

“I think that took them off-guard. Mom really regrets dropping that mint julep glass. The set is worthless now that one of the glasses is broken.”Pandora has only just started her blog, and is writing almost in real-time about her adventures in a Japanese school. This blog will only get better, especially now that the rumour is out that she is“Yanki” (a notorious type of anti-social punk). Firefly in Japan Firefly (not his real name) came to Japan from Australia five years ago with no Japanese, little money and no friends or contacts, to study martial arts for a month. After one week of living in Tokyo he decided to stay:
“I felt like Japan was testing me. Seeing if I had what it takes. One guy at martial arts often talked about the“martial arts god”, who looks after people who come to Japan with the serious intent to learn martial arts.“If you just commit yourself to martial arts, things will happen,” he told me, as we sat on a train speeding through the Japanese countryside.”Firefly’s blog has proved to be enormously popular in a short space of time. An only cursory sampling of his writing might leave you with the impression that he is a typically“ignorant” gaijin, but you would be mistaken—enthusiastically and sincerely written, his posts are filled with valuable insights into Japanese life and culture, and his roadside encounter with a yakuza is one of many classics. ChadTheEvilXpat At the time of writing the evil Chad‘s blog has vanished, perhaps under the strain of the traffic that comes making the front-page of Reddit, but hopefully he will soon return, as his "Helpful advice of how to mess with Japanese people” was a blogging classic:
“When you're about to cross a 1-lane road with no other cars for 500 meters in either direction and there is still a mob of people waiting for the crossing light, proceed across without breaking stride. Bonus points if there are mothers holding their children back for whom you can provide a bad example, and further bonus points if anyone follows you who was previously standing there.”Chad probably is a typical gaijin, yet his candour and irreverence are refreshing. Terry Dobson’s story Not a blog, but a great story about a 70 year old using Aikido to“disarm” an aggressive drunk on a Tokyo train. Hint: Aikido translates as“the way of harmonious spirit.”
"C’mere," the old man said in an easy vernacular, beckoning to the drunk. "C’mere and talk with me." He waved his hand lightly. The big man followed, as if on a string. He planted his feet belligerently in front of the old gentleman, and roared above the clacking wheels, "Why the hell should I talk to you?" The drunk now had his back to me. If his elbow moved so much as a millimeter, I’d drop him in his socks.
“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil...people are in revolt again life itself. “While the economy has been making money” he continued,“all the money that should have gone into research and development has gone into executive compensation. If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.”Vonnegut switched from the politcal to the personal without breaking stride:
“As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments. The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night.With his audience rapt, Vonnegut broke into song, performing a tender rendition of“Stardust Memories.” Now they were reverential.
“To hell with the advances in computers,” he said after singing.“YOU are supposed to advance and become, not the computers. Find out what’s inside you. And don’t kill anybody.”Now argument there from this web-developer come meditator. Back to the political again:
“There are no factories any more. Where are the jobs supposed to come from? There’s nothing for people to do anymore. We need to ask the Seminoles: ‘what the hell did you do?’ after the tribe’s traditional livelihood was taken away.”Answering questions written in by students, he explained the meaning of life:
“We should be kind to each other. Be civil. And appreciate the good moments by saying ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’
“You’re awful cute” he said to someone in the front row. He grinned and looked around.“If this isn’t nice, what is?
A soliloquy about the joys of going to the store to buy an envelope:“One talks to the people there, comments on the ‘silly-looking dog,’ finds all sorts of adventures along the way.”Any suggestions for great writing?
“Never use semi-colons. What are they good for? What are you supposed to do with them? You’re reading along, and then suddenly, there it is. What does it mean? All semi-colons do is suggest you’ve been to college.”And...
“Make sure that your reader is having a good time. Get to the who, when, where, what right away, so the reader knows what is going on.”Back to life, and isn't a writer just a more observant reporter of life than most?
“Live one day at a time. Say ‘if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!’ “You meet saints every where. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”And to conclude:
“The greatest peace comes from the knowledge that I have enough. Joe Heller [Catch 22] told me that. “I began writing because I found myself possessed. I looked at what I wrote and I said ‘How the hell did I do that?’ “We may all be possessed. I hope so.”I hope so too. But please don't tell Kurt I've been using semi-colons...
Question: Because you write about extraordinary events, do strange things ever happen to you? Susan Cooper: Yes, sometimes they do. When I began to write 'Silver on the Tree', I found it very hard and I remember going to stay the weekend with my American publisher, I told her I was having trouble and she said, "Let's talk about it in the morning, let's go for a walk now." We went for a walk in the meadow behind her house and three things happened: We saw two swans swimming in the river, an enormous bumble-bee came flying past my nose (very late in the afternoon for a bumble-bee to be about) and then my publisher told me a tale of a strange black mink, which she'd seen in the meadow last summer and I suddenly realised that in my first chapter I had two swans, a bumble-bee and a black mink! Now that is pure coincidence, but it's the sort of thing that gives you tingles and it certainly encouraged me to go on with the book.The cross-over between fact and fiction, dream and reality, sanity and not is one of my favourite subjects—more abiding interest really—and not just because I spend time in consciousness-altering meditation every day. I was fascinated by the idea of the unreal being real from an earliest age; there was something just beyond comprehension, always gnawing away, whispering that the magical might exist in this world, just out of my reach. Which reminds me of an essay written by Indian spiritual master Sri Aurobindo, and now I really am getting diverted, called“The Intermediate Zone,” on the realm of consciousness just beyond the waking state, where dreams and half-truths take shape, informed by regions ever higher and more perfect... But no I must stop or else there will be no turning back, or finishing of what is almost finished, head turned, attention diverted by the charms of sudden temptation, and the glowing inspiration of the just started. Is this the definition of procrastination? Or just distraction.