Potorous gilbertii

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

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

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

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]