I think today is Walt Whitman's birthday!  I love Whitman, I read him a lot in Japan.  He is so rowdy and macho yet he loves operas and dainty hieroglyphics.  My favorite Whitmans are "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking" and "To a Foil'd European Revolutionary."

I was reading a year-end round up where they asked Japanese writers to pick some of their their favorite poems from 2008, and one of Taguchi Inuo's selections was Obama's victory speech.  I thought that was nice.

PS, It's pretty crazy that no major Japanese poetry magazine is available online. Most don't even have websites at all.  The only way to subscribe is filling out a card and sending it by mail!  I wonder why that is, it seems like a really terrible idea to me, what with all the troubles with print media.

I just finished Beedle the Bard.  It was so cozy.  I just quit Grad School for a couple hours and had my Hogwarts time.
I have to say though I had a secret little hope there would be something about Dumbledore and Grindlewald.

The love story adds something really special and heartbreaking to Dumbledore's character, but sadly it isn't in the books at all, not really.  Wouldn't one of these marginal endnotes be an appropriate place for a ghostly little hint of something? The Hairy Heart comes closest I suppose.  Still, were it not for Rowling's many copious interviews, I would leave the Hogwarts world thinking Dumbledore's heart was still locked away somewhere, possibly getting a little stubbly. 

I think I did a bad job organizing my time this week--I'm so behind in the novel I'm supposed to present on Thurs it just seems impossible.  I think I will just fake it I guess.  I hate doing that.  Or maybe tell my adviser I can't present?  He said in the email I didn't have to, but did he really mean that?  I mean I know I don't have to if I have an emergency obviously, but is procrastination an emergency? Grad school is hard.  Last week in this class we did poetry and I felt so smart and prepared, now it's back to normal I guess.

I'm crazy excited for Thanksgiving--seeing the Obama rally with the skyline in the background was so emotional.  My cousin sent me this article in French about Hyde Park, it's pretty funny to think about French people pronouncing Valois, ohlala les prix ont augmenté.

Plus there was this really sad part where the dog died and the main character had to throw away his doggy bed.  (This is Nagareru by Koda Aya).   I teared up when she found his teethmarks on the girl's shoe.  I don't know, obviously my brain is kind of overloaded and I'm very emotionally involved in all the Obama puppy speculation.  Maybe I could say that--for emotional reasons I can't present about anything unless it is explicitly about the Obamas' puppy, not just something that reminds me of it? 

Things I have seen in Berkeley:
-hummingbirds
-Lynn Hejinian at the supermarket
-a prince charles spaniel puppy
-a dulcimer
-Bande a Part, and then I looked up the dance on Youtube and thought, I should write in my Livejournal I haven't done that for a while.

Gov. of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro's reaction to the death of Ueno zoo's giant panda Ling Ling : いてもいなくてもいいんじゃないか。("Who cares if she's alive or dead?" basically) 
Hardly the most offensive thing he's said, but honestly, she's a panda for goodness sake, who says mean things about pandas.  They say these comments might affect Japan's efforts to acquire another panda from China.
I am trying to read a newspaper article a day, one long one one day and one short one the next day, and this is my short one today.
When I saw Ling Ling at the Ueno zoo, she seemed kind of sluggish and sad.  I don't know if that's normal panda in captivity behavior, but I hope she wasn't mistreated or anything.

Translations of Hiraide Takashi by Sawako Nakayasu in Poetry Magazine and Octopus.  He seems like a really interesting poet, and Sawako Nakayasu's translations are always great.  It says Hiraide has a book coming out in English (Nakayasu's translations)!  I wonder when there will be another issue of Factorial, it seems like it's been a while. 
(I don't know too much about Hiraide, but I think he's kInd of like Inagawa Masato, who is also very interesting and just won a prize I think).

Also here are two really interesting articles about stamp collecting: The Passion that Led Me Astray and In Praise of the Collecting Act.  I was just telling somebody who was asking about how I got interested in Japan, how one of my first memories about Japan is I had a stamp collecting book with a Japan page, and one day my dad brought me home some Japanese stamps to put in it.

Well this is another current events-ish post, but here I am on the internet, so there we are. Today is the last official day to sign this petition protesting the recent rape of a young girl in Okinawa by a US serviceman. Even if you miss the official day, though, it's always worth sending a message of support (especially as an American citizen). Just copy and paste the text of the letter into an email to the address on the screen. Plus it was just Valentines day, no?, tis the season to protest sexual violence.

More info about the case here.

Hee to go with what I wrote about Hillary, there is a city called Obama,　小浜 , in Fukui prefecture! They are making manju with his face on them. Oh I miss Japan sometimes, so funny.


Japan Times, "For Fukui city of Obama, choice of U.S. candidate is a no-brainer"

I'm supporting Obama, but I definitely respect Hillary. I saw her commencement speech online from Wellesley, though, and it was so well written and soulful I was kind of amazed. If only she projected more of this kind of emotion now.

"We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. ...

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, or Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness."

It was really powerful, I recommend it. Anyway, back to my head cold, my soup, things like that.