Previously Published: Nerd in Japan (Part II of II)

Continued from Part I

More months pass, more of the same, you feel like you could be anywhere in the world. You are tired of spending so much on books. You fantasize about second hand bookshops. You believe in karma, all the Toronto libraries you avoided so carefully as a smoking teenager, now in a land where even the big ole library by your apartment doesn't carry a single English novel. You dream of a vacation – a break from your routine. Your little collection of things you have not yet read is running low, so is money. 'The Brothers Karamazov' still sits - all of it - on your shelf and hard as you vacuum your tatami mat the dust on that great book doesn't move. You realize you don’t know how to remove dust from a book. Reading it is not an option either since you haven't yet gained the drive to endure all the people, all the struggle and all the weather of Russia.

In the sliding paper doors of your current bedroom world, the winter gets right inside your room and your mind. You realize the weather frames your thoughts.

Then late December, your parents come to visit. The dreamed of break in the routine. Suddenly it feels less cold inside (though not, ironically, to your Canadian parents, fresh from their insulated centrally heated world).

Your father has brought you some used books. Your brother has sent a stack of New Yorkers. You read little and travel lots. Your nose runs and your parents do too. You try and keep up. You see much of the country, enjoying what remains foreign to you. You train it most of the way until you need a cable car to get up a mountain. You are on top of the pines. It is cold and quiet and you wake up at 6 am with the monks and then eat what they would eat, seaweed and soggy tofu for breakfast. Your father dreams of bacon and eggs. You pretend not to. Your parents go back home. You miss home.

Near the end of winter vacation the great big bookstore downtown has one of their biannual English book sales. Like a starving child with a golden ticket you run into the marvelous factory to take all you can get. Books for five and eight dollars, books that would cost double and triple that at home. Good books too, like a Hemingway, or a John Irving when you feel like watching a movie in book form.

You get home to find a friend has sent you some short stories by post. You're desk is not enough. You're whole room is a library and it's growing and it doesn't seem to matter as much that it's cold outside. You're not sure you are reading any faster but you are certainly reading more, trying to dent the pile at the same time as you rev up to teach and write and rent videos all over again.

Previously Published: Nerd in Japan (I of II)

This is the first thing I ever published (and for a couple yen too!) in The Tokyo Noticeboard a few years back.

You go to a world without English to teach it, and write in it.
The television is not in English and not interesting, except maybe for the commercials and variety shows because they are always well and truly over the top. For ratings: the pretty girls in very short skirts; For yuks: at least one middle-aged salaryman in blonde wig and a very short skirt. You never watch these shows. You glimpse them. One, two, three minute glimpses. You barely flip anymore.

So videos: You join the thousands of foreigners around Japan frequenting the video shops stocked chock-a-block full with the latest Hollywood candy. You realize you are tired of candy. Often you find yourself at the video store comfortable to just kill time, browsing up and down the aisles, leaving the store having not rented a thing.

You start reading more. You pay exorbitant rates, like 2500 yen a paperback because they are imported. Yet you buy more books in this one year than any before. You borrow books from other teachers. You acquire books when those same teachers leave the country. In turn, you pass on all the books you know you will never lug home. Thus your library is a modern library, an exercise in minimalism.

You think you are cool, sitting on your couch looking at the carefully selected books you have lined up on your desk. You realize you are a nerd. Still, you are more inclined to rent movies.

Reading is still a chore in your mind but you like it when the books are good. When the books are good it doesn't feel like homework. The more you read the more you realize they aren't often good. You re-read the good ones. You eat at the same fast food places.

You rent old movies. You wonder why your video store has copies of 'Fletch Lives' and 'The Karate Kid part 2' but doesn't carry the originals. You pine for those originals (for 'Fletch' really, though you have a strange and persistent longing to hunt down a copy of the original 'Karate Kid,' to see if it is one of those lucky few childhood movies that stands the test of time). You learn that 'Back to the Future' is a classic and that 'Stand by Me' is not as great as you remembered.

This way, folks, for Part II.

Jhumpa Lahumpa Lahiri at Angel Orensanz & Beyond

I think that I’ve always been someone more comfortable observing life ... intensely so as a child ...
-Jhumpa Lahiri (in conversation with Charlie Rose)


I once had a crush on a writer named Jhumpa
[pronounced joom-pa]
Last name: Lahiri
For years now
In my mind's ears and my poor wife's
She was Jhumpa Lahumpa
That's how I thought of her, how I referred to her
I couldn't stop

If you don't know, this is ridiculous
The London born, Bengali-Indian author from America
Her stories are not silly
They're New Yorker literary
Jhumpa doesn't write for kids
That's not her style
Not Jhumpa Lahumpa
Ahem, Lahiri
Sorry

No, but seriously
At 33
For her first book
Jhumpa Lahumpa
Lahiri!
Won the Pulitzer

It's that name
I can't stop converting it to Willy Wonka creations

Jhumpa, Lahumpa, zoomtitty doo

This is unfair
She is a serious writer
I have an actual anecdote

Last year I flew to New York to meet her
Truth told, I was to meet many famous writers
The annual New Yorker Festival

She'd share the stage with two other American scribes
Also with unique names
T. Coraghessan Boyle
And, really, what're you gonna rhyme that with
And Jeffrey Eugenides
Which only ever made me think of Eugenics
Which brings up the Nazis
And there's nothing funny about that
(Unless Tarantino, Roberto Benigni or Mel Brooks are involved)



But Jhumpa
Lahumpa
She didn't have to be funny
Her tense, realist, powerful stories sure weren't

The three writers were on a stage in a converted old synagogue
Angel Orensanz was the venue's name
Someone famous probably
I didn't google him
Left him a Sephardic Jewish left fielder in my mind
Angel Orensanz
If he'd been any baseball good
Shit, if he'd ever gotten to wear the pinstripes
They'd have had to name a fizzy citrus drink after him
Angel Orensanz
Ksh
Glug glug glug
Ahhh!

It was a Friday night
Sabbath eve at the old synagogue
Not that anyone seemed to notice

The writers were speaking

Jhumpa who had been Lahumpa
on that stage
In Angel Orensanz's wooden cathedral of a synagogue
Eugenidies and Coraghessan on either side
Up there she became Lahiri La-lousy

She was so cold and closed
As if she were angry to be there
To share
Not just uncomfortable
Because believe me, I was ready to give sympathy
To Jhumpa who had been
Lahumpa
We all were
Lovers of her Interpretation of Maladies
But this woman was downright contrary
What flow the other two writers on stage produced
Lahiri cancelled out
Like a negative bug lamp
Zapping any good buzz in the room
The Shul
The Orensanz

She was awful
Anti-social
Discomforting
Unsettling
Disagreeable
Awful

I couldn't help myself
Going up after
Joining the line of the many who went up after

No photo request
No, no, I don't want you to sign my book
Just hear my appreciation
Know my thanks
For your big-brassy talent
For the depth of your soul-shuddering insights

To the lined up folks before me
Lahiri was glass-eyed cold
That stage awful
It was also personal

Things would be different for me
For us
She and I
I knew
I was wrong
It was not
She shook my hand
She did not smile
Those cold eyes

There was no Lahumpa to this Jhumpa

Crush crushed
Romance over
I'd no longer even like her
It was decided

But then I heard that quote
That soundbite I wrote above
The half I wrote above
And the half I left to put here, below

...But I think that that’s really … always a part of me – the fact that I am very comfortable removing myself from actual experience.

It's not personal, Jon
You don't even know the woman
It's her books you fell for
Her short stories
Remember
I do
And soon
I'll return
She is that good
Jhumpa Lahumpa Lahiri

Like it is

"You're not the only one who reads the New Yorker, Jon."

-Sonia W.

Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

Before they make this one into a commercial



The Poem

Pioneers! Oh Pioneers!

On Snobbery, Poetry, Fiona Apple Sullen Beauty, Walt Whitman and Levi's?

Of the 20 or so would-be writers in my first-year creative writing class, there were two who had actual talent. They weren't a couple, as it turned out, but initially we all thought they were, and so, those first autumn months, they were, in my mind, the king and queen of the class. In this case, the queen ruled above all.

She wore black, smoked cigarettes, was Fiona Apple thin, short, sullen, big-eyed cartoon adorable at the same time as she was a total complex, dark, (fucked up?) mystery. Even when you talked to her, she could not look you (or anyone else) in the eye. Still more teenage girl than woman she wrote so well (craft, imagination, perception) I'm not sure I understood why she was in our class. A friend of the family I passed one of her stories onto proclaimed it to be New Yorker worthy.

One day, this is more than ten years ago now, I went to her apartment, an ugly high rise near Toronto's York University (are there any other kind up there?). Nothing happened. She was quite beautiful but yet oddly not sexual. I was also young and probably wouldn't have known how to do what I might have wanted to do had she let me (which I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have), confused as I was of my own intentions, enamoured of her girl charms but just as covetous of her artist talents, wanting, needing to know her secrets. How could I do what she did, how could I succeed to effect others as she did me, to write that way, to go forth and conquer on paper.

Pioneer! Oh pioneer!

It was afternoon, thus bright from the light come into the apartment. No wine was being drunk, no heroin injected, not even an old record player to provide scratchy music for mood. It was actually rather disappointing to find the apartment so neat, the generic selection of magazines on her coffee table, and not elitist Harper's type rags either. She had Rolling Stone, Cosmo. I commented on them, surprised that she read this kind of stuff. I expected her to read nothing but obscure French poets and James Joyce.

I remember her response. She said that magazines were a "totally valid form of art." I thought it was the most pretentious thing I'd ever heard. I also started allowing myself to read magazines more frequently, more openly after that.

All this to say that I've come to believe that advertisements can be a totally valid art form.




Cause any ad, even if it is rather eerily nationalistic, that can so effectively use a Walt Whitman poem, is pretty cool in my all too often snobby books (though not, apparently, my iTunes collection, which includes, much to my friends' delight, the latest Britney Spears album).

Basterds Footnote

[from An Inglorious Movie Recommendation]
+My apologies to Mr. Pitt. On first viewing I didn't recognize what a great performance he gave. He's no Tom Cruise; he's a hell of a lot better.

Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" - A Book Recommendation

Have you ever noticed how the stories that make you feel the most, the ones that most stay with you are often novels, fables, legends, stories that are fictitious, imagined, about people who never were and yet who live so much more real in your mind's eye, springing as they do grotesque-evil or salt-of-the-earth-beautiful off that page.

The true stories we read, the non-fiction that we enjoy, while always stimulating often falls short somehow. I'd argue this is because news reportage and less crafted non-fiction typically stick so closely to the "facts" they bypass the feelings behind them. Writers of literary fiction, on the other hand, focus much of their attention on the reaction to events, rather than on the events themselves. The now very in-fashion genre that bridges the gap, that Truman Capote made famous with his desert island worthy "In Cold Blood," is often termed literary non-fiction. That is, a true story written not by a person that can type, but rather by one who has spent the better part of their life learning how to write.

"Zeitoun" is a book of literary non-fiction. As such, it's a gripping story and it is also beautiful, the kind of book you feel proud to own.

With the kind of simplicity that only a master craftsman can achieve (the Malcom Gladwell made famous 10,000 Hour Rule +++ or, in writing terms, the more than 1,000,000 words it takes), Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" manages, like a world class film composer's score that you don't notice it is so seamlessly thread through the film, to make this true story strictly about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American man who remains in New Orleans during Katrina and afterward. The writing doesn't once point the finger back at the artist, at Eggers, who is, by now [see my entry on the writer who is also a publisher, philanthropist and screenwriter if interested to see his many accomplishments and why I'm enamoured of him], a massive literary personality in his own right. It takes a good deal of ego to become a master of anything, and a great deal of humility to then cut down and spit-shine your writing so hard as to wipe off any of that egotistical grease you might be tempted to leave behind.

Plain, direct and with my favourite kind of simplicity (the Hemingway-made-famous deceptive kind), what makes this story so compelling is that not only do we get the immediacy of the Katrina debacle as seen through the eyes of a man who lived through it, but as with any heroic story, we get the kind of intimacy that only a book - in novelistic story sense - can provide, spending a few hundred tense yet often tender pages with Zeitoun; we get to know his family, his wife Kathy, an American who converted to Islam before she met her husband (itself a fascinating tangential story that Eggers is clever enough to slow down and tell in detail).

Like reading any great story about any great hero from a world not our own, like reading about a family from India, or a book about a young Jewish man coming of age in Montreal, this work of non-fiction brings us on side with a heroic Muslim man, which seems to me like fair retribution - this kind of empathy inducing tale - when considering the post 9/11 treatment so many Muslim-Americans, and, for that matter, all brown skinned Americans have had to endure in the paranoid post 9/11 world.

"Zeitoun" would be a fascinating story no matter who told it, but with Eggers at the helm, you get a great story told with economy, humility and with the killer critical element - the ability to take you, for instance, onto that metal canoe with Abdulraman, so that you paddle down the streets of New Orleans with him, so that you endure all that follows with him. So that you too can know what this storm did and what abhorrent actions the Bush administration took, and what critical ones they were foolish and heartless enough not to take.

Great imagination is rooted, they say, in empathy. For years I mulled this one over not exactly sure what it meant. I can articulate it now, after having read this powerful story. Eggers digs deep into the life experience that one family endures and in so doing allows us to live those experiences with him. The best books don't just let us escape, nor is it just that they make us think; it is the feeling, it's the empathy that's key because if we don't get to care deeply about the characters involved, why complete five pages of the thing.

I completed 335, and fast.

Lloyd Jones' "Mr. Pip" - A Book recommendation

Go away to an island, a place of myth based on real. A fable story that has a "Little Prince" ability, a Murakami ability to get your imagination flowing but is also political without being big P political. I.e. Interesting, but still fiction story stunning. The magic that was the transporting reason you went to books as a kid. That kind of book. But for grownups.

Reading is an Extra Curricular Activity

The best places for reading:
1. in bed at night before sleep
2. in bed on a weekend morning when you got no plans, no rush, no kids (or the magical possiblity of your kids not being up yet)
3. Japanese trains
4. trains in other parts of the world
5. subways
6. under a tree in a park
7. on a park bench
8. lying on my parents big blue couch in their living room
9. The Blue Moon Cafe (a totally preposterous little (by little I'm talking two tables and the wooden counter) eatery in north Osaka that makes Tex Mex and South-East Asian and Korean dishes and almost always has Johnny Cash's greatest hits on the mini stereo)
10. my living room in the evening, candles aflame on the windowsill

You?

A Question

When did going to the gym become our only extra-curricular activity?