Blogorrhea Junior

Conspiracy Theory: The NYT Book Review Version

I don't know why I keep reading the NYTimes Book Review with its crappy record of ignoring women's writing (when it's not outright belittling it). I guess I keep hoping that, magically, one day that will change. Then I remind myself that one of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who feels this way about the male literary world though. One of my favorite book blogs, Fade Theory, has a link to an interview with Spanish author Lucia Etxebarria in cafebabel. (I haven't read any of her books as they're currently only available in her native Spanish and in French translations), Etxebarria has been a "journalist, translator, script-writer and has worked in advertising" in addition to writing novels and non-fiction books about pop culture. About male writers, she says,

‘Male artists are artists, female artists are women. That’s the way things work, and they have always been this way. Literature is an even more macho art than others. There’s a border between sentimental literature and virile literature, which should be kept in mind. Male writers are very embedded into their virility, and it’s a threat if we women sell more books than them.’ The former professor at the University of Aberdeen is jokingly blunt. ‘My books sell well and the best part is that I’m blunt, so people categorise me as a lesbian, or in the best case, as an emasculator.’

If it's a given that women writers ≠ artists, and I think it's safe to say that's true, then in that light, you can see the Times's exclusion of women as part of a conspiracy to erase our words. This is especially true with their high toned and highbrow attitude, though they've now condescended to review (gasp!) mass market fiction (and funny how much of that is written by women!), because in trade fiction, women dominate and on the non-fiction best seller list, the proportion of women to men is almost even, too. And yet, this week's perfidy reviews in the Book Review (Sunday, May 25, 2008): books by men: 11/13. 12/13 if you count the one that's co-authored with a woman, even though her name comes first.

Some things never change. But it's good to have somebody say it out loud.

Books that Make Us Look Smart

Sorry about two in a row of these. Why is it that I can never resist these things? Is it bragging? Is it the impulse to share in the culture of books and the cultural literacy of my particular group of people? Probably a little of both. Book people tend to talk about books a lot, and recommend stuff we've read to other people who like the same sorts of books we do. I think that's part of it. I'm not yet a user of LibraryThing because I'm afraid I'd get sucked into that and be lost forever. There's nothing I love more than talking about books, the way other people talk about movies and television shows. But they're not mutually exclusive, by any means. I've gacked this from LJ pal Gloriana, a fellow Star Wars fan; last time we met we spent a significant part of the conversation talking about Peter Greenaway films, for which I have a particular weakness.

On to the meme:

What we have here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

(I have a limited amount of shelf space, so unless otherwise indicated, the unread ones or half-started ones aren't even on my shelf. Neither are a lot of the ones I've read, if they weren't keepers.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [Normally I love stuff like this, but I couldn't get past the first ten pages; that's my limit. Life is too short to read books one doesn't like when not reading them for school.]
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude [keeper]
Wuthering Heights [keeper]
The Silmarillion [keeper]
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose [keeper]
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice [I just can't make myself love Jane Austen they way I'm told an English major should]
Jane Eyre [The Brontes, now, they're a different matter entirely, though my favorite of the lot is still Vilette, an unsung classic.]
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace [I can only take so much of the Russians; this was too much]
Vanity Fair [and the movie, too]
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad [I'm working my way through the Robert Fagles translation right now]
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner [keeper]
Mrs. Dalloway [keeper]
Great Expectations [one of the few Dickens I haven't read, even though I can't stand him]
American Gods [keeper]
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius [Dave Eggers just really irritates me; I don't even know why]
Atlas Shrugged [drivel]
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books [this was so marvelous that I bought it as an ebook first, then wanted a hardcopy; and I bought one for my mother]
Memoirs of a Geisha [I read the book it was based on, instead]
Middlesex
Quicksilver [I still have to get to this trilogy. Truthfully, I'm a little afraid of it because I got so engrossed in Cryptonomicron.]
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales [Once for school, once for fun, now and then ever since; my excuse is that I was a medievalist ]
The Historian: A Novel [And threw across the room at the end. What a crap ending! Loved the rest of it, though.]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera [one of my top five favorites; keeper]
Brave New World [keeper]
The Fountainhead  [see above]
Foucault’s Pendulum [On the 'to try again' pile]
Middlemarch
Frankenstein [plus the Polidori short story from the same evening, sez Gloriana. Me too!]
The Count of Monte Cristo [and all the Musketeer books, with relish]
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
1984 [keeper]
Angels & Demons [wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole]
Inferno [I was reading the newish translation on the train and got into a long conversation with an NYC cop about it; he'd read it in Catholic school and loved it]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray [keeper]
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse [keeper]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections [And not likely to ever read it either, if Franzen's essays are any indication of his style. What a whiner!]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune [keeper]
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon [could not put it down]
Neverwhere [keeper]
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being [which became the unbearable weight of boredom]
Beloved [keeper]
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon [keeper]
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita [Genius, but ew! Makes me want to take a shower afterwards. Alone. Ew!]
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values [Twice, believe it or not]
The Aeneid [as a kid, in a very condensed version]
Watership Down [Am I the only person who thought this was really stupid?]
Gravity’s Rainbow [V was so much better]
The Hobbit [keeper]
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Cult books (?) meme

This is from the UK's Telegraph, originally, gacked from one of my LJ friends. As the journalist points out, it's hard to define what makes a cult book, vs. a best seller, and the two are not necessarily the same. I'm a little shocked not just at how many of these I've read, but how early I was drawn to this kind of book. Some of them I read when I was a kid, or a very young adult. Here's what the Telegraph calls a cult book:

In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

I like the "mental flophouse" line. I wish my boarders would start paying rent. There are a lot of them.

I've added a few of my own to this list, since it's sort of heavily British and weighted with boys' coming of age stories.I'm not even going to touch the fact that they've treated a number of ovarian (I refuse to use the word "seminal" in this context) feminist texts as "cult" literature, or the way their description trivializes The Female Eunuch. Because, you know, we're such a minority. Like those whack-job Arthurians and the SF nuts.

My additions are in blue. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read, strikeout the ones you hated.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) One of my friends did her Ph.D. dissertation on Durrell and I read bits of that. Does that count?
A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) I've read bits and pieces of this, just to see where my parents were getting their tactics from. No such luck.
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968) See Dianetics, below. And have a tin foil hat, while you're at it.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) This one I keep looking at in the bookstore thinkking, hmm, that looks good.
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950) That's not a cult book. It's a cult. Period.
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) Tried this one, too, but thought it was stupid.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979) On the long list to be read.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) Well, I tried, anyway. V was better.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979) Why is repetition considered so clever? The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities were far better than this.
Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) Cut me a break; I was like, twelve, at the time.
The Magus by John Fowles (1966) Tedious and disappointing.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-55) Hello? How did they miss this one?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
The Merlin Series by Mary Stewart (1970-1995) Responsible for the creation of many Arthurians and medievalists.
No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) I liked Dharma Bums better, though.
The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923) I got a copy of this for my HS graduation from my favorite cool cousin.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922) Also on my reading list, along with Steppenwolf.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961) How can you ignore a book whose principal neologism, grok, has become part of the language?
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968) Thought this wa sa dumb book, too.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Shakespeare's Birthday: Publishing in the New Frontier

First, happy birthday to the Bard of Avon (1564-1616), an extremely talented man ripped off by his own publisher. I've mentioned elsewhere that, in his lifetime, Shakespeare didn't own the rights to his own sonnets and the printer who published him put out a collection of his work (that also included poems only attributed to him; talk about diluting the brand!) without paying him a farthing. (Copyright wouldn't be developed for nearly another 100 years.) Printing presses in Europe were only around 100 years old (Gutenberg, the European inventor, died in 1468) and just coming into wide use at this time, so books were still something of a luxury item. The text was laboriously hand set, the signatures hand-cut and hand-sewn and hand-bound, so there was still a lot of labor involved in producing multiples, which made them somewhat pricey. The beauty of poetry is that it's short and needn't be more than a single signature. It can also be pamphlet-bound which makes it far less work than a leather-bound book and a quick money-maker.

I won't go into the whole history of printing and publishing here, but suffice to say, it's going in some interesting directions now. Print On Demand (POD) publishing has become quite popular and distribution over the net has made advertising far cheaper and wider than ever before possible. In true conglomerate fashion, Amazon, which is now the world's largest bookseller, is trying to horn in on the action of PODs and corner the market. It recently bought BookSurge, a POD company, and is now telling other POD publishers that it must use BookSurge's facilities or forgo distribution by Amazon. This is very bad news for places like Lulu and Lightning Source. From the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon's Web site.

Amazon "doesn't consider this an ultimatum," according to one of its spokespersons, but when you've cornered 15% of the book distribution market, and most of the online market, what else can you call it? Okay, blackmail, maybe. Extortion? Oh, I know. Monopoly!

In the spirit of independent publishing and World Book Day, Oached Pish has gathered a list of links to independent publishers in honor of the Bard's birthday. You'll see my own Maelstrom House listed there, though I haven't got much stock yet, and everything else from manga to poetry.

And if you're a poet thinking about DIYing, it's worth checking out the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative for links and news.

Still Looking for An Answer

We've been here before, but it never hurts to revisit a trend, especially one as long-standing and reprehensible as this one. Like, when is the New York Times Book Review going to get a freaking clue? I mean, that women read more than men (44% vs. 29%), that we write important books that it would be worth their time to actually read, and that feminism is not only here to stay, but that disparaging it with lousy reviews by women is not going to either discredit it or make it go away? Wake up, boyz. There are women in the club now, and if the college graduation numbers mean anything, we'll outnumber you eventually.

One of my favorite women's mags, Bitch, has taken the TBR to task again in a searing indictment called "Hard Times," written by Sarah Seltzer, which unmasks and analyzes their smear tactics.  A small excerpt:

Beyond this, though, books that take women’s issues in hand are rarely taken seriously [emphasis mine]. It’s not just that they are criticized, which they are, but rather that the books, their authors—and heck, the whole feminist movement—are routinely treated with a mixture of giggly naïveté and barbed antifeminist prejudices. In a 2007 op-ed for In These Times, media critic Susan J. Douglas noted that there’s “a robust tradition in the Times Book Review to stereotype feminists as single-minded, humorless ideologues who march daily to some shrine where we all genuflect before images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

That's actually putting it kindly. One of the excerpts from Toni Bentley’s TBR review of Katha Pollitt’s essay collection Learning to Drive uses the phrase, "Vagina dentata intellectualis" to describe Pollitt's place in the intellectual pantheon. This is a step beyond damning with faint praise. It's not even praising with faint damns. It's nasty, lightweight criticism that resorts to the personal, and it should be beneath a reviewer. And since when is former ballet dancer Toni Bentley a feminist scholar? That's who should have been reviewing Pollitt's book. Just denying Pollitt the right to be judged by a fellow scholar trivializes her work. This is a common tactic at the times, along with their claim that (and I love this one) that the reason women don’t get as much space in the section was because they don’t write about topics like military history," according to TBR preview editor Barry Gewen at a speech at the Radcliffe Institute (it's a wonder he survived to leave the stage, given the venue).

Gewen's talk, ironically (or maybe not so), was entitled "The New York Times Book Review as Cultural Gatekeeper." Well, yeah. And not in a good way.

[via Feministing]

UPDATE: My friend Jen of Cocktail Party Physics and the author of two popular physics-for-the-non-physicist books, sent me the link to this marvelous essay by Rebecca Solnit about the flip side of the problem, wherein a book, if written by a woman, obviously cannot be important. The article is about much more than that (including the infuriating habit of many men to bullshit confidently about subjects they know nothing of to women who do know), but it's really about women's continuing lack of credibility in what is still a man's world. Don't miss it. Here's a quick taste:

Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better, but this war won't end in my lifetime.

I'd Rather Be in the Studio!

How many times have you said that when you're doing something else, even stuff to promote yourself, or keep food on the table? Art is way more fun and way more satisfying than promoting art, but unless you're only doing it as a hobby and don't care if anyone but your family ever sees any of it, you've got to promote it. Since that's what I'm interested in doing, I've been reading Alyson Stanfield's Art Biz Blog for about a year now. It's full of great tips and information on promoting your art and making it at the same time. Now she's got a book, and she's on a blog book tour with it. Check her out on Christine DeCamp's Passion for Painting, where Alyson's giving advice on how to get other people's information for networking. On top of that, you can win a free copy of her book by helping get the word out (a clever ploy, Alyson!). See, I'm doing it, but only because after a year of reading Alyson's blog, I'm sure the book is worth it. And if I don't win a copy, I'm buying one. You should too.

The Big Read

I know we're halfway into April, and that it's National Poetry Month, but if you live in New York, it's also The Big Read. To quote the NEA, who funds it, "The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture." In New York, it's being sponsored by the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, a cool organization in its own right. And the Big Read in the Big Apple is Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon! I love noir anyway, and Hammett is one of the masters. Not as smooth as Chandler, but pretty darn good, and this is a classic in the genre. (Besides, Lillian Hellman thought he was pretty special, too, and that's reason enough to like his work.) Posman Books at Grand Central has the book on sale for 20% off the cover proce thorugh April 30. There's still time to catch up!

Poetry in the Street

Happy Poetry Month! Yeah, I saw that eyeroll, spud. "Poetry, whatever." I don't know why there's such contempt for such a democratic art form in this country, aside from the general art hate that plagues the US in general. (And what up with that? You'd think we were all a nation of sand pounders or something.) Yet for all our contempt, the stuff is everywhere, in varying degrees of quality. It's the first verbal art form we learn in nursery rhymes. It's in our pop songs, in rap and hip-hop. It's in bad greeting cards (and good ones), in advertising jingles. Big chunks of our religious literature consist of poetry. There are literally hundreds of small literary journals that publish it. Our country even has a poet laureate (currently Charles Simic). And yet its practitioners have little respect and its best examples go largely unnoticed. More well-educated women and African Americans read it than anyone else, though it's often given as a gift. It's everywhere, and yet, the people who write it are largely unknown to the general public.

Not so in other countries, where a poet's work may be quoted from memory daily as a source of national pride (like Chile's Pablo Neruda), as anthems of revolution or outcries against political repression (like Palestine's Fadwa Tuqan), as embodiments of the national character (Spain's Cervantes, Italy's Dante, England's Shakespeare, Russia's Pushkin, Iran's Rumi and Hafiz). Then there are some poets whose work is so important that it becomes part of the daily public life, like these verses from León Felipe Camino Galicia embedded in Huertas Street in Madrid, Spain. [via Imatges i paraules].

and I ended up being born in a town of which I remember nothing:
I spent the blue days of my childhood in Salamanca,
And my youth, a somber youth, in the Mountain.

[translation by Carlos Daniel Schröder]

Imagine seeing lines from William Carlos Williams's poem "Paterson" embedded in the street of that town, or Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" on The Magnificent Mile.

Why not?

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the Golden Age science fiction writers who fired the imagination of would-be space explorers everywhere, died today in his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was probably one of the most influential novels in the genre, along with the Stanley Kubrick movie made from it. His creation Hal  was an early model (good and bad) for AI constructs, along with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. From his first novel, Prelude to Space, which foreshadowed the Apollo missions to the moon, to The Fountains of Paradise, in which he described the construction of a space elevator now in the planning stages, Clarke, an engineer, was a practical visionary whose predictions had a habit of coming true. In 1945, he sketched out in a published paper the utility of geosynchronous satellites for communications purposes almost ten years before the folks at Bell Labs launched the Telstar and Echo satellites. Though he was by no means the originator of the idea, he was certainly a popularizer and active proponent of it, as he was of technology in general, and space exploration in particular.

Though his characters could be two-dimensional, his science was generally impeccable and inspiring. No one in my childhood reading made space or the possibility of "slip[ping] the surly bonds of earth" seem so real to me, not even Star Trek. It was Clarke who taught me what geosynchronous orbit and LaGrange points are, proving that a spoonful of fiction helps the mathematics go down, at least to people like me. That inspiration wasn't confined to interesting kids in science fiction. “I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books,” Clarke once said. I can only imagine how many engineers and other space scientists he inspired.

Aside from his novels, Clarke was best known for his three laws of science and technology:

1. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

While the first two are important for egging on inventions and new discoveries, it will be useful to remember the third law should we ever meet an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization face to face, since far too many of us are prone to worship what we don't understand, as Clarke also illustrated in his Rama books. Generally dismissive of religion, Clarke was still painfully aware of the necessity of some kind of guiding morality. "As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying," Clarke said in 1967. It's still a timely message.

Thanks for years and volumes of inspiration and great Saturday afternoons. RIP.

[Cross-posted at Cocktail Party Physics]

The Real Things

Since sleep is eluding me once again, I thought I might as well catch up on some posts here. I've got a giant backlog of things I want to write about and haven't been at my computer much lately. But I had such a great time Friday night that I wanted to share it here. Ellis Avery (of Tea & Croquet fame) gave a reading of her novel The Teahouse Fire, at the Asia Society, followed by an interview and a tea ceremony demo. The reading was great, unsurprisingly. Ellis has studied tea, the Japanese language, and lived in Japan for just under a year, all of which inform her novel. One of the things that makes it interesting is that it's based on a historical character who managed to wrest the monopoly on tea ceremony out of men's hands (traditionally, the tea masters were all men) and make it part of women's school curricula. I'm really enjoying the book, and hearing Ellis read and talk about the book's genesis and inspiration just whetted my appetite for more.

Seeing a real tea ceremony was an added bonus, as it's something I've always wanted to do. There were some concessions made to location, of course, mostly that there was no hearth. Two members of the audience acted as guests while a demonstrator (whose name, horribly, I have forgotten, even though I spoke to her afterwards) from Cha-An Teahouse who is also a student at the Urasenko Chanoyu Center. I've read a lot about Cha-no-yu (literally "hot water for tea") and watched a number of videos like this one, but seeing it live is another matter. I would love to see it in a real tea house, which have their own special architecture and decoration and landscaping, all of which are part of the full ceremony. But it was so lovely to be able to watch someone perform the ceremony and see the delicacy of the movements. It's choreographed really, like a dance, and equally graceful. The video above only gives you a pale image of what it's really like to watch.

While I was waiting to meet Gretl and Christine, I took a walk through The Asia Society exhibit, "Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860," which includes not only examples of erotic art, but paintings of Kabuki and Noh scenes and actors. There are some really stunning woodblocks and silk scroll paintings. Two of my favorites of the latter was a Chinese dragon in the clouds with a koto, and the wonderful black carp at the left. But what I was really excited to see was an original print of Hokusai's "The "Great Wave off Kanagawa." I've seen this a million times in reproductions; it's one of my favorites and so popular that it's almost a cliche now. Seeing the real thing completely dispels any jadedness you might have about it though. The colors are so vivid, and yet somehow softened by time so they're not garish but not faded either, and the workmanship on the blocks is astonishingly delicate. It's so sharp you can feel the spray. It has a liveliness that reproductions will never have. The same is true of the other ukiyo-e and paintings. They're all delightful, so much so that I'm going back again. The exhibit runs through May 4th. It's $10 to get in, free on Fridays from 6-9.

And while we're on about Japanese paper art, thanks to Cerebral Rose for the heads up about Canon's pages and pages of print-your-own origami paper and scrapbook stuff. There are some gorgeous chiyogami and patterns for origami too. Just to prove how ubiquitous "The Great Wave" is, there's even a 3-D decoupage kit of it at this site too, that you can also download, along with instructions, for free.

And finally, there's the Rainbow In Your Hand (click for larger image) from Utrecht, via Arctic Oak. 

But you know, it's never going to be like the real thing, either.