Emissaries to the Tang exhibit at Narahaku

Part of our reason for going to Japan was so Mrs. Sgt. T could visit Nara. Nara is the focus of much of her research, and this year happens to be the 1300th anniversary of its founding as the first permanent (at least, it was intended to be permanent) Chinese-style capital in Japanese history. Those may sound like a lot of qualifiers, but believe me, it was a big deal.

Usually when we visit Nara we hit a lot of temples. This time we didn't have much time; instead we visited museums and special exhibits. The big one of these was at the Nara National Museum: "Imperial Envoys to Tang China: Early Japanese Encounters with Continental Culture." The Japanese title, Dai Kentôshi Ten 大遣唐使展, was much more concise. It can be, because basically everybody in Japan knows what the kentôshi were: they were official envoys sent by the Japanese court to Tang China. There were nearly twenty such missions between the 7th and 9th centuries, and their job was to not only do diplomatic stuff (that's historiographical terminology, by the way) but to bring back Chinese culture, as much and as thoroughly as possible. Basically they were supposed to learn a lot of stuff, and bring back a lot of stuff. What kind of stuff? Books. One of the things they did was to buy as many books as they could bring back in their ships.

Mrs Sgt T's joke this whole trip was that we feel like kentôshi when we go back to Japan. It's true: as academics whose subject is Japan but whose base is the US, in particular a part of the US where books in Japanese are not quite as plentiful or easily obtained as one might wish, one of the things we do when we get back to Japan is to buy as many books as we possibly can. Scholarly monographs and manga, weighty reference works and light trash novels: we order them used, we buy them new, we pile them up and put 'em on boats. We're kentôshi, no doubt about it. And it's some comfort to know we're following in illustrious footsteps. Those who study history are sometimes delighted to realize they're repeating it.

So that was one thing I got out of the Great Kentôshi Exhibit: a better understanding of these people to whom the Mrs was comparing us. I love getting the joke, on those rare occasions I do.

The other thing I learned was: dude, emaki are awesome. I mean, I knew about them, and that they're very important. I've known people who studied them. But they're a little before my own period of specialization, and for some reason I guess I'd just never paid much attention. But they had one on display, the Kibi Daijin nyûtô emaki 吉備大臣入唐絵巻, or (as the MFA, which owns it and lent it to Narahaku for the exhibit, titles it) "Minister Kibi's Adventures in China." I love how the MFA cataloguers (donor?) add that "Adventures," as superhero-ish as it sounds, and as unjustified a "translation" as it is, because it perfectly captures the direct, vervacious spirit of this scroll. Japanese government official travels all the way to China, braving horrible dangers, only to face more peril at the hands of the wily Chinese - but don't worry, kids, he outsmarts them all!

This part was on display: the Chinese challenged Kibi to beat their masters at go. He cheated - he swallowed a piece. They try to find it - the way you try to find any game piece one of your kids has swallowed. You examine his spoor. Awesome!

Only a portion of the scroll was unrolled for view, but what was there was great. Really made me want to know the whole story. Eight years in Boston, and I only discover this jewel now, in Nara.

Silent movies on airplanes

I can't sleep on airplanes. Try as I might, I can never do more than drop off for a ten-minute nap. This poses a problem on ten-hour trans-Pacific flights, like the one I was on yesterday.

So how did I spend the time? I finished one of the four books I started in Japan a couple of weeks ago (more on which later). I listened to my iPod until the battery was almost dead. And I watched in-flight movies with the sound off.

Another thing I can't do on an airplane is commit to a movie. If it's worth seeing, I want to hold out for better viewing conditions than a miniscule screen, bad color, cropped frame, tinny sound, and constant interruptions. And if it's not worth seeing, it's not worth turning off the iPod for.

This time around it was romantic comedies back to back to back to back. Coincidence that I was just thinking about this genre the other day.

First up was Valentine's Day, starring Julia Roberts and and and and. This kind of ensemble cast thing can be fun: I liked Love, Actually, and some other examples I can't remember - in fact they're usually forgettable, but at least pleasant. This one I couldn't quite tell about, but what I did notice was that according to it, LA is a place inhabited mostly by blonde women with heart-shaped faces. There are some Asians, but they're mostly gardeners (the guy that owns the flower shop); some Latinos, but they're mostly laborers (the guy who delivers for the flower shop); some blacks, but they're mostly entertainers... I don't usually try to harp on this kind of thing, but with the sound off it really stood out.

Next up was When in Rome. We had kind of wanted to see this one, because we have such fond memories of Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars, but this wasn't that. In fact, of the four movies I saw on the plane this one worked best with the sound off. I felt like I was watching a silent movie - in other words I think I got everything I needed to. I could lip-read the few lines of dialogue that were essential, and everything else I could guess from situation and body language... Which is, I'd submit, either high praise for the movie, or pretty damning criticism. Take your pick.

The funnest was Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and Her Hair. Adams is a tremendously winning actress, cute as a button, and she does have nice hair: bouncy, sheeny, perfect for a Clairol commercial. I spent the whole movie just gazing at it. Which was its own reward: at first I was laughing because in every scene she has a completely different hairdo. And her hair is always perfectly styled, no matter how disheveled she's supposed to look. Then I realized that she had different hair in every shot. Clearly what happened is that the hairdresser rushed in between takes to re-coiff her, and the continuity editor never noticed that in one take her hair is tucked behind her left shoulder, and in another it's hanging down in front of her left shoulder. Once you notice it, you can't stop watching - it happens in scene after her scene. Quite amusing.

The last was 500 Days of Summer, which I should have liked if for no other reason than that it starred a brunette rather than a blonde - this, I think, is part of what marks it as Indie in its sensibilities. This, and the fact that the main characters look like five-year-olds dressed by parents with literature degrees. I was not in the mood for precious by this point, so I turned my attention to the iPod.

1974 Dead, 2010 Dylan, and Clarence White-era Byrds. Now that's entertainment.

Kuwata Keisuke's recent work

Kuwata Keisuke is one of the few Japanese pop stars who I really follow. Both in his solo work and in the context of his erstwhile band Southern All Stars, he's probably the only certifiable pop genius I've come across in Japan. As a songwriter he's trying to combine the mainstream J-pop hitmaking lyrical sensibility of Aku Yû with the poetic inventiveness of Bob Dylan and the pornographic cleverness of Prince (sometimes Kuwata makes Prince sound like the Church Lady), set to the unassailable tunefulness of Paul McCartney; as a performer he's equal parts McCartney and Mick Jagger. In other words, he's one of the few interesting lyricists in mainstream J-pop, one of the most consistently catchy songwriters around, and an always compelling performer.

His main flaw as an artist is that he's too prolific. It's just not summer in Japan without a new Kuwata Keisuke/SAS beach song, and it's just not Christmas without a new KK/SAS romantic ballad. Most years he obliges, but there are only so many variations he can wring out of these templates, and so his songs, brilliant as as they usually are individually, often tend to blend together.

Then again, sometimes he'll come up with something astounding, something that only he could come up with.

Take, for example, his work in the last year or so. This consists of:

1) a Kuwata Keisuke solo single called "Kimi ni sayonara." Three songs.

2) a Hara Yûko solo single called "Yume o arigatô." Two new songs. Hara Yûko is Kuwata's wife, also a member of SAS, and a solo artist in her own right; often her records are written, arranged, and produced by KK himself, which is the case here.

3) another Hara song, written and produced by KK, on a Hara Yûko collection released just last week.

Altogether, that's six new songs released on CD, but since one of these is eighteen minutes long, it all equals a whole album, at least of the vinyl variety. Considering that Kuwata has done more or less this amount of work every for the last thirty, it's a pretty good output for a guy in his fifties.

What's it all add up to? The lead Hara Yûko song is expert fluff, a bouncy pop number that sounds like it's meant to play in a video arcade; her already slightly surreal voice sounds like it might be auto-tuned, which would be typical of KK. The new song on the b-side, and two of the three songs on KK's single, are kind of forgettable.

But the bonus song on her anthology, also a KK production, is brilliant. "Kyoto monogatari," it's called, "Kyoto story," and the lyrics are essentially a bunch of Kyoto place names and catch words strung together. Musically it's a pastiche of mid-20th century pop, pre-rock, with some self-orientalizing musical color: there's a koto mixed in there with the horns, the strings, and the harpsichord. The whole thing is as rich and delicate and subtle as a piece of wagashi, which is to say it's a perfect pop confection.

In a very different way, the third song on KK's single is also a masterpiece. Called "Koe ni dashite utaitai Nihon bungaku" (Japanese literature I want to sing out loud), it's a medley of passages from modern Japanese literary classics set to music. The complete list is here (in Japanese) for those who are interested. As for the song itself, here's part one and here's part two. Musically, as well as lyrically, it's quite amazing: the melodies and arrangements are catchy, and each builds interestingly on the last; they're witty, too, with Akutagawa's Buddhist parable "The Spider's Thread" being given a raga-rock setting and Soseki's "I Am A Cat" turning into a thrashy funk stomp.

This is, I think, Kuwata's answer to the second side of Abbey Road. It's plain he's been thinking about Abbey Road lately. The cover to SAS's last album (in 2005), shown above, is an homage to Abbey Road's. And last year Kuwata gave a show in which he performed Abbey Road in its entirety - as mondegreens. That is, he wrote nonsense Japanese lyrics to all the song that approximated, soundwise, the way the English lyrics sound to Japanese ears.

The Abbey Road concert and the J-lit song were both part of a half-year miniseries Kuwata did on Japanese tv last year (I'm sorry I missed it; it's out on DVD, but way too expensive for me, and it leaves out the Abbey Road show) called Music Tiger (Ongaku tora-san), a reference to the famous Tora-san movies. The import of the title seems to have been not only that putting Kuwata in your iPod is like putting a tiger in your tank, but that he's also a roving lovable musical scoundrel - appropriately, the program found him covering an incredible range of tunes both Western and Japanese, both old and new, as well as a lot of new stuff and a broad swathe of his back catalog.

In other words, it's been a busy couple of years for Mr. Kuwata. And he has a new album coming out in October...

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

So I'm in Japan and I blog for the first time in a week and it's about this?

We watched Something's Gotta Give tonight for essentially the same reason that I'm blogging it. We were home (i.e., home in Japan) tonight for the first time in many days, and we were exhausted and needed something to vegetate to, and this was handy. Japanese TV is just as brain-numbing, but neither of us, pop culture fanatics though we are, can stand most Japanese television. We watch with great interest for the first day or two we're here, then we remember how unbelievably, maddeningly stupid most of it is. Brain-numbing, but in a bad way...

Is this a good movie? I have nothing against romantic comedies; I don't usually reach for them in a pile of DVDs, but I can appreciate a good one. This isn't entirely a good one. But it's enjoyable enough, up to a point.

The good: Diane Keaton, of course. There's a scene, after she and Jack have slept together, where he says something that leaves her at a loss for words, and you can see about ten different emotions crossing over her face before she says anything, from love to anger to embarrassment to rueful amusement to others too fleeting to quite identify. I'm not sure I know what good acting is, but I think this is it.

Also good: Keanu Reeves, surprisingly enough. I'm not sure I know what good acting is, and I've really never been sure Keanu can do it. I know a lot of people think he can't. And I'll admit that there's a very wooden quality about him in most of his roles. But in almost everything I've seen him in, this woodenness works in favor of his performance. This is true of Matrix, certainly, and of Dracula, too. I won't go so far as to say it's on purpose - that is, it may not be acting - but he's smart enough to usually only take roles in which his style of performance will be effective. It's effective here: I actually believed his character's attraction to, and then love for, Diane's: he's so direct, so preternaturally possessed, so unembellished, that you can buy him as a guy who knows what he feels and can see beyond social strictures.

Which makes it all the more a shame that the bad in this movie is so bad: the way it mercilessly tosses Reeves aside when he's served his purpose. You know from the start, because it's a romcom, that Diane and Jack will end up together, but I at least was rooting for Diane and Keanu. And the movie lets them stay together far too long - when Keanu is cast aside for Jack, you can't help but feel sorry for him. Especially because Jack's change of heart is explained in such a silly manner - like Diane's really going to forgive him because of a two-minute High Fidelity pastiche?

So Jack and Diane end up together. I knew that, and I was prepared to hate the movie because of it. But I have to admit, lousy writing aside, they have pretty good chemistry. And that, after all, is what you see a romantic comedy for. This onscreen chemistry thing is real, even if it's hard to quantify or analyze. And it's as good a reason as any to enjoy a movie.

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1837)

Some details. It was actually serialized between 1836 and 1837, so that, properly, should be the publication date. That it was serialized is important: you can feel it in the rhythms of the chapters, and the way the story changes as you go through it. It was, largely, improvised, month to month, and it shows. In a good way. Also, the actual title (which you won't often see on the covers of modern editions) is The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which is an infinitely better title than the one it's commonly known by. Not only does it have that glorious alliteration (not just the four p's but also the ck's in the penultimate word, leading into the hard c of Club), it has a grandiosity that tells you what to expect. The popular title, Pickwick Papers, is a bit of a cipher.

I noted that the story changes. I read the Signet Classic edition (three bucks at Smith Family Bookstore - can't beat that), and Steven Marcus points this out in his afterword, so this is no great discovery of mine, obviously. But it's one I was glad I picked up on. How does it change?

It starts out in mock heroic mode, presenting the thoroughly trivial doings of some harmless middle-aged men as if they were the daring adventures of some accomplished personages. What Dickens is sending up here - it may not be apparent to every modern reader, since he's really writing for contemporary Londoners, more than in most of his books - is the kind of amateur philosopher (in the old sense of naturalist and/or scholar) that Jenny Uglow profiled so brilliantly a few years ago in The Lunar Men. The ones Uglow writes about really were quite sharp; Dickens' joke is to make these inquiring minds cheerfully clueless. They think they're discovering the world and all its principles anew, but really they're the last to understand what's really going on.

This is amusing, as far as it goes, but luckily it doesn't go far: very soon Dickens decides he'd rather do something else. Maybe it's that he develops a soft spot for Pickwick himself, because he very quickly is transformed from buffoon to someone whose eccentricity proceeds from his virtue, an unworldliness that is almost unbelievable. Almost - what makes Pickwick endearing is that his virtue is never expressed in preaching, or lordliness, or even much in the way of indignance, and it never raises its possessor above having a good time. So Pickwick emerges not only as one of the truly Good Men of literature (Marcus says Dostoevsky liked him), but also as the somewhat unlikely life of the party. Everybody wants to have a beer with this guy - and quite a few of the characters do. Or at least a rum punch.

All that's well and good, and a fine reason to read the novel. So too is its plot: a bit of a shaggy-dog story, to be sure, with digressions so frequent as to be almost maddening, but once you get onto its wobbly wavelength, the story moves right along, and is fairly satisfying.

But what really gave me pleasure was the prose. I've made it clear elsewhere that my turn, in the last few years, to 19th century literature is largely a matter of discovering the beauties of the way English used to be written. Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and in very different ways Thomas Hardy and Herman Melville all had at their command resources of expression that seem lost to us today. Dickens has it too, but again, in a very different way. I seldom found myself admiring his sentences or paragraphs for their beauty, their musicality or elegance; not in the way I can luxuriate in Austen or almost sing along with Scott. But I did find myself wondering at the incredible complexity of nuance that Dickens could pack into a sentence.

Here's one chosen more or less at random, from Chapter 41:

There is no disguising the fact that Mr. Pickwick felt very low-spirited and uncomfortable; not for lack of society, for the prison was very full, and a bottle of wine would at once have purchased the utmost good-fellowship of a few choice spirits without any more formal introduction; but he was alone in the coarse vulgar crowd and felt the depression of spirit and sinking of heart naturally consequent upon the reflection that he was cooped and caged up without a prospect of liberation.

The action this sentence narrates is the simplest. Mr. Pickwick, being in prison, is depressed. It's a simple circumstance, and a sober one: no laughing matter. But along the way Dickens manages to find time to joke about the crowded conditions of the prison, the class of people incarcerated there, the susceptibility of all men to drink, the shallowness of good manners, and indeed Mr. Pickwick's own propriety and the incongruity of him being where he is. Mr. Pickwick is a gentleman through-and-through, and so when Dickens talks about him, or when as here he describes the world as Mr. Pickwick experiences it, it's always with the assumption of gentlemanly ways - that, for example, intimacy will only proceed from a formal introduction, or that low spirits might be best hidden beneath a veneer of gentlemanly sociability. Mr. Pickwick is not only depressed about where he is and who he's with, he's depressed that he's allowing it to depress him. And Dickens is concerned not only with telling us that he's depressed, but with delivering to us the particular flavor of depression as it exists for a gentleman as good natured as Pickwick, and also with making sure that all this information is presented in a tone that both captures the solemnity of the moment and preserves the comic aspect of the narration.

I'm not even sure I've got it all right, but you get the idea. There's a lot going on here. It's a rich sentence. And the book is full of 'em.

It's been over twenty years since I read any Dickens, and twenty years ago I wasn't digging writing like this. That's why I'm going on at such length about it now. It's a recent enthusiasm of mine.

Rajio taiso no. 4

You have to be familiar with NHK's supremely dippy radio calisthenics to get this one. Turns out there have been 3 incarnations of them (I had no idea). There's a youtube parody going around Japan this week called Radio taiso no. 4. Very, very funny, if you know the original (which, despite the name, is now done on TV as well).

Here's the video. It's good enough that I don't even mind that it's actually guerrilla marketing by a sportswear company.

And here's one of somebody actually trying it at home. The cat who doesn't want to get involved is the best part.

Here's one of a badminton team being taken by surprise by it. And a cheerleading squad. And a soccer team trying it.

Honesty from Jim Emerson

I haven't been blogging too much lately; really, it hasn't been that I lost interest, just that I've been busy, and some of the things I've been reading/seeing/listening to have been rather long in getting through, so I didn't necessarily have anything to blog about. Just finished The Pickwick Papers, for example, which took me over a month to get through; I'll try to blog it sometime this week, but that sort of explains why I haven't written about books lately...

Anyway, it may seem that I've lost interest once I link to the wonderful essay Jim Emerson has up on his Scanners film blog right now. I don't read a lot of film blogs (and there are a lot of film blogs); I found Emerson's through Ebert's website, and it pretty much fixes me for film commentary beyond simple movie reviews. So I say this without a lot of knowledge to back it up, but I don't think you'll find too many people on the internets writing about culture on a professional level (far above mine) who have the courage to admit what he's almost admitting
here, which is that there can come a point when, no matter how much you love a thing, there can come a point when you lose interest in it; more precisely, when you realize that your love for the thing doesn't necessarily mean you have to be enthusiastic about every new development in the thing.

He's talking about movies (mostly: he has a nice paragraph about music). Here's how he puts it:

So, I guess I can imagine reaching a point when I just say, "Forget it. I'd rather concentrate my energies studying and (re-)discovering great movies that already exist than keep expecting to find something satisfying in next week's mainstream theatrical releases just because they're 'new' products" -- whatever "mainstream" means, if anything, in our increasingly balkanized, niche-ified pop culture landscape. I recognize that, in the late 20th and early 21st century, the chances of me discovering what I'd consider to be a genuinely "new," compelling movie at the multiplex have grown mighty slim.

If you can make generalizations (and I know: you can't) about something as hydraheaded as the internets, it seems to me that the culture commentary thereon is overwhelmingly oriented toward the new. As he seems to be recognizing in his essay, to be interested in film on the internet seems to automatically entail being interested in new films.

But what if you're not? I don't have the heart to read all the comments on Emerson's post, but I can well imagine readers of a certain bent seeing his as the complaint of a cranky old fart (most of Emerson's commenters are fanatically loyal, so I doubt they'll say this), or of an aesthetically complacent, intellectually borderline-incurious traditionalist. None of which he is, of course...

I'm trying to figure out exactly what it is that strikes such a chord in me about this essay. Part of it, I think, is the recognition that as you get old you sometimes lose interest in the new. I almost think it's inevitable. It hasn't happened to me with films - most of my favorite directors are still in their primes, and a lot of my favorite films are from the last twenty years, and if I don't get out to the theater much, I do try to put new things in the Netflix queue when they look interesting, and a fair amount of recent films look interesting to me.

But a cursory reading of this blog should make it clear that it has happened to me with music. I, quite obviously, love music. I mean, I loooooovvvvvvvvveeeeeeee music. Willie Dixon once said, "I never said I was a millionaire, I said I've spent more money than a millionaire" - and I've spent it all on music. But I can't even remember the last new artist I liked well enough to buy a whole CD of (and I still consume most of my music in CD format). The odd Idol post aside, music is essentially over for me.

Why? Reasons both personal and, I begin to suspect, universal. The personal was an unintended separation from contemporary pop at a key time in my youth. I spent two years on a religious mission from age 20 to 22, in a foreign country and under a regime of rules that precluded listening to any non-religious music. I was never solely focused on the present - I developed my fetish for '60s hippie bands as a high school student in the Reagan era - but I was as intensely engaged with new music as most teenagers are right up until this point. Then for two years I dropped out of touch, and missed everything. This was from 1990 to 1992, the beginning of grunge.

This meant that I essentially missed out on the biggest rock development of my generation, and my engagement with contemporary music has never been the same. I tried to play catch-up for a while, but I never really recovered - I felt alienated from most alternative rock in the '90s. Meanwhile, hip hop never appealed to me much, and the one new musical development in the '90s that really did it for me, acid jazz, proved to be mostly a dance-music fad rather than a real revolution. By the time the '00s arrived I'd essentially given up trying to keep up with new music.

For a long time I wrestled with myself over this; I still feel a little guilt over not trying to engage with new music. Not only is there the anxiety over appearing to be an old fart (happens to all of us, both the aging and the anxiety over it), but there's the knowledge that lots of people I know and respect seem to find a great deal to love in new music. But then, almost all those people are much younger than me...

That's where the possibly-universal comes into it. I still pay attention just enough to know what some of the trends are, and what some people see in them (but not enough attention to name names accurately, so I won't), but it's still not enough to actually motivate me to invest in new music. Because a lot of it seems to be retreading stuff I've already been through. Rock music, I realized long ago, is essentially about youth and rebellion, which means that every couple of decades it has to eat itself, kill its parents, forget its past, which of course means it's doomed to repeat it, or if you want to put it more optimistically it's always free to make its own mistakes. So a lot of the gestures in rock I've seen before (and when they seemed fresh to me they were already repetitious to my parents' generation). I can appreciate them, but I don't feel compelled to join them.

And I think this is bound to happen as you get older. You realize, from your own experience, that there really isn't all that much new under the sun, and that in some cases youth is best left to the young. In some fields this isn't a problem; in rock music it is, because the revolutionary
impulse at the heart of rock (and this is true of pop, too, although for a different reason: in pop it's because, after all, presentism is the defining characteristic of pop) means that rock critics skew young (even Christgau, who I confess I never liked, lost his gig in the aughts). If you're a rock fan, you get old, and you either decide that new rock isn't as good as what came before and you get dismissed as an old fart, or you keep trying to stay current and look like an idiot and get dismissed as an old fart anyway.

Of course, none of this matters: unless you have to do this for a living, you should just listen to what you like, and as for people's opinions, it's like Jerry Garcia used to say: fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. But no matter how much we may admire him, few of us can actually be as devil-may-care as the Friend of the Devil himself; I for one will admit that I don't want to get stale, stuck in a rut, old, and that's why I had such anxiety for so long about having given up on new music.

But the thing is, I never gave up on discovering music. And this is an important point in Emerson's essay, too. Like the man says, it doesn't matter how old it is, if you haven't heard it it's new to you. I'm constantly discovering new music - it just happens to be anywhere from thirty to ninety years old most of the time.

I strongly believe that's a valid approach. In other words, I don't criticize those who give up on new music (etc.), but I also think that if you give up discovering new music you're giving up on growing, at least in that particular area. That's why I don't just give up and listen to nothing but Dylan and the Dead - I could probably do that and be happy, but I wouldn't respect myself. So I buy a Lee Morgan cd, and I discover "Mr. Kenyatta," and it makes me glad.

What I don't understand, actually, is why this isn't a more common stance. If I could shift the subtopic to movies for a minute, one of the nice things about living in Cambridge/Somerville was that we had the Brattle right there, a fantastic revival house showing classic movies all the time. I mean, if you cared about movies at all it was heaven to be able to see things like Apocalypse Now, Zabriskie Point, Seven Samurai, Casablanca, and all the rest on the big screen, especially if you were too young to have caught them when they were first in release. And yet the Brattle is always hurting for money. I just can't understand how a major American metro area can support up to a half dozen multiplexes but not a single revival screen.

Why aren't more people interested in old art, is the question. Why does Wikipedia contain more pages about The National than about Sidney Bechet?

...No real point to all this that I've written, obviously. I'm in Japan right now, which always makes me introspective because it's been the site and catalyst for so much of my adulthood; and I'm also jet-lagged, which makes it harder than normal to put two thoughts together coherently. But, if anyone was curious, maybe this post explains why this blog is so scatter-shot. Or maybe it just demonstrates it...

I'll try to write something about something soon. Probably Pickwick.