admin – Moorings

Many people know and love “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop’s exquisite poem on loss, and it has been my touchstone poem for many years as well. Recently, though, I was introduced to another of her poems, “The Bight,” in a poetry class. Not as readily accessible as “One Art”–most of us need to look up the title in the dictionary and possibly at least one other word within the work (hello “marl”)–the teacher skillfully guided the class to a preliminary understanding of it, all the way through the famous closing words, “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.” Since then I have been tackling one of her poems each day and devouring books about her.

As a former encyclopedia editor, I love the fact that I can pull up Wikipedia at any moment and make it better, especially by improving its coverage of women. At my first art+feminism editathon, at MOMA in 2015, I learned of the artist Shimada Yoshiko, who is responsible for some of those statues of “comfort women,” and created an article about her. Last year I participated in the art+feminism event at the University of Michigan Library, creating or enhancing entries about Japanese women manga artists. This year we participated in Ada Lovelace Day, increasing and enhancing the coverage of women scientists. My handle on Wikipedia is Nihon Bungaku (meaning “Japanese literature,” which I haven’t yet gotten around to doing anything about!). I encourage you to create an account and start editing.

I am crazy about the work of Gretchen Rubin, who describes herself as someone who researches happiness, good habits, and human nature. I guess that one of the things that I find most interesting about her is that she “started her career in law and was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she realized she wanted to be a writer.” Once she realized that, she just wrote. I haven’t read anything from her pre-Happiness Project period, and I may not have read any of her books straight through. What I recommend the most highly is her weekly podcast, Happier. I mean, when would you have another chance to listen in on the conversation between two sisters while one is cleaning the other’s closet! Her sister, Elizabeth, cohosts Happier and recently launched her own podcast, Happier in Hollywood. Elizabeth follows the cohosted model and does her show–which I also recommend highly–with her friend of 17 years and writing partner, Sarah Fain.

In 2014 I received a doctoral degree in East Asian studies from New York University. My research focused on a key figure in Japanese history, Nakajima Shōen. She was using the name Kishida Toshiko when she made history as a speechmaker for women’s rights in the early 1880s. Nakajima was the surname of her husband, Nakajima Nobuyuki, the first speaker of the house in the Japanese Diet. She adopted Shōen as a kind of pen name. After her marriage, she published many pieces in the women’s education magazine Jogaku zasshi. Also in that journal she published an adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram, entitled Zen’aku no chimata. She later published an autobiographical novella, Sankan no meika. My dissertation examines the latter two works. In 2018 my English translation of the novella received the Kyoko Iriye Selden Memorial Translation Prize. At present I am translating Shoen’s diaries into English.

The musical Hamilton and everything connected with it has given me countless hours of pleasure. Some dismiss it as soon as they hear its music pigeonholed as rap or hip-hop. Actually, it encompasses a wide variety of styles, including that of the grand old American musical; taken all together, the entire production of Hamilton is a wholly new genre unto itself and should not be missed.

I wish I could remember exactly how, but some years ago I got interested in shakyō, or sutra-copying as practiced in Japan. Soon after I arrived in Japan in 2011 for a year of research, I learned of a shakyō demonstration and hands-on workshop being offered by a Buddhist temple in a Tokyo shopping mall. My experience there inspired me to copy the the 266-character Heart Sutra most every day that year. There are two ways that shakyō is done: you either trace the characters of the sutra or write the sutra while referring to a copy of it.