On beauty

Oscar Wilde famously said, “All art is useless”, while Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. So if art is about beautiful stuff, why is it useless?And if it’s useless, why does it matter? 

It’s useless because its value lies in itself and not in its function. It may have no function. For example, if one wants to get a job in today’s economy, a degree in, say, philosophy is arguably of little instrumental value, especially as compared to a degree in economics or business studies. Yet we continue to teach philosophy because of its inherent value. My old apartment in Prague had an ornate façade bristling with carvings, and a stairwell of elaborate mosaic tiles whose only function was to be beautiful. My apartment in Tokyo, in contrast, is purely functional. The windows are simple squares fitted with safety glass. The stairwell has beige rubber flooring. It lacks beauty because there is nothing unnecessary or useless about it.

What’s wrong with beige rubber flooring and safety glass? Well, people need to feel that they are capable of creating beauty. The natural world, be it jungle, desert, mountain or ocean, is without exception beautiful. The only ugly things to be seen, wherever one may look, are manmade. The sense that we belong to a species that can only deface and bespoil the world brings with it a heavy burden of guilt, which in turn may lead to depression or aggression. Thus, manmade things must, at least some of the time, be beautiful if we are to be happy. 

I want to be happy, so I’d very much like to take credit for this beautiful insight, but it was Stephen Fry. A beautiful man indeed. 

Great Britain

As I'm moving to Blightly in a few weeks, I was intrigued to stumble upon an article in the Independent entitled "The things that really make Britain great". Listed therein were such delights as morris dancing, alcopops and, I kid you not, readers' wives. 

I dare say the Independent was attempting to be amusing, but it made for quite depressing reading, more so because of what it said about the quality of journalism in the UK these days than what it revealed about British popular culture; a quite remarkable achievement. 

What am I letting myself in for?

'Erbs

I’ve told you before about my talented and wonderful friend Che. She’s good at playing piano, good at being devious and mischievous and, so she’s just discovered, good at growing herbs on her balcony in Prague. She’s also good at writing poems about growing herbs on her balcony in Prague (though her cavalier approach to capitalization leaves something to be desired); 

there are green things rising

and it's quite surprising

how soon it'll be

that i offer thee

spag bog with oregano straight off the balcony

there are green things maturing

and it's reassuring

that within reach will be

for you and me

calabrese salad with basil straight off the balcony

there are green things expanding

and it's rather glad'ning

that i can prepare

without a care

a big bowl with rocket straight off the balcony

there are green things growing

and it's nice knowing

that one day

i'll say

fancy a mojito with mint straight off the balcony?

Please direct book deals, cash prizes and offers of rumpy pumpy for Che to me here at Timorous Beastie.

A la recherche du madeleine perdu

Timorous Beast took me for Sunday lunch at our local Frenchie. It's a tiny place, where they charge an unbelievable 1,200 yen for a two-course lunch. Of course, Beast and I, being fat, greedy gaijin, always have a pichet of wine and dessert and coffee too. It's our contribution to the economy. 

So there we were, chatting away between spoonfuls of lime sorbet and cheese mousse. I was just reaching the denouement of my theory about communism, having timed it perfectly to coincide with the end of my sorbet, which I planned to combine with a sublime mouthful of moist, spongy madeleine, when I look down at my dish to see that my madeleine had disappeared. I looked at Beast. He looked at me, cheeks bulging. "You didn't want that, did you?"

What a howler

I’ve just finished reading Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong. It tells the tale of a student from Beijing who spends twelve years living with nomadic herdsmen in Inner Mongolia. As the title suggests, it focuses on the role of wolves on the plains and their relationship with the land and people. 

I really wanted to like it, as I have a fascination for Mongolia, a love of all things lupine, and an interest in environmental issues. But it took me two weeks to get through it. I kept putting it down in disgust and tutting to myself, “Razor-sharp teeth”? Honestly. Or, “....sides and chests spurted blood, the stench of which drove the crazed predators to commit acts of frenzied cruelty.” These are wolves and horses we are talking about. 

Aside from the cliché, there was the fact that the book was peopled by caricatures rather than characters, from the wise old Mongol and his eager student to the ignorant, rapacious Chinese settlers. Throw in some clumsy metaphors about wolves and sheep to represent the herdsmen and Han Chinese, add a bit of patronizing didactic about spirituality and ecology, and you’ve got 500 pages of instant irritation. 

I don’t know how it got past the Chinese censors, but more than that, I don’t know how it got past the judging panel of the Man Asian Literary Prize. 

Lady of Leisure

Because I'm leaving Japan in May, I couldn't teach this semester and so I'm essentially not working much these days. And I must say I think I've found a vocation. 

After a night snuggled on the sofa with Timorous Beast, Jason Bourne and a bottle of syrah, I woke up at the despicable hour of 10.00 am. Upon checking my inbox, I found a lovely email from a Welsh colleague who left Tokyo last year and is now in Aberystwyth, with photos of him frolicking in misty fields with animals. Then I sat on the balcony in the sunshine listening to the birds twittering before popping round to the post office, running a few errands and picking up something for lunch.

Bliss.

Slimed

I saw this headline in today's paper:

Man arrested for wiping saliva on woman sleeping on train

There's not a lot of crime in Japan, but when they go for it, they certainly do it in style.