The Williamsburg of Old Japan

Dear blog readers! 

Summer is here, and in D.C. that means two things: It’s time to stay indoors and drink lots of iced tea. To celebrate the arrival of summer, I’ve decided to post on my blog about the sometimes enchanting, sometimes transporting, and sometimes just plain weird cultural attractions I come across and parties I attend. These posts will, I hope, counterbalance the short stories I’m writing, which may not ever be read by anyone, except the friends I sometimes share them with. Think of these as a “Letter from Washington” or “My Life on the D List,” penned by a Washington lawyer averse to television and blessed with a little spare time.

Today’s entry is about an exhibit of 18th and 19th Century Manga cartoons on display at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery until August 11, and it is called … 

The Williamsburg of Old Japan

In 1600, the Japanese military leader Tokugawa Ieyasu crowned a lifetime of battlefield victories and diplomatic triumphs by winning the battle of Sekigahara, at that time the biggest and most important military victory in Japanese history. (Wikipedia has a nice summary of Ieyasu’s life and rise to power.) Three years later, after consolidating his power across Japan, Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate, a feudal system of government that ruled Japan for the next 250 years, known as the Edo Period for the name of its ruling city, better (and later) known as Tokyo.

The cultural and artistic flowering of the Edo Period bears a resemblance to our own electronic age. The feudal system established by Ieyasu in 1603, and carried on by his successors until 1868, concentrated wealth and power among a ruling elite, and brought artists, craftsmen, and merchants to the cities. The shift from brush painting to block printing, along with other technological advances, enabled the mass production of images. As the introductory text to the Sackler Gallery’s exhibit Hand-Held: Gerhard Pulverer’s Japanese Illustrated Books explains, these forces “transformed Japan in the seventeenth century much as electronic media has altered communication around the world.”

A happy coincidence of forces, in other words, introduced mass, and mass-producable, popular culture to Japan. People traveled to yukaku, or pleasure districts, to enjoy an urban lifestyle known as ukiyo, poetically translatable as “the floating world.” The most prominent of these latter-day bohemian enclaves was Yoshiwara, what we might think of as, and in its day probably was, the Williamsburg of the Edo Age.

Among the cultural and hedonistic pleasures on offer in the yukaku (music, storytelling, kabuki theater, geisha girls, puppetry, poetry, literature, and art) were shops selling small cartoon books printed from finely styled woodcuts. The books, which were only slightly larger than an iPhone, and just as handy, were produced in vibrant colors, on paper so delicate as to be transparent. A beautiful collection of these Edo era, early Manga cartoon books, collected by Gerhard and Rosemarie Perverer, are on display at the Sackler Gallery until August 11, and they are worth checking out.

What you will notice, in addition to the graceful and accessible style of the cartoons, is their surprisingly contemporary feel. Times and technology may change, but great art looks familiar to the inhabitants of any age. The drawings are enchanting. I visited the exhibit twice, and both times I got lost in the magical images from another world and time. 

There are elaborate battle scenes, warriors slaying monsters, beautiful women receiving visitors, old men contemplating serene landscapes, courtesans relaxing between appointments, and portraits of kabuki actors, all drawn in light strokes and brought to life with a touch of charm. There is a tall oak in a print by Mizushima Nihofu that looks like it belongs in a painting by Van Gogh. In the oversized, partly self-referential, hanging scroll entitled Women Airing Books and Clothes, by Katsukawa Shunsho, two women dry freshly-printed pages on a line as a third binds the pages and a fourth, who has become distracted, reads the finished product. The print Tenzopan shokei ichiran, by Yashima Gakutei, presents a breathtaking color scene of a galleon, under full sail and a yellow moon, slipping through a trough between two towering, breaking waves.

The exhibit illustrates other unlikely parallels between the Edo era and our own, including the fact that the publishing world favored vertical integration, with distribution, sales, and marketing handled by a single business, as if Amazon’s anti-competitive business model had been imported into shogunal Japan. The pornographic books, which are presented in a recessed alcove, are as lascivious and grotesque as anything available on the internet. There is even one print, of a canal in Yokohama spanned by an iron bridge, in which, among the strolling residents and rickshaw drivers, there is a character who seems to be taking notes on a pad he holds before him, perhaps for his own small article he will later print and pass around.

Some things never change.

I Was So Full of Sleep

On the same day the Pope announced his resignation a bolt of lightning struck the dome of the Vatican in Rome. Days later, an asteroid streaked across the sky in Russia’s Ural Mountain region, its sonic boom shattering windows and setting off car alarms. It landed just outside of Chelyabinsk. Miraculously, its image was recorded on the dashboard camcorders Russian drivers use religiously to record the accidents they are always getting into. The next day a meteor streaked across the sky in San Francisco.

A week after that, the federal government announced the beginning of a widespread and large-scale cuts that are completely unnecessary, but that the government had inflicted on itself, in a crazy attempt to force itself to balance its budget. News also broke that a clown-provocateur had organized a coalition to run in the Italian parliamentary elections, and that the Italian people might also elect Silvio Berlusconi to another term, even as his trial for illegally consorting with a 13 year-old belly dancer was getting underway.

I asked myself the same question everyone else did.

“What can all this mean?”

The only conclusion I have reached, so far, is that I should start a tumblr about my vacation, in which I will travel into the heart of the above-described insanity. In a case of either horrendous or magnificent timing, depending on your point of view, I plan to fly to Rome, then travel down to Naples, and finally spend a week in Positano at a writing workshop organized by One Story Magazine and the proprietors of the hotel Le Sireneuse, all in the middle of the papal conclave, the expected runoff in the Italian parliamentary elections, and the government furlough. 

Hopefully, this tumblr will be a record of my adventures. It may, however, also become the forum in which I plea for the establishment of a fund to pay for my return to the United States.

Dante said it best in the first canticle of the Inferno:

so my mind, still in flight

turned back to look once more upon the pass

no mortal being ever left alive.

Through the Uprights!

[Dear Thomas Friedman: I have written your Sunday column for you. Sincerely, Sean Carman (with special thanks to Ezra Klein and Lucia Graves)]

I was taking a cab from National Airport to my apartment in Washington the other day. I live in a gentrifying neighborhood that is home to a rising, fairly well integrated class of African-American, Ethiopian, and white beneficiaries of globalization and the housing bubble. It’s a neighborhood of yoga mats, African cuisine, and hip-hop culture, but those are stories for another time. The question on my cab driver’s mind was simple.

“Tom,” he asked me. “You’re a nationally syndicated columnist and highly-paid luncheon speaker. What’s the bottom line on the sequestration fiasco?”

“Good question,” I said.

And one on which we all need to focus in the coming weeks, I could have added, if we’re going to understand the dynamics of Congress’ latest foray into fiscal brinksmanship. 

As with all American political quandaries, the first and most fundamental question is what sports analogy to use.

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A Brief Ode to Richard III

Beneath space 5 King Richard lies;
        Of his bones the tarmac’s made;
   Those potholes were once his eyes:
        Nothing of him that doth fade,
   His welcome here is o’er-stayed
   Six centuries’ fines unpaid.
   Parking maidens ring his knell:
                Ding-dong.
   Hark! now I hear them — Bloody hell.

First They Came for My Assault Rifle

I wrote this piece early in the morning on the day after the Newtown shooting, at the small desk in my room at the Milwaukee Hilton, where I spent the month of December for work. Yesterday it ran on McSweeney’s, to mark the passing of one month since the tragedy.

Resolutions

My new year’s resolution was to be more present. As a result, I spent the first few weeks of the new year scolding myself whenever I caught myself daydreaming, or absent-mindedly leaving my apartment without something I meant to bring along (the shoes I needed to take to the shoe repair store, for example). One day last week I caught myself returning the ice cream to the refrigerator. Later that day, I stopped myself a moment before I put shaving cream on my toothbrush.

That’s when I realized my mistake. “Who am I kidding?” I thought. “I’m never going to be ‘more present.’” 

I immediately changed my resolution to “try not to worry so much” and have been much happier since.

Geoff Dyer Writing About Not Being Able to Write

The best circumstance for writing, I realized within days of arriving at Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.

                            — Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

Precipice

“This time,” the Speaker said, “we have to insist on massive spending cuts.”

“Absolutely,” his first aide said.

“But we cannot propose any cuts ourselves,” the Speaker said.

“Goes without saying,” the first aide said.

“Wait,” the second aide said. “Why not?”

The Speaker and the first aide looked at him.

“I mean, for the sake of argument,” he said.

“Because no one wants them,” the Speaker said.

“Social security, Medicare and Medicaid,” the first aide said, frowning as he spoke. “Federal programs, infrastructure, disaster relief. Every line item turns out to be something someone needs.”

“That’s the Hell of this,” the Speaker said.

“Proposing cuts ourselves would be suicide,” the first aide said.

“I see it now,” the second aide replied. He was looking at the carpet.

The Speaker and his first aide surveyed the ceremonial office. It was paneled in carved oak and decorated with the insignia of power — flags, photographs of monuments and iconic vistas, a stuffed bald eagle posed as if in flight. The corner fireplace was cold, and went unused, but it had once been real. The second aide kept looking at the carpet. He saw a field of blue decorated with evenly and widely spaced gold stars.

“There has to be a panic,” the Speaker finally said. “A frenzy powered by euphoria, that borders on insanity.”

“Like when a mob begins to riot,” the first aide said.

“Exactly.”

“And becomes a single entity,” the first aide went on, “irrationally bent on violence.”

“That’s when we do it,” the Speaker said. “It’s the only time.”

“And what happens then?” said the second aide, who was still looking at the carpet.

The Speaker’s eyes, bloodshot from the long meetings and the sleepless nights, became glassy, then welled with tears. The tears brimmed behind his lower eyelids, then spilled onto his cheeks, like water pouring through the spillways of a dam.

“Oblivion,” he said, his voice choking just a little. He reached for his hanker-chief and dabbed it on his face.

And that was that. The two aides, somehow knowing the meeting was over, snapped shut their briefing books and took their leave.

Kryl’s Horn Still Blows

This weekend I was in Crawfordsville, Indiana, attending a celebration of the life and work of my great grandfather, the 1930’s cornettist and bandmaster Bohumir Kryl. Kryl carved the Indiana limestone friezes on the Victorian man-cave (personal study) built by Crawfordsville resident General Lew Wallace, the Civil War hero who wrote the novel Ben Hur. After completing the sculptures, Kryl left Crawfordsville to become first cornettist in John Phillips Sousa’s band. He went on to become one of the most famous musicians and band leaders of his day, and the greatest cornettist in history.

The Bohumir Kryl Project was the brainchild of Tim McCormick, a Crawfordsville insurance agent, musician, and antique phonograph collector who became somewhat obssessed with our great grandfather’s life and music career. The weekend program included a presentation of Kryl’s life by Richard Bowen, the Wabash College glee club director, who dressed as Kryl, and a rousing concert of period music (including Kryl’s “Josephine Waltz”) performed by the Crawfordsville Community Orchestra and musicians from across the country, including my cousin Mark Yancich, principal timpanist with the Atlanta Symphony (pictured above), his nephew Putt, also a percussionist, and Kurt Christiansen, principal trumpeter for the U.S. Air Force Band, among others.

This website (via Wabash College) has a nice collection of photographs from the event, including one of Mark playing the anvil and brake drum for Verdi’s “Miserere and Anvil Chorus,” a shot of Tim McCormick presenting my aunt, Pauny Yancich, Kryl’s last living granddaughter, with a certificate recognizing her as the inaugural General Lew Wallace Museum Scholar in Residence Emeritus, and one of my cousin Dave returning the favor by bestowing upon McCormick a certificate of adoption into the family, which, Dave noted, McCormick had earned by demonstrating the ”interest, tenacity and, frankly, insanity” that qualified him to become a member of the family.

Michelle Dean on Leaving “Brooklyn”

We’ve all read personal essays that lurch from one subject to the next, their loosely-connected ideas rolling along like train cars threatening to jump a disjointed track. Michelle Dean’s Saturday Rumpus essay on realizing your dream by leaving the place most associated with it organizes its themes into a streamlined whole. Like any good story, every turn feels at once surprising and inevitable. Of course, I also liked it because it is about a lawyer’s dream to become a writer.

An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant Population

“It happened the previous year Kardamanov had sent to the magazine Niva an article entitled “An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant Population,” and receiving a reply which reflected unfavorably on his pride as an author, he complained bitterly to his neighbors, thereby earning the reputation as a writer.”

Anton Chekhov, “St. Peter’s Day”

An English Translation of William Giraldi’s Review of Alix Ohlin’s Novel Inside and Her Story Collection Signs and Wonders

[With apologies to William Giraldi.]

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, William Giraldi wrote an inexcusably vicious review of Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside and her story collection Signs and Wonders. 

Unfortunately, Giraldi didn’t write his review in English. Instead, he wrote it in an ornamental, hyperbolic, pseudo-intellectual approximation of English, that employed synonyms and pretentious phrases that sounded like English, but didn’t actually make sense.

This left a number of readers puzzled. Giraldi was clearly angry with Ohlin, but why? All she did was write a couple of books. Did she borrow something of his and not return it? Maybe they dated at some point?

And why didn’t he like Ohlin’s writing? Something about it being “stiffened in a morgue of mentation” and that he didn’t like her titles. Apart from that, it was hard to tell. 

In an effort to get to the bottom of these mysteries, I took the trouble to translate Giraldi’s review into English. 

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“These Things Will Make All of Us Just a Little Bit More Free”

But for me this trial is a “so-called” trial. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood and fictitiousness, of sloppily disguised deception, in the verdict of the so-called court.

Because all you can deprive me of is “so-called” freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia. But nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to openness [glasnost], when this will be read and heard by thousands of people. This freedom goes on living with every person who is not indifferent, who hears us in this country. With everyone who found shards of the trial in themselves, like in previous times they found them in Franz Kafka and Guy Debord. I believe that I have honesty and openness, I thirst for the truth; and these things will make all of us just a little bit more free. We will see this yet.

— From the closing statement of Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot.

All three closing statements are brilliant. Read them here: http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements 

“So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each time as if it were something new.”

                                              — War and Peace

On Usain Bolt

You might think he has
the perfect sprinter’s name,
but in fact Mercury,
the winged messenger,
would be even better:
A fleet, antic
envoy between the
mortals and the Gods.