Letters Home

Letters for Laurgernon? The Laurax? Laura-nd Peace?

2010-04-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Anyway. Hi Laura!

Edit: Bit of a ramble. Jump to the good stuff.

How are you readjusting to Toronto after months of systematic de-adjustment? Are things fitting differently? Do you find yourself at a certain philosophical distance from pre-trip Laura, with her pre-trip ways and thoughts? Or are you pre-trippier than ever? Have you moved out yet? You’d best’ve, is my thinking.

Here's a picture I took on Nature Day. It makes me think of Russia. Of photos of Russia, anyway.

I got your magic wine bottle balancing stand the other day in the mail. It is an outstanding utensil for when you and guests want to get a little tipsy and, um, not fall over? Anyway, thanks. I will enjoy many opportunities to "dazzle my friends and impress my partner" with it, exactly as the brochure enclosed with it suggests!

I am a noted fan of both wine and balance, especially where dining is concerned. My parents can confirm that I really dove into balancing things at an early age. My mom, in particular, might recall the times I pulled out all the pots, tupperware, bowls and cereal boxes from their respective cupboards and gingerly Jenga’d them in to a stately mid-kitchen tower. For some reason I called the resulting sculpture a “fire engine.” Psh. Kids.

I want to set the record straight that, no matter what Andra said, I wasn’t jealous of the possum-skin map you sent her, though. In fact, for the first week, I thought you’d sent it to both of us, and was showing it off with the pride of a new proprietor leading tour groups. When I realized I had it wrong, that it had never been mine, I went ‘aw,’ like a kid who gets taken to the local ice-cream parlour only to watch his parents have dessert, which Andra found funny, because it is.

Damn, that is a straight record! It has probably never even looked at another record of the same sex, is how straight it is. It wears only pink, or only blue, but I respect its privacy and won’t check which. Also it only enjoys certain kinds of movies and either loves or refuses to dance.

Speaking of that, a few days ago I started writing you a letter about dance breaks, but that evolved into a detailed probe of dance breaks’ official and carnivalesque aspects and cellular dialogic structure. It seemed right up your alley, but I’m going to have to do some more research, so I’m afraid you just can’t have that letter, at least not for a while.

Instead, I’ll tell you about Koyasan. It’s where I went on Nature Day. Nature Day is a made up holiday that creates a four-day ultraweekend in Japan. A word on Japanese holidays: as you might suspect, having toured the country, Japan becomes in-fucking-tolerable when everyone has a day off. City streets that are vacant in daytime become so stuffed with fleshy bodies that it becomes impossible for anyone to go where they are going. They still bump around all over the place, but it’s more of a jittery, Brownian motion than anything we properly think of as moving. From overhead, all the pointless kinesis must look a little static on TV.

Oh man, I just realized those static channels will be a thing of the past once the digital broadcast switchover is complete. I used to have a friend who called it “the battle of the black and white ants.” Being a well-adjusted, normal kid, I recall pressing my face literally right up against the screen so I could be fascinated by the tiny lines of color inside all the crazy black-and-white static. I can remember the smell of the screen, of dust and electrical charge that made my hair stand up just a little until mom came and told me not to do that or I’d eventually hurt my eyes or something.

: (

That was relevant, but here’s something different. Koyasan is a remote spot high up in a circle of mountains, and it is a great place to go on Nature Day, not only because of its nature, but also because you won’t find yourself jockeying with ungodly human swarms just to walk down the sidewalk.

It’s also one great big artifact of the history of Japanese civilization—a testimony, in the form of real estate, of an age when the emperor could set aside eight whole mountains for the purpose of religious retreat, meditation, and devotion to aesthetic works as a path to enlightenment.

The site was chosen over eleven-hundred years ago by the monk known in death Kobodaishi. By the way, using “death names” to distinguish between a person’s living existence and their state of posthumous influence were traditional in Japan for a long, long time. In fact, saying that a woman knew the death names of her whole family’s ancestors was once a way of joking that she needed to get a life.

Kobodaishi (Kuukai in life) came back to Japan from Tang-dynasty China after a diplomatic mission that had lasted many years, during which time he became the head of the Chinese school of Shingon Buddhism. On returning home, he must have been pretty enthusiastic about spreading the good word. So how did he end up with an imperial bequest of eight mountains in perpetuity? Well, there’s a story involving lots of wandering and an encounter with a pair of gods resembling a white dog and a black dog, but the main reason is that, seen through the eye of a creative ninth-century mapmaker, the elevated valley in between eight peaks resembles a sacred lotus blossom. Since Shingon Buddhism is concerned with how the experience of certain kinds of beauty prepares humans for enlightenment, Kuukai had no trouble deciding that this was the place. It also helped that he had considerable pull with the political classes.

It is encrusted with temples, many of which have stood so long they outdate the old-growth forest all around them. Aside from the Shingon analogue of St. Peter’s Cathedral, from which the sect’s other thirty-six-hundred-ish temples worldwide are administered, the site is occupied by so many other abbeys, temples, sub-temples, holy spots, shrines, adjunct shrines, holdout shrines, wartime bunker shrines, and shrines on wheels that there is a great pilgrimage route—a lengthy psychogeographic tour that normally leads one along a chain of temples hundreds of miles long—that takes place entirely within the valley, coiling along past a huge number of sites. You can recognize the people walking this route by the ceremonial hiking gear they wear: thick wooden sandals and conical sun hats, and a kind of white ninja costume with a full-body apron that ends up covered in calligraphy as monks in each temple sign the outfit in brush-painted sutras and adages specific to each stop on the road. These practices have developed and sustained for an unimaginably long time. A lantern in one of the temples, called “the lamp of the poor woman,” has been kept continuous aflame for nine-hundred years.

But the heart of the place is in the cemetery woods. I know that probably sounds a bit morbid (which may actually be a draw to you, Gothicky McPoem-Sketch), but deathly is the one thing it is not. It overflows with liveliness in a slightly paradoxical, probably Buddhist “let’s-not-get-too-attached-to-living-or-dying” way. And it’s beautiful. As in visually drop-dead gorgeous.

The woods, which are equal parts pine forest, Lost City, and statue garden, are constantly filled with people just strolling around, free of the usual graveside associations that hang over burial grounds in Japan just like they do the Christian parts.

Instead of a sense of mourning, spookiness, or even light-a-candle remembrance, the place radiates signs of a tremendous amount of ongoing commitment, membership, and belonging. Part of that is in the coral structure of the site. Ancient grave lanterns half-consumed by the woods stand on top of the buckled granite surfaces of even older, positively primordial tombs. Next to these agglomerations, which can be as big as a row of houses and incorporate a half-dozen different styles of monument, sit shining new marble stones, whose resemblance to fresh young sprigs in a forest of old giants is hard to miss.

For years, sometimes many decades, monks will place colorful robes and hats on the new jizo buddha statues settling into their perches amongst the avalanche of resting places. After a while, these clothes stop being replaced and fall into earth-toned tatters before dissolving completely and being replaced by moss and roots. I saw a jizo whose head had been cracked off by some disturbance, and on the weathered stump of its neck someone had placed an ordinary rock from the path, so long ago that the rock was welded to the statue by a bushy seal of moss and caught soil out of which grew a few hairlike shoots of a tree that had recently found a foothold there.

The cemetery began with the death of Kododaishi, who was buried in a cedar grove by the river that ran behind the main temple that he’d established. Over time, disciples and devotees added their tombs to what became an accretive neighborhood of funerary mounds, lanterns, tall wooden markers, carved grave stones, shrines, torii gate-fronted enclosed courts for family spirits, multi-armed brass Buddhas that slowly turn green with age, and jizo sprouting up like mushrooms. On foot, the approach to the temple now takes the better part of an hour, and that’s if you press on directly, without stopping to explore the forest, the millions of pieces of evidence of constant human care, and the off-path mausolea tucked into odd places and concealed by hundreds of years of tree growth but still showing faint colors of faded paint.

Koyasan is serviced by a cable-car connected directly to the Nankai regional train network, from whose bustling Osaka hub you can reach the retreat in about eighty minutes. You used to have to wind your way up a long path up one of the mountainsides, which took all day. Women weren’t even allowed through the main gate until 1872, but instead had to take a precipitous route along the edges of a series of cliffs. They were surely a committed bunch.

It also hold a sleepy but basically modern town, which has the odd property of not bugging the hell out of me, even though I despise little countryside towns with a passion seldom equalled in this world. The mountains’ centuries of essentially closed existence, barred until recently to anything but religious traffic, is part of how Koyasan developed its identity, not to mention its stunning concentration of temples and pagodas. But it also seems to have had the effect of giving the local one-horse town an unusual character and welcome character.

What I normally I can’t stand about small towns isn’t just the lack of options they present, but the atmosphere of folksiness, the ingrown lines of organization they form along, and the constant presence of the repetetive, massively boring and possessive, as though the place doesn’t want anyone to leave, or move, or change, just stay stuck in place.

With that in mind, something about the little town with its storefront pharmacy, its one (Chinese) restaurant that stays open after 7 p.m., its wooden “international” café that also sells crafts by local artists, and its three-hundred souvenir outlets seems natural, balanced rather than glued in place. I’m sure it has much to do with the fact that the whole town’s life and that of its visitors revolves around the religious function of the mountain, and not just in a commercial sense. In a way the whole town is just another sprawling temple ground, with secular rituals repeated day-in, day-out, in observation of the same ideals that permeate the monastic grounds. The organic, overpowering feeling of simultaneous newness and age in the cemetery woods spills into the town. Anyway, it’s a nice place, and if you duck into the back alleys or that one café I mentioned, it’s full of a restrained kind of vivacity that is both wonderful and no threat to my cherished prejudice against the average stupid middle-of-nowhere hamlet.

And now I think I’d like to end the letter, since I’m putting off having lunch and two-thousand words is probably enough for you for the time being.

Also: dance break!

Letter to Gigi, Part One: The Only Part. !!!

2010-03-08T23:21:00.000-08:00

Gigi!

How are you doing? Boy howdy, has it ever been a long time, I tell you what. It's too bad we couldn't meet up for dangerous largeburgers while I was in town. I now realize that 11 a.m. is the imaginary time for which, when drinking, I make plans that sober reflection would reveal as impossible. I propose a simple test. If I say it is a great idea to do X at 11 a.m. tomorrow and if, during the saying, there is at least one beer in my hand, please plan on the exact opposite of what I said. This problem came up more times than I could count (three times, so, basically infinity).

Your letter arrived! And I must say, it is wonderful, both as a message and as a thing in its own right. I do indeed like your new malachite pen, especially its grainy, semi-clear ink that pools in green feet at the base of each letter, where the tip evidently slowed. Also, I'm happy you did not write on both sides of the paper, a mean thing to do since no one wants to be all flippy-pagey when they're sitting down with a good cup of bad coffee for a nice letter-read. That is Fact.

Cheat sheet: 1. No one. 2. Flippy-pagey. 3. Fact.

In conclusion, going through your letter was like reading all 250 of Monet's Water Lillies four times, writ miniscule. Bravo. Therefore I would like to invite you over for dinner and vacation. Black tie, arrive at 7 p.m., sometime in May. There wil be sushi, matcha-flavored Kit-Kats, and (if you play your cards right) samurai slalom monster-truck battles. I don't think I have to tell you that you do not want to miss that.

Don't worry too much about the timing. I believe the Bible says "just do your best to show up and we'll figure everything out later." I guess it only implies that. But it does get pretty explicit when it warns that if you fail to show up, a five-headed dragon will rise from the deep, light nine seven-branched candelabras, trade five goats for six apples, be taller than Jim but younger than Sally, and eat the city of Smyrna. I'm pretty sure I got that right. Fucking Smyrna. Good riddance. Has anyone published a book of word problems starring John the Baptist? I'm betting there's a market out there.

Will you be bringing Byron, or is he too busy fixing his fancy computer machines? 'Cause if it makes him happy, he can fix my computer machine while he's here. The up key and onboard mouse no longer work. Lappy's fanciness is definitely on the decline.

I feel like I owe you an apology for taking so long to reply to your emails, letters, facebook pokes, carrier pigeons, shortwave broadcasts, and that message you burned onto the moon with a flamethrower (impressive). It's come to the point where you can actually hear the guilt flaring up whenever one of your letters comes. What I mean is like this:

COMPUTER MACHINE: You got an internet mail letter from Gigi.

ME: Noooooooooooo! (Exit, pursued by bear)

The thing was, I already felt so bad about not replying, that it seemed like replying would only draw attention to how bad I'd previously been about not replying, which would reopen all those old wounds, and that would be bad, what with all the salt. Yessir, I sure am a clear, concise, and fluent communicator, or at least that's what my ~~mom~~ resumé says.

About the bears. Japanese people fear nothing, so bears here have evolved to smell guilt instead. It's working out for them.

One request: when you come, if you come, please bring me a full-size, never-surrender, get-outta-mah-way, North American god-damned stapler. A stapler you can drive railroad spikes with. A stapler of manifest destiny. In Japan, you are allowed to walk around with a honed, naked katana, but office supplies only come in toy versions. And their puny my-first-staplers use small, weak metal stock. So bring some staples, too. If it helps you shop, let's say I want something you could use to hang up some kids on a concrete wall. Or keep their hands nice and together. Or, thinking out loud here, hold their mouths shut. Also, when I print out booklets wider than five centimetres it would be nice to be able to staple them down the centre crease. These are all just wacky, random examples that popped up in my head for no reason. Have I mentioned my students? Because they are angels! You should take one with you. Wouldn't that be crazy? Okay, it's settled! I will help you pick one out.

Let me tell you something about staplers: "The first known stapler was handmade in the 18th century in France for King Louis XV, by an expatriate Norwegian. Each staple was inscribed with the insignia of the royal court, as required." That, my friend, is how it is done. So a Franco-Norwegian kingstapler will also be fine.

This is the part of the letter where I go from talking about Japanese stuff and the obligatory staplers to asking about you, because I'm curious and also want some more letters. What I want to know about, though, is kendo. Do you fight with the whole outfit and face-cage and everything? Amazing. My school has a kendo club, and two of my teachers are in it, although I'm sure the chance to beat their students with sticks on a regular basis was in no way an incentive to join. Actually, it seemed far from primal, at least for beginners. For the first year or so all they let you do is practice vertically chopping the air, then chopping and taking one step, then two steps, and so on until you've worked your way up to chopping and walking. Then you get to work on pivots. Eventually, some goddamned beautiful stick-fightin' artistry emerges, but for an impatient guy like me, a better choice is just going out to the backyard and finding some sticks for a bit of fightin', however tactically and aesthetically imperfect.

What is cool about it is that, the instructor tells me, much of the art is meant to do nothing but make you seem intimidating and break your opponent's nerve. Kendo teachers figured, after all, that it's pretty hard not to kill or maim someone when you're swining around a fine Japanese sword, so they put most of the work into teaching a kind of aggressive caution and some threat postures to keep you in the game long enough for your enemy to screw up or lose patience. The teacher who runs the kendo class has been a kendoka since she was 13 or 14 years old, and damn is she ever imposing. All those things I wanted a stapler for? She can do them just by looking at you. Plus, she can fly? I think? So yeah, you should stick with kendo for a while.

What are the haps, in terms of Gigi? You don't have to give me the whole rundown on Hugh! Psh, when I want to know what's up with him I just madlib his name into Victorian literature and pretend that brings me up to speed on the guy (fun target words: Christmas, hypnotist, importance, earnest, wuther). Or I check in via the webcam I installed in his hair. There is enough hair up there to easily tuck away a small server, cable modem, and grouchy system administrator.

I wasn't that big of a fan of Rosetta Stone when I tried it. Not that I paid for it, but for the same price you could get a month or two of in-class practice, which I did pay for, and that works better for me. Then again, I have this thing where when I sit down at a computer, I read the entire internet (thanks, Google, for making that possible) or sometimes write letters to people. That could explain why I hardly ever used the language-teaching program. You're learning two languages at once? I hope that hasn't disrupted your eight-books-a-week reading pace.

Any new tattoos? Fun fact: as you have no doubt heard, if you have a tattoo in Japan, you are automatically a loan shark—period. There is no wiggle room on this. You are permitted and expected to engage in the sharkery of loans, as well as any associated shake-downing, cigarette-flinging, and finger-amputation. This is fine, because everyone will pointedly ignore all the shady business so as not to force a confrontation. The exception is bath houses, which you will not be permitted to enter (because you are a shark and it is a public bath; not that hard to figure out). This is sad, because going to Japan and not trying out the onsen would be like if that guy from Avatar got his cat body and then just curled up in front of the oven and went to sleep for the rest of the movie.

But! Fortunately! Kobe is Mafia City. Everybody has tattoos here. People think you're straight-laced if you turn twenty and still have all the joints of your fingers. I shark loans by accident all the time. I'm just walking to the store to buy some milk and bam: loan. So it's all okay here, even in the onsen. Yep, the whole point of these two paragraphs is: don't worry about your tattoos.

Hooray! Alright, that is all for now.

Concisely,

- Andre

Shiny New Feature: Unreliable bio of the addressed!

If civilization were to end in a cataclysm, TV-style, having Gigi Inara in your ragtag band of survivors would instantly double your likelihood of living through the gritty first season and lasting all the way to the series finale. For one thing, she is great for morale. So catchy is her cheer is that she can boost a whole room's enthusiasm level while taking a nap in the corner. I have of course seen this. Furthermore, I was barely kidding about the eight-book-a-week reading pace. Girl will seriously outread you. She is the self-aware, blood-based equivalent of eighteen libraries and most of the good parts of the internet.

A couple years back, she formally changed her last name in honor of one of the characters in Joss Whedon's Firefly. Inexplicably, she chose neither Hoban Washburne, nor Jayne, nor Alice in Killingsland, but opted for the companion. In any case, this alone would be enough to make her legally teh geekiest girl in the room. She also does music like crazy, and last time I checked she gave lessons on every conceivable musical instrument from voice to bowfridgeaphone at Elite Music Academy, which I can only assume is an upper-tier performance school for the well-heeled and above-average. In fact, according to my good friend Google, she wrote a weekly series on musical education called Gigi's Tips, which I believe has not required any updates in the past two years because she has fully explained music.

Hi there, Jane!

2010-01-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

I have a letter here that I am writing for you. I went into a cave last Wednesday on my winter vacation. Luckily, I had my handy-dandy camera handy. Dandily. Here is a thing:

I believe it's just a big stalagtite, but other people have called it a flowstone column. [Update: Thanks to yesterday's copious cave research, I know that it's definitely a stalagtite plus a stalagmite (or just a column). Flowstone isn't even the same kind of speleothem, of course.] The cave I went in, by the way, was Akiyoshido, part of the largest cave system in Japan. Everything in Japan is either the largest, the oldest, the largest/oldest wooden example of its type, the best, the thinnest, the slipperiest, the most secret, and so on. Call it Japanese exceptionalism: every city, village or speck on the map finds the one superlative thing they've got going on, and pours all their energy into making it even better and then promoting it. I'm keeping a list:

Most x Things In Japan

Every category you can think of has a leading example somewhere in this country, and each one of these standouts is championed by its hometown. All of them—all—draw crowds of tourists. Here's what I've got so far:

Aquarium, Biggest: Osaka
Building, Tallest: Yokohama
Building (coastal), Tallest: Fukuoka Tower
Caldera in the World, Largest: Aso Caldera, on Kumamoto island
Ferris Wheel, Largest: Claimed by both Osaka and Tokyo
Ferris Wheel, Biggest: Odaiba
Ferris Wheel, Highest: Fukuoka
Noodles (ramen), Best: Hakata ward, Fukuoka
Noodles (udon), Best: Takamatsu
[Noodles (soba), Best]: TBD, but I'm sure they're out there
Poisonous Blowfish, Most Poisonous but still edible: Kanazawa
Poisonous Blowfish, Least Poisonous: Usuki
Poisonous Blowfish, Best Overall: Shimonoseki
Preserved Squid, Largest: Tottori Prefectural Museum, ("also home to a live giant salamander")
Suspension Bridge in the World, Longest: Akazhi
Surviving Building in Sapporo, Oldest: Tokeidai
Tourist Attraction in Japan, "Most Disappointing": Also Tokeidai
Telescope, Largest: Saji Astro Park, Takayama
Wooden Building, Biggest (Volume): Nara
Wooden Building, Biggest (Height and Base): Izumo Dome

This is my favorite picture of the day, I think. On a side note, that red blob to the left? that's flowstone. The cave was chilly, and brightly lit in this section, but got hot, dank and dark further on.

After I took this picture, I couldn't get rid of the idea of something crawling on the roof of the cave using those ceiling fingers as handholds. It wasn't a creepy mental image, just persistent, even when I was in completely different-looking parts of the cave. This place was a stop on the way to Hiroshima, which also I'm trying to write a post about, but it might take me a while to get all my thoughts in order for that.

Here's the bridge to nowhere. Actually, the whole cave is in the middle of nowhere, so it's really just nowhere infrastructure. Those pools are the strangest formation in the whole cave. I'd love for someone to explain how they form. They're the flat, cloverleaf-shaped basins with high walls of perfecftly regular thickness and height, arranged in cascading terraces. I can see how the outline of the basin could be deposited, but why the high walls? Why are the walls so perfectly flat and regular? Tricks, I tells ya. Well they can't fool me. [Update: Still can't fool me, but maybe they are rimstone dams? More tricks.]

Fin.

So what's the news? Fill me in. Not the U of T news, I'm pretty on top of that, though I am thinking the $59 million shortfall at U of A is something I'd like to hear more about. Listen, you need to do something for me. I need you to cut and paste some stuff for me at the Great Varsity C/P mashup. Just a thing or two. Yell at me over email, we can collaborate. As with all things involving scissors, the more frantic, the better.

Yikes. I can't sleep a whole lot in Japan, so right now I'm kind of prepared to trail off and go make tea. Your thoughts on this? Oh, by the way, did you get the thing I sent you? My parents had to carry it back to Toronto after Canada Post ballsd things up trying to deliver it.

That is all from me. See you soon,

- André

Hanney, Christopher H.C., TIME SENSITIVE MATERIALS ENCLOSED

2009-12-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 9th. Rainy.

Actually, it's a clear dawn and chilly outside at a brisk 7 degrees, but that seemed like no way to start a letter.

It's been a long time since the last one of these letters home. There's no excuse for that lapse, of course, but it was probably your fault, so I'm feeling pretty good about things, on the whole. I got something I want you to do, though. Do you think you could write a three- or four-hundred word blurb about a neighborhood in Kobe for a tourist book on the general idea of the city? Try and sound like you know what you're talking about, but don't skimp on the goddamn wonders. Here is a picture.

And here is a ho-hum shot I took downtown:

My thinking is, residents of a city neither act like tourists nor, usually, hold the latter's interest for very long. So I want the guidebook about what curious people want to hear about the place, not what jaded types like me already know inside and out.

I'm working in a hurry because I have a full slate of giant Buddhas to meet with today and I gotta run, so if I start to sound a but clipped just imagine that I'm pacing, muttering and chain-smoking cigars. That should sort things out.

What do you want from Japan? Better settle on something good. Hi to Kirsten. Cats doing okay? How's the job situation? Rent. Social events. Fitness regimen. Unusual or political complaints. Etc. I look forward to receiving your answers following the completion of your guidebook assignment. My love to the relevant parties.

Charity and Temperance,

André Bovee-Begun

This Semi-Pornographic Tornado Loves You

2009-11-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

Mish! How's life for the working man in Canada? I hear the metropass is going up, but on the bright side, I understand there are some city councillors who want to require cyclists to have licenses, so if that goes ahead at least bikes won't be an option anymore. Anyway, your streets are less crowded than mine:

Japan's pretty Japanese. They, and therefore I, just got a new Prime Minister, the first liberal in ever, whose wife is very, very much on-record about believing she was abducted by benevolent aliens and rode a triangle to the planet Venus. The newspapers published drawings of the triangle. So basically the new PM is the Obama of alien abductee spouses. Japan goes through governments like you go through a bag of tomatoes, you tomato-lovin' guy, so we'll see how long Space Wife Obama lasts. He's been good so far. On the social welfare front, he increased the daily government allowance of Giant Octopus and dolphin meat to three kilos for every man, woman and child and four kilos for every housecat (he wants to encourage cat use). I don't feel bad eating them—if they're really so smart, how come they keeping getting themselves caught? Really, though? Fresh fish costs slightly less than lettuce. So our salads are usually about fifty-percent swordfish, to reduce expenses. While produce is super expensive, a small subset of it is very delicious. I just cleaned off a whole bowl full of a kind of tiny hypertangerines that try to survive by disguising themselves as limes. Man, are those good.

How is the situation doing at your swinging pad? You should give me your address—I've got a Japan Thing I want to send you guys as a house present. It's called a Fukubukuru ("luck bag"), and it's a random merch bag that every store sells—you buy it without knowing what's inside, but there's always something really odd. I've got a talking chocolate bar and a highly suggestive plastic tornado doll.

I miss Toronto, though. On the other hand, I mostly miss you guys, and a ticket to Hawaii costs just as much as one home. Wanna meet up in Hawaii? I'll buy the first round of drinks, and then we'll do whatever it is people do in Hawaii. Bodyboard? Bodybuild? Waterboard? Anyway, I'm sure it'd be great. Let's do it.

What else can I tell you about? I went back to Kyoto the other day and we picked up a temple pilgrimage book. That's this accordion-bound book of good calligraphy paper that you take with you to temples, and the priests sign it in elaborate brush paintings. I know. Pretty sweet. And I visited the Temple of 1033 Golden Buddhas in Orderly Formation. It was much as the name suggests! Also, rocks in smocks like those at left are big here.

How's the writing going? Have you had anything else accepted lately? Doing NaNoWriMo?

Ah! Okay, I gotta go see a guy to settle and argument about who's better at frisbee and sword fighting in Wii Sports, so I'll leave it there. Write me back and remind me how it feels to be able to stretch your arms out on the sidewalk and spin around without hitting twelve people!

- André

Letter From Home: Dan Epstein!

2009-10-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

Everything's gone all upside-downy!

monkeys~!!!! so coool!!!!! samurai drama tv!!! damn thats a good letter andre, im going to make that part of the promotional monologue on my facebook wall//

anywho i am totally focusing on my own stuff. i bought an antique TLR and have been doing this blog called afriendisafriend.tumblr.com. i assume you will be in it when you get home or when i maybe visit you in the summer. i also have thegravenimage.tumblr.com which is updated less often but is a bit more serious in it's tone.

the sigma is a damn fine lens and surprisingly it works on full frame!! it is the only of the super wide family that does! if you dont get that one, there are plenty of wides in the world. i would go canon or sigma. ... Read More

(the photos look excellent btw. in fact i think the varsity should run a couple of these letters.)

and to conclude, of course kids should be able to read what they want or they wont want to read. what is this guy a jackass?? when i was a child in grade 2 i wanted to read goosebumps to satisfy my reading assignments. i genuinely loved those books and while they had predictable plot lines and cheesy dialogue, i found them challenging enough because, well, i was 8. my teacher, on the other hand, decided that since i was showing such a nice bourgeoning (sp?) interest in literature, decided to assign me the secret of the rats of nimh, which made me very mad and i basically stopped reading and turned to the dark side of video games and tv until i was a bit older.

ps - i am working on the speech right now.

God damn I am a Dan fan!

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a bus to write you an email

2009-10-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Hi Wyndham! I'm Andre and I'm your penpal in Japan! I'm on a bus in Japan, at the end of the day—or, as they call it chez toi, "five in the morning"! Things, I might've mentioned, are a bit tiring here, but they're pretty good, all'n-all, I s'pose. What about you, Wyndham? Windy City Gal? Wyndemonium? Jean-Claude Wyn Dhamme? On a scale of 1 to classy, how're you keeping it? There's another California girl here in Kobe who reminds me a lot of you. In fact, I think she might become you in the future, by absorbing your thoughts and memories from your brain directly. I mean, she seems pretty normal when you meet her, but then you're like, there's something in that girl's eyes like she would totally absorb a person's memories. Food for thought.

Wyndham come see Japan! Toronto is for d-bags. No, no, I don't mean that—not the second part, anyway. Toronto is the Capitol of Wonderfol. It is the stuff from which bedtime stories are made, and I shivered just now, half from nostalgia and half from the memory of what it feels like to be cold.

Yeah the weather is not so fantastic here because it is really hot, forever. Did your first winter in Toronto suck or are those things I hear about how people from Davis are wusses just stories? Japanese people are huge wusses about cold. Anyway you have to wear two layers here or else you'll sweat through your shirt. Hooray for details, right? But hey I do an armful of laundry in my tiny washing machine every day and I live in a building where everyone has a clothesline on their balcony, including me, and every time I'm out there I want to have shouty conversations with the neighborhood, or call someone below to come up for dinner. If I had a partner in balcony-shoutery we could both pretend we were speaking Italian like in the Lower-East Side in movies. We could ham it up and everyone would think we were actual people from Italy. They warned us when we came here that most people would see us as representatives of our home countries and assume that Canadians always act like we do, so obviously the real fun is stereotype-bombing other nations and ethnicities. Australia's stock in Japan has come way down since August, all's I'm saying.

Bus ride's over gotta go catch a train. Train ride's over, at home now gotta eat a bag of ikafry [PS: Ikafry are chips so delicious they make unicorns themselves drool with joy]. Chips all eaten now, writing you more. Yeah, I started writing on an iPhone, gonna finish on a laptop. Time passes like crazy here! I can't believe it's almost three months since I left. Holy shit, it just got completely dark in five minutes. It went straight from afternooney orangey-purplish glow to black just now while I was in the kitchen eating my amazing goddamn chips. Yikes. Yeah, I am thinking about time a bit here right now.

Wyndham, I'm not gonna lie to you, time is at a premium for me, and space is kind of expensive, too, so I want you to write me back about the two BEST and WORST things in your life over the past three months. Or, the two MOST NORMAL things in your life, but you have to write those like they're really exciting if you accept that challenge.

What keeps time rolling by is that what I do is is basically to teach for about four hours a day, plan for four, read and write for two each, do the cooking, and listen to like eight hours of Mountain Goats, everyday, all of which works because many of those things can get done at the same time. I heard that the Mountain Goats made fun of you when you interviewed him. That is pretty funny, but if I laugh, it's with love, which is more than I can say about a certain Goats to whom I'm currently listening. If you ever second-time interview him, you should ask him only very personal questions. It could be a thing of yours: Wyndham's personal questions for questionable persons. You already start most of your conversations with "how's your sex life," so'd it'd be a cinch.

Now I'm disappearing back into the Internet! Goodbye! Should you write me a letter right now? Should you wait till tomorrow and see whether you even still want to? Maybe you should just compose a response and only tell it to a single stranger at a bus stop, trusting it to reach me through word of mouth! Life is full of big and little choices, but it's the ones we don't make that come back to haunt us!

I haven't high-fived anyone above the age of thirteen in three damn months,

- André

Daniel J. Esquire, Epst.,

2009-10-26T03:22:00.000-07:00

Alright Dan, listen up, I've got a story for you about a brand new Martin Luther King Jr. speech that practically no one ever heard, for real.

So I was arguing with this guy, David, on a train the other day about whether teachers should discourage kids from reading cheesy Young-Adult fiction (him: yes, me: no, and let me tell you, I was madder than a broom at a Swiffer convention). To change the subject, he mentioned how his dad had grown up in Atlanta, and then his wife jumped in with this story about how David's dad, had been friends with the King children, and they used to catch lectures from him about how they were all going to be the leaders of their generation, and so they'd better stop rollerskating in the god-damn kitchen! Now I know you do a fine Dr. King impersonation, Dan, and what I'm wondering is, do you think could reconstruct his long-lost "Don't Roller Skate in the Kitchen" speech? The guy's dad, by the way, grew up to become first a street mime and then an Oregon state congressman (the normal progression), so it's definitely a really good speech.

David's a high school teacher from Portland, and his take on the teen-novel question is that high art is aesthetically complicated and "wakes up" our minds in new ways, so that being challenged to appreciate it makes kids more discerning, critical people, while "low art" just walls them in. David's also a self-taught harpist, a big fan of fantasy lit, and a professed snob, plus he can walk on his hands. I was going to post a picture of him below, playing a tiny bamboo flute, but I don't actually like that picture, so here are some women in Kyoto dressed like geishas instead.

So, here's the story of the Japanese renaissance fair I went to in Kyoto this weekend. It was billed as a festival of street performances and crafts from the Edo period, but it was set in a temple courtyard and everyone was in character as villagers, merchants and actors. No samurai, which was a shame, but a couple people swung some giant wooden mallets around.

Those guys two guys are making mochi, a desert that's like a cross between marshmallows and cookie dough and that's made by beating rice to a gooey pulp while it boils. They're vaguely like red bean paste buns, but in a gelatinous, embryonic form. You should find some in Chinatown if you haven't had them before.

This lady is selling little painted shingles you use in shinto prayer. Every booth had a performer who would drop by every once in a while to gather a crowd around the booth. So basically it was an ad-supported show. That reminds me, there's a TV station here called the Samurai Drama Channel.

Scream. Packs and packs of wild monkeys are roving around on the mountain in Kyoto. With monkeys, I think, the expectation is that you'll usually be told not to feed them. Not so here, where the thinking is that, since we're civilized and get to eat whatever, wherever, why shouldn't the monkeys?

Some monkeys just went with the flow. There's a chicken-wired shelter on the top of the mountain where you can go and be completely surrounded by screaming macaques, but it's really unnecessary since you can leave it and just walk around with the monkeys everywhere else. I don't have a whole lot more to say about all this except I love monkeys and the more of them there are scampering around, the better.

Here's a Buddhist temple complex at night. They never lock anything up here. I'm not sure whether or not people are expected to wander in at night, but it's an amazing place to see in the dark when the whole complex is empty and just the night lanterns are out.

Oh yeah, I'm thinking of buying a Sigma 12-22 and finally ditching my crappy kit lens. Do you know if there's anything about it I should know beforehand, or if there's something else I might want to consider, bearing in mind that I'm planning to get a full frame body in a year or two?

I didn't plan on writing you a letter that was half pictures and ended with a gear question, I just happened to have just gotten back from a weekend trip where I took tons of photos. Plus with Andrew coming to visit in November I've got lenses on my mind, and I want to try and settle on one (or a flash) by the time he gets here. And, well, it hasn't been the best day and to some extent I just wanted to look through the photos and write about what was in them. Actually, I'm more interested in what you think about the Young Adult novel thing. What are you doing lately? How's your plan to focus on your own stuff going? You are still going to be in town when I get back, yes? Give me news, even if you have to make it all up.

No skates inside,

André

Hey JADE!

2009-10-23T07:24:00.001-07:00

I don't have much time before a band of 13-year-olds comes to carry me away, rob me of halloween stickers, and make me play tennis, so I'll write really fast. Try to speed-read this letter so you get the right impression.

You have to tell me everything that's going on/has happened in Toronto (approximately). Really. Japan is so normal. Sushi-grade fish costs seven cents a pound, unflavored peaches and apples cost $20 each, and trains depart every five minutes from hundreds of stations along Kobe's four different rail networks (actually true) that can take you anywhere in the country in under 40 minutes or it's free. The usual! Boring!

Yeah, Japan is just a humdrum country full of lots of people and things where I wake up at 6 a.m. each night, work 10 hours (a half-day under Japanese labor laws), and then go to bed at 10 p.m. in the afternoon. But Toronto! I hear there's snow in Toronto right now, and that it's so cold you can't quite stay comfortable in just a T-shirt. Japanese people don't sweat, ever, and are all currently wearing sweaters and sports jackets in 20-degree weather, even indoors. I'm looked on as some kind of friendly ice gorilla, which is to say that I'm finally getting the respect I deserve. You've got to come and try it out. You could be a kindhearted frosty gibbon, or, if you prefer, a highly amused barbary apesickle.

Word reaches these shores about what happens in Toronto. They say in Toronto street bands play something other than jazz or cheesy love songs. Birds sing, children laugh, or so the stories go. Bureaucrats duel over zoning bylaw revisions, squaring off atop battle towers of the maximum allowable height for core buildings, and when one falls his landing is softened only by the whirlwinds of cheering and booing stirred up by the wild crowd! Asked what's their favorite building on campus, students inexplicably say Hart House, just to fuck with you! MPPs run over cyclists' heads and never get blamed! Douglas Coupland weeps for Keith Urquhart's generation! Dan Epstein lurks around every corner, whispering secrets! Jade Colbert sleeps with one eye open, in the shadow of a concrete turkey, next to a table made entirely of magazines. Is all this true? Is the city I've heard of out there somewhere, real like those living buskers painted to look like gigantic toys? Is Toronto the life-size bronze cowboy actually alive, or is that portable gas heater next to it just there for show? Tell me, but if the news is bad, don't give it to me straight—I couldn't take it.

Also. T-shirts. Every time I see a shop display of stylin' Engrish clothes I want to buy a box of them and ship it straight back to the Varsity, especially the copy editors. I very nearly picked up one with "Middle School" on it, and another that claimed, in sly brush cursive, to be a "Diversion." A racy girls' tee shouted "the energy was obtained by the thing!" in glitter, but along the back it preached that "loving others makes us deiform," so that's alright. Because deiform is good form.

My favorite, though, was one I would absolutely wear at every opportunity: "Miraculous! The word sincerely deprived is surely transmitted." I would like to believe that's true, especially considering how often I've been writing home.

I'll tell you one more thing about Japan if you tell me two more things about Toronto, which is fair, 'cause I already know all sorts of stuff about Toronto and you've barely seen anything here. Last week I went to the deer disantlering ceremony in Nara, which is a Japanese city made mostly of temples that served as the basis for much of Doctor Seuss and all of the Legend of Zelda. Nara, being so damned holy, is full of deer so sacred that no one is permitted to harm them, and the local monks have trained them to bow twice when they're offered food. So everyone feeds the deer, and there are deer everywhere, like the cats of Rome, but likeable. They are a sure sign that Shinto is a useful religion.

Anyway, the bucks get their antlers in fall, at which point they become incredibly dangerous. Not really, at all, but so deep runs the fear of these Bambyish woodland critters goring someone that Nara is practically wallpapered with cartoony posters showing one of the dog-sized deer killing a tourist. Judgments of what's safe and what's dangerous in Japan feel a lot like snap decisions. It's safe, for instance, to keep your school open when 40 per cent of the students have H1N1, or to make your kids stand on each others' shoulders in tottering human pyramids four storeys tall (fun!), but docile, handfed deer taught only to love become homicidal terrors when they grow a few inches of antler.

So, in a three-day ritual that's been performed annually 1,200 times, shinto monks lasso the bucks and wrestle them onto a bed in a grassy field, where a priest calms them by giving them water to drink and then saws off their antlers. As for the deer, once the rough treatment is over, they don't seem to care one way or the other. They just trotted off and went back to bowing and eating. A few of them even kept on bumping heads with just their horn stumps. But the ceremony was severe and somber. The antlers were passed from respectfully hand to hand and a hush fell over the crowd.

Those same killy posters also illustrate how manly the antlers make the deer feel. The one with the biggest rack has a gold medal and the fawning attention of a pair of lovestruck does, the king of the woods. Japan would have to be completely redesigned if Freudianism caught on here, so no one sees the antlers as overtly phallic, more like really flashy pieces of man-jewelery. But in a country with impenetrable gender boundaries, where men are men and grown women bring pink Minnie Mouse cell-phones to work, those deer are making a big sacrifice. It's like they're being forced to wear a blouse, I guess. Wacky? Anyway, afterwards I saw a Japanese girl strutting around with a set of the fresh-cut antlers on her head, showing off and head-butting people, so maybe the whole thing is more complicated than it seemed.

Alright, Ms. Colbert, the bell has rung and the kids will descend in a moment waving rackets and pulling my hair. Drop me a line sometime, postcard me, Skype me or something, 'cause though I've been bad at writing letters home, I'm starting to miss you guys so much that I'll shortly be holding imaginary conversations with you. What was that sound? The wind!

André

PS:
3-2-1-57-602 Minatomjima Nakamachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi
650-0046
JAPAN

What is this, and why are you tagging me in Facebook notes?

2000-10-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

Hello,

So, I'm in Japan. And before I left, I talked a lot of talk to a lot of people about how I was going to blog and facebook-note and postcard-send and in general constantly fling news and reminders of my existence at you from afar. But then I got here and it turns out that working in a country where your coworkers turn in 6-6 workdays is pretty tiring, and when I sat down to type or write something to you, I'd be so worn out I wouldn't have a whole lot to say. And it wasn't only the blanking out, but the fact that I'd really just want to watch an X-Files and go pass out, bearing in mind that I'd still have to cook dinner and lunch, iron my clothes for tomorrow, and maybe do some dishes or laundry. And plan for the weekend, which always seem to fill up, as happens when you live with eighty very sociable folks in a society where most of you are illiterate and can't talk much, either.

A dilemma!

But then, I was writing an email during some downtime at work, and by the time I finished, it was clear that not only had it not killed me, but also that it said basically the same stuff I'd wanted to blog about, but with a personal side.

So instead of sending that email, I'm starting this blog with it. Each post is addressed to a single person, but open to anyone. In-real-life letters are great and all, but they're just too private. The greater part of what's good about knowing all of you is what emerges when, in various combinations, we're all in a loud room together. Besides, in the near future we won't even want privacy, so why cling to it now? How many people, having bothered to get the hang of, say, Twitter, go on to just direct-message their friends one at a time? Nobody. Zero people. Especially not you.

I have no idea what kind of pace I'll keep with the letters, but I'll make sure to bug you when there's another one up that I want you to get. Sometimes I write lonnnnng letters, though, and on top of that is the fact that from time to time I absolutely will use twenty words when three could and should have done. In my defense, I hardly ever get to use English here, so bear with me when I go overboard--and you can even nudge me in the right direction, should friendship, hostility, or a sense of good style so move you.

I'm looking forward to poking at my own letters and looking at how I change my tone and content when I'm writing to different people. If I threw in a few scatterplots and some vague evolutionary psychology, I could call this a mad social-science project. Just to keep things blurry, though, I promise to be extra mean to Sara Quinn. And extra nice to Lucas Rizoli.

The first letter is to Jade because she was the one I was writing to when I thought of this, and since she's the boss of most of you, you dare not complain. So this is the newest new plan, and if I didn't wear you out with all that, you can go back and read other people's mail right away.

Sincerely,

André Bovee-Begun

PS:
3-2-1-57-602 Minatomjima Nakamachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi
650-0046
JAPAN