Edward Seidensticker
While flipping through newspapers that had piled up through the last two weeks, I spot a small item just before turning the page*: Edward Seidensticker has died. Actuarially this cannot be a huge shock -- he was born in 1921 -- but it is a loss.
Seidensticker is usually described as one of the great translators of Japanese literature into English. That he certainly was. His translations of Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and other books were generally credited with helping Kawabata become the first Japanese winner of the Nobel prize for literature. He also did important translations for the man who should have won the prize, Yukio Mishima, including the last volume of Mishima's unforgettable Sea of Fertility four-volume saga. (And, yes, the Tale of Genji and so on.)
I met Seidensticker half a dozen times for meals and drinks in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was urbane, arch, ever-amused in a cosmopolitan way. That tone comes through in his under-appreciated nonfiction books about Japan itself -- histories of Tokyo like Low City, High City and Tokyo Rising, and an archness-incarnate book about living as a foreigner in Tokyo: This Country Japan.
Although he would be the last person to describe himself as typical of anything, he illustrated two larger trends. He learned Japanese to serve as a Marine Corps translator during World War II, part of an important generation of American scholars, businessmen, journalists, and diplomats who became Japanologists thanks to wartime experience. And, to be careful in phrasing a point he did not publicly discuss, after the war many Western homosexuals found the Japan of the Fifties and onward a more comfortable and attractive environment than their homelands at that time.
He was a talented, honorable, and accomplished man.
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* This is something that never happens when you're reading newspapers strictly online. Yes, there are many other means of unexpected discovery on the internet, but they're different from the same process with actual newspapers. Subject for another day: why online access is indispensable but in some ways worse than what it is replacing.
Final words on Friday Night Lights
As mentioned earlier, my wife and I were having some trouble seeing how things turned out for Coach Taylor and the Dillon Panthers in the new series Friday Night Lights. Thanks to our Shanghai-based friend Tom Carter, we got .AVI files of the final two episodes, which allowed us to watch them on a laptop computer (hey, the rigors of the foreign-correspondent life) without the 30-seconds-on, 45-seconds-off herky-jerky effect of watching "streaming" video from NBC's own site while based in China.
So now we know the first-season fate of Coach, Mrs. Coach, Smash, Riggins, Buddy, Tyra, Landry, Lyla, Street, Matt Saracen, and all the rest of the Dillon population. (An important virtue of the series: every one of these people, plus many more, comes across as a fully-rendered non-cliche character. Eg Tyra's mother, Matt's father and grandmother, Riggins's neighbor and her son, Smash's mother and girlfriend, Jason Street's parents, Herc, and Coach and Mrs. Coach's daughter.)
Concluding remarks:
1) I cannot easily come up with a more impressive series on network TV than this one.
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Free Flight update #3: Bruce Holmes to DayJet
A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.
Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:
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David Halberstam
The news of David Halberstam's death is a surprisingly shocking blow. In general, a man's passing at age 73 cannot seem wholly unnatural or out of sequence. But it was hard to think of Halberstam as being as anything but young. He was as full of ambition and energy and enthusiasm and spark as anyone I know, of any age.
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Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: A nice man, not just an eminent one
I ran into Arthur Schlesinger perhaps ten times in my life. The first was 40 years ago, when he came to visit his son Andy during Andy's freshman year in college. I wandered by, from my room around the corner in the same freshman dorm, and was astonished to see the man whose A Thousand Days I had studied only a few months earlier in high school social studies class in California. With the Kennedy administration still in living memory, he was a real celebrity in those days, not just a successful writer, but he was unaffected and approachable to his son's new classmates.
The last time I saw him was a year or so ago, at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, a kind of Friar's Club for one-time presidential speechwriters.
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Homage where homage is due: Charles Peters
David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a very nice column of tribute to Charles Peters, my original employer in the magazine world and, for me and a large number of other people in journalism, something like Chairman Mao without the starvation and mass terror. That is, an inspirational and consequential figure whose doctrine had its oddities and whose personal habits did too, but whose influence can't be ignored. Fortunately Charlie's influence, unlike the Chairman's, was overwhelmingly to the good.
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
