Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

A short  Goodreads Review of Sun and Steel  by Yukio Mishima that I wrote a little while ago. I have to say – I do not quite get the adoration that people have for this book on YouTube. People talk about it as a kind of masculine self-help book about mastering the “discipline of the steel”, weightlifting and weapons, and embracing your physical being and physical experience. The book does detail Mishima's journey to leave his room and transform himself through lifting steel, running, and fencing. Flirtations with the military, etc. Yet it isnt simply that, as the subtitle suggests "Art, Action and Ritual Death", it presents a worldview on relationship between word (spirit) and action (body) and their reconciliation in death. One of the notions that I was sympathetic to is that there is a problem of overindulging in introspection and the idea that the ‘surface’ of things might contain its own kind of depths (of experience) and that the ‘depth’ within oneself are a series ...

A couple of weeks ago I read Murakami's ' Norwegian wood '  which centers around a young student Toru Watanabe dealing with social isolation in Tokyo, the loss of a close fiend and his connections with two young women.  It's a very beautiful novel. I especially enjoyed all the little humorous, emotional or salacious side stories told by Midori and Reiko that pepper the novel alongside the main plot line. It's easy to see how this novel, which is supposedly unlike his others, captured the imagination of Japanese youth in the 'lost decade'.  Anyways, I found this BBC documentary about the author and I thought I would share it here. 

An engaging documentary on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov . It contains a lot of archival footage of interviews with the man himself and covers topics from lepidoptery to Lolita.   The narrator Stephen Smith interviews Martin Amis and contemporary literary critics to identify the character of the man and the underlying moral message of his Magnum opus .  Though I enjoyed it, I'm not quite sure if Nabokov would have approved : there is a heavy strain of criticism as psychoanalysis, art as didacticism throughout the film.

Henry Miller, author of The Tropic Of Cancer , at dinner with Brenda Venus in 1979 discussing literature, life and food. -----Also on A Night OF Dostoevskian Smiles and Sadean Excesses : - Henry Miller Asleep and Awake . - Nabokov on "Lolita" . - The Logic of Existential Meaning .

Towards the end of high-school, a close friend of the family suffered from a stroke that left him without the ability to read with any sustained proficiency. As such, M---- D---- gave me his collection of books that he had acquired over the years. He had majored in literature and the collection contained a good cross-section of the Western cannon – great books – from the inception of the Spanish novel through Dickens and Dostoevsky to the authors of the Latin American boom. There was much poetry, 18 th century English and French verse and anthologies of Bronze Age Greeks. I can remember sitting with M---- D---- in hospital and talking of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus and his smile of recognition and happiness that I was taking pleasure in reading and literature. That the books were going to good use. Whilst perpetually curious and striving for understanding, up to this point I had allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education. The collection was fuel to the fire. Among...

Tom Schiller's documentary on Henry Miller, the author of The Tropic of Cancer , and the intricacies of his bathroom walls.

And then the day came, When the risk to remain tight In a bud Was more painful Than the risk it took to blossom. - Anaïs Nin.

From Hemingway's ' Death in the Afternoon ': "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured, or well-bred, is merely a popinjay. And this too, remember: a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."