June 15: Mostly Asian Edition

I like the term that Ruby Cohn uses in the title of her excellent study Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, because it covers sequels, prequels, variations, re-imaginings, parodies, reboots -- all conceivable uses of and responses to source material. We need the term because such works are more numerous now than ever. (I think there may be other words in technical literary criticism with a similar meaning, although I cannot recall them offhand. There always seems to be a Greek word in these situations!)

Eric Rauchway's novel Banana Republican, which follows the career of Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby after that novel ends, is a brand new example of an offshoot:

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Gatsby-in-Nicaragua-/24871/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

The Chinese journalist Xinran discusses her favorite books about her country, including the multi-volume 18th century novel The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber), which I am currently reading myself; I'm nearing the end of the first volume of the five-volume Penguin translation.

For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes....In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there.

http://fivebooks.com/interviews/xinran-on-understanding-china

That is absolutely true. Xinran singles out an episode that demonstrates "how important food is in Chinese society"; for me, an equivalently important part of the novel is a chapter on landscape architecture that is one of the greatest pieces of writing I have ever read on that subject.

Julia Lovell in The Guardian summarizes the career of a key Chinese writer that Xinran does not mention, Lu Xun (1881-1936):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/12/rereading-julia-lovell-lu-xun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_xun 

Although I am scarcely very knowledgeable in Chinese literature, I prize the poem "Dead Water" by Lu Xun's contemporary Wen Yidou (1899-1946), which I first discovered in Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature, and which I have read several translations of. This is Lucas Klein's version:

This is a ditch of desperate dead water,
Where wind can blow but raise no ripples.
Best just to throw in more scraps of copper and iron,
Might as well pour in your leftovers of cold porridge. 

Perhaps the copper will green into emerald,
Tin cans rusting out stalks of peach blossoms;
Then let the grease weave up a sheet of silk,
While bacteria steam it into the clouds of dawn. 

Let the dead water ferment into a ditch of green wine,
Pearl-like whitecaps floating all over;
The laughter of little pearls will turn into large pearls,
Before being bit burst by mosquitoes stealing wine. 

So this ditch of desperate dead water
Can just boast of a few degrees of brightness.
And if the frogs can't bear the solitude,
Then just say the dead water will cry out a song.

This is a ditch of desperate dead water,
Which is certainly not where beauty resides,
Best just to give it up for ugliness to cultivate,
And see what kind of world he can turn it into. 

As clearly as E.M. Forster's Howards End represents England, Wen's "ditch of desperate dead water" is the China that he loved and hated. It sometimes seems to me that most great artists simultaneously love and hate their native countries, and this poem is one of the finest expressions of that contradiction in all of world literature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Yiduo

The Korean photographer Han Sungpil has been documenting a peculiar brand of modern outdoor art installation that is meant to "cloak" construction sites:

http://www.lensculture.com/sungpil2010.html?thisPic=11

(Hat tip to 3QuarksDaily.)

Of course I am especially alert to Korean material these days, as for example this laudatory review of Kim Young-ha's novel Your Republic Is Calling You at The Complete Review:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/korea/kimyh2.htm

They say this is the Asian Century; I took them seriously and moved to Asia. Today there is as much "interface" between Asian and Western culture as there has ever been. Caustic Cover Critic points out how the Thai-born (but now London-based) artist Niroot Puttapipat has illustrated a volume of Russian fairy tales:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/06/niroot-puttapipats-russian-legends.html

If you like your Asian culture less refined and more populist, you can always take in a Bollywood film like Sholay:

...the idea of a “curry western” was something I couldn’t resist. Sholay, released in 1975, is regarded as the first of this genre. It also happens to be the highest grossing Bollywood movie of all time. If you’re expecting something resembling a spaghetti western you’re in for some major shocks. It’s possibly debatable that it’s even a western at all. It isn’t set in the American West; it’s set in central India. And it’s set in modern times. On the other hand the main plot is a classic western revenge plot and the basic structure of the movie, and more importantly the whole ethos of the film, makes it absolutely a western.

http://princeplanetmovies.blogspot.com/2010/06/sholay-1975.html?zx=dddab9301df0d4c0

Among notables born on this date are composers Edvard Grieg and Otto Luening, pop singers Waylon Jennings and Johnny Hallyday, jazz pianist Erroll Garner, painter Nicholas Poussin, cartoonist Saul Steinberg, politician Mario Cuomo, psychologist Erik Erikson, poets Ramon Lopez Velarde (Mexico) and Ibn-e-Insha (Urdu), children's writer Brian Jacques, humanitarian Paul Rusesabagina, baseball players Billy Williams, Wade Boggs, and Tim Lincecum, and actors Harry Langdon, Lash La Rue, Nicola Pagett, Simon Callow, Courteney Cox, Ice Cube, Helen Hunt, Alberto Sordi, and Neil Patrick Harris. I haven't seen enough of the work of silent film comedian Harry Langdon (1994-1944) to come to grips with his unique "child-adult" style (which by all accounts only reached fruition in a few films).  This is a nice clip (featuring several animals!) from his short Smile Please (1924), his first surviving film; pre-persona, as it were.



http://silent-movies.com/Langdon/