Frederick Turner, 'Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of *Tropic of Cancer*' (2011)

Frederick Turner, Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011.

Turner lays the groundwork for Henry Miller's breakthrough novel by putting it in context. He goes back to the American frontier mentality, the development of American folklore (much of it rough and biting), and on through Walt Whitman and Mark Twain to Miller. 

Frontier folklore: "The Yankee spun his tales, performed his sleights-of-hand, and changed his name and address, all with a blank, impenetrable mask behind which was -- what? Maybe only a collection of personae." (page 29).

This is the third time in less than three weeks that the ideas of "masks" and "personae" and cultural milieu have popped up: previously, in recent posts on James Brown (here) and Anaïs Nin (here). Zeitgeist, meet synchronicity. 

And then there's the palimpsest, in which earlier writings are partially erased or faded, and new texts are piled on top like archaeological layers, with bits of the old coming to light from time to time. 

"[I]t is surprising how many facts of Miller's life are either unknown or in dispute . . . The major problem here is Miller himself. who was as compulsive a mythologizer as he was autobiographical, incessantly and even gleefully inventing competing versions of events . . . so that what he left behind at his death was a vast palimpsest presenting biographers and critics with a plethora of problems that can never be definitively solved." (pages 57-58).

Miller loved burlesque: "In the darkness of the hall and the focused lights of the stage, in the deliberate thinness of the make-believe, things otherwise off-limits were not simply allowed, they were celebrated. Here the masks were joyfully hurled aside and the knock-down power of the frontier-formed culture was in plain view." (page 72).

". . . against his many poses, his masks and disguises, his evasions and indecisions and prevarications . . . was a tough, knotty core of artistic integrity that made him show up for work . . ." (page 127)

"'I will never become a European,' he said, '"but thank God, I am no longer an American. I am one of those things you call an 'expatriate,' a voluntary exile. I have no country, no frontiers, no taxes to pay, no army to fight for.'" (page 171) 

Quoting Emerson: '"The way to write is to throw you body at the mark when your arrows are spent.'" (page 188)

Quoting from the novel: "'One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy.'" (page 204)

Brassaï, (Conchita & Friends), 1933

Fun book. Anaïs Nin plays an important role, there is mention of the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline -- whose work Miller's Tropic of Cancer was compared to at publication (Tropic was banned in the USA until the early 1960s) -- and others play their parts, too, such as the photographer-artiste Brassaï. 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.   

'Tokyo: A Biography' (2016). From the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake to Fukushima

Stephen Mansfield, Tokyo: A Biography. Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2016).

Imperial Japan took control of all of Korea in 1910, exploiting its resources. After the 1923 earthquake and its resultant fires, Korean workers in Japan became targets of Japanese nationalists (Japan First types). "Koreans were convenient scapegoats, and were easily sought out in slums where they lived by members of the police force, the notorious Black Dragon Society, military sports clubs, or anyone with a personal grudge or score to settle . . . lacking rational judgement or orderly deportment, [they] dragged Koreans from their homes and workplaces and hacked them to death. Others were strung up on telegraph poles or boiled alive in drums. Those who failed impromptu linguistic tests in Japanese were sentenced in mock trials and beheaded."  (Tokyo, pages 107-108). Also targeted were socialists, feminists, and other social reformers. 

By the 1930s, with dissenting voices suppressed or crushed, Japan as a whole became increasingly militaristic and jingoistic; its leadership became increasingly reckless. 

When Japanese forces seized Nanjing/Nanking, China, in December, 1937, they began a wholesale slaughter of its inhabitants -- killing as many as 300,000 civilians. 

The writer Iris Shun-Ru Chang (1968-2004), committed suicide seven years after completing The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) and other works. She had been severely depressed, and no wonder why.

When the Japanese and Anglo-American Empires violently collided into each other, the scope of the Asia-Pacific War widened and deepened. More and more people were consumed, by the millions. 

Yet there was still a flicker of dissent among some Japanese. "Not everyone was keen to make the sacrifice and go to the front line. Prohibitions on tattooing were introduced during the war as a response to an increasing number of young men seeking ways to avoid conscription. People wearing tattoos were considered noncomformists who might spread dissent among the military ranks." (Tokyo, pages 126-127).  

Naturally, many writers and artists were dubious of the war and Japanese militarization, too. Nagai Kafu wrote: "However cruel and arbitrary the methods of the government may be, they cannot restrain the imagination, While there is life, there will be freedom." (Quoted in Tokyo, page 127). 

But like the Japanese military, the American military, too, became increasingly vicious. By early 1945, "the Americans [were] now bent on causing mass casualties to civilian populations as they later would with Hiroshima and Nagasaki," exploding napalm to "extract a maximum death toll. . . the first of America's high-tech massacres" and "slaughter bombings." (Tokyo, page 130).

After Japan's surrender, the American Occupation began. In immediate response, the Relaxation and Amusement Association (RAA) was formed to "entertain" American military personnel with "comfort stations" and brothels, which were also given euphemisms such as "Tea Shop Sanitation" and "Café Associations." These were large-scale operations with some 70,000 organized "comfort women" and tens of thousands of freelancing or yakuza-(gangster)-run "panpan girls." For the many gay servicemen, there were dansho and a quick blooming of gay bars. (Tokyo, pages 140-141). Very little of this seems to have made its way into celebrations of "America's Greatest Generation" -- or family histories. For most, apparently, what happened in Tokyo stayed in Tokyo.

Galloping through the Cold War, Godzilla movies came out amid understandable atomic jitters (Hiroshima and Nagasaki being very close in the rear-view mirror); and Japan's economy took off, thanks in part to servicing American military efforts in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, and while showcasing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. By the 1980s, Japan's economy was swaggering, at least until the next bust. Though Americans back in the USA feared the pointed competition from Japanese companies, they were all the while buying more Japanese cars and electronics.  

In 1995, Tokyo was again traumatized, this time by the Doomsday Cult Aum Shinrikyo / "Supreme Truth," which used sarin nerve gas to attack the subway system. This was the same kind of gas recently used in Syria to attack Syrian villagers. In the Tokyo attack, 5,000 people were sickened and twelve died outright. (Tokyo, page 181).

Jumping to March 11, 2011, the catastrophic Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami caused an accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, a horrendous and toxic radiation event still ongoing in 2017. Fukushima is situated about 150 miles (200+ kilometers) from Tokyo. (Tokyo, page 183).

Arriving at today, May 5, 2017, Fukushima is still a dangerous and daunting problem, but Tokyo is also under threat from a possible North Korean missile attack. For Tokyo, the fun never stops! 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Tosin Otitoju: 'Lovebirds' (2016)

I. Lovebirds. Poems by Tosin Otitoju (2016) in three sections. This is a new book, Tosin’s eighth. Format:

A TRUE STORY (20 poems)

TWO ANGRY BIRDS (10 poems)

THE LOVE MOVEMENT (25 poems)

From my perspective as a reader, these are some of the vivid tropes and themes in  Lovebirds: technology; social media; business; mirrors; gods; angels; God; marriage; luck.

Permeating Lovebirds, there is a refined testimony of ancient, enduring human themes mixed with contemporary technology and ongoing concerns.

A few poetic samples from longer poems:

“Wishes and Horses”

Everything points to a need for a merger

To save on duplicating auras on twitter . . .

It’s good to be wise, better to be lucky.

(pages 23-24).

“Feedback”

I see in you a blur

 instead of your face a ghost

   question-marks, answers,

     hypnotizing laughs.

. . . black-magic or test-the-spirits

       angels here with us.

(pages 26-27).

“Sometimes You Need”

Misery loves company

And gravity needs distance.

(page 42).

“When the Boat Hit the Rocks”

There comes a point

when you start to yearn

for the simple complexity

of city life.

(page 43).

II. Questions & Answers. Q = me. A = Tosin. 

Q: What is it about mirrors?

A: Mirrors for some weird reason. I'd actually meant to do a whole collection of poems either directly about mirrors or indirectly by writing a poem and an opposite or something like that. I later decided on Love and a couple of other collections to come...mirrors are more abstract...you try to hang a commercial project on mirrors and...I don't know, Nigerians know love and maybe have less time for you to explain that the topic is mirrors - nobody wants the headache. If you want more people to love you(r work), try Arithmetic over Differential Equations. :)

Q: Lovebirds is timeless, but also of the contemporary tech world. What kind of impact does tech have on love and social relationships?

A: In this collection I hoped to do love and romance, but I'm delighted that it also had an interesting setting, namely, tech. So it's romantic, but it's robotic.

Tech is a thing masculine and robot-like, which would seem to be the opposite of romantic. It's physics, chemistry, planets, science, feedback amplification, bits/bytes/packets/cyber, twitter.

By the way, Janelle Monáe did androids too in her music, a whole album titled The ArchAndroid, and that's specifically why I had the guts to choose "Android Love" for the title of the poem I placed first. I think of this as the "overture" introducing the opera, the robot opera.

Q: How does business figure into Lovebirds?  And other systems?

A: Another example of the hard-edged - calculations and robots - in what should be soft and romantic. I mean, in the realm of love, who thinks of mergers and cost-savings, hedges and insurance? Then again, who doesn't - I mean who doesn't among people who think in these terms about almost everything else?

And once you discover that there are planetary systems with multiple suns, won't your love poetry or even your mythology shift to include this image of a "two-sun dance"?

And if your work includes experiencing or understanding positive feedback loops, when you then consider thoughts feeding on similar thoughts, or an image feeding on its mirror image, or two people sharing synchronized feelings, won't you deduce or imagine resonance, system overheating, heightened excitement, or that screeching noise from the microphone-with-speakers?

In summary, at the center of this collection is a love, mystical, old-fashioned, yearning, and poetic. Yet in the poems we find hints of academics, mathematics, technology, science, business, and so on. For example, there is the "Definition" which feels quite formal to me, like something I would do in math and I presume others would do in law for instance - begin a study of a thing with a precise definition and logically go through a proof, examples, corollaries and the rest. I adore this definition of love. I tried to get it in Wikipedia but some gatekeeper kept rejecting it. That was annoying. I'm expert enough to provide a definition of love! I get annoyed with things like this. It would take another page to explore and explain the annoyance.

Q: In several of the poems, there is an interesting interplay between different ways of perceiving reality. For example, gods and God are mentioned, angels, ghosts. Do they all exist simultaneously in some kind of dreamscape?

A: There's a bit I'm not saying about the angels, ghosts, and shall we say more mystical experiences that inspired this love and parts of this collection.

2015 or so, I told my good friend (an ex, naturally) that I was in love with someone online even though it was not an affair and there was no actual talking and how very psychic everything was from day one. I was amazed that he understood.

In public, I won't talk like that for fear that they still lock people up in mental institutions - do they? I also told a very young friend (a veritable cool kid, some sort of art student, teenager, in university abroad) and he understood too. He said, oh, you mean subbing. Apparently, young people did that all the time - relating privately on social media through subliminal but public messages. Then they collectively dumped twitter and moved on to...what was it the youngsters moved on to? Instagram? SnapChat?

Let's just say this: I am very thankful to the muses for this work, and very thankful to one major muse - wink, and thankful to God, and to ... I usually don't write acknowledgement pages because it's so impossible to truly pin down all the major inspirations for a work. I don't feel as psychic today as I did in those days, and I think it's because this work is done?

Aside, there's a child that lives in my compound, who's back today from two weeks away at Grandma's. I wish I had the talent to write about her - the way her voice makes me feel. It rings like a bell. She talks simply all the time, and I simply die of happiness at her enthusiasm. Oh I love the other kids as well - the one that just learned to talk animal talk to invisible friends, startling her mother, and the littler one whose voice I haven't found yet, although sometimes she cries, and now she calls my name when she sees me.

We had a lot of additional kids here for the holidays - some boys for a change hohoho. Anyhow, I pray one day for the talent to explain the beauty that is her excited talking. She was just shouting something now, I think they were making play-food and she was inviting the others to eat.

Q: What’s next?

A: [See this link]: I'm still writing. 

Note: We did a Q & A session in 2011 that is available in two parts. One of the topics was the beauty of Yemen, but this is too painful a topic to revive here, given the ongoing war and its catastrophic impact. Maybe we can speak of it down the road, when peace is brokered.

October 10, 2011: Interview with Tosin Otitoju, Part One.

October 11, 2011: Interview with Tosin Otitoju, Part Two.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Brian Jay Jones: 'Washington Irving' (2008, 2011), Take I

In the mid-1990s, I had to give a little twenty minute background talk on American author Washington Irving (1783-1859) to a class in Virginia. Their reading assignment for that day was "Rip Van Winkle" (1819). 

I hadn't given a whole lot of additional thought to Washington Irving until last year, when traveling in Granada, Spain, I saw several of his books for sale, some in English and some in Spanish, at the Alhambra. This piqued my interest again, and it was with great pleasure that I found a copy of Brian Jay Jones' Washington Irving: The Definitive Biography of America's First Bestselling Author (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011; originally published in 2008 as Washington Irving: An American Original). 

It was with even greater pleasure that I read it - just finished it this week, in fact. Based mostly on letters and other primary sources, it's an engaging biography. 

One of the grandest episodes of Irving's life was his time as United States Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Spain from 1842 to 1846. But more on that another time, I suspect. For now, let me salute Jones' excellent biography. 

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Islamic Art: The Past and Modern, Take I

Nuzhat Kazmi's Islamic Art: The Past and Modern (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2011) gives a clear framework for studying Islamic art, with plenty of illustrations. Beautiful synergies, patterns, colors, vibrations, fields, designs and craft are enclosed within. 

The first chapter covers Islamic painting, which is not universal because of an Islamic distaste for icons. The author quotes Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1605), challenging those who reject paintings: "There are many that hate painting; but such men I dislike." He went on to say that painters are vessels of Allah. The above is an example of a painting from Islamic South Asia, circa 1615-1620 (now in the British Museum). Even today, there is a diversity of opinion about paintings within the Islamic world. 

Islamic Art: The Past and Modern does well to show the geographical diffusion of Islamic art, from the Middle East to South and East Asia, from North Africa to Spain and Portugal, and into West and East Africa, as well. There is great diversity even between areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Syria-Lebanon. 

The development of various types of calligraphy is one of the many great achievements in Islamic art. Here are two examples from the year 1537 of Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing. More examples can be seen of Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the US National Library of Medicine at this link.

Islamic Art: The Past and Modern next proceeds to consider textiles, pottery, ceramics, glass, metal, architecture and the modern world, with an overview of Islamic Dynasties and a glossary of Islamic and Arabic language terms. To be continued. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Asif Kapadia's 'Amy' (2015)

Amy, Asif Kapadia's 2015 documentary about the rise and demise of the impressive 21st century vocalist and songwriter Amy Winehouse, delivers a film that is, like its subject, both lovely and lively. At 128 minutes, Amy is longer than most such biopics, yet it flows along so gracefully and rapidly that one wants, if anything, more. Fantastic!

Amy Winehouse carried forward the torch of the great blues and jazz diva procession listed, in part, below. Above all, Amy shared with them an edgy realness combined with powerful vocals and catchy songs.

Bessie Smith (1894-1937), 43.
Ma Rainey (1886-1939), 53.
Billie Holiday (1915-1959), 44.
Édith Piaf (1915-1963), 47.
Dinah Washington (1924-1963), 39.
Janis Joplin (1943-1970), 27.
Amy Winehouse (1982-2011), 27.

All of these singers have been characterized as "old souls" at one time or another. In Amy, Tony Bennett quips, "If she had lived, I would have said: 'slow down -- you're too important . . . Life teaches you, really how to live it -- if you could live long enough...'" (See IMDB for a slight variation in punctuation). To them all, a salute!

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Charles Gramlich: 'The Adventures of an Arkansawyer' (2014)

Charles Gramlich has done a wonderful thing: combined his earlier Days of Beer: The Memoirs of a Beer Drinkin' Man, originally in ebook format (Razored Zen Press, 2011), with a new, bigger section, "Adventures of an Arkansawyer," which is twice as long as the first part, in the form of a traditionally printed codex book entitled The Adventures of an Arkansawyer (Razored Zen Press, 2014). As much as I enjoyed Days of Beer as an ebook, I very much enjoyed it again as part of a larger, printed book. So, I'd say, why not purchase both and see what you think?  If you haven't already, that is . . . (More details of how to acquire a copy here).   

My initial response to Days of Beer can be found in another post.  In this one, I'll focus on the new material. The setting is laid out clearly: the Gramlich family farm in Arkansas, " a few miles south of the Arkansas River . . . The closest actual town was Charleston, Arkansas," with "a population of around 1,400 when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. The closest city was Fort Smith . . ." (page 63).

Now, in the new section, Charles focuses more on the family and farming milieu than on beer-drinking adventures. He does so in a warm and wry way, loving toward his family, through vignettes -- many of them comical and some more serious. These can be read both as stand-alone pieces, and as part of the larger tapestry. A reader unfamiliar with family farming will learn things about the kind of work it entails, and indeed, this thread also serves as a valuable reminder that many or most people on earth, until the Industrial Revolution, were farmers, probably working in somewhat similar ways. But there is also a time element at work here. 

The Adventures of an Arkansawyer, beyond the farming element, says much about American life in general during the period after the Second World War and before the complete communications revolution brought on by the internet, digitization and wireless mobile devices by the beginning of the 21st century. In that, it is a testimony to American social and limited technological life from the 1960s to the 1980s -- and not just in rural areas far away from the sea coasts. 

We also catch glimpses of why and how Charles became a writer. A big element in his development came through his avid reading, which was given a lot of extra fuel thanks to his sister Dolores, once she began working at a nearby library and could provide him access to an expanding trove of reading material. 

Charles, even as a child, had a vivid imagination and colorful (even visionary) dream life. There are probably several factors that worked together to propel this inner life. 

Closeup of stained glass, St. Mary's of the Valley, Hot Springs, Arkansas, by EDF, 2015

For one thing, outside of school, Charles was isolated from others around his age. He couldn't just bop down a sidewalk or street to hang out with a friend or friends his age, as in a cityscape or suburb. 

Secondly, the Gramlich family was Catholic and Charles was given a Catholic education. "My Catholic grade school," he writes, "had a small library of maybe a hundred and fifty volumes, mostly about saints. I read all of those" (page 179). I guarantee you that this process alone would have fueled Charles' imagination. Beyond that, in 1960, only two percent of the population of Arkansas was Catholic (even though Catholicism in Arkansas dates back to 1541), so the Gramlich family was distinctive in their religious culture. 

Third, Charles has anosmia (see page 74), and cannot detect or discern scents or odors. This is one of the five or six senses, right? Charles anosmia has led him to clever strategies of getting around this, which reminds me a lot of the wisdom of Huck Finn. Do you remember when Huck forgets his made-up name, George Jackson, and tricks Buck into spelling it out for him? (cf. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884-1885, chapter 17). Charles may be the very (re)incarnation of Huck Finn -- who knows?

And really, truly finally for now, a salute to Charles Gramlich for his fine, fun and evocative memoir, The Adventures of an Arkansawyer.

p.s. Charles is now an Experimental Social Psychology Professor at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. How he got there is touched upon toward the end of the book. As you can imagine, that's an interesting story in its own right. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (2011): Take II

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011 paperback edition).

Next cycle: space and time. In "the modern era," if time is money, what is dimension and distance?

Carr considers how human conceptions of geography and time have gone from one mind-blowing worldview to another. 

By the way, what time is it?  Do you know the time of day or night? Where are you situated?

"The technology of the map gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence. . . What the map did for space -- translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon -- another technology, the mechanical clock, did for time."  (Carr, page 41). 

One may use a map to get from point A to point B, and calculate time of passage with a little math. Time/space -> actual elapsed time & ever-shifting estimated time of arrival.

In order to work in the contemporary electrified world, most workers need to become tethered to a factory-like space/time rhythm -- even though such a tether never feels quite "natural."  If abstracted time and mapped geography came naturally to us, we wouldn't need watches or clocks, maps or GPS.  

So, in the last x thousand years, we as humans have proceeded from operating through the scrim of hunter/gatherer and agricultural concepts of time according to season, moon, sun, and changed -- by say what we call "the 19th century" -- to more regimented railroad/military mobilization/factory production schedules. Electricity makes the industrialized way easy to maintain -- even if we must keep one eye on the clock to keep ourselves aligned with the greater electric beehive.

With such changes in time/space worldviews, we have gained in "efficiency" and possibility, but have also lost a good deal of connection with season, moon, sun and nature in general. Win some, lose some.

Do you have any preference between time and space? Are you happy living in "the present?"  Or is there some other "era" that tickles your fancy, where and when you'd rather be? 

Today's Rune: Fertility.  

Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (2011): Take I

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011 paperback edition).

Well, how's your noodle holding up inside the electronic envelope?  Has the internet made mush of your attention span and ability to think deeply?

These are essential questions raised and explored by Nicholas Carr, using Marshall McLuhan as a jumping off point. 

"The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind," Carr notes on page 6.

He cites a study that observed how many people don't read in a traditional way, but rather "skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest" (page 9).

This is how I seek out "news" and "updates," certainly, though I read books, longer articles and poetry in basically the same "left to right" manner that I've done since childhood, regardless of format (that is, I do this with both printed materials and digitized etexts). Also, I make sure to take plenty of time away from "the madding crowd" -- online or in my actual 3D physical space -- for deep reading, contemplation, writing, connecting, thinking, or zoning out. 

How about you?  How about people born within the digital age?

To be continued: No sense in making this post any longer or heavier: online readers tend to devote only about ten seconds per webpage and read (or skim) only about 18% of content, missing or ignoring 82% of the rest (page 135). Still, thanks for reading even that much.

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Kang Je-gyu's 'My Way' / 마이 웨이 (2011): Take Two

Shirai (Fan Bingbing), one of the characters in Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) is a Chinese sniper. There were thousands of women snipers engaged in combat during the World War II period-- none of them American. Consider Lyudmila "Lady Death" Pavlychenko, a Ukrainian Soviet sniper who killed 309 Axis men. Women snipers fought during the American War in Vietnam, as is depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket (Ngoc Le plays a Viet Cong sniper).    

Another element of Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011): the runner. The two main characters compete in races before the outbreak of war -- just as in Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). In both films, running is another way to spotlight race, class and socio-economic competition. It makes one think of the Olympics, the ancient Greeks, The Iliad and the "tribal core" sports of the 21st century. It also might make one think of the Robert Altman film MASH (1970), set during the Korean War of 1950-1953, and prison films like Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard (1974), as well as Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), which among other things deals with anti-Semitism. In My Way, there is not only the runner vs. runner aspect; at Normandy, we see Axis soldiers playing football (i.e. soccer) before the coming Allied invasion.

Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) also deals with prisons, POW camps, gulags, concentration camps, forced labor and all of their most terrible conditions. Indeed, the German title for the film at its 2012 release in Germany was Prisoners of War -- in English. 

Since forever, it seems, POWs and prisoners in general have been treated very badly. Who would want to be trapped in an Iranian or North Korean prison? Or a Chinese, German, Russian, Turkish one? Or a French or British penal colony? During the American Civil War, both sides treated POWs in an abysmal manner, leaving them -- their fellow  Americans -- exposed to the elements, malnourished and decimated by infectious disease. Captured freedmen and free black men were either executed or sent back into, or into, slavery. Today, groups like the so-called Islamic State execute prisoners en masse. I doubt treatment of prisoners in ancient times was a pretty picture, either. 

Why are prisoners treated so cruelly? It's so easy -- too easy. Millions of prisoners -- civilians and soldiers, grownups and children -- perished while in prisons, camps and gulags during WW2. Millions more died in captivity after the war, never returned by the captor nations to their home countries -- or expatriated and then imprisoned-to-death in their home countries. My Way reminds us.

Today's Rune: Growth.   

Kang Je-gyu's 'My Way' / 마이 웨이 (2011): Take One

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Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011), delivers an epic story that begins in Japanese Occupied Korea in the late 1920s and ends, or almost ends, at Normandy in 1944. Drawing on the real story of Yang Kyoungjong and the great sweep of history, My Way works on several levels -- from the small and human to the mass and inhuman violence of global war. 

Like The Iliad, My Way lets us see multiple viewpoints. And as with that Homeric epic, there is an abundance of courage, stupidity, shrewdness, luck, fate, adventure, cruelty and death. 

Among a group of characters, three stand out: Korean Joon-Sik (Jang Dong-gun), Japanese Tatsuo (Joe Odagiri) and Chinese Shirai (Fan Bingbing); the latter, a female sniper, contributes to an unlikely romantic thread, as well. 

Among the crazier things one will encounter in My Way is a Japanese infantry frontal assault against Soviet tanks at Khalkhyn Gol (1939).  

Here, a Soviet frontal assault against German positions at Kharkov in Ukraine (1943). 

In My Way, no one is as fanatical as low level military officers -- Japanese, Russian and German -- in sending their men into doomed, bloody efforts. 

As members of Ostlegionen units, Asians were positioned at Normandy, part of the German defenses of the Atlantic Wall. There were all sorts of ethnicities in the Ostlegionen: mostly desperate POWs converted into cannon fodder. 

Spotlighting the existence of the Ostlegionen is fascinating, another way in which My Way raises consciousness about the complexities and nuances of war on a massive scale.   

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: Round Two (Clothes)

Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing translated by Cathy Hirano (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014)  / Magic Cleaning: Wie richtiges Aufräumen Ihr Leben verändert [lit. "How real tidying changed your life"], (2013).

KonMari categorical method – clothes. All in one go. “Does it spark joy?”  “Express appreciation.”  I gathered all my clothes -- everything except what I was wearing -- and coats -- and piled them on a blanket on the floor. Then I handled every single item and decided one of three ways to go: keep, donate or discard. Everything. What I hauled away:

Sports jackets/suit tops
Donate = 3 (1 tweed)

Sweaters
Donate=1

Button shirts:

Discard = 1

Donate = 5

Sweat tops

Donate = 2

Trousers

Donate = 1

Sweat pants

Donate = 1

T-shirts

Discard = 6

Donate = 26

Gloves

Donate = 1 pair

Knit hat

Donate = 1

Pairs of socks

Discard = 14

Hangers

Mix of donate and discard (broken ones)

Total = 1 sack of discards, 3 sacks of donations

Marie Kondo's Magic Cleaning: Wie Wohnung und Seele aufgeräumt bleiben [lit. "how apartment and soul remain tidy"], (2014).

Closet reorganized -- heavy on left to light on right “like an archer’s aim.” Chest drawers reorganized and folded for optimal display and utility. Storage cabinet ditto. Room for everything, in a civilized fashion. Spare buttons, etc., donated to tailor/seamstress next to dry cleaner. Two ties to dry cleaner. One coat in for repair.

Elapsed time: three hours.

Success: total!

Next category: Books. 

Today's Rune: Gateway.