Plague 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...
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 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 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 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I am reading Mark Fisher’s brilliant posthumous collection, K-Pop: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018) and come across the...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 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 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 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 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 ArticleHosono 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 ArticleEven a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973
About a decade ago, when I was writing Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Prehistory of J-Pop, I had the idea of trying to organize the release in the U.S. of a series of compilation CDs of a variety...
View ArticlePointillism and Limited Animation
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit “Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh: Ways of Pointillism,” a remarkable exhibit at the Albertina Museum in Vienna (open through 8 January 2017). It was an...
View ArticleA Very Short Story
“The Day Gordon MacRae Died” Oh, what a beautiful morning. I’ve spilled coffee all down the front of my white shirt. It’s an enormous stain the shape of Oklahoma—tipped on its ass, panhandle up. And...
View ArticleGodzilla vs. Hegel
Yesterday afternoon, we attended a nearly sold-out screening of Shin-Gojira (Godzilla Rusurgence), the new reboot of the Godzilla movie franchise directed by Anno Hideaki (of Neon Genesis Evangelion...
View ArticleMarxist Theory and Practice from Japan
One welcome trend of recent years in my field is the wave of new translations that finally make available to English-language readers the history of Marxist and anarchist culture in modern Japan. With...
View ArticleNew fiction: “When a Derelict Angel Speaks”
My short story “When a Derelict Angel Speaks” has just appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Vol. 5, No. 1. Enjoy! When a Derelict Angel Speaks Michael Bourdaghs It takes a second for Steve’s head to...
View ArticleKuroshima Denji’s “The Two-Sen Copper Coin”
My translation of a 1926 short story by the proletarian literature author Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) has just appeared online at The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. The Two-Sen Copper Coin It was...
View ArticleWar Trauma in a Comic Novel
There’s an unsettling moment in Sasaki Kuni‘s novel, Bonjinden (The Life of a Mediocrity、1929-30). Sasaki (1883-1964) was a celebrated humor writer, as well as a translator of Mark Twain, Cervantes,...
View ArticleYet Another Unjustly Overlooked Song by The Kinks
Do yourself a favor and take three minutes to listen to this 1971 recording, an outtake from the Muswell Hillbillies sessions.. Make sure you read Ray Davies’ lyrics, too. The song has everything:...
View ArticleWatch and Listen to Yours Truly
It’s become common these days for universities to videotape public lectures and make them available online. A few talks I’ve given in recent years are available for your viewing pleasure, should you be...
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