Thursday, September 23, 2010

And Just Like That . . . She's Gone

Hannah True Jocius is no more, Hannah True lives on.

Without going into it, let me just say it is a huge burden on women to change their names, identities, personae -- from single women into someone's wife. If any of my friends ask (I do not push this on anyone), I would say keep your name. Why give up everything that you've dreamed of, worked for, everything you've been to take another name? I feel incredibly lucky to love a husband who wants me to have my own name and my own achievements.

I've been told that my previous in-law family wants to erase me from their history -- fair enough, even though you can't change history. Whatever the truth is, it's nice to not have to carry that name around with me anymore.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

What I'm Listening To Now/ September Mediascape



I have to make a confession.

Every month Christian steals my ipod and puts a new mix on it so I have a new mix every month for the past two years. I love it. It's a labor of love (my friend Sheila says if it's not a labor of love it's just labor) but it's also the only way I hear a full spectrum of tons of different songs. Left to my own devices I would latch onto a handful of albums and listen to them over and over. But these mixes give me lots of different songs to listen to over and over and over. I think the term for people like me are "latchers:" we find songs we love and work the tar out of them. That being said, here are the songs I'm lovin' on now:

Sleigh Bells -- Rill Rill

Quasi -- Rockabilly Party

The Hold Steady -- Hurricane J

Karen O and The Kids -- Hideaway (Oh man, it makes me cry)

Buffy Sainte-Marie -- Helpless

The Roots -- How I Got Over


Podcasts (available for free on iTunes)

The Bugle (From Times Online.uk) -- The Daily Show's John Oliver and his comedy partner Andy Szaltzman give the rundown on world news. Be prepared for Andy's puns (they are horrible).

The Pod F. Tompkast -- Paul F. Tompkins plays the (thin) conceit that it is nighttime on the internet and anything can happen. And if you are at all interested in what might happen in a creative collaboration between Andrew Lloyd Weber and Ice-T, take a listen. He's a comedian at the top of his game.


Television

We've just wrapped up True Blood Season 2. (I don't want to hear anything about season three -- yet.) We've got other shows lined up: Season Five of The Wire, Weeds and Big Love.

Books

I'm into The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillian and Mark Twain. I'm trying to figure out different techniques of local writing. Christian and I are reading Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon together (okay, he reads while I do bake or do yoga) and I love Pynchon's take on those two. Or rather, I love Christian's take on Pynchon's writing.

Last and most importantly, there is a review of Christian's book! And on a pop-culture site, no less! Very cool indeed.



Friday, September 10, 2010

Book: Tokyo Year Zero






            It’s no secret that I am intensely connected with Japan. I lived there for three years, and that experience imprinted on me a love for and unending questions about the place. It is one country about which Westerners feel comfortable making gross generalizations. These are usually along the lines of “Japan is such a crazy/zany/weird place” and suggest that all Japanese people have agreed to abandon good taste and morality. How else to explain a video clip where the young members of girl group Morning Musume (Morning’s Daughter) strap ham to the tops of their heads and poke their noggins through holes in a wooden platform where a hungry gila monster runs loose? The girls, of course, deliver cochlea-shredding screams before they duck away; the last girl standing is the winner. This, like the many other such clips, leaves me a bit empty. It’s not that I don’t laugh; on the contrary, I’ve heard Morning Musume and I’m rooting for the gila monster.  What bothers me, rather, is how this clip and its ham-headed hi-jinx fit in to the American conception of Japan.

            Upon hearing that I lived in Japan, I get the usual questions. Do you speak Japanese? Did you speak it before you went? Did you ever see a vending machine selling girls’ underwear? Isn’t it really crazy there? (Yes. No. No. Not really.) What gets me is that by the third or fourth question we are already in Wacky Japan, land of Beer-o-mats and ass-warming toilets, and perhaps, for the historically minded, sumo-wrestling geishas. Wacky Japan, well, it just isn’t as wacky as most people would like it to be. Japan is, in short, a foreign country.  They do things differently there. The Wacky Japan line only dumbs the place down, brackets out its history and the intricacies of it culture: the nation as carnival sideshow. I mean, have you seen those rockabilly haircuts? Compensated dating???!!!

            So it will be no great surprise that I have been disappointed by books I’ve read that have been set in Japan. The Japanese characters are flat, or the whole cast is imported from America. Movies don’t handle a Japanese setting much better: while I love Lost in Translation, Japan is only a backdrop, a place where Americans discover themselves while Tokyo and her citizens are merely background – an entire city relegated to white noise.

            When my husband quietly put Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace in my reading pile I was a bit apprehensive. An English author writing about immediate post-war Tokyo? There was a lot of room for disappointment; these waters have plenty of shipwrecks in them.

            Tokyo Year Zero is, at heart, a murder mystery based on the very real serial murderer Yoshio Kodaira. But it cannot really be called a mystery  or even thriller because the reader is too far inside Detective Minami’s head to create adequate cat-and-mouse tension. Peace deploys his skills as a novelist quite nimbly: the very first thing you read is a stream of consciousness flashback from a soldier roughly outlining his departure for Manchuria with fragments of other memories mixed in. Peace’s choice of names (there are detectives named for all points of the compass except East) and locations (the main police stations are near the Imperial Palace – the empty heart of Tokyo, off-limits to the common Japanese) are all carefully chosen.

            For the most part, the reader follows Detective Minami as he stumbles through a murder investigation. At the same time, the reader sees Detective Minami’s mind as he stumbles towards a psychotic break. Peace employs the best use of repetition that I’ve ever seen: the ton-ton hammering of post-war Tokyo rebuilding, an entire city as a building zone with noise spilling everywhere; the scenes that Minami replays in his head, trying to make the ending come out right; the omnipresent loss of family, home, identity, structure, jobs, food. It’s remarkable how much Peace achieves with technique alone. I guarantee at some point you will attempt to bracket out the noise markers, and that will put you in the same frame of mind as Detective Minami, our mentally disintegrating anti-hero.

            Something else Tokyo Year Zero does especially well is address Japanese atrocities in China. Kodaira and Minami are both veterans who served time in China; both are confused at how their brutal behavior on the mainland earned them medals while U.S.-occupied Japan wants nothing to do with them. Peace does not spare his characters from reckoning with their deeds and the reader is not spared the details of those atrocities. The characters deal with their pasts in different ways, to be sure, but the consequences of their acts remain with them. While Peace doesn’t linger on the Chinese survivors, he does hint at their outcomes by setting up a parallel structure with a Japanese brothel where abandoned women try to eke out an existence stripped of any human dignity. Peace does not put Japan in the zany box, but treats both wartime imperial savagery as well as post-war turmoil with careful regard. I have to say again that he delivers a master class in repetition, elevating it beyond gimmick into something new altogether.

The fans of Wacky Japan, who celebrate the Naked Festival and Engrish, bring a certain post-modern ironic humor to the table, but precious little else. There are plenty of websites that chronicle craziest things about Japan from a Westerner’s point of view, but these are purely anecdotal – good for a chuckle but not much more. What adds to the conversation is an understanding that Japan is yes, at times, weird, but also serious. Light and dark. Horrific perpetrator and nuclear victim. Peace seeks out one of the hardest, saddest moments in history and somehow draws out a novel, and an exceptionally well-written one at that. No ham hats required.


Saturday, September 4, 2010

A Weddin' Story



Oh, happiness! Yesterday was our one-year anniversary.

I had told Christian, way back in early days of our relationship, that if I ever got married again, the fella would have to pull out all the stops, every bell and whistle, and surprise me. I didn’t really think of it again.

I should have known something was up. He started the day with something men usually never say: "let's wear our favorite clothes today!" He was so excited and convincing that I totally fell for it. Our friend Vivasvan was visiting and we decided to take a drive upstate and have lunch at the lovely Dorset Inn. I did think a proposal was a possibility, but usually people get proposals when its just the two of them and we had our friend with us. So the whole drive up I’m chatting away to Viv about Vermont and the scenery and all that.

When we finally get to Dorset, Christian gets out of the car and says "Hey, I need to talk to you," and he shows me a marriage certificate. Unbeknownst to me, he arranged all the paperwork, a pretense to be dressed up and a justice of the peace named Mr. Squire to meet us at the Inn. 

Christian looks at me and says "you want to go do this now?"
Stunned! He pulled off the biggest surprise by totally skipping the proposal that we both knew the answer to and going straight to the wedding.


We stood on the village green, in-between the Dorset General Store and the Inn. Local carpenters and workers on their lunch break could see us and when it was clear we were getting situated for a wedding ceremony, someone cued up music:
Just a small time girl livin' in a lonely world
She took
 the midnight train goin' anywhere . . . .

"Don't Stop Believing" by Journey blared out from a truck and became our wedding song. I’m not a big fan of that particular song but I love that it came to us unbidden and unplanned. After we kissed, people watching from both sides of the green whooped and hollered and came over to wish us congratulations.

Me, Christian and Mr. Squires.







Christian even got rings. He took a page from our friends Andy and Lauran and got a retaining ring and a locking washer from the local hardware store. Even though I now have an antique sapphire and diamond ring, I still sometimes slip on the retaining ring. Christian has gotten lots of compliments on his ring over the past year.

The three of us had lunch at the Inn, and decided that the only difficult bit of eloping is telling all your friends and family. 









So we dressed up, drove a piece north and got hitched. It was a beautiful day. And a complete surprise. 





And that is that.

I am the unreliable witness to my own existence