Message from lclark

[Anonymous]

Hello, Fellow Travelers:

My name is Leigh Clark. I teach AP English Language and AP Engliish Literature at James Monroe High School in North Hills (several miles east of CSUN in the San Fernando Valley). I, like most of you, have never been to Asia, although I have admired things Japanese (films, poetry, philosophy, architecture, pianos, gardens, food, cars) for decades now and have always wanted to go to Japan. After having studied the history and culture of China in the Spring 2007 NCTA Seminar, I am equally excited about visiting the Middle Kingdom, exploring its complex past and immersing myself, for a time, in the contemporary culture of the emerging (or present?) dominant world superpower. I remember meeting the late Susan Sontag back in the early 1970s when she was preparing to make her first visit to China (at that time newly opened to American travelers through the efforts of that inveterate foe of Communism, the late Richard M. Nixon). Sontag was so excited about the prospect of seeing China for the first time that she could hardly talk about anything else. She even published a poem about her anticipated visit in The New Yorker. I now know exactly how she felt.

Thanks to John Keveanos for his list of films. I intend to view the Chinese films as soon as possible. The "dark" Japanese films sound intriguing as well. But then, Japanese cinema has always had its dark side, has it not? Going back forty, fifty, even sixty years or more, we find films such as Kurosawa's Stray Dog, Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain and Kobayashi's Kwaidan, and that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I think about, there are lots of others. (In fact, come to think of it, all those Godzilla and Rodan movies are rather dark and post-nuclear, even if sometimes "silly dark"--a subject explored, by the way, in Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster" in her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation.)

From reading your postings, it sounds like we have an outstanding group assembled for our "Journey to the East" (as Hermann Hesse once put it). I had the pleasure of studying with some of you last spring and look forward to seeing you again and to meeting all the other members of our Summer Study Tour next weekend.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High