No Greater Hell

There’s no greater Hell
Than having a friendship bottom out
For the simple reason that you didn’t measure up
To its recalibrated terms

Shogun: The Life of Ieyasu Tokugawa

Shogun: The Life of Ieyasu Tokugawa by A.L. Sadler.

Having just read Hideyoshi, a fairly recent scholarly work by Mary Elizabeth Berry, I delved into this 1937 biography, nay hagiography, of Ieyasu Togugawa. Though this book was written while Japanese troops were running roughshod in China and threatening Western interests all around, Sadler, an Australian. makes no effort to conceal his admiration for the first Tokugawa shogun.

In this book, Ieyasu is by turns strong and humble, but always behaving in the manner appropriate to the moment. For instance, on the eve of his famous meeting with Hideyoshi in 1585, a nervous Hideyoshi visited Ieyasu to enjoin him to be most submissive the next day, so that Hidyoshi might not lose face with his men. Ieyasu duly complied. Even Ieyasu's later upending of Hideyori, son of the late Hideyoshi, comes across as a matter of necessity, as Hideyori had taken to assembling men and ample arms in his redoubt at Osaka. It took two campaigns to eliminate Hideyori, the second made necessary because of Ieyasu's leniency toward Hideyori after the first.

Meanwhile, Ieyasu appears to possess a talent for speaking in pithy aphorisms in the middle of battle. Did he actually say what Sadler asserts, or is Sadler engaging in a bit of hero worship? I have always regarded battle as a messy, chaotic affair which offers scant occasion for recording what is said. I was reminded of a recent On Point episode about famous quotations when one the guests mentioned that Custer supposedly said "We have caught them napping." at Little Big Horn. How could we know that he said that, and what survivor reported it later? I suspect that if what Ieyasu said during battle were to come to light, we might learn a great deal about sixteenth-century Japanese expletives.

Since it was written in 1937, this book labors under many of the assumptions of the day (with the notable exception of the Japanese). To wit, Sadler writes about a Japanese shipwreck on Formosa in 1616: "their (the Japanese) crews were attacked and most of them killed by these sturdy aboriginals (Taiwanese), who have been a thorn in the side of Japan ever since, for they are animals who defend themselves very decidedly when attacked." Oh, the 1930s! And women? Don't get me started. More maps would have helped as well. There a many detailed maps of the terrain of certain battle sites, but Sadler assumes an expert's knowledge of the geographical map of Japan.

Shogun is nevertheless worth reading for the wealth of details about sixteenth-century Japanese life, from ceremonial protocol to military tactics, and for the insight into the events of a crucial period in Japanese history, when the centralization of the state ran oddly parallel to similar developments in Europe. It is one of a very few works in English on Ieyasu Tokugawa.

Boozy Bonhomie

My early twenties were far and away the happiest moments of my life. My family were alive, my friends unmarried, and college still held out its social, intellectual charm. At times during that brief stretch I remember leaning back in my chair surveying my surroundings, friends about me relishing boozy bonhomie and exchanging honest laughter. My family remained supportive and secure. And the better part of a lifetime of reading awaited me.

I cannot decide which was harder to bear: the sudden death of my father, which reminded me of my own mortality, or the marrying away of my friends, which assured me of my solitude. The former was a terrific blow, the latter an incremental cancer. Both dented my armor. But it was graduate school that clubbed the enthusiasm for living right the fuck out of me, for it was there that I discovered that reading offered little more than a momentary diversion from nothing.

Residual Solace

To realize that even if you get back to where you once were when you had an outside chance at mediocrity

your youth will have passed

and the nest that you hope for is a second blush of it

by the time that you will be in a position to attain even that, the tectonic plates will have pulled apart

and your youth will reside on the opposing plate.

New England

There is a charm to the place

That is mentioned in guidebooks

Thoreau and Dickinson and Melville and all those gables

And brave thoughts were once thought here

And I was drawn here as a young man imbued with Emerson

And I've been here long enough to recognize it as paved over horrifically

Skokie, Illinois with a wicked accent

I'm about to give up on following basketball. After watching about fifteen games of the NCAA tournament, I've seen too many prematurely-hoisted 3-point shots and recklesss body launches into opposing defenses for me to draw any other onclusion than that team ball has died and it's all a televised circus show. What Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan spawned has finally come back to kill the game.

Where those players--and those of their time---delighted crowds with no-look passes and mercurial shots, they did so in the knowledge that they would include teammates when it counted--witness MJ's double-nickle game against the Knicks, which he ended with a dime to--Bill Wennington.

Two dribbles and a jump shot. UConn is up by three over Butler with 15 minutes left, and they worked 5 seconds off the clock before settling for--you got it!--a jump shot!

Man, oh man!

James Joyce--The Dead

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There is little that is lovelier than this. I am at a loss to think of a greater ending to a story

A Girlfriend's Dog

At what point do you forget the name of an old girlfriend’s dog? Not the one that bit you on the arm (dog, not girlfriend), but just an ordinary dog that occasionally trotted past you in their living room or slept in front of you as you picked her locks on the sofa. I had a girlfriend years ago—when I was nineteen—whom I thought I loved deeply, and I thought of her day and night. We went out for a year before we broke up. For a while after we broke up, I thought of everything about her, including the warmth of her family home, and the faces and names of her family members, and among these I placed her dog, since they treated him like a family member (they even fed him turkey during the holidays).
A few months ago I thought of this girlfriend, and I recalled the holiday meals at her house, and the faces and name of her family. But I could not for the life of me recall the name of her dog. I can picture its size and coloring, and I think that its name began with the letter “C.” But at what moment did I lose the dog’s complete name? There must have been a moment when you might have asked me, “Just what was the name of that dog of an old girlfriend?” And to this I would have replied with full confidence, “Charlie.” But had you waited another moment to pose the same question, I might have answered with, ‘Corky’? or was it ‘Cortense’?” And if you had waited yet another measure of time to ask me, I might have responded with “Callie”, or “Canover.” But more time has passed since those hypothetical questions, and now my answer has been reduced to “C-------.”
Soon, no telling when, I will refer to the dog as “Bernie”, and then soon thereafter I will deny that my old girlfriend even had a dog, or even a name of her own, and then I will forget that I had a girlfriend.
And all those little moments that my old girlfriend and I shared together, like the time we escaped from the rain into an old baseball dugout in a field where I had played little league ball or the time when we got stranded in a snowstorm together on Christmas Eve and missed Christmas with our families---all of that will vanish.

Egyptian Revolution?

The naivete of expectation, well, I've grown accustoned to it. This is what happens when you attain a certain age. This BS in Egypt, all of these gestures to a democratic future...what a joke. This country simply has no history of democracy--the building of the pyramids comes to mind---and never will have. History has certain rules. Egypt will enjoy democracy in the same manner as Russia has done since the heady days of the decline of the USSR. Mubarak has nodded to democracy by transferring authority to, of all institutions, the military. Arab militaries. as everyone knows, represent the long-suppressed voices of the democratic minority in that part of the world. Think Libya.



Democracy?...Democracy? Playoffs?.......Playoffs?

Nina Simone--Princess Noire

Nina Simone was obviously an exceptional talent, and according to Princess Noire, the recent biography by Nadine Cohondas, almost impossible to live with or be around. Trained in classical piano as a young girl in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (the Eunice Waymon) studied for a while at The Juilliard School, but was afterward rejected for admission by the Curtis Institute, which Simone interpreted as a racial snub. She maintained the dream of becoming a performer of classical music, but eventually backed into playing blues and jazz as a young woman in New York City. All of this, as well as Simone's early career, Cohondas treats with substantial detail. I found the account of Simone's transformation into a protest musician during the Civil Rights period fascinating, and I found myself listening to "Mississippi Goddam" and "Backlash Blues" as I read.

Nina Simone's behavior soon grew erratic, and she would berate audiences or storm off the stage. Beginning in the late 1960s, it appears, one in possession of a ticket to a Nina Simone performance stood only an even chance of watching her perform. Indeed, Cohondas focuses on the tragic trajectory of Simone's life in the book's second half, and the story assumes the form of a series of tales of crude behavior, missing opportunities, and crumbling fortunes. Certainly there was more to Simone than that.

Still, Princess Noire contains vivid descriptions of Simone's music, and that alone makes the book worthwhile.