The Book Thread! What are you reading?

[erilaz]

As I continued to read the book, I spotted a bit in the Second Edition update to the chapter on Orgonomy that made me happy. Gardner reports on Wilhelm Reich's "most spectacular recent invention" — a rain-making device that Irwin Ross described in the New York Post, Sept. 5, 1954, thusly:

a bank of long hollow pipes tilting at the sky and sections of hollow cable, all of which are mounted on a metal box; it resembles a stylized version of an anti-aircraft gun, and works with surprising ease. The clouds are not sprayed with any substance; the hollow pipes merely draw orgone out of them—thus weakening their cohesive power and eventually causing them to break up.

Kate Bush fanatics like me will of course be acquainted with Reich's "cloudbusters":

[erilaz]

Nihongo Notes 1: Speaking and Living in Japan (1977) by Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani — I picked this up at a used book store in Berkeley last weekend. It's a collection of 70 columns that first appeared in The Japan Times in 1976 and 1977, which chronicle the misadventures of a fictitious Mr. Ernest Lerner (ha ha), as he struggles to learn the finer points of the Japanese language. The columns are quite informative, covering matters of pronunciation, grammar, and especially idiomatic expressions. Some address things that I already knew, of course, but I still managed to learn a fair amount.

Mr. Lerner's blunders are often humorous. When I read this:

I put my foot in my mouth again today. When I introduced Miss Winters to my Japanese friends I meant to say Edo-bungaku-o kenkyuu-shite-imasu (She's studying the literature of the Edo period). But my "d" sounded like an "r," so...

I was laughing out loud before I even reached the explanation:

Spoiler: show

...what I actually said was "She's studying pornographic literature."

[Zunu]

I agree it's a pretty fun little book,not bad at all or perhaps I should say warukunainjanaideshouka. Small and flexible enough to fit in a jacket pocket and the kind of book where you can just pick it up in the middle and find something brief and interesting to read. The woman of the team also wrote "Introduction to Intermediate Japanese - An Integrated Course" which you can also find used for quite cheap due to the fact that it is around 35 years old and contains dialog about answering machines and other subject matter that comes off as dated (but is still perfectly useful Japanese).

Spoiler: show

I wonder if that would work in reverse? "No I wasn't flirting inappropriately...I just wanted to ask you about 17th century Japan; how could you possibly take offense!!!!"

[erilaz]

Currently reading When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines and She.

The basic plot is typical Haggard: English adventurer goes to a distant country and discovers the remains of a lost civilization. What I found especially different about this one was how it addressed and critiqued current events. In one chapter, the ancient king of the Children of Wisdom, who had been asleep for 250,000 years (!), takes our English narrator as a guide on a tour of the modern world via astral projection or something similar. But since this story was first published as a newspaper serial in 1918, the modern world that Haggard shows us includes German war atrocities and a scene that for me hit close to home:

We came to a hilly country which I recognised as Armenia, for once I travelled there, and stopped on a seashore. Here were the Turks in thousands. They were engaged in driving before them mobs of men, women and children in countless numbers. On and on they drove them till they reached the shore. There they massacred them with bayonets, with bullets, or by drowning. I remember a dreadful scene of a poor woman standing up to her waist in the water. Three children were clinging to her—but I cannot go on, really I cannot go on. In the end a Turk waded out and bayoneted her while she strove to protect the last living child with her poor body whence it sprang.

[erilaz]

I'm currently reading Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery. It's a fascinating look at a writer/artist whose work I've enjoyed for decades. I've been copying various passages from the book, because they speak to me so well. For example:

Profiles of Gorey inevitably mention his passing infatuation with soaps such as All My Children and Days of Our Lives or his devotion to Golden Girls or his long-running addiction to Buffy, The X-Files, and Star Trek, partly as evidence of the unselfconscious postmodernism of his eclectic tastes and partly for comic effect. (The man who lived for Balanchine and rhapsodizes about eleventh-century Japanese literature watches Alf and Magnum, P.I.! Who knew?) Gorey, of course, was quick to puncture inflated theories about his TV viewing: asked, by an interviewer, if his was “a scholarly interest in American pop culture,” he replied, “No, I just like trash.” (p. 355)

Consider his house. Inside, it was a yard-saler’s idea of a wunderkammer—a cabinet of wonders, one of those private museums that emerged in the sixteenth century as the Enlightenment was gathering steam. Progenitors of the natural history museum, they were crammed full of all manner of fossils, freaks of nature, archaeological artifacts, clockwork automata, unicorn horns, mermaid hands, mummies, pieces of the True Cross, skeletal deformities, bezoars, zoological specimens, and, foreshadowing the surrealists, curiously shaped things (stones, deformed vegetables) that resembled other things, all promiscuously jumbled together with the zany taxonomic logic of the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, the make-believe taxonomy Borges cites in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” (p. 358)

[erilaz]

I just finished reading Rat Girl, a memoir by Kristin Hersh, vocalist/guitarist of Throwing Muses and 50FootWave. It mainly covers a significant year of Hersh's life, from Spring 1985 to Spring 1986, with brief flashbacks to her childhood and snippets from her songs, which reflect the action in the main narrative. In Spring 1985, Hersh was an 18-year-old student at the college where her father was a professor and where her best friend was 64-year-old Betty Hutton, who was a movie star back in the '40s and '50s. Over the course of the next 12 months, Hersh is diagnosed as bipolar, she discovers that she's pregnant, and Throwing Muses record their eponymous debut album for the 4AD label.

The book is intense and crazy at times, but it's very enjoyable and often laugh-out-loud funny. Hersh's conversations with Betty Hutton and Ivo Watts-Russell (4AD's co-founder) are especially amusing.

A few words about 4AD: Back in the '80s and '90s, when Ivo was running the show, it was the coolest record label on the planet. If a record had a female vocalist and was on 4AD, I was guaranteed to at least like it, and I would usually love it. Belly, Heidi Berry, The Breeders, Cocteau Twins, Lydia Lunch, Lush, Pixies, Scheer, Tarnation, that dog., and Throwing Muses are some of my favorites from the 4AD roster.

[erilaz]

Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World (2020) by Matt Alt. It's a very readable history of the creations that have made Japan such a high-tech and pop-culture powerhouse — and their creators, very few of whom are known to the world at large. The story ranges from Kosuge Matsuzo, who kick-started the postwar Japanese toy industry by making toy jeeps out of tin cans discarded by the occupying forces, to Nishimura Hiroyuki and Christopher "moot" Poole, the creators of 2channel and 4chan respectively. As you might expect, it's a tale of manga, anime, video games, innovative gadgetry, and lots of kawaii stuff.

[Zunu]

I saw the new anime Look Back this weekend. It's about two elementary school girls who set out to become manga artists. It was only an hour long but really well done and quite emotional. One of the girls, although overflowing with natural artistic talent, had a shy, tongue-tied way of talking. I kept thinking of her as Arisawa Ichika the entire time.

[erilaz]

Just finished: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh.

The sixth volume in Continuum/Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series is the best volume I've read so far. Cavanagh's examination of the Pink Floyd's brilliant debut album has the perfect balance of technical detail, deep research, new interviews, cultural context, and the author's personal reminiscences. I didn't notice a single error, factual or typographical.

Next up: Rebel Girl, a memoir by Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, The Julie Ruin).