MOVING

If anyone cares this blog has moved over to tumblr. I'm not super-thrilled about this but blogspot is kind've a ghost town. Sort of a relic from a different age on the internet, but as it is approaching 2014 I find myself wanting to move on to a different age. One has to go where the action is, get with the times, etc.. This move is something like the jump we all made from myspace to facebook. So, you can find me at tumblr now. See you there.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe (1959)

Running had always been made much of in our family, especially running from the police.

            Been in some kind of awfully British mood recently; it feels as though I have endured week after week of bad skies and dreary food, and in some of my more desperate and pitiful moments I have even listened to the Smiths. I haven’t ever been to England, and I never will, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call this mood “British”. And the cherry is I have begun to occasionally drink tea, a couple times a week, like somebody’s desiccated old grandmother. This Brythonic attitude of mine can be traced back, I believe, to a documentary about the Beatles I recently watched in a “History of Rock and Roll” class I am taking at a Community College because I failed it years ago when I was a shifty, miserable teenager prone to taking out his relationship with his mother on himself and the world. Obstinate ol’ me may be the only person on the planet who isn’t totally jazzed and fully erect over the Beatles, though I have mellowed on that front a little bit. I was struck at the footage used in the beginning of the documentary, during the earliest part of their career, in Munich and Liverpool. It was very grimy and romantic, and I think it infected me somehow. Mostly I just zoned out though, because of the indecipherable Liverpudlian accents of many of the interviewees. One could hardly call it English at all. Also because skiffle is terrible music.

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.

            Hard for me to imagine what my life was like before I took up my position as America’s preeminent Bolaño scholar. I don’t know what I was doing then, probably something sleazy and forgettable. But the minute I sat down for the first of many long interrogations of a Bolaño text I knew that my life would never be the same. The scales fell from my eyes and, now sighted for the first time, I was called to spread the message of Bob Bolaño. Reading Bolaño is like hearing the voice of a friend I never knew I had.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Verne (1864)

            I don’t think I’ll be blowing any minds by saying that our world is hostile to adventure and individuality. It’s a square universe, where the one rule is square up or die. There’s no end to the pressures of conformity, the orders to stay put, to never leave the city, and constantly buy things. Even if one day the doors to adventure were thrown open neither myself nor any of my slug-countrymen would have a clue what to do. Conformity is drilled into us. All the maps are filled in, the species named and classified, and after several successful trips to the moon our leaders have decided that was good enough for them. The one institution that Americans believe can provide the adventure they crave is the military, which of course means that to a broad swath of America adventure involves shooting poor people, throwing hand grenades at poor people, launching guided missiles at poor people, spraying poor people with napalm, humiliating poor people, raping poor people, torturing poor people, desecrating cultural treasures, getting bad religious tattoos, starting barfights, beating people up for being different, and leaving a horde of crippled, mutilated orphans and widows wherever they go and then laughing about it. Rather than striking off towards the horizon adventure in our War Culture--where you are not a Real Man unless you have killed--involves thrill-killing one’s way across the third world.

The Decay of the Angel

 The Decay of the Angel (1972)

Yukio Mishima

Perhaps, he sometimes thought, he was a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness. It was clear in any case that he was not a human being.

            On November 25^th, 1970, Yukio Mishima, after inking the final word of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, drove with a select few members of his private army/boy’s club to the Japan’s Eastern Army Headquarters. There they kidnapped a general, bound him to a chair, and standing on a balcony before the gathered crowd Mishima delivered a speech about duty and honor and purity. The crowd, not understanding what they were witness to, jeered him and he retreated inside. As he unbuttoned his coat Mishima turned to one of his acolytes and said: “I don’t think they even heard me.” And then, in the grand culmination of his life and his art, he committed suicide by ritual disembowelment.

The Temple of Dawn

The Temple of Dawn (1970)

Yukio Mishima

            Or: in which Shigekuni Honda, the bourgeois lawyer creep, masturbates to the memory of his dead childhood friend. I can tell already that this is going to be a difficult blog post for me to write. I’m running out of things to say about Yukio Mishima!

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses (1969)

Yukio Mishima

We can only rely on our swords, and on bombs made from our flesh.

           

            For the second installment of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy Mishima moves the calendar forward almost two decades, to 1932. Shigekuni Honda, the earnest and intelligent school friend of Kiyoaki Matsugae, is now a respected judge in Kansai, which I gather is sort of out in the sticks, far from civilization. He is sagacious and sturdy and known for his legal wisdom. One day while attending a kendo tournament at a shrine he encounters a young man whom he believes is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki: they share a similar set of birthmarks, and the circumstances of their meeting mirror the final words spoken by Kiyoaki while he lay wracked by a feverish delirium. The young man, Isao Iinuma, is the son of Kiyoaki’s childhood tutor, who was expelled from the Matsugae household for impregnating a maid. In the intervening years the elder Iinuma has founded a school, the so-called “Academy of Patriotism”, a far-right enclave where his son is a star student and captain of the kendo team.

            Honda only shows up at the beginning and the end and for most of the book we follow Isao, who couldn’t possibly be less like Kiyoaki. Kiyoaki was all emotions and no will. Isao is the opposite; his is a ruthless, disciplined willpower. Isao embodies the concept of “purity” but it’s wholly alien to a Western conception. For Isao (and Mishima) purity involves making a statement to the Emperor and then committing an artistic suicide while facing the rising sun. In order to facilitate his grand gesture he has enlisted several of his school comrades in a plot to up end the social order by murdering several wealthy capitalists and then committing seppuku on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They try to involve an army Lieutenant and Prince Harunori, the same Prince who was betrothed to Satoko Ayakura. Someone rats them out and they are arrested and tried. The group is broken apart but after his trial Isao escapes his father’s house and murders the industrialist Kurahara and then disembowels himself.

            Isao and his group of fanatics draw their inspiration from a pamphlet concerning the Shinpuren Rebellion, a 19^th Century revolt of dissatisfied samurai and Shinto fundamentalists. They called themselves the League of the Divine Wind, which you might better recognize as the kamikaze. The rebellion failed and most of its members disemboweled themselves, which to Isao and his compatriots just about the best thing a human being could do. I guess it’s sort of admirable in a way, if you’re a pervert or an ultranationalist or someone impressed by ostentatious displays of obedience. Something like 4,000 kamikaze pilots gave their lives during the Second World War, which seems to me to be a gratuitous loss of life that stands out in even against a tapestry of senseless violence, genocide, grisly meat-grinders and black holes of human suffering. It’s not as if they were destroyed by bombs or famine or other things over which they had no control. They were convinced to sacrifice themselves meaninglessly for the sake of an Emperor who presided over some of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind and was never once held accountable. Hirohito lived until 1989! Personally I could never imagine being suicidally devoted to a cause or an idea, and especially not a feudalistic anachronism like the Emperor of Japan.

            Of all the Mishima novels I’ve read this is the one that I have enjoyed the least. Mishima writes beautifully but there is one flaw that towers above everything: perfect characters are boring. Isao is perfect. Everyone he encounters is entranced by the intensity of his gaze, at his clarity, drive, and the purity of his obsession. He is intelligent, healthy, and untarnished. There is no conflict, no doubt. It’s an intriguing idea but it doesn’t come off the way I think Mishima wanted it to. I would think that a writer of Mishima’s caliber would know that. That was kind of disappointing. Otherwise it was more of the usual Mishima: very sensual, emotionally rich, and luxurious. Very surreal and internal and full of vivid beauty. And like other Mishima novels it is homoerotic as all heck! It made Spring Snow look like Big Tit Blondes #3. Isao is a champion in kendo, a form of fencing fought using very stiff, erect wooden staves that smash and crack together while hot sunlight reflects off sweaty, gleaming musculature. Young men, with their muscles coiled like vipers, pant in the hot darkness. And so on.

            One thing that I always appreciate about a Mishima book is that he is all about defeating hypocrisy and destroying the parent-world. As the product of two wildly hypocritical people that sentiment appeals to me.

In fact, it is Isao’s father who informs on him to the police, because his father is ultimately envious of the purity of youth. Much of the book concerns the contrast between purity and corruption. The old men, capitalists and landowners, are trapped in their weak, corrupt flesh while the pure, like Isao, die young and leave beautiful corpses. Mishima was somewhat obsessed with flesh, muscle, and skin. He was a bodybuilder, after all, which takes no small amount of hatred towards your material form.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that. I don’t want to run out things to write about before I finish The Sea of Fertility. Just started The Temple of Dawn. That book, and the next, are both shorter than Runaway Horses, so I should be done with this cycle pretty quickly. I’m not used to reading novels in a series one after the other and part of me wants to set it aside and move on to something else, but I’m going to power through them. I think Mishima’s dedication to beauty and his completely unique worldview make such a task very worthwhile. 

Also, I should note that the 80s biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, is very, very good. Highly recommend that. Excellent Phillip Glass soundtrack, insane set design. A worthwhile viewing!