14.05.19

Good morning.  The world is full of hypocrites and hooligans.  I’m a hooligan.  Today is a bright sunny day.  Tomorrow it will rain.  Take what you can.  Leave all the rest and go on your merry way again.  To let words fall from the sky and through my body and out from my typing fingers is a scary experience and if noone validates me it makes it all the more difficult.  Got my first pseudo-review today, somewhat sheltered by the fact that my name wasn’t mentioned and it was a book written by tons o writers.  Read my stuff to Jenni and Nikita last night.  I think they liked it, but it’s quite intimidating to have peers inspect your words.  Of course they're usually kinder than the strange journalists with something to prove.

And now I contemplate that long-ago half tale that I try to pound into being mine (my most recent project).  The results are awkward and passionless, but it is a necessary exercise.  The reviews won’t be kind on this one.  How can I throw crap out into the world and be happy with it.  It’s all necessary, because I’m going to live a long time (if I haven't just jinxed myself by saying so) and later what I write will be well-crafted and will speak to the masses, or at least will let me sleep at night knowing that I am doing what I came to do.  Ahhh patience and time and practice and perseverance and belief in oneself and in one’s dreams in the face of criticism, jealousy, poverty, ….

Next week I read and I plan to make it strong.  My voice (physical) is loud and my spirit is powerful and deep; where it meets the animal me, it believes: I am good.  I am good.  I am good.
 

za review, for all it's worth:

'Faces' draws expat literati crowd

Mark Austin Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Faces in the Crowds: A Tokyo International Anthology
Edited by Hillel Wright, with a foreword by Donald Richie
Printed Matter Press, 256 pp, 2,500 yen
"I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning," wrote James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In the brash heroism of their attempts to express themselves as "freely" and "wholly" as they can, the writers featured in Faces in the Crowds: A Tokyo International Anthology emulate Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. Nearly all are or were exiles in Japan and so are armed with insights born of separation from home, and many could be described as "cunning" in the sense of "dexterous" and "crafty."
None is silent.
Faces in the Crowds is a raucous, rollicking ragbag of poems, short stories, monographs, harangues and messages from Mars. Edited by lecturer and novelist Hillel Wright, the compilation comprises works by members of three Tokyo-based writers groups--performers at poetry readings at What the Dickens, a British pub in Ebisu; the Tokyo Writers' Group; and Temple University Japan Poets--as well as writers referred to Wright by word of mouth and a final section featuring the "Editor's Guests."
As its apt title suggests, the anthology, published as an imprint of the venerable Printed Matter literary review (if venerability may be ascribed to a publication "only" 26 years old), features a diverse mix of styles and subjects. Nevertheless, a resolutely demotic idiom runs like a mother lode through the volume, reflecting Donald Richie's characterization of Printed Matter in his typically erudite and to-the-point foreword as a "west-coast dissident with hippy hankerings."
Indeed, the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg seem to flit half-seen through the pages of Faces in the Crowds, brushing shoulders with the revenant selves looking for their American, Australian, British, Canadian, Chinese, Ghanaian, Japanese, New Zealand and Taiwanese authors. Richie notes that the concern of these authors "is with the sense of self alone--finding it, expressing it, holding onto it. That this occurs in Japan does not make much difference."
This attitude is more evident in the poems, which are far stronger, on balance, than the short stories. Only a few of the former induce the toe-curling and abdomen-clenching that will be familiar to graduates of Creative Writing 101 who actually deserved the passing grade. Many are minor masterpieces. Take John Gribble's "To the Neighbor's Tom," a message of reassurance to the mouser next door, obviously penned by a kindred spirit:
"NeeaouUUugh."
What's the matter, there,
Horns?
She won't give you
a tumble?
I see. I see
it's got your tail
all tied in knots.
Just give it a rest.
One of these days
she'll be rubbing her need
all over you. Never mind
your boulder-shaped head,
the fuzz instead of fur,
or that voice like a neglected gate.
It will happen.
Trust me.
If Richie is right about Japan not mattering so very much to the writers featured in Faces in the Crowds, except as a backdrop to be sketched in framing their existential psychodramas, then perhaps the problem with the short stories was the writers' unconscious felt need to cast "Japan" as a character--a need that probably derived from the crushing weight of tradition. If most of what you read about Japan is "Japan as other," and if this infects your style, then is there much room left for "you"?
"Bankrupt," a short story by Janice Valerie Young that contains no references to Japan or "Japan," is a screamed, jazzy, nerve-jangling two-page riff on a broken marriage triggered when the husband complains that a hair of his wife, who feels herself to be the wronged party, has fallen into his plate of spaghetti. Six representative bars of the melody line:
"Four years! Four years of my life straight down the toilet! I'm so old now, nearly forty-two, and what do I have to show for the past four years? A spotty wedding picture--I told you not to dust it with Windex! A ruined wedding picture and a ruined four years! Pass the parmesan!"
A launch party for "Faces in the Crowds" will be held at What the Dickens on May 26. The party starts at 3 p.m. and features readings from 16 contributing writers and live music from Higezu (The Moustaches). The entry fee, which includes a copy of the book and one drink, is 3,000 yen. For a map to the venue, see www.eigomedia.com/dickens/.

Copyright 2002 The Yomiuri Shimbun
 

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