Return to List

Japan's Economy, Dirty Books, Anti-Americanisms, and Illegal Butterflies

Japan Remodeled by Steven Vogel reviewed in the Business section of the 

Sunday New York Times—

JAPAN’S RETOOLING IS DISTINCTLY JAPANESE

by Stephen Kotkin

7 January 2007

WHAT’S up with Japan? China’s ascent has diverted attention from East Asia’s other formidable power. With an economy still the world’s second-largest ($4.7 trillion) after the United States, and one of the top three or four militaries, Japan is not to be taken lightly.

In the 1980s, Japan’s economic tsunami appeared set to engulf every country in its path. In the 1990s, just as deliriously, its economy receded. Ideologues of all stripes had a field day, because what looked like a state-guided model first produced stunning success (nearly a quarter-century of around 8 percent annual growth after 1950) and then stunning failure (more than a decade of stagnation after a late-1980s stock market and real estate crash). Then came another surprise. Since early 2002, Japan has been on a steady rebound. “Japan Remodeled” (Cornell, $19.95) by Steven K. Vogel, political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gets beyond the punditry by presenting a social-science understanding tested against executive interviews, company case studies and foreign comparisons. It is not page-turning reportage. But the indulgent reader is rewarded with the best analysis in English of Japan’s distinctive market economy. . . .

Link to complete review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/business/yourmoney/07book.html?ei=5090&en=8f65d65a2795b7f2&ex=1325826000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all


Rave reviews of Dirt for Art's Sake by Elisabeth Ladenson:

From the Washington Post Book World—

LUSTY LITERATURE

How does a book go from being an obscenity to being a classic?

by John Sutherland

Elisabeth Ladenson's witty meditation on literary obscenity pivots on "irony, paradox, and absurdity." How, she ruminates, can one generation's "dirt" be another generation's "art"? "How does an obscene work become a classic?" It's a fascinating set of hows. . . . The law's clod-hopping attempts to throw some kind of lasso round obscenity is a well-trodden topic. The End of Obscenity by Charles Rembar, legal defender of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, looked at the asininities of the law. The topic has drawn the contemplative attention of philosophers such as Catharine MacKinnon. Polemicists -- most ferociously Andrea Dworkin -- have had their angry say. What distinguishes Ladenson's contribution is her breadth of approach and subtlety of critical analysis. And also, unusual in this field, a sly humor. . . .

Link to complete review:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012502167.html

From Maclean's—

WHEN LITERATURE COULD STILL SHOCK

Past obscenity trials show how novels once rocked the social order

by Brian Bethune
1 January 2007

Five years ago, Elizabeth Ladenson, a not always mild-mannered French professor at New York's Columbia University, was startled to learn that her new email software came complete with a default option named Moodwatch. Designed to save emotional emailers from their own impetuosity, Moodwatch ranks messages by inserting chili pepper icons when it encounters potentially offensive words. Looking back over past emails, Ladenson was puzzled to find a two-chili ranking on one that merely listed the 13 poems for which Charles Baudelaire faced obscenity charges in 1857. The problem turned out to have been the poem "Lesbos"—politically correct Moodwatch had read the word as a derogatory reference, the feminine equivalent of "fags." In other words, the conservative Catholic France of Napoleon III and an officious bit of contemporary software both wanted to censor Baudelaire, albeit for entirely different reasons.

That's only the first in an array of ironies and absurdities that Ladenson examines in Dirt for Art's Sake (Cornell UP), her absorbing study of a century's worth of literary obscenity trials. Between the landmark year of 1857, when Britain passed the Obscene Publications Act and France launched prosecutions against Baudelaire and

Gustave Flaubert, through the trials of Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill, Western culture completely overthrew its traditional concept of the relationship between art and morality, obliterating the very idea of literary obscenity. Out went the old—literature's duty to uphold the ideal—and in came the new: art for art's sake (exempt from moral judgment), and what Ladenson calls dirt for art's sake, art's duty to be realistic, particularly in sexuality. . . .

Link to complete review: http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/history/article.jsp?content=20070101_139029_139029

From the Sunday Times (London)—

GRIME AND PUNISHMENT

by Christopher Hart

31 December 2006

Sex for us may have begun in 1963, but for the Victorians it began in 1857. So suggests Elisabeth Ladenson in this witty and elegant study, written with an exceptional sensitivity to the multiple ironies regarding sex and censorship in literature. 1857 was the annus mirabilis, or horribilis, that saw the publication and then prosecution of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in England. Madame Bovary was defended successfully, while Les Fleurs du Mal came out in modified form. But Baudelaire does tend to strike us now as part of that slightly silly late Romantic/fin de siècle movement that, having no real grasp of “evil”, decided it must be something exotic and thrilling with which to épater le bourgeois. A century or more later, we have some rather more concrete examples of evil to reflect upon, and very unglamorous and aesthetically unappealing they look too, in all their sickness and squalor and banality. Toying with some astract idea of “Mal” as an aesthetic credo seems both childish and repellent, and Ladenson’s description of Baudelaire as “The Florist of Evil” is appropriately withering.

With every text she so perceptively reads, she has something fresh and arresting to say. She is especially brilliant on Ulysses, along with Madame Bovary the most obvious work of genius under examination here. One of James Joyce’s greatest offences was repeatedly to conflate in the mind of Leopold Bloom, as she delicately puts it, the “erotic and the excretory”. His moral critics again and again argued that this was not how any decent person thought or felt. And again and again they betrayed themselves, by describing purely sexual scenes as “filth” and “dirt”, emanating “from the sewer”, thereby proving precisely the truthfulness of Joyce’s slightly uncomfortable Freudian point about how the human subconscious functions in regard to matters below-the-belt. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf, while twittering on in her Bloomsberryish way about the importance of truthfulness in modern literature, couldn’t cope with Ulysses at all, reacting with hilarious snobbery to this “illiterate, underbred book”, which reminded her of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”. Among other things, Woolf wouldn’t have been able to cope with “the first non-comical defecation in literature”. It is typical of Ladenson’s approach to cast her cultural net wide and remind us that, while the 1967 film of the novel by Jospeh Strick reproduced the spanking and fornication, it still couldn’t cope with that simple act of “non-comical defecation” . . .

Link to complete review:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2514921,00.html

From Publishers Weekly—

Starred Review A professor of French and comparative literature, Ladenson (Proust's Lesbianism) sets out to answer the question, "How does an 'obscene' book become a 'classic?' " with this spry but exhaustive look at the history and culture surrounding the modern world's most controversial literature. Ladenson touches on numerous "dirty" books, using a handful of landmark titles as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging survey: Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Lolita. Using court records, novelists' letters, newspaper reviews and other books on the subject, Ladenson constructs a vivid composite of society's shifting relationship with such polarizing subjects as adultery, homosexuality and pedophilia-including the suppression thereof as well as the appetite therefor. Tracing the evolution of "obscenity" from the 1850s to the late 20th century, Ladenson outlines the debates over "art for art's sake," as well as the province of realism, illustrating the rocky process of acceptance for the twin concepts and the literature they provoked. Witty, well-written and relevant, including fascinating details from the lives of writers, court cases as recent as the 1960s and as far-flung as Japan, and attempts to reinvent controversial works for contemporary audiences (such as two film versions of Lolita), this highly readable study should make scholars and book junkies as happy as pigs in lit.

The Boston Globe on Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, edited by Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane—

THE MANY STRIPES OF ANTI-AMERICANISM

Sociologists find that anti-American sentiment is more varied—and less widespread—than

you might think

by Neil Gross

14 January 14, 2007

LAST WEEK, VENEZUELA swore in for a third term President Hugo Chavez—a man who routinely denounces US "imperialism" and who referred to President George W. Bush as the devil in a speech before the United Nations. Chavez's reelection caused some commentators here to fret about the so-called "pink tide" of socialism that is sweeping Latin America, from Bolivia to Brazil, but there has been no sense of shock or outrage that a politician spouting fiery anti-American rhetoric could win 63 percent of the votes in his country.

Link to complete article:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/01/14/the_many_stripes_of_anti_americanism/

The Scripps Howard News Service on Communities without Borders by David Bacon—

ARE BUTTERFLIES ILLEGAL INTRUDERS?

by Jose de la Isla
27 December 2006

If a butterfly's fluttering wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Louisiana, why is it hard to understand that when making a living becomes impossible in one place, people migrate to earn a living someplace else? David Bacon's book, Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices From the World of Migration, makes the connection. It shows how calamity in one place leads to consequences in another.

Furthermore, what happens when Bacon wants you, the reader, to grasp the protagonists' messages? He lets them tell their own story in their own words. In it, invisible people, instead of the anonymous digits in pompous studies, spring to life. The individuals in Bacon's book are members of communities and they are mostly involved in significant activities. When you hear their words, an improved perspective arises about where the public debate on immigration misses the point. Take Fausto Lspez, for instance. He grew up speaking Triqui in the highlands of the Mexican state of Oaxaca and received Spanish instruction in school. Two decades ago, he left, as did half the village, for Mexico City, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California. In Ensenada, B.C., he was joined by his family. With other Triquis they organized a new community to provide shelter and food to others who arrived. Because of low pay, Lopez decided to enter the United States. He sent his family back to Copala in Oaxaca, where his children could get proper instruction in their native language. "I want my children to learn Spanish but also keep our traditions," he says. He traveled to fertile northern California and settled where reeds grow along the Russian River. He joined other native people who had built huts, as their great grandfathers had in Mexico. They live like that to save money to send home from their work in the vineyards. Through a fellow Triqui, Lspez joined the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB, by its Spanish acronym). "I am doing this for my family," he says.

There's a photo of FIOB members voting, in their age-old tradition, on a particularly sensitive matter when a leader failed to be accountable to the membership. It should give us a moment's pause to appreciate and envy how profoundly democratic some of these cultures are.

Link to complete article:

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=DELAISLA-12-27-06