Thursday, April 26, 2007

Happy Birthday to You

Over at Mostly Harmless I have a Radiohead City Music Hall flavored tribute to imoto, who turns 1 today. Tanjobi omedeto, imoto!

Got a post cooking on Twain, Arac, Hawthorne, and Melville (hopefully for Saturday), but while you're waiting with bated breath for it, I thought I'd ask a certain exasperated London scholar what he thinks of The Iron Heel and what he recommends I read to make sense of its representations of Japan besides Colleen Lye's work....

Oh, and you need to read Robert Farley on the dangerality of Melville and Hawthorne. Heh! Indeed.

[Update 4/29/07: d celebrates his daughter's first birthday at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Which just goes to show that for some who Blog While Academic, April can't possibly be the cruelest month.]

2 comments:

SEK said...

Outside of the Lye -- which I haven't actually read -- I can't think of anyone who discusses Japan in The Iron Heel. That said, the representation of it falls squarely within London's own contradictory opinion of the Japanese: on the one hand, he admires them; on the other, they're part of "the Yellow Peril." So in The Iron Heel, you have their Oligarchy take over China, but you also have their socialist revolutionaries lauded for their commitment and bravery. A better place to look for London's thought on the Japanese would be Jack London Reports, which contains his reportage on the Sino-Japanese War.

The Constructivist said...

Scott, thanks much for the tip and the useful summary! I may just have to excerpt from Lye's analyses of his war-time reportage, as I can't get ahold of the volume you mention on this campus and don't have time to get to another one this afternoon....

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