← New Books Network
New Books Network
Reginald Jackson, “Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls” (U Michigan Press, 2018)
01:21:19
Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures.
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:01]
State Farm Announcer
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [00:30]
Carla Nappi
Your planet is now marked for death.
- [00:34]
Marvel Studios Announcer
Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps is now streaming on Disney.
- [00:38]
Reginald Jackson
We will protect you as a family.
- [00:40]
Marvel Studios Announcer
Line em up Johnny Marvel's first family is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. That is fantastic. And critics say it's one of the best superhero movies of all time. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four first steps now streaming on Disney. Rated PG 13.
- [00:56]
Reginald Jackson
What time has it been?
- [00:57]
Marvel Studios Announcer
It's Clobber Dawn.
- [01:00]
Jackson Hewitt Announcer
Jackson Hewitt handles your taxes and your stress. Inhale our no surprise price of 149 or less. Exhale. Paying more for complicated taxes. You won't. Inhale. New tax law knowledge. Exhale. Missing out on your biggest refund. Certainly not. Don't miss paying 149 or less. Rest easy. Jackson Hewitt, Scott Taxes guaranteed limited time offer for new clients on the draw turns Participating locations in their turns@jacksonhue.com 149
- [01:31]
Marvel Studios Announcer
welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:40]
Carla Nappi
Hi there. I'm Carla Nappy. Thanks so much for joining us and it's really great to be back with you today. I just finished talking with Reginald Jackson about his amazing new book, Textures of Morning Calligraphy, Mortality and the Tale of Genji Scrolls. And this came out. It's like hot off the presses. 2018 just came out with the University of Michigan Press. Now it's a really extensive interview, so I won't talk too much here at the beginning, except to say this is a super, super inspiring book. It's beautiful. Not just as a sensory object to experience, to look at, to touch, to hold, but also in terms of the prose, the work that the writing does, that the work of the book kind of brings in the reader through the writing and the way that the written text and the images work together. It's just an amazing, astounding object and achievement. So the book itself looks at the interplay and the kind of intertwining and relationships between reading and dying, legibility and mortality through the work of mourning. And mourning here is something that's not just done on the part of an individual person. Mourning is also something that writing can do, that texts can do. And you'll see as you look at the book, and you'll hear, as you hear us talking in just a few moments, how the reader is actually brought into that work and the ways in which mourning here is not just about loss. It's about doing positive critical work that can result in thriving, as you'll hear us talking about at the end. So this is a book that will be of interest to really, anyone interested in Japanese literature, in art history, in performance studies, but also in transdisciplinary work and transdisciplinary work that specifically connects to modern contemporary issues, even when it's talking about the medieval past. Okay, so with that, I'll leave you to it. And just thank you again for joining Reggie and I for our conversation today and for listening. I hope you enjoy. I'm here today to talk with Reginald Jackson about his brand new, beautiful and super awesome book, Textures of Mourning. Welcome to New Books in East Asian Studies, Reggie. And thanks so much, first of all, for writing a super inspiring book and also for making time to talk with me. Welcome to the podcast.
- [04:19]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
- [04:22]
Carla Nappi
So I'll say a little bit just to situate listeners who have no idea what the book's about into the book and then we'll kind of go from there. So Textures of Mourning, Calligraphy, Mortality, and the Tale of Genji Scrolls theorizes in the words of the book the relationship between reading and dying across three central texts. And we'll talk about these in turn. These are the Heian Period, the Tale of Genji, a 12th century illustrated hand scrolls of the Tale of Genji, or the Genji Scrolls, and then a 21st century resurrected Genji scrolls exhibition. So there's a lot going on here. Reggie, I'm super excited to talk about this, but let's start at the beginning. What brought you to the study of Japan and to Heian Japan in particular?
- [05:08]
Reginald Jackson
Sure. Well, I think. I think it's important to say, I mean, students and friends of mine know this story, but it was really a complete fluke. I was trying to get out of Chicago when I was a freshman in high school and probably was trying before that too, but wasn't as successful. And as part of that, I applied to a boarding school, a public boarding school in Illinois called the Illinois Math and Science Academy. And as part of that application process, we had to write down a foreign language that we'd like to take. And I'd taken Spanish quite against my will my first year. And this assumed I would take Spanish too. But they said in the event that you're unable to take the language of your choice, please list in descending order other languages that you'd be willing to take. And in my 13 or 14 year old hubris, not expecting to ever not be able to pass the placement test for Spanish too, I just wrote down Japanese, Russian and Latin because it didn't matter anyway. And then I failed the placement test and had to take Japanese. So that was completely devastating. And on the one hand, but I met this really amazing teacher, a guy by the name of Jonathan Basanson, who was an incredible teacher and changed my life, frankly. And so a huge shout out to Jonathan Basanson. And he was just amazing. And it was because of him, in fact, that I decided to stick with Japanese. And I'd always liked literature and reading. And it just so happened that by the time I finished high school, I knew that I really liked literature and I knew that I really like Japanese. So I just kind of decided in a very kind of arithmetic way to just put Japanese and literature together and try to study that in college, but started off as an English major, in fact, but was taking Japanese and Chinese and just had some really great teachers there, particularly Patrick Cadeau, who was my mentor at Amherst College. And I just kind of stuck with it. And after a year abroad in the associated Kyoto program in Kyoto with folks like Tony Chambers and Suzanne Gay and Monica Betta, who works on no Drama, I was kind of hooked. But I planned to do modern Japanese literature just because I liked Tanizaki so much. But people that know Tanizaki know that he's deeply invested, in fact, and he's my favorite Japanese author and in fact is only really good to the extent that he invested so heavily in pre modern, but particularly kind of Heian literary tropes and his spirit of experimentation and so forth drew so heavily on that work that at some level, even though I didn't really know it, I was really invested in that too, just by default, because I really liked his work. And then I applied to graduate school to work on modern Japanese literature and, and went to Princeton eventually, after some thought. And it turned out that the modernist that I went to work with went elsewhere. So I kind of had no choice if I wanted to stay at that institution but to do hand literature because Hidecki, Richard Okada was there as a pre modernist and he was also awesome. And so it was really because my advisor in modern literature left that I really had to think seriously about committing to, to hand Literature. And it turned out with folks like Yoshiaki Shimizu doing medieval art history and so forth, there was a real. In a way that I couldn't have anticipated, there was a real pool of folks that were really interested in that material that I could work with. And it just kind of happened by accident, really. So had not the stars aligned to make me fail a Spanish placement test and then later move my advisor, my then advisor to another institution, I wouldn't be here. So I'm glad I am and I'm glad I've been able to make it work. But it was not some really well designed plan that I started hatching in my bedroom as a teenager or something. It was really just kind of trying to respond to these different forks that I couldn't have ever anticipated.
- [09:29]
Carla Nappi
I heard you had a pretty amazing roommate in grad school as well. I'm just saying, you know.
- [09:34]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, I did. One in particular was. Was incredible. Brilliant pataphysicist.
- [09:40]
Carla Nappi
Yeah, I mean, I hear amazing things about her. So anyway. Well, maybe we'll get to that. So Reggie, you mentioned early in the book that the project wasn't always about death, Right. And again, this is in the words of the book, right? You say that it began as an investigation of midare or tangle or disruption as a mode of performance in medieval Japanese culture. So can say a little bit about the genesis of the project and how you. The genesis, how did it come to look the way it does? And how did you come to tangle and then to death?
- [10:14]
Reginald Jackson
To death right now? No, again, it was kind of by accident. I mean, I think that it's important to say that I've been interested in a lot of things for a long time, so music and visual art. And I do some music and do some visual art. And I think that year in Japan in particular was really, really formative, partially because I got to work with Anthony Chambers and he introduced me to Tanizaki in a serious way. And then because I really was interested in literature, but because there was no literature class, one of the semesters I took the closest thing I could find, which was a class with Monica Betta on no drama. And that was just mind blowingly amazing. So just being able to see performances every week, week after week after week, and she's just such a font of knowledge, was really incredible. And it the shit out of me. The first time I saw it. I saw a play called O no Way, which is based actually on chapter. The OI chapter of the Tale of Genji. And I hadn't read that yet. But I was like, oh, if this is anything, if the book chapter is anything like what I've seen a. I don't want everyone to read it, but I kind of am curious about it. Which is all to say that I was interested in Midare through no, that's what got me into it. And then in graduate school, when I was able to take a graduate seminar on. On Heian calligraphy in particular, and then also an Emakimono hand scrolled seminar and saw the scroll for the first time and learned about this kind of mode of writing called Midaregaki or tangled script, things started to kind of make sense to me because it seemed then to be a trope that was an image that was recurring across different spaces and different mediums. So in hand scrolls in no drama and literature. And so I was trying to figure out, frankly, just how to put all the things that I really liked into some kind of coherent format. And it seemed to me that finding some kind of motif or some kind of theme that would let me do a lot of different things and move in different directions was what felt best. And that one, because it dealt with questions of gender and sexuality, because it dealt with questions of performance and also kind of style, both on stage, but also in literary style and visual artistic style, that it was kind of the perfect vehicle for being able to ask a lot of different types of questions about a lot of different types of objects. And so the dissertation was really about Midare. It basically had two halves, effectively, as opposed to chapters. It was really about no and about. About visual art. And Mirare was just kind of the cipher through which I was able to start to try to decode some of the things that I saw happening in both of those realms. But when I started to think more about turning this dissertation into a book, it was interesting. There were a couple people, Jim Ketlar actually at Chicago, was an interesting guy in this regard because who were really compelled by the kind of multimodal aspect of the project. And Tom Hare, also one of my dissertation advisors, was really interested for keeping both of those elements intact. And then there are a lot of folks who I think were right in the end who said, no, it's too much, it's too hard to do those things well and do them justice in a book. Particularly if it's going to be your first book. People won't know what to think of it. And it will seem likely, through no fault of your own, that you're too kind of discombobulated or that you're trying kind of spreading things too thin. And so it'll make much more sense if you just focus on one or the other and really kind of dive deep and do it that way. That'll be more legible. And so the question of legibility was coming up in a very practical sense too, in terms of how to make this book saleable and discernible and hopefully even satisfying to the powers that be. They're going to have to judge it and. And ascribe some level of excellence or lack thereof to it. And that's what really kind of chastened me and made me say, okay, maybe this isn't the time to go and be ambitious in that regard. And it makes more sense and it's safer, frankly, for me to take out all the stuff on dance. So as opposed to doing something that lets me unite, combine the powers of calligraphy and dance, I should just shelve the dance stuff for now and really just focus on one aspect because that will be if I plan to stay in this career for a long time. That might actually bode better in the long term than trying to do those things at once too early. So I was a little sad about that. But I think in the end I'm really happy with the way things have turned out all told. But it definitely made for a lot of soul searching along the way in terms of what to keep and what to get rid of.
- [15:24]
Carla Nappi
I mean, this is actually a great way to move to something else that I wanted to ask you about. It's really helpful to hear about the process, though. And, you know, I've also, you know, we've been in contact her a little bit through the process, and it's been amazing to watch that transform. And I think what we tend to like, even when we try to cut things out of our work and we think we're keeping them separate because it's still the same person doing the work. Right. Stuff is going to come in. I mean, so even we'll get to this when we talk about the book in the later chapters, a little bit later. But you may have taken the dance out of this instant substantiation of the study, but still there's so much about movement and body and gesture. Right. That's. That comes in really beautifully in the study that I think that doesn't feel like a loss. Right. So it just. Although I'm really excited to see the next book and we'll get to that too.
- [16:20]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, of course.
- [16:21]
Carla Nappi
So you mentioned how ambitious. Right. The project is, and it's a really beautifully ambitious. And I think, and I'll just. Just assert this because it's true, a completely successful, ambitious experiment in transdisciplinarity. So you describe textures early in the book in the note to the reader, which begins as a thank you to the reader for reading, which is amazing, which I think is just evidence of the generosity to the reader that's there throughout the book and will also so hopefully talk about that. But you describe textures as, quote, a transdisciplinary experiment that may well fail, but you hope nevertheless performs positive work in the Spiral Down. Now, this transdisciplinarity, as I've mentioned, is one of the marvelous things about the book. And it moves among primarily three disciplinary fields, Japanese literature, art history and performance studies. Now, I hope that when listeners become readers, if they're not already and they read the book, the benefits of doing this kind of transdisciplinary work will be obvious. So let's instead talk a little bit about the challenges. What are some of the. What have you found to be some of the difficulties or cost or challenges of trying to do this kind of ambitiously transdisciplinary work? Sure.
- [17:46]
Reginald Jackson
Well, first of all, thank you so much for that. That's that very generous assertion. I think there's a lot to say on the score. In fact, you mentioned in some ways how difficult it is to take out some of these vestigial hopes and themes, I think. And indeed, at a certain level, the book mourns the removal of all the dance stuff. Right. And I think it does that. And in trying to kind of smuggle it back in through a real focus on embodiment and gesture and all these other things and really amplify those things to the extent that things have been amputated. But I think in terms of the challenges, I was really struck in trying to revise the dissertation and talking to people. I mean, some of them editors, many of whom will remain nameless. There's a lot of talk in the academy, I think, particularly now, and this very neoliberally bankrupt kind of context, about how interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity is really what we're going for and how great it is and so forth, but nobody really talks about just the stakes of that and how expensive it is, both both very literally, in terms of just kind of brute monetary resources or lack thereof. And then what it costs in terms of trying to make a case to folks for whom interdisciplinarity in and of itself is not necessarily Valuable. So there are deans who can make a name for promoting that kind of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary emphasis on paper. But when it comes time to submit your tenure materials or to submit to a journal, I've found often that talk is cheap. That's right. So I think that I'm much more empathetic and sympathetic and much less naive on that score than I was when I set out with the project. Partially because, I should say, I was, you know, at Princeton at that particular moment. I just had amazing folks who were completely down for letting me do that and kind of explore and be more experimental. And that's part of the reason I decided to be there. And I really gained a lot from that environment. But once I left that little, very lush green bubble, people were less inclined to. To be sympathetic to that, to that gesture. And that was good for me, actually, I should say it was not necessarily kind, but it was really important to experience that. And one of the things, just to say it very, kind of a very simple level, was that to do something like this costs a lot of money. And I did not have a lot of money. I did not know how much money it would cost to actually say, include images. I had certain editors say, you know, this sounds great, but if you could take out all of this sad death stuff and make it cheaper by not requesting so many color images and, you know, keep all the sex stuff, that's. That's. That'd be a really great book. That's the book I want to publish, you know, and I'm. And I'm not even, you know, that's. That's slightly paraphrasing, but not so much. And I'm really grateful to that editor for being so transparent and honest with me, because that was really helpful to hear because I was encountering a lot of resistance, first of all, because the book was trying to do too much. I think in its earliest incarnation, it was too long. It was kind of baggy and monstrous in a lovable way to me, but not so much the people who had to actually figure out how to publish it. But it was also, the images cost a lot. And it's one of these things where I was really trying for a long time to figure out how to make the arguments with, but still keep things under this really amorphous price point that I just couldn't hit otherwise. I didn't know how to do that. And I didn't have the money up front to say to a publisher, oh, I have this $10,000, $20,000. Invention to make this worth your while. And so there are people who said, I'd love to do this, but unless it's a coffee table book that we can sell to people who care nothing about these things or really want something pretty, you know, the days of the Getty subvention are long past, you know, and so I'm sympathetic, but I can't do it. So I think that's important to say and I really want to say that, use that as an opportunity to really thank the University of Michigan Press and in particular Christopher Dreier, who is a God among men, you know, for really believing in the project and the folks who are able to help me fund this. Because without that, it wouldn't, first of all, it wouldn't look as pretty as it does, but it also wouldn't be able to make the case, I think, hopefully as clearly and ideally as effectively as it has been, because people kind of headed for the exits. When I said, hey, I want to take this transdisciplinary thing seriously, but this is what it means. It means money has to be paid to get these images in here. So I can talk about the gesture of the line, unless you want this just to be a literary study, which is going to be much cheaper and likely shorter and non glossy stock.
- [23:20]
Jackson Hewitt Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com, own the dream. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order.
- [24:10]
Reginald Jackson
Oh.
- [24:10]
Jackson Hewitt Announcer
Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [24:16]
Reginald Jackson
1-800-contacts.
- [24:18]
Depop Announcer
Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow. Tomorrow, and he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [24:48]
Carla Nappi
I mean, one of the things that becomes really clear because of the images, right? And because they're in color and because of how you use the images not as illustration. Right. But as part of the argument is that, well, it becomes really a central part of the argument of the book, right? So the book is a project that theorizes, in the words of the book, the intersection between legibility and mortality through the work of mourning. Okay? So throughout the book, the practices of reading and of mourning are intertwined. And by having access to the images as part of the argument, you know, you take us through the work of reading rather than just telling us about it. Right? So rather than the book being a representation of what you're talking about, you're really making us part of that process. And this starts right in the first chapter. So close to the opening of chapter one. The book says something, and I love this. It can be easy to take reading for granted. Now, to read, as is very, very clear right from the beginning of the book is again, in the words of the book, to do more than merely decipher marks on a surface. Okay? It's a multi sensory experience. Now, this is something that I really love about the work that the book performs and is really. And this is its critical and generative approach toward reading as practice and method. Now in the book, and here, early in the first chapter, you propose a method that you call apprehensive reading. So, Reggie, as a way to really bring us deep into the body of the book, can you describe what is apprehensive reading and what's important for listeners to understand about it at this point?
- [26:37]
Reginald Jackson
Understand about it? Yeah, no, thank you for that. And I'm sorry, I just thought about one quick thing from your previous question. I just wanted to say briefly, is that about the note to the reader? I mean, I want to say that part of the revision of the book was trying to make the book more and more generous. I think it didn't start out that way and I had to learn how to try to. To really bring that to the fore. And also, I don't take anybody's reading of the book for granted. So it actually is a sincere. Particularly since it's an $85 book if you're reading it legally. I thank you for. Even if you're taking it out of the library. I really am appreciative because it took a lot of work from lots of different people to actually make it possible. So I don't take that for granted. That's why I wanted to put that note in there and try to kind of cushion people. People's entrance into it. So along those lines, then, I think the apprehensive reading part is really. It's about a few different things. I mean, on the one hand, it's about what I'd like to think of as an intervention of this book in terms of pushing against some of the aspirations for being comprehensive in the more kind of positivist leanings of the discipline that I'm in, namely pre modern Japanese literary studies, or just pre modern studies. I think that one of the things that I've noticed over the years, I've benefited a lot from scholarship in that vein, and I still do. And particularly as it's practiced by scholars in Japan who know more than I will ever know about the usage frequency of a certain term and a certain text or all these other things. And I think that's really helpful. I've really benefited from that. But I think it also forecloses a lot and takes for granted a lot about the stability of texts and what texts are capable of and our own kind of engagement with them. And so the idea behind apprehensive reading was about a couple things. One was about trying to take the materiality of the actual object of a handscroll seriously. And part of the arguments of the book later on, particularly when we start to think about the. The 21st century resurrection, is that when I went to see these on different occasions in the museum, it just struck me that you can't touch them. And so you're basically treating this hand scroll, this object that's designed to be handled and touched and interacted with and rolled and unrolled and according to the width and the strength of someone's torso and how people would touch these objects as though it were just a static painting. And it really struck me how much is lost. I mean, I understand I'm not expecting them to kind of give people access to these really brittle national treasures. But it was just really striking to me what was being lost in that desire to show something as a symbol of national pride, but to not be able to touch it was also withholding something from the reader. And so if reading, ideally in the time that these objects were produced, was very much about touching and about this kind of social interaction and commenting and pleasure and all These other things. And that was being truncated then, presumably by definition, then this whole aspect of reading was also being lost. So I wanted to kind of pun on the idea of apprehension both as what it means to apprehend, which is, is to say to kind of grab something, to touch it, to actually kind of bring it in, to grasp, which is to say the main aspect of reading a handscroll on the one hand, but then also what it might mean in terms of effectively kind of foisting this stance of a certain humility or of not trepidation per se, but at least of slowing down the reading process and not having a reader that is used to say texting or used to television or used to reading things on a Kindle and swiping fingers and so forth, to move ahead to just kind of the distance, that presumed familiarity with the text. And to do that is a generative thing. So to in some ways get us to recognize how little we really know about the text and to not see that as a scary thing and to not presume that comprehension or comprehensiveness as opposed to apprehensiveness, to be superior. Because so much of the scholarship that I didn't like and don't like is about trying to presume this objective stance and trying to assert this. You know, it seems really colonialist and expansionist. Like, you know, if I can only cover everything, you know, that's how I'll prove my worth as a scholar, or that's how I'll be able to make the case that I am, I am, you know, this is a magnum opus as opposed to, you know, something that could be much more pedagogically useful in some ways or much more true to the. To the spirit of the work. If we can even talk in this really kind of frou frou terms about aesthetic products. But I just didn't like that stance of I am the expert and now I'm going to tell you everything there is to know about this thing and that's how I'm going to prove myself and my worth and so forth. I didn't like that. I didn't like the kind of conversations I had with people who expected me to do something similar in order to prove that what I was thinking about and trying to write about was rigorous somehow. And the fact that it was so deeply entrenched and that people just took that for granted as a mode of operation and not everywhere and interesting. I think it's really a field specific kind of thing. Right. I really wanted to work against that and to just say, you know, basically, what happens if we can't take comprehensiveness for granted as this kind of. This thing that guarantees the value of a project? And what happens when we can never know everything, but we still have to move forward? Right. What does reading look like then? And what other kinds of intuitions, frankly, can we bring to something? And can we take intuition seriously as this really personal, embodied, idiosyncratic way of moving through a text that doesn't have recourse to this external validation or structure of value that we're used to?
- [33:27]
Carla Nappi
And I think one of the things that you just said was really striking and really brings this into relief very powerfully. You talked about the spirit of the work, right? And this is something that was kind of offhand as something else that you were saying. But I think there's really something to that. I mean, in moving us into the book really moves us into a space where the work has a spirit, right? The work is alive and the work is dying, and the work can die. And so rather than espousing a method and a practice of reading that's all about comprehensiveness and keeping intact, one of the beautiful things and the kinds of work that the book does is really bringing us into a decompositional process. Process, right. An appreciation of the fact that dying happens. The work is decomposing. We are decomposing, right? We have this relationship as bodies in time and space when we are reading and reading with an object, a text. And you talk about this in various ways that inform, I think, a really beautiful and really different approach to reading that than a lot of readers of your book are going to have experienced. And this potentially has really profound ramifications beyond the pages of your book as a result. So you talk about this in the first part of the book in terms of what you call decompositional aesthetics. And so I'll just describe this very briefly. And this is largely in the words of the book that are kind of taken from different ventures. You talk about the calligraphic tract, okay? And I'll say, just for listeners who have no idea, a lot of the texts that you're talking about here, although that changes when we get to the end of the book. These are texts that have both kind of paintings and calligraphic texts as part of the body of the work, right? So the calligraphic tract, part of this text, as you say, dramatizes life, loss in process as a visceral, durative elaboration of lines. So you have here calligraphy is dramatizing loss, and it's visceral. And it happens in time. And you say the resulting unrest emerges as a kind of decompositional aesthetics. So after some chapters where you're elaborating the components and the concepts in this apprehensive reading that we've talked about. Right, including what you've talked about, including an attentiveness to gesture, to texture of a text, to thinking and treating and reading calligraphy as performance, you start bringing us into the text kind of examples of this decomposing and decomposition in the text itself. Okay, so part two of the book really does this very beautifully. And so let's move to part two and part three just to give listeners a sense of, like, what does this look like in practice? Okay, so part two and chapter three, which is the main chapter in part two, look closely at a figure in the Genji scrolls. Right? This is Kashiwagi, and he, as you say, epitomizes illegibility in the tale of Genji. So, Reggie, as a way to take listeners into, you know, kind of an example of what's happening in this apprehensive reading, can you tell us something about Kashiwagi and something about what's happening that's so fascinating in this text?
- [37:01]
Reginald Jackson
It's fascinating. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I can try to do that kind of succinctly. I mean, I think one thing for people. I'm not sure how many people will be familiar with Genji who'll be reading the book, but I should say Kashiwagi is really this fascinating, tragic figure in Genji. And partially because he's this figure, really, in my view, he's the only figure to really give Genji a kind of comeuppance. I mean, one of the things that makes him so interesting is that he writes in a very eccentric way, as Genji finds. Much to his chagrin, when Genji locates a letter that he's been writing to the third princess, who's one of Genji's wives, and Kashiwagi has an affair with her under Genji's nose, and Genji can't stand it and effectively kills him. And so he's a really interesting figure, partially because after Genji kind of basically stares him down and it seems like he views his this kind of evil spirit to possess Kashiwagi and kill him off, Kashiwagi's writing disintegrates. And one of the most amazing scenes in the entire tale of Genji, in my view, is when Kashiwagi is sick. He's on his deathbed effectively. And he's trying to write to Onasan no Miya, the third princess, who's now basically kind of given him the cold shoulder because she's also terrified of what Genji will do to her. Because it's clear that Genji is not pleased. And now he's the most powerful person in the realm. And he looks at his writing and it says, basically, it's turned into the Tracks of Strange Birds. So I think it's Ayashiki tori no ato. And there's lots of different ways to read that, but the very fact that in this moment of dying, he's compelled to write first of all, and then he. He's forced to look at his writing as a reflection of his own limitations, his own inability to communicate. He's kind of emasculated in that moment. And this is part of what Genji hopes for, partially because there's such this sexual undertone to writing. It's the means by which courtship happens in a hand context. So there's a lot of different things going on in the. This section. But it just seems so poignant, that moment where he looks at his own script and in some ways recognizing that he can't communicate that his writing has disintegrated into this kind of chicken scratch, effectively, where writing is everything, right? You don't see the person you're courting, you see their calligraphy long before you ever actually kind of consummate the deed. So it was just a really striking example. And so what I wanted to do is to really think about all of the different resonances of that moment of confronting death by confronting a text, and to then think about what it means for this writer, who is Kashiwagi, to also be a reader and effectively, in that moment of reading, to also be a mourner. He is now mourning himself in some ways before the fact, because he knows in looking at this, this decomposed writing, that he does not have very much time left and that he will likely not have a legacy beyond this. So the question is, how do you read a text that's broken? And I think one answer one could give is that you can't read it the same way you read a text that's not broken. And so what are the tools that we would need? And one of them, I think, when I think about apprehensive reading, he is incredibly apprehensive in reading his own reading, reading. And I mean, reading his own writing. Sorry, Right. Because he knows that. I mean, first of all, he's incredibly fearful. He can barely keep his eyes open. He can barely sit up straight. So his body is struggling to be able to read on the one hand, but he can't do it in the same way. And it's at that moment then that his dear friend Yugiri, Genji's son, comes in and effectively starts, who doesn't know all of the kind of dirty deeds that are going on, effectively staring at Kashiwagi, wondering what's going on. So now you have someone trying to recreate Kashiwagi in a very sympathetic way, but who can't understand what's going on. So I think that part of what I'm trying to do in that part of the book is to take that opacity of Kashiwagi's writing seriously and therefore to say to what extent should we take something like spirit possession, or should we take something like, if we can't read his text or what he's written, his calligraphy properly, maybe we have to think about what his hair and his beard look like, or how straight his hat is, and we have to read his body. If this text has now become in some ways a figure of his decomposing body, then we have to read that too, because that's what's going to help us understand the scene better. And obviously, I wasn't around a thousand years ago, but I think that that's part of what the artists who made the hand scrolls, this, both the calligraphy part, the calligraphic tract, and then also the painting were doing, is that they were for an audience that was intimately familiar with all of these different. With the Genji tale, they were kind of opening the text in a new way to allow people to take gesture seriously and to kind of offer different kind of hypotheses about how certain. Certain angles of architecture or coloration of different clothing items and so forth fit together to really bring the. Draw the reader into this in a way that wasn't available without the use of this particular handscroll format.
- [43:03]
Carla Nappi
Oh, I was just going to say, I mean, one of the really exciting things about this for me that I just want to flag for listeners is that, I mean, wearing my history of health and illness hat just for a second, this really excitingly points us to the idea that it's not just dying. Well, first of all, texts have bodies, and it's not just bodies that can be ill, but calligraphy can be ill. Right? And so this chapter really takes us into a method for understanding and reading illness in calligraphic terms terms. Right? In terms of like line weight, column width. And you teach us how to read the body of the text as it is manifesting illness, which I think is fascinating. And especially, you know, from the perspective of like understanding health bodies and illness and history and where those manifest, this is just really exciting.
- [43:59]
Reginald Jackson
So. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. And I think, I mean along those lines, I think it's. This is a book about a lot of things and one of them is about me trying to do these texts justice and try to proliferate as best I can, hopefully as clearly as I can, different ways of reading. And I think that's part of my own attempt to grapple with these really crazy fascinating, but also crazy difficult to handle texts. And hopefully people from different fields, whether that's history of science or medicine, or people interested in illness, can find techniques there that are helpful. I think that to go back to something you said earlier, one of the things that can be hard about this, and I think this is where the apprehensive reading comes in, is that this is not a document in a more maybe traditional or more staid historical notion much might be. This is very much this kind of creative, kind of highly idiosyncratic interpretive text. And yet it has things that teach us about how bodies and ill bodies and dying bodies, that people made sense of those at a particular historical moment and are valuable. And I think there's always this thing in the back of my mind about what deserves to be read and to be taken seriously. And at least when I was in graduate school and even since then, there's this kind of presumption that the capital H historical should take precedence and the artistic, you know what I mean? It's like this joke about all the literature students have to take the history seminars, but the history students don't have to take the literature seminars. They take other history of different regions. And maybe that's changed, but in my day that was not the case. And just even institutionally we have these kind of biases about what's valuable and how a certain document that is not as elaborate and filigreed and is not kind of flaunt in some ways it's non seriousness or does not flaunt, its fictitiousness to the same degree should somehow be discounted or not taken as seriously. And I wanted to try to read this hard, read it really as closely as I possibly could, in order to kind of push back against some of that and to try to hopefully dismantle some of those.
- [46:35]
Carla Nappi
And speaking of exactly what you just were talking about. For listeners who are particularly interested in an elaboration of some of these ideas that you just were sharing with us, the last part of the book, the conclusion, goes into issues of privilege, right? And the way that issues of privilege are entangled with the reading and having an understanding of bodies and of dying bodies. And this is also something that comes into the next chapter, actually the next two chapters of the book. So let's make sure we get to this, even if it's just a tiny little taste of this amazingly delicious cake in part three. So part three of the book elaborates a question that you were just bringing up in your discussion of Kashiwagi, and that's the question of how to read a dying body. So this chapter, or this part of the book, rather part three, mourning, it focuses on the death of Genji's most beloved wife, Murasaki. No ue. Is that how you. Okay. And it does this in order to, again, in the words of the book, examine the relationship between legibility and gendered styles of looking. So the chapter, as it says itself, performs a genealogy of her subjection. And here I just want to kind of orally footnote for listeners, there's a whole fascinating and really important discussion of genealogy and the relationship and the distinctions between genealogy and lineage earlier in the book, I think in chapter two in particular, we didn't talk about that in detail, but issues of genealogy. And that's a word that carries. That does a lot of work in the book, is what I'm saying. And so I just invoked that. Exactly. So, listeners, there's a lot more about genealogy that you can find in the book, but. Okay, a genealogy of her subjection. So this chapter, chapter four takes us a little bit into the history of these characters, relations with each other. And it argues, and this is largely in the words of the book, that Genji's melancholic attachment to the women in his life who came before Murasaki and who died, and there's a lover and there's a mother motivate his investment in her as both a student and as a lover. And that investment, like, shapes his writing, and it also shapes the way he reads her body. Okay, so there is, like, so much going on here. And I want to. Honestly, Reggie, if we had like another five hours, we could spend it just on this chapter. So.
- [49:09]
Reginald Jackson
Of course, sure.
- [49:10]
Carla Nappi
There's a lot going on. What I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about are two things that just came up in what I said that really just a Lot of work here. One of them is this idea of melancholy, and the other is the idea of pedagogy. And so let's start with melancholy. The chapter talks about melancholia as what you call a kind of failed mourning. And that's M O U R N I N G For listeners, Melancholy failed in morning. And it engages Freud pretty substantively in this. Can you talk about the importance of melting melancholia as failed mourning in terms of the work it does for the book?
- [49:48]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, sure. So I think. I mean, one thing to say is that part of. I'm a Freud fan in this book, there's other types of psychoanalysis that one could draw on. But I think that that was really helpful for me to think as a paradigm or as a kind of frame to think through some of the things that were going on, on with just kind of object relations and relationships between people and things and so forth. For me, what's really important to keep in mind for melancholic mourning or melancholia, is this notion of failure and the ways in which failure can be productive. So even when I talk about failure and the potential for failure of the book in the Note to the Reader, that's kind of what I'm gesturing towards, is that. That melancholia is. It sucks, it's painful, much like mourning, but it's also incredibly productive. And what I wanted to do in this part of the book is really think about, kind of unpack that and think about how generative melancholia could be. And what that means in Genji's case is that he's lost his mother. He's lost these women that are really close to him, these mother figures, but not also kind of other lovers. And by the time he comes, comes to Murasaki when he's older and she's effectively a child, it's exactly that kind of baggage that he's carrying that leads him to her specifically and then leads him to train her as his star pupil. So there's a way in which what he does in terms of playing with dolls and teaching her how to write and work on her poetry and so forth, grooming her effectively into being this kind of ideal companion, lover, etc. To fill all these holes in himself. I call it melancholic pedagogy. Because all the energy of that pedagogical enterprise is coming out of this loss, this really, really traumatizing, frankly, loss that he's experienced. So, I mean, when I teach Genji, my students say, oh, he's such a creep and he's so terrible and blah, blah, blah. All of which is true on the one hand. But it's also, I think, important to say, well, where are these kind of exploitive or really tyrannical desires coming from? And it's coming from this space of loss, this kind of unaddressed, this. His inability to mourn the loss of his mother and these other figures in his. In his life that push him down this path. And what that means for Murasaki is at least two things. One is that she too eventually becomes a casualty of that trauma, but she also gets this incredible education. And this was part of the. I mean, I think these last chapters were really, I don't want to say an evolution in my thinking, but I think I. Something clicked for me when I started to think about beyond any broader aspirations to make the book more worldly than a lot of work in pre modern studies tends to be. I was just thinking about just changes in the academy and what it means to teach and to learn and how I'll speak for myself, how I learned a lot from. From very difficult circumstances in my own education and the students around me, particularly nowadays folks are really dealing with a lot and trying to think about how does that generative and what does one do when you realize that with Murasaki, one of the things that's interesting is that her midare gaki, her tangled script is incredibly gorgeous, as is she. But that comes from Genji holding on too tight. And it comes from, you know, it's the product of. It accrues out of. Of his. His unresolved mourning for other people. And indeed when she dies, she's resisting, you know, she's. She's saying, you know, I want to be a nun. And he won't let her, right, because he can't bear the thought of her, of her leaving him. And that's effectively, you know, what. What pushes her over the edge, you know, so she kind of wills her own death, death at that moment. And it's really interesting to then think about how his writing then and his reading, his capacity to read and write then perishes with her because he can no longer kind of control her development, you know, how she learns and so forth. So melancholia really becomes a frame through which to understand how teaching happens and how lessons are kind of are imparted and how they can be both painful but also generative. And there's a kind of part of the idea behind the contrast between, say, genealogy and lineage is genealogy this is coming out of Foucault's notion in Nietzsche Genealogy History of it being this really complicated, frankly, kind of calligraphic process, us beset by all these different dissipations and twists and turns and everything that it's not a straight line. And even these lines that seem straight and straightforward are incredibly complex when we kind of probe beneath the surface. And so melancholia becomes a way to think about that really complicated nature of transmission or dissemination and how relationships between texts, but also between people are always kind of bearing the traces of that complexity.
- [55:46]
Carla Nappi
And this actually really nicely takes us into the fourth part of the book.
- [55:52]
Reginald Jackson
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless Way Too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [56:14]
Jackson Hewitt Announcer
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [56:20]
Marvel Studios Announcer
See full terms@mintmobile.com want consistent color for every job? Milo's Pro Rewards members get a 20% paint discount on future purchases after paint annual qualifying spend reaches $3,000 plus order eligible in stock paint and paint supplies by 2pm for free. Same day delivery by 8pm improving is easy at Lowe's. Exclude spray paint and mistints. More exclusions Terms and conditions apply. Subject to Change details@lowe's.com Terms same day delivery valid in select zip codes subject to driver availability.
- [56:49]
Carla Nappi
Details@lowe's.com SameDayDelivery so you talked about control, right? Also a little bit before, and this very much reminded me of what's happening here. So part four of the book brings us into the 20th, 21st century. And in this part of the book you chart again, in the words of the book, how loss is suppressed, redressed, or repurposed to serve a range of aims within contemporary Japanese society. So this is fascinating and we'll only have a little bit of time to talk about it, but I want to just kind of give listeners a sense of what's happening. So chapter six brings us into the Genji Scroll Scrolls Reborn project. You describe this as a kind of a resurrection or an attempt at a resurrection in which, like really interestingly, all the kind of generative darknesses and opacities of the object that we've learned to live with to Decompose together with. To read in the previous chapters are kind of taken out, right? So this. This. This exhibit or exhibition renders all of these places of discomfort and opacity transparent, or it renders them null, actually, in order to make the object as transparent as possible, the text is severed from the image. You talk about the kind of culturalist current that goes along with this. And the chapter, Chapter six does this beautiful work mourning the kinds of omissions that come from this. This selective resurrection, which is really a transformation of the object itself. And you talk here also about the gendering of the labor, where this exhibition makes much of the kind of masculine men scientists and the feminine women artists. Right? And there's all kinds of implications of that that listeners will find in the chapter. But you don't just leave it there, right? You don't just say, like, oh, you know, like, doesn't that. Isn't that unfortunate? Right. You also do the work of imagining what might an exhibition looked like that did kind of honor and live with and work with these opacities. And you describe this experimental exhibition in Chapter 7, and you call it Patina Japonica, the Time Worn Opacity Embracement Exhibition Exposition. So, Reggie, let's bring this exhibition to life briefly. Can you talk about this imagined exhibition? Why is it important? What are the stakes? And what kind of work might this be doing?
- [59:27]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, no. Yeah. Thank you. So, first of all, shout out to Phil Caffan for suggesting not the title, but just kind of putting. I did a book workshop at University of Chicago, and he was there, and he made a really great point at that workshop. And he said, when I was. This is a less kind of generous version of the book. On a very early draft, he said, it sounds like you're blaming the modern exhibition for being a modern exhibition. And I think in some ways I was. I wasn't really meaning to, but there was a kind of way in which the kind of. Of the. The militant curmudgeon in me was. Was like, you know, then they took out this and they did this and blah, blah, blah. And interestingly, I was sounding like some of the scholars that I think, you know, might have hated the book. You know, I think I was just like, they're taking. You know, they're. This is. I was. I was. This really. It was this really kind of. It wasn't reductive. I mean, I think it was this point where I was really. My love for the object was coming through and I didn't know what to do with those feelings effectively and so what was happening is that I was like, look at how terrible this is. Consumerist culture is terrible and blah, blah, blah. And I think what he was suggesting was that that's all well and good, but it doesn't go far enough. And so after thinking about it for some years, actually I was like, how do I not just complain? It's easy to criticize something, but how do you actually make something out of that? It dawned on me that I should probably try to say, okay, well, if I were to make one, like, I'm no curator, I'm no art historian, but what would the right way be? Given that we can't magically go back in time and find completion. And indeed, like I say, being comprehensive to find all the pieces and put them together into this shining hole is not misses the point completely. So how do I kind of address this? And it seemed to me that making this kind of fanciful, kind of in some ways throwback to the kind of early World's Fairs, completely kind of ludicrous, but also I think invested exhibition would be a nice way to do it. And the idea here was really to say, okay, let's take the losses and the opacities and not treat them as the kind of evil redheaded stepchildren and actually try to value them. What would it mean to give these things value as opposed to just trying to eradicate them? And so one of the things I do is try to take the emphasis off of merely looking and to make it this space where people can have coffee and tea and talk and in some ways try to. To hearken back to the kind of salon culture of Murasaki Shikibu's day. You know, this kind of Genji era type interaction with the text where people aren't just are really kind of actively trying to use it to create something else. And also not getting rid of these big black spots, but actually kind of wearing them, like having buttons of this big black spots that actually sleep really invite people to ask questions about it as opposed to just get rid of it and people can read that section. It's really just a kind of thought experiment that on the one hand might seem a little silly, but I felt like, okay, and yet it's a way to interact with these texts that is not as first of all, chauvinist ideally is not as reductive. It's also frankly not going to be as popular or as consumerist because there's very little of value to sell now. And that's important because that move away from the consumerist arc of the exhibition actually helps to cut down on some of the cultural nationalism that's subsidizing this to begin with with. So I think that was. I mean, partially. It's like we're getting towards the end of the book. I need to have some fun at this point to make sure that I don't kill myself in the home stretch. And so it had the added benefit of being a salve in dark times when one's trying to just kind of push this thing over the finish line. But it was also when to kind of push back against my own insecurities and curmudgeonly inclinations with regard to this undertaking, which was massive and expensive. And the artists that are cast as being girly artists and those manly men with the telescopes and the X rays and the other thing, they really worked really hard to do this thing and really believed in it. And I kind of wanted to. Wanted to in some ways, make myself more vulnerable in saying, I'm not just going to sit here and criticize this as being worthless or valueless at all. I'm going to try to make something that I think it does a different kind of work and give the reader the opportunity to say, oh, this is really fascinating, or this seems complete, complete nonsense. But to really, at the same time, sit with the discomfort that would come from some of the things that I'm proposing in that exhibition. I've never seen an exhibition like it, and I think there's plenty of reasons why, because I think it would be a completely unsuccessful, but therefore incredibly interesting way to do things. And I think the last thing to say on that score is just that I was inspired by Masao Miyoshi's piece Writing about Documenta X, about just how that was run and the kind of format of that exhibition and what he found so refreshing about it. When I was writing about that part and just trying to think, okay, well, how could we kind of hack the museum and do a different kind of work that wasn't just about kind of oohing and ahhing at this backlit glass and kind of effectively genuflecting before the object? You know, how can we take it into hand and use it to be more creative?
- [65:55]
Carla Nappi
It becomes part of something that you propose here in this chapter and at the end of the book that you call Dwelling with the Dead. Right. So Dwelling with the Dead as a critical practice. Reggie, as we move toward the conclusion of our conversation, can you say a little bit about what Dwelling with the Dead as a Critical practice might entail might entail.
- [66:18]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, I think one of the things it involves is just slowing down, actually, and a lot of things, in some ways, when I get to that part of the book, I've talked a lot about genealogy. I've talked a lot about apprehensive reading. I've talked a lot about trying to proliferate ways of seeing and thinking and engaging with text texts. And so in that moment, the basic argument there is that I felt like the Gendi scrolls, reborn exhibits were really trying to get rid of death and to not reckon with it, and really trying death was a bad thing. And so all these efforts to redress it were really, I think, very deliberately trying to produce a fiction of everlasting life that I thought was really pernicious. And so, by contrast, I propose dwelling with the dead as a way of mourning, first of all. So in some ways it's kind of a euphemism for mourning. And what that entails is either taking, not running away from the fact of mortality, kind of sitting with it and staring it in the face and reflecting on that and embracing that, which is hard. I think that the majority of folks don't want to think about the fact that we're all going to die and we don't know when, and that that has implications not just for how we live our lives, but how we look at other people and things and how we let things into our lives or not. Not and what we take for granted and what we overlook effectively. So dwelling with the dead was really specifically was meant to. To push against the. The tenor of that. Of those. Right, those resurrected Genji exhibitions, and to kind of propose a way of. Of reflecting thoughtfully and on these objects in ways that can be really uncomfortable people, but I think ultimately really generative in terms of alerting us to things that we wouldn't be able to see or understand otherwise. At a very concrete level, it's about looking at the calligraphy and valuing it just as much as those paintings that may or may not remind us of ourselves. So it's about, in some ways, a less narcissistic engagement with these objects, but I think more existentially or philosophically, it's about trying to slow down and look more inward in a less narcissistic way in order to read better and to understand the world in a less fascist way effectively.
- [69:12]
Carla Nappi
In fact, here's something that you come back to in the conclusion. I'm just going to read because I just love this. This is from 277 to mourn is not Merely to experience loss. Rather, mourning names a process of making legible the circumstances surrounding infusing and even demanding mortality. This grants the possibility of grappling with loss by learning to repurpose it as injury perhaps, but also as a resource for thriving. And I just wanted to get that out there because there is so much in the conclusion, right. And we won't really have a chance, chance to talk about this at any length, but there's so much in the conclusion that really dwells with that idea and carries it further into how we understand privilege, as I mentioned before, but also in terms of how we understand the relationship between these medieval issues and contemporary issues of violence of all sorts of geopolitics right now. And sort of it's really white supremacy, white supremacy in particular. And the conclusion does the work of not just saying, doesn't this suck? But like, okay, like let's, let's have it suck, like let's experience the suckage. And it does and not get over it, but as you say, get on with it.
- [70:36]
Reginald Jackson
Right.
- [70:36]
Carla Nappi
Sort of like how do we dwell with that and how do we find a way to exist and to move
- [70:43]
Reginald Jackson
forward as they thrive even? Yeah, yeah. And I know that we don't, we don't have the time to really get into it, but I mean, I think that's. I wanted to say that, I mean a couple things. One is that I really do, I mean, part of my own, over the course of the revisions of the book and so forth, I mean, I came to a different understanding of what mourning could mean. And at a certain level it's just as simple as like, oh, it doesn't have to be a sad thing. It's actually a way of making sense of things and despite all these adversities and so forth, really trying to be clear eyed and move forward and try to mine these difficult experiences to move forward. And I think it's important to say that I really wanted the book to, to the extent that it could. I mean, part of the idea behind even thinking about the 21st century and the sixth of the these exhibitions was about trying to make a gesture towards being worldly because it happens so seldom and works about pre modern Japanese literature and to really try to take that seriously and find a way to connect these things, which is really hard to do. And I'm grateful that the Genji scrolls and all that cultural nationalist sentiment was able to help me do that. But I think along those lines, things like the 2016 election and seeing how devastated a lot of my students and people generally were with the election of Trump was really on my mind, and I saw effectively how broken so many people were, and I wasn't surprised that he was elected. And so I was both kind of sympathetic and empathetic toward the people around me who were really reeling and I think, think, but also kind of trying to figure out both why I wasn't so surprised and also kind of what to say to people who were really looking for some kind of guidance and a reason not to despair. And the conclusion is trying to do that. I don't know that it does it really effectively, but it's trying to grapple with that and to think about what it means to. To. To take law seriously and not just try to move past it and then therefore miss in some ways a lot of the lessons that can be taken. Do you know what I mean? And I think I was really struck by, you know, the factionalism before the election and then afterwards, you know, this kind of red, blue dichotomy that's. That's so reductive and really, I think, was part of the reason people were just. Were so despairing in that moment. It's like blue, lost, red one, it's over. And it's like, well, politics is so much more capacious and so much broader than that. And it seemed like people were in some ways not dwelling with the dead. We're so pained, understandably, and so traumatized that we're missing this opportunity that seemed really right to really rethink an entire system of how one interacts and assumes some kind of political position and tries to. To move. And instead we're just reverting quite unconsciously in a really melancholic way, to these kind of red blue factionalisms that were part of the problem to begin with. And so I think that had this book was written long before versions of it, it just took a long time to publish. But had I been writing or revising the conclusion a year earlier, I wouldn't have been trying to really kind of grapple with those connections. But one of the byproducts of it being a product of history is that stuff is in there. And I like to think the book is better for it. Some people will really think of that as being far afield or as somehow not germane to the project. But I think it's really central because it does get us to think about things like white supremacy, supremacy in terms of how it lets us read or forecloses certain options for reading or cultural nationalism in Japan, or in the context of Brexit or in the context of Make America Great Again, or all these other things, I think that really would enhance our capacity to go back to, say, Heian texts or medieval texts with fresh eyes and really make connections that should be made in order to enrich our capacity to think better things.
- [75:13]
Carla Nappi
On that note, Reggie, thank you so much. There's so much more that we could talk about. Right. It's really just a tremendously rich book, but in the absence of another five hours, which, as I've mentioned, I would love to hard it up. Is there anything in particular that you'd like to mention that we didn't have a chance to talk about, perhaps especially for listeners who aren't yet readers?
- [75:37]
Reginald Jackson
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you so much, Carla, for, for allowing me this opportunity. I'm really grateful for it. And, and it's, you know, we can talk more, we talk more off podcast about all these other things. Yeah, I don't, I don't think so. I would just say that, you know, again, for people who aren't readers and are thinking about being readers, you know, I, I, you know, I'm grateful for your interest. I think that it's, as I mentioned in the note to the reader, I think it's a hard book because it's a hard book to read, I think, because it's trying to do a lot of different things simultaneously. But I would really hope, as a method junkie, if there are any method junkies out there, that I really do think that there's something in there for lots of different constituents, constituencies, and for the students out there that are trying to figure out whether or not, you know, to invest in old, fusty, crumbly texts because you haven't been given the opportunity or a good reason to do so. I hope that you'd find some reasons in this book. You know, I really do. You know, this is never going to be a bestseller, but I did write it with, with the hope and with the, the, the intention that, that it would actually bring people in and not alienate folks. So, I mean, it's for the reader to judge how well that happens, but it is really trying to reach beyond a very kind of boutique enclave. And, and, and I hope that people who come to it or decide to try it out will, Will really get a sense of that should they decide to pick up.
- [77:23]
Carla Nappi
So, Reggie, what's next for you now that the book is out?
- [77:28]
Reginald Jackson
Sleep. Sleep is. No, no, I mean, it's interesting. I talked to you a bit, Carla, about This. But the book in its earliest, baggiest incarnation was almost twice as long. And that's on me because I didn't know anything. I didn't know that 90,000 words was the editorial sweet spot, you know, and, and I was just writing, you know, what seemed to be germane to this topic. And it turned out that, you know, questions of sexuality, of queerness, of different types of. Of loss, not just death, were really central to that. And I ended up, you know, I'm finishing up now revisions for a second, second project, which is, it's called Approximate Remove Queering, Intimacy and Loss and the Tale of Genji. And in some ways this is kind of the complement to Textures of Mourning. It's a lot of the stuff that I had to cut from the book and it's much more focused around kind of questions of queerness, not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of different modes of relating to the world. So much more, hopefully a much broader way of understanding different types of orientations in the world with regard to intimacy and loss. And so I'm finishing that up now and I'm excited about that. And beyond that, there's two other projects that I'm kind of finishing up. One is a book on dance. So finally it's like, okay, now I'm going to do this dance project now that the tenure book is done and these other kind of more legibly invested in expertise books are done. There's a choreographer and dancer and really amazing artist named Yasuko Yokoshi, who I've worked with for some years now, who does just really great work. And I'm trying to write a book on her works now. And so I'm working on that. And then the longer term project, which is going to take a couple years, I think think is a book on slavery and performance in pre modern Japan. And that's where I finally get to kind of sink my teeth into performance as most people think of it. So it's not calligraphy, but kind of dancing and other types and apostasy and thinking about the Jesuits and Japan and no drama in a very serious way and minstrelsy and all these things and race, racial formations as well. And I'm just kind of starting out on that project and giving talks on that material now. So those are the things besides that just trying to draw a lot more and play more guitar and let the book kind of be its own thing, not reread it and slap myself in the face when I realize I should have rephrased things and stuff. This kind of mourn my ideal version of the book and get past that and just kind of keep working, kind of plugging away at other things and trying to stay healthy, you know.
- [80:32]
Carla Nappi
I hear you. And on that note, Reggie, thank you so much. I can't thank you enough. Congratulations on a brilliant oh, thank you so much and best of luck. And I'll look forward to talking with you about the next one.
- [80:44]
Reginald Jackson
That sounds so great. Thank you so much again. I really appreciate it. And one more thing. I just wanted to say thank you again to Christopher Dreier, the acquisitions editor at UIMpress, who really believe in this project. There are lots of people that helped Alison. Alexei, my wife, is also amazingly supportive in that regard, but I just want to make sure that they get their proper acknowledgement among all these other people. It wouldn't have happened otherwise.
- [81:08]
Carla Nappi
Thanks, Reggie. You've been listening to new books in East Asian Studies. Thanks very much for joining us this time and come back and check us out again next time.
- [81:23]
Jackson Hewitt Announcer
Two Good and Co Coffee Creamers are made with farm fresh cream, real milk and contain 3 grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the 5 grams per serving in leading traditional coffee creamers for a rich, delicious experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold or frothy, two Good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two Good coffee creamers Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle.