061 of Infinite Jest, which is not very far in at all (I'm buried in an eight-page, 8pt back-of-the-book footnote (Note 304), which has followed on from a one-line subsection (Note 39b) referent of Note 39 proper, spinning off page 89, which is I suppose where I properly am.

And while I find this incredibly fun (in a way, it's like a neverending cascading of concepts inside concepts (speaking of which, I'm not sure whether this was seen as revolutionary when Infinite Jest was first published (1996) or if, as I feel, it was seen as a formal literary version of the sort of games children's books would play (I would always run out of fingers marking the different paths I'd taken in Choose Your Own Adventure books))) there is something about it that doesn't lend itself to reading in the doctor's waiting room.

I went there straight after work, thinking I could get some study done in the hour or so before my appointment. Unfortunately a small girl with a beautiful smile was busy running back and forth across the waiting room and shouting with the glee of childhood. This was nice, but I was trying to infer the verb conjugation-form of the なあ ending ("to state one's feeling emphatically") when the example given was only the たいなあ form ("to state one's wish emotively", viz.:

一度南極へ行きたいなあ。"I wish I could go to Antarctica just once."

So I pulled Infinite Jest out of my bag (no small feat in itself) and thus bring you to the point of the post. Mea maxima culpa, for my last post's suggestion that an Australian man of a certain age wouldn't have used the term "minor-leaguers". Less than 24 hours later, I was walking along the seafront and remembered the following lines from TISM's "The Back upon which Jezza Jumped":

The minor-leaguers, the average markers, the consistent second raters;

The stay at homers, the timid loners, the habitual masturbators;

The ugly girls, the amputees, the screaming mongoloid;

The senile old, the deformed young, the bladders that unwillingly void...

I was wrong.

But the connection between one of the stories in How We are Hungry and the very start of Infinite Jest lies here:

Jerry has an accent that sounds British but possesses the round vowels of an Australian. (Eggers, 150)

The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. (Wallace, 6)

As an Australian whose accent has never matched the stereotype, I think I know what Eggers and Wallace are saying here. That there would be gradations of accents in Australia, whether geographic or cultural, based on class or local demography of immigrants, is not so much denied or unknown or unworthy of even being speculated upon; it is in fact that the non-Australian reader, on being introduced to an Australian character, needs to be told that this one isn't the guy you're thinking of.

I have no doubt that the Wallace's tennis coach character is Australian, even though the text doesn't state it directly. And I know it from a brilliant line of wipe-your-glosses genius that follows thereafter. Hal interlocks his fingers "into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X."

His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. (Wallace, 6)

It takes another eight pages before Coach White refers to someone as "mate".

Anyway I didn't get very far through Note 304 (which is a fantastic, horrific description of an incredibly violent pastime reminiscent of the sport-based society of Georges Perec's W) before the doctor was able to see me, and I went upstairs to see her, and the long and short of it is that despite being accidentally hit quite hard in the groin three weeks ago by a tennis ball, the cremasteric muscle is undamaged and the bruising is only painful (as opposed to painful and worrying).

Bettongia penicillata

2009-06-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I overslept.

Yesterday I got nine books from the library, florid with the hope of finishing them all within the alloted three weeks, and with the effort of carrying them home.

I read two of the smaller books first: "Eddie Krumble is The Clapper" by Dito Montiel, and "How We are Hungry" by Dave Eggers. You will note, either now or after your Google search, that these are both modern American literature of the recently-fashionable and even-more-recently unfashionable Probably Has A Name But I Don't Know It school. I like reading American literature because it underscores how very wrong I've got the United States.

Until I was about 20, I thought I knew the USA well. I had a diet of largely American television as a child, which allowed me learn my state capitals, and American math primers ("math" "primers" indeed) which taught me to subtract a liter from a quart gallon in over-large san-serif fonts. But then I visited the US, and realised not all accents made it onto TV, and people also tended not to live upstairs from friendly Muppets.

"Eddie Krumble is The Clapper" is an awful, terrible novel requiring of the reader

- about 75 to 90 minutes

It also begins with a "my life was nothing special until six months ago" moment before plunging back to the story proper. When the story ends with the "well, that sure wrapped up nicely" moment (six months later, remember?) he is somehow married to the girl and they have several children.

"How We are Hungry" was an improvement, but featured many, many stories in which Americans travel to non-Western countries and sweat wealth-guilt before having a moment of self-realisation in the final sentence which ends in some vocalised heart-in-mouth emotional expression like running through a goddamn stream in the wind! I quite liked this, actually. Especially the section where a dog translates a squirrel (critiquing the dogs' acrobatic endeavours) for the benefit of his human readers:

"the squirrels say other things, their eyes full of glee. "It makes me laugh that she did not make it across the gap." "I am very happy that he fell and seems to be in pain."

Unfortunately Eggers also wants us to believe a middle-aged Australian character would disparage a group with the term "minor-leaguers". I'll let this slide as the Australian was talking to an American, and because it ties into my next post.

I'm presently eighteen pages into the third book, "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, which is probably going to take the full three weeks.

Ogmograptis scribula

2008-08-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to call it, but my first encounter with it was in the TV ad for Diamond Chopsticks. The restaurant, which advertised extensively on Sydney television throughout the 1980s, wrote its name in roman letters composed of several wedge-shaped strokes to represent Chinese-looking writing. It resembles cuneiform script far more than it does Chinese; nevertheless this now seems to be the global standard for Chinese restaurants and for anything attempting an east-Asian look. To the six-year-old me, the strange gulf between the Chinese people who appeared in the ad and the Chinoiserie of the font used was far more jarring and noticeable than the, in retrospect, more bizarre use of Offenbach's galop infernal as background music (the accompanying lyrics were "Diamond Chopsticks, 6-8-4-1-double-4! Diamond Chopsticks, try some you'll be back for more!").

When attempting a little more authenticity, however, it is wise to check one's sources. Unless you are Brighton's listing magazine XYZ, in which case you will end up printing this on your cover and carpet bombing every shop in town with evidence you failed Year 7 Japanese.

At a local charity shop a week or two ago I happened to find an LP of Fiddler on the Roof making extensive use of a bastardised Hebrew version of English. Not too surprising, I suppose, but to go on and use this font on The King and I seems to indicate a level of ignorance that - oh all right - frankly doesn't surprise me.

Let's not even mention the poster for Borat.

Setonix brachyurus

2008-07-21T23:42:00.000-07:00

I
My wife was giggling at someone's blog. I looked over; the site was called 日本語のできないダンナさま. I knew enough to feel embarrassed.
"You're too used to Windows," she said when I mentioned that I might ditch the laptop for a shiny MacBook like hers.
I am not too old to learn how to use a new operating system, but I am far too old to ever be comfortable with it.

II
"i like the idea of your mac, and am warming to jump ship to attack, but there is a story in the end of the first book of don quixote where two ships come up against each, moors versus christians and when the christians ramm the boat the narator jumps to attack the other ship but somehow his boat then veers off course and no one else joins him and he becomes a hostage/prisoner of the moors making him row their boats...this is a convulated metaphor for my frustrations/fears/anxieties of shifting from pc to mac for all those reasons unsighted above."
- Misha Kropotkin, Your Name Here

III
"Vhali, king of Algiers, a brave and bold pirate, having boarded and taken the Capitana galley of Malto, in which only three knights were left alive, and those desperately wounded, the galley of John Andrea Doria bore up to succour them: in this galley I was embarked with my company, and doing my duty on this occasion; I leaped into the enemy's galley, which getting loose from ours that intended to board the Algerine, my soldiers were hindered from following me, and I remained alone among a great number of enemies; whom not being able to resist; I was taken after having received several wounds; and as you have already heard, Vehali having escaped with all his squadron, I found myself his prisoner; and was the only afflicted man among so many joyful ones, and the only captive among so many free..."
- The Captive, Don Quixote

IV

"I am not too old to learn how to use a new operating system, but I am far too old to ever be comfortable with it." If only learning Mac OS was as fun as learning hangul or Arabic.

Varanus tristis

2008-07-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

Chlamydosaurus kingii

2008-06-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

...and I read books here and I read manuscripts in London, I went to the Royal Geographical Society, I went to Rhodes House. I had a marvellous experience at Rhodes House. This woman says, "Welcome, Mr Cathcart, it's very nice to have you here. You'll find the catalogue is quite self-explanatory." So I go out to the catalogue, and after 20 minutes I can't find anything. And I come back and I say, "Look, I'm awfully sorry, but I just can't find anything in the catalogue about Australia." And she said, "Oh yes, it's under 'Non-Africana'."

for reading, listening

Menura novaehollandiae

2008-06-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

Today I had to call one of my credit card companies to report that I had received my new card. As I live in Britain and the company is in Australia, I followed the instruction to reverse the charges and called British Telecom.

"British Telecom" sounds woefully outdated to my ears, given that the Australian Telecom changed its name to Telstra over a decade ago. It's like arriving in a small town to find that the local Pizza Hut is still using the old logo with its curly-girly twiggle coming from the side of the H (I imagine pastel-coloured suits in an eighties boardroom asking each other "How can we give this H more of that outrageous camp swagger?"); or like seeing the dated "future" Pepsi logo in Back to the Future: you snicker slightly at how they could have got it so wrong.

Anyway, I say to British Telecom "I'd like to call Australia reverse-charge."

The operator says "I will have to pass you through to another operator."

I briefly wonder why I am being told. Do I have an option? I get some hold music, before a cheery Australian robot asks me to dial the number "as if I was calling from within Australia. For example, to call a number in Sydney, dial 02, then the number." This is utterly heartwarming; I get to pretend I'm in Australia for a few seconds, and the mention of the Sydney area code floods my mind with nostalgia. I resist the temptation to call my old house, and dial the credit card hotline. There is a pause. I suddenly realise that I am going to have to read out my card number, then provide my name and date of birth for clarification. Perhaps a phone booth in the pub is not the smartest place to be making this call from. I am thinking about the satellite relay my voice is being filtered through to go from Britain to Australia.

Then a lady with a strong American flavour to her not-quite American accent asks me the appropriate questions, activates my card, and wishes me a good evening. Oh, it's evening in Australia. So I say

"Excuse me, just out of interest, would you mind telling me where your call centre is located?"

There is a pause. I know this pause because I used to do exactly her job for a British credit card company in Manchester. People in the UK would call me (also in the UK), hear my accent, answer the ID questions, and then tremulously inquire if they were really calling all the way to Australia. You could tell that the old ones were slightly in awe of this brave new world; arrogant ones were working up to tell you it was a disgrace that this was an international call they'd been hoodwinked into making; and the young ones would tell you off for moving to a dismal shithole when I could have been at home cooking flaming shrimpo on the barbio.

The American lady says that she is in the Philippines. I thank her, say goodbye, and sever the orbital transmission from my morning summer English phone box, via midnight winter Australian phone company, to her tropical Filipino call centre, safe in the knowledge that I don't use my Australian credit card anyway, and when I call her to renew my next card in 2011, she will still be there, just like last time we spoke in 2005.

Swainsona formosa

2008-05-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

Next in my withering screeds of singles-obsession comes a fairly simple question: what song is the shortest single ever? Spiderbait put out a number of sub-two minute singles in the late nineties; the video for the Vines' "Highly Evolved" turned its ninety-second duration into a selling point by simply broadcasting a countdown to its own conclusion. The Pixies' "Allison" lasts seventy-seven seconds - but despite having a video, this never came out as a single.

Until further notice I am crowning "I'm a Strong Lion" by Robert Pollard the winner (66 seconds) but I am keen to be disproved wrong.

I believe that in the fifties a popular single in diner jukeboxes was called "Three Minutes Silence", consisting of precisely that and aimed at people who didn't want lousy kids playing their rockabilly nonsense while they were trying to have a decent Godfearing conversation for chrissakes.

Callocephalon fimbriatum

2008-05-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I bought "We're Gonna Rise", the new single from the Breeders. I cannot actually remember the last time I bought a new single, which is a surprising state of affairs. Once I had a vague philosphy about singles; which was buy them instead of albums. The thinking was that singles were much more collectible than albums, and over time were priced up, rather than albums, which crop up in second-hand shops at cheapo prices. They were collectible in the sense that they were released in varying formats, and there was the thrill of discovering that only one shop in your city had copies of the seven inch, or the enhanced digipak, or that you got a poster with this one, or a bonus disc of other artists on the same label with that one.

Whereas the album was available everywhere, and if you waited a year, would be half-price, nice-price, or dirt cheap and second hand. Singles were thus sketchpads and sandboxes; the improving proving grounds for experiments and nonsense, always far more fruitful than the album track that sounds like an album track. Who cannot love the fact that Cocteau Twins twelve-inches were played on the radio at the wrong speed and John Peel never noticed? That Sneeze released a seven-inch with 20 songs on it? That the Breeders have released their first B-side since 2001, and it is ninety seconds of melodic nonsense German chanting in the middest and Westernest of Midwestern accents?

A truly stupid B-side wins over a considered one any time. Surely it is no coincidence that the Breeders' cover of "Lord of the Thighs", and the Pixies' cover of "Winterlong" are seen by some as the best things ever performed by those bands. They take you where you did not expect to be taken, because the bands allow themselves to be hijacked by an idea that seems not to spring from any concept of what their own band is all about.

There seems to be a bit less of this messing around now, given that the vinyl revival has meant records have to work in the market. Manic bedroom tinkerers like Jesus Couldn't Drum were once able to blart out a sugar rush of gleeful nonsense that would get reviewed locally and then disappear. Now, if a band in Brazil put out a fun song, they get released in major markets immediately and their second single gets reviewed in every zine in the world. A band like They Might Be Giants, once your reliable go-to source for B-side experimentation, doesn't even release singles any more.

As I type today, I am listening to the "Jesus Christ Super Star" single by Kazmi With Rickies. Track 4 is a spoken-word exhortation for listeners to remix the track for future release. Track 5 is the vocal track with a click track. Behold and lo, the next year a five-track EP of the best remixes appeared. And this was on EMI, twelve years ago. Yet today we have editorials lambasting EMI for not adapting to change, and praising Radiohead's brave experiments with releasing the "Nude" multitracks and inviting listeners to remix them...

Proteaceae

2008-04-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

It was slightly over ten years ago that I made the move into documenting my own obsessive record collecting. I started to compile an HTML database of all the tracks on all the CDs I owned, complete with facts about the albums and personal comments about each release - it was an intensely nerdy website that happened to be offline and, in fact, still sits mouldering away in a sub-directory on my laptop, having not been updated since September 2001.

I have, however, never stopped asking myself the sort of questions that would fill a charity-shopful of Record Collector magazines. Which album has spawned the largest number of singles? It's one of those questions that can never be answered, because there is no clear definition of 'single'. I think we can all safely disagree with the view that every track on iTunes is a single by virtue of its being able to be downloaded individually - this is, in fact, my favourite worst nightmare of the future of the single.

If a single has its own individual physical product, I think it's a single. Back in the nineties I asked Steve about this, and he gave the example of Alanis Morrisette's debut album: six singles you could buy in shops. The very next year, Garbage's album "Version 2.0" was released and, over the following fifteen or so months, spawned six singles.

That is, in the UK. Britain introduced more and more convoluted and ridiculous rules for What A Single Was. By 1998 if you had more than three tracks, sir, you were no single. So the B-sides of the six British singles were found in their entirety on the B-sides of the four Australian singles (there being no rule in Australia that you couldn't have a five-track single - in fact, Towa Tei's "Private Eyes" had nine tracks, Cher's "Believe" had ten.)

However, if you develop a relationship with the music, you may find you have unconsiously extended that relationship to the cover art and the design. So while, living in Australia, I had access to all the B-sides, what I didn't have were the cover art of the missing two singles. And I somehow wanted these even though I already had all the music on them. And slowly this desire spread to other bands I liked, so that now, a good five years after the very last time I ever felt the remotest desire to listen to Garbage's music, I still retain all this information as a muscle memory.

TISM's "Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance" had six singles. Even though one of them came out two years before the album and was extensively reworked for the album version. It's a single from the album, shut up.

All this has been brought on by the release of The Spinto Band's new single, "Summer Grof", which heralds their second album, "Moonwink".
Here is the song.

When I like a band, I like to hear all their stuff, and pretend I'm some kind of archivist. I usually try to pick up the Japanese releases. The Spinto Band are American, but are signed to an English label that expended no little effort in getting them known. As the UK is still (not by much, but still) a viable singles market, the first album generated five singles in Radiant's attempt to raise Spinto awareness. (I count "Brown Boxes" distinct from "Mountains", citing the "Grass"/"Dear God" issue and assuming you will know what this means if you care about this sort of thing.)

The question I am now asking myself is: given that the Spinto-consciousness raising did not presumably have the intended effect, will the UK release of "Moonwink" have anything like the number of etched 7" singles and cavalcade of formats that heralded "Nice and Nicely Done"? I am still waiting for a band to commit commercial suicide and gain everlasting fame by releasing their entire album, mastered into one CD track, as a B-side. The band would instantly be the subject of a thousand bemused blog posts, sell seventy thousand copies of the single and watch as their stars rose and the album itself tanked spectacularly.

Maybe, Spinto Band, you will self-immolate and win my heart in this way. Then again, they could do it as "Moonwink, Acoustic Version" and it would be seen as a free music stunt worthy of Radiohead. This is a band far more cutting edge than I think anyone gives them credit for. They provided a director's commentary for one of their songs, for frig's sake. And, in fact, the cassingle could have been invented for that very purpose. Think on it, Spintos.