2002-02-20 - 9:31 p.m.
A couple of awkward Japanese words:
“Takadananobaba” -- name of a Tokyo neighborhood
“atatakata” -- was warm, as in “Kinowa atatakata,” “Yesterday was warm.”
A couple of recent observations:
Sign in elementary school bathroom stall urging cleanliness, including diagrams of the correct and incorrect ways to tear toilet paper from the roll.
Wet washcloth on the “bag your own groceries” table a the supermarket, used for wetting fingertips to separate and open those pesky plastic bags -- so you don’t have be unsanitary and lick your fingers.
Most received compliment (average 3x a week):
“Sarah, you use chopsticks so well!”
Comment from woman on the news who saw President Bush eating at a restaurant during his Japan visit:
“He seemed very kind, and he was able to use chopsticks very well!”
English writing on the covers of notebooks at a stationary store:
“Be chic about a notebook. Tasty character is our best criterion.”
“There is a white and long road there. And try to walk. There is a wood of knowledge there."“To produce music is also in a sense to produce children.” (on a music notebook)Definite perk of this job is lots of reading time. Here’s what I’ve read since winter break:
“Shopgirl,” by Steve Martin. Impressive that this novella was written by Steve Martin, but not an impressive book overall. A quick read though.
“Prodigal Summer,” by Barbara Kingsolver. An enjoyable, amazingly rich and painstakingly detailed work of fiction. I was left totally awestruck by her talent. I wish every book was this good. Perhaps the reason that I was unimpressed by...
“The Red Tent” I worked my way through 2/3 of this book and then gave up. The nouveaux-Biblical language was annoying, and I didn’t find the story compelling at all. A bit mystified by all the hype (perhaps lurking in the last 1/3?), but then again I didn’t see the Oprah’s Book Club discussion.
“Bridget Jones’ Diary” Loved it.
“Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes” by Ted Conover. I love this guy. He drops everything, jumps into subcultures he finds fascinating, and then turns the experience into an insightful and impossible to put down book. He did the research for this book -- bumming around on trains for a few months -- while taking a semester off from studying anthropology at Amherst.
“Coyotes,” by Ted Conover. A few years after “Rolling Nowhere,” Ted decides to investigate the world of illegal Mexican workers -- by toiling alongside them in orchards, living in a remote Mexican village, and smuggling himself across the border numerous times. The result is another page-turner. (His most recent work, is “Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,” which I read last year).
“Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” by David Brooks. From the back cover, I was expecting this book to be a collection of entertaining anecdotes about the Lexus-driving, Pottery Barn-shopping set, but it turned out to be a much more scholarly endeavor (though entertaining nonetheless). Brooks traces the fusion of the 1960’s bohemian and 1980’s bourgeois cultures into today’s “Bobos,” the class driving today’s major cultural and social trends. He covers a lot of late 20th century social history in a very easy-to-digest way, but he infuriatingly only mentions the issues of race and gender in passing, a curious omission for a book about class. He winds up, as it were, explaining that the political manifestation of the Bobo lifestyle is none other than the DLC New Democrat.
“Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” by Anthony Bourdain. I read this nearly 300 page book in three days. It is just that good. Bourdain, an ex-junkie and early-1970’s Vassar flunk-out, weaves the narrative of his own up and down career in the restaurant business with chapters revealing some of the industry’s best kept secrets (for example: don’t order fish on Mondays because chances are it’s four days old). Makes me glad my waitressing days are behind me (economy willing).
Meanwhile everyone here seems to be reading Harry Potter -- On the train home from work on Friday, the 11 year-old boy next to me was reading it, and later that night on a packed commuter train in Tokyo, a fifty-something salary man was equally engrossed in the same book. Call me lazy, but I never could get into that whole Harry Potter thing.
