Hosono Haruomi: The Reluctant Frontman (11/15/2017 @ Nakano Sun Plaza)
After opening sets by manzai duo Knights and the Suzuki-Suzuki brother-sister musical impersonator team, Hosono Haruomi took to the stage at sold-out Nakano Sun Plaza. The 70-year-old revealed a...
View ArticleLiterary Tourism and Letters of Recommendation
Over the past decade, I have practiced a particular form of readerly tourism. When I travel somewhere that is the setting for a novel, I bring the book along and read a few pages while sitting in the...
View ArticleWhat I Listened to in 2018
It’s that time of year: I’m enjoying reading people’s top-albums-of-the-year lists. So, for what it’s worth, here are the twenty 2018 albums I listened to the most, in alphabetical order: Courtney...
View ArticleThings You Find in a Japanese Used Bookstore
In his 1931 essay, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” Walter Benjamin writes that to a book collector, the attraction lies not so much in the fate of a book as a work, but rather in...
View ArticleHow to be an Ethical Music Fan in a Corrupt World
1). How to buy music: Never, ever order your music from Amazon.com or its woeful kin. Obviously. Your local record shop, should you be so lucky as to still have one, needs your business. Another...
View ArticleA Light Bulb Goes On in my Mind
I am reading Mark Fisher’s brilliant posthumous collection, K-Pop: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018) and come across the...
View ArticleRe-Encountering John Lee Hooker
Last week, I enjoyed reading Robert Christgau’s belated review of Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century, Charles Shaar Murray’s 2002 biography of John Lee...
View ArticleFree Open-Access E-Book Editions of Two Edited Volumes
I’m delighted that University of Michigan Press has just made two books I edited available in free open-access e-book editions. This was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the...
View ArticleOpen-Access Article: “Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature...
An essay of mine originally published in the volume Literature Among the Ruins, 1945-1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism (Lexington Books, 2018) is now available in open-access online form at...
View ArticlePlague Year Listening: A Look Back
The lockdowns of 2020 provided ample opportunities to sit at home and listen to music. Here are twenty albums from the plague year that gave me the most pleasure, listed in alphabetical order. I got...
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