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Yoko Tawada during a reading in front of the sculpture of Knut at Berlin’s natural-history museum. Credit Photograph from Yoko Tawada

We’re doing a Bibliophibians Reading Group for her novel, Memoirs of A Polar Bear, beginning on Monday, July 2. You can join the discussion by posting in Comments.

Then we will do an interview with Ms Tawada during her visit. Our conversation will be posted on the Bibliophibians YouTube and IGTV channels, which we will launch very soon.

Thank you to our friends at Goethe Institut and the Japan Foundation Manila for making the arrangements.

Often in Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own. This is, of course, precisely what it feels like to speak in a non-mother tongue. It also is, in fact, often what is happening in Tawada’s stories: in one story a woman seems to be turning into a fish and in another a monk leaps into a pond to embrace his own reflection. But the mythologies mix with more familiar tropes. And often in Tawada’s work, sights or sensations we are accustomed to start to seem like traces of alien stories: “In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears,” Tawada writes in her short story, “The Talisman” (also from “Where Europe Begins”).

Read Yoko Tawada’s Magnificent Strangeness by Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker and Imagine That: The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada in the New York Times Magazine.

Image from wallpapervortex

This one is by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, whose doorstop-sized novels I will read when I go to South America.

And this by the Japanese poet Hideo Ogumi, whom I know nothing about, but whose gloriously unkempt hair inspires me to go uncombed today (So if you run into me I may look crazier than usual).

Like many readers I’ve had a long and tortuous relationship with Herman Melville. Moby Dick IS my Moby Dick: I’ve attempted to read it several times and found it fascinating and absolutely bonkers, but lacked the stamina to read more than a couple of chapters. I finally listened to Moby Dick as read by Tilda Swinton et al during a tour of Turkey which included drives of up to six hours. Someday I will read the novel in its entirety.

For now I’ve managed Jean Giono’s fictional account of the events leading up to the writing of Moby Dick. It is as strange and hallucinatory as the novel it introduces (Giono had worked on the French translation). In it, Melville, whose parents have tried and failed to make him a respectable businessman on land, has become a successful writer of novels of the sea. In 1849 he goes to London to deliver his novel White Jacket to his publishers.

Like Moby Dick, Giono’s novel mentions the Philippines. “Manilamen” have long been renowned seafarers. What if Melville, who worked on whalers, stopped in the Philippines? What would he have thought of the place? (Reminds me of my friend’s long-delayed Joseph Conrad in Mindanao story.)

On impulse he decides to travel to a town called Woodcut, and on the mail carriage he meets a beautiful woman smuggling wheat for the famine-stricken Irish. Her name is Adeline White. He explains storms to her with a leaf.

They begin a correspondence. He writes Moby Dick for her, but she never tells him what she thinks of his masterpiece—she falls ill and he never hears from her again. He goes to work as a customs inspector and in his 34 remaining years, never writes again.

Not true, Edmund White points out in the foreword. Melville was not a ladies’ man. He was bisexual and probably in love with his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He wrote other books after the big one, including Billy Budd. So Giono’s Melville is not a factual biography, but it is weird and gorgeous.

Happy Birthday, Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Schmitz Zafra Safin-Sprungli!

She is in excellent health, thank you. We thought that after she had several teeth taken out she would stick to soft food, but she still snacks on kibble and is especially fond of fried or roasted chicken. Saffy’s hobby is sitting on computer keyboards or notebook pages while her human is trying to write, and challenging her to a staring contest. Saffy always wins.

Today Saffy is the Birthday Oracle. Post your questions about your personal lives, careers, travel plans, pets, and everything else in Comments, and the Oracle will give you an answer.

You know how, when you have guests, and they look at your bookshelves and say, “Have you read all these books?” your opinion of them plummets and you start lumping them with the people who move their lips while they read?

There’s something worse: Admitting that your answer to their stupid question is tilting towards No.

I don’t have a regular job, but I know the importance of routine for adding structure to your days. The only routine I have that doesn’t have to do with the cats’ food and other supplies is reading one book a week. A pleasurable routine, without the tediousness. Well 2018 is officially my worst reading year since I started making lists of the books I’ve read. We’re at Week 24 and I’ve only read 11 books (and started and abandoned many more).

I blame real life for getting in the way of my reading. It is time for extreme measures.

1. No buying of new books (“new” includes used books, and I don’t read e-books or else I’d have thousands of unread books) until you’ve read 13 books and caught up on your reading quota.

2. No worming out of the requirement by giving away books.

3. Catch up by reading short (less than 200 pages) books.

Here’s the emergency reading list.

Not in photo: Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of A Polar Bear, which is on its way. We’re doing a Memoirs of A Polar Bear reading group, then doing an interview with Ms Tawada when she comes to Manila in July.

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Speaking of books. I like the food at La Creperie, but does their management realize the horrible associations of the decor at their Burgos Circle BGC branch? Who’s the genius who thought, “Ooh, let’s stuff all the books in the fake fireplace, di ba cute?”

Could someone please tell them about the Nazi book burnings? Symbols, people, symbols.

Illustration by Adrian Gill

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

Being a chef is a lot like being an air-traffic controller: you are constantly dealing with the threat of disaster. You’ve got to be Mom and Dad, drill sergeant, detective, psychiatrist, and priest to a crew of opportunistic, mercenary hooligans, whom you must protect from the nefarious and often foolish strategies of owners. Year after year, cooks contend with bouncing paychecks, irate purveyors, desperate owners looking for the masterstroke that will cure their restaurant’s ills: Live Cabaret! Free Shrimp! New Orleans Brunch!

In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese, Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”

Read the whole piece in The New Yorker.

RIP Anthony Bourdain, who showed people how to walk the earth properly.