Gary Dexter

Today

17 Sep 2020
Gary Dexter

Why the Japanese love wearing facemasks

On any given street in Tokyo today, almost everyone will be wearing a mask. The Covid-19 death toll in Japan is around 1,500 in a country of 126 million people. This is dramatically less than the UK’s, yet everyone still covers up, and there are hardly any anti-mask movements of the sort that have become popular in Europe and America. Why are the Japanese so happy to wear masks, when it makes some people from other nationalities so cross? The first reason is the most obvious: to avoid spreading germs. Not catching germs, mind — spreading germs. It is considered bad manners in Japan to have a cold or a cough without trying to contain the bacteria or viruses being discharged. Of course, Japanese people, like anyone else, also wish to avoid catching germs.

Why the Japanese love wearing facemasks

Thursday

28 Sep 2017
Gary Dexter

Abe’s challenge

As the only nation to have suffered mass casualties from a nuclear bomb, Japan has been understandably nervous about Kim Jong-un’s missile tests. Sales of domestic nuclear bunkers and gas masks have soared and nationally aired TV ads with a chilling ‘Protect and Survive’ flavour urge residents to hunker behind washing machines in basements and stay away from windows. This is one reason why Shinzo Abe, Japan’s long-standing Prime Minister, felt confident enough to surprise the world this week and call a snap election. In the light of Theresa May’s recent disaster, it seemed to many like a rash move. Here, on the face of it, is a Prime Minister in a very similar position to the one May held in June: seeking to consolidate support at a moment when the opposition is in disarray, predictions of a landslide… But Abe is bullish.

Abe’s challenge

Thursday

13 Jul 2017
Gary Dexter

Mixed blessings | 13 July 2017

Japan is the only developed country where people openly espouse two distinct and incompatible religions at the same time — Buddhism and Shinto. The Japanese go to Shinto shrines for weddings and children’s celebrations. They go to Buddhist temples for funerals. Shinto shrines are sometimes found within the precincts of Buddhist temples, and vice versa, so it’s possible to beseech Buddha and the fox god in the same ten minutes. To confuse the picture still further, Japan is one of the most secular places on Earth: atheism is practised simultaneously with the other mutually incompatible religions. My Japanese wife, for example, visits and prays at temples and shrines, but in all other respects takes a scientific attitude to the world (and is trained in medicine).

Mixed blessings | 13 July 2017

Thursday

11 May 2017
Gary Dexter

Found in translation

Buririggu deshita. Suraibi tōbu Wēbu de gairu to gimburu shite, Nante mimuji na borogōbu, Mōmu rassu autoguraibimashita ne. If this looks familiar, it’s not surprising. This is the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, translated into Japanese by Noriko Watanabe. Ms Watanabe is a translator of children’s books living in Sendai, in the north of Japan, and she is working on a new translation of the two Alice books. I met her in a bar called Come Here. Is translating Lewis Carroll, which is already nonsense, into another language, a near-impossible task? I asked her. ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘Actually it’s easy because Japanese is about 15 per cent English. So we can just take a word like “brillig” and turn it into wasei-eigo [Japanese-made English].

Found in translation

Thursday

31 Mar 2016
Gary Dexter

The poetic state of the nation

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-eugenics-torywars-poetry/media.mp3" title="Gary Dexter and Dean Atta discuss the poetic state of the nation" startat=1169] Listen [/audioplayer] It was past midnight in Norwich. There was a keen wind rifling up London Street. It was dark and it was January. I was hoarse, my feet hurt and, more to the point, I was cold. I had been punishing myself for four-and-a-half hours reciting poems by Eliot, Larkin, Wordsworth and Whitman. I stopped a pretty Hungarian girl and her boyfriend to ask for their favourite poem. ‘Anything by Pablo Neruda,’ she said. I told her I would recite some Neruda and offer my hat for a donation if they enjoyed it. It began well enough (‘Yo te he nombrado reina…’) but I can’t speak Spanish so I got stuck pronouncing the verbs in the third verse.

The poetic state of the nation

Saturday

26 Nov 2011
Gary Dexter

Bookends: Not filthy enough

The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It was written in 1935, rediscovered in 2003 and is now published for the first time. Marjorie, a suburban wife and mother, comes home after a ‘jaunt’ in ‘town’ to find her sister dead in the kitchen on page four It is said to be suicide, but we have doubts.Towards the end of the book, Forester summarises the action: ‘It was a filthy business, a tale of lust and murder and revenge, unredeemed by any of the nobler qualities of mankind.’ Not a bad précis, though anyone who reads The Pursued hoping to have their jaded 21st-century palate tickled is likely to be disappointed. Veils aplenty are drawn over the actual business of lust, and what murder there is in the book is accomplished with a thud offstage.

Bookends: Not filthy enough

Saturday

13 Nov 2010
Gary Dexter

The body in the library

Jacques Bonnet is a distinguished French art historian and novelist who has amassed a private library of 40,000 volumes (around double the number contained in the average Waterstones). Phantoms on the Bookshelves is Bonnet’s meditation on a life lived with so many books. Particularly pressing is the matter of classification. ‘Should I put Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology? next to his more historical works?’ he worries. ‘Should Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire be next to his studies of sexuality and euertegism (gift-giving) in ancient Rome? Does Picasso count as French or Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? And what am I to do with Michelangelo?’ At this point one is tempted to answer the question in a rather crude manner, and in fact the book is not always easy for an Anglophone reader to take.

Saturday

23 Oct 2010
Gary Dexter

Alternative Reading: Passion Bum

Robert Silverberg is the great 20th-century pioneer of science fiction, the multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of books such as Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle.Robert Silverberg is the great 20th-century pioneer of science fiction, the multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of books such as Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. What few know, however, is that he is also the super-prolific author of scores of soft-porn pulp titles under pseudonyms such as John Dexter, Don Elliott and Loren Beauchamp. Passion Bum is a prime example of this output (the phrase ‘passion bum’ sounds like the sign-off in a letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis, but uses ‘bum’ in the US sense of ‘tramp’ or ‘ne’er-do well’).

Alternative Reading: Passion Bum

Saturday

25 Sep 2010
Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 25 September 2010

The cover of On Snooker shows the Queen Mother sizing up a shot, making a passable bridge but rather failing to get behind the cue. The book is by Mordecai Richler, the great Canadian novelist and essayist, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version, who died in 2001. On Snooker takes in all the major figures of the late-20th-century game, and is unafraid to bring out its juicier side, particularly the depredations of its bad boys: Alex Higgins trashing hotel rooms, urinating in plant-pots, whaling his cue at the spectators, ending up broke, drinking from left-over beer glasses; Ronnie O’Sullivan and his dad, Ronnie O’Sullivan Sr., who ran a dirty books empire (‘Ron’s the name, porn’s the game’) and was put away for stabbing a chauffeur; and Steve Davis, who because of his prostate complaint Richler labels ‘the sly old pisser’.

Monday

14 Dec 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 14 December 2009

Here are two Alternative Reading Christmas gift ideas: books respectively by Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The Gordonian offering is by an ordained minister who wants to help you with your finances. ‘Gordon Brown’s message is very clear,’ the back cover says. The Cameronian offering is by a poet from Brooklyn, whose poems are ‘false translations’ of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. This he achieves by taking the original French verse and then transmuting it into English via a sort of wilful mishearing: ‘Tout Entière’, for example, becomes ‘Two Ton Chair’, and its first line, ‘Le Démon, dans ma chambre haute…’ becomes ‘Lime demons are out dancing.’ The back cover puts the matter in a nutshell: ‘David Cameron may very well be the best of the unknown rip-off artists of his generation.

Wednesday

2 Dec 2009
Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 2 December 2009

Thomas Keneally is the Booker-Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Tom Keneally is the author of The Utility Player, a biography of the rugby league player Des Hasler. Naturally Thomas and Tom are the same person. The unashamed idolatry of The Utility Player is difficult to convey here, but can be glimpsed in the following description: ‘Des is an Australian version of an Arthurian knight. His heart was strong because his soul was rigorously aligned . . . he is the Zen practitioner of rugby league, the code’s monk.’Keneally is one of those people who see a single sport as a template for the clockwork of the universe, and he is not alone among practitioners of fiction in this.

Wednesday

18 Nov 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 18 November 2009

The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Crackow (a ‘crack’ being 18th-century slang for a fart).The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Crackow (a ‘crack’ being 18th-century slang for a fart). Its real author, however, was Jonathan Swift, though you will search in vain through biographies to find any reference to the fact. That The Benefit of Farting was a real emanation of the Dean of St Patrick’s is hardly to be doubted, since it appeared in the fifth edition of his Miscellanies of 1736, when the author himself was still alive.

Wednesday

4 Nov 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 4 November 2009

William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare.William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare. In substance it is a reworking of the Swiss tale from a humorous angle. This was long before Jeeves and Bertie, Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner and Ukridge, and before even most of the school stories (Mike only appeared in 1909, five years after William Tell). Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1941: ‘Collectors prize as bibliographical rarities such early works as William Tell Told Again and Swoop, but it is impossible to discern in them any promise of what was to come.

Wednesday

21 Oct 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 21 October 2009

Love Letters of a Japanese begins: ‘These letters are real.Love Letters of a Japanese begins: ‘These letters are real. And like all real things they have a quality which no artificial counterpart can attain.’ They were pseudonymously published by Marie Stopes, the birth control reformer, under the editorship of ‘G. N. Mortlake’, and document a love affair between ‘Mertyl Meredith’ and ‘Kenrio Watanabe’. ‘G. N. Mortlake’ was an invention; Marie herself was ‘Mertyl’; and a married Japanese botanist, Kenjiro Fujii, was the model for ‘Kenrio’. Marie had had a disastrous love affair with him, and Love Letters of a Japanese, in edited form, are their billets-doux. Both Marie and Fujii were at the time professional botanists (this was before Marie’s career in birth control), and while Fujii busied himself with papers such as ‘Has the Spermatazoid of a Gingko a Tail or None?’ Marie replied with loving echoes in ‘The Flora of the Inferior Oolite of Brora’.

Wednesday

7 Oct 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 7 October 2009

‘Recipe for a chic murder,’ runs the blurb on the back of Death Likes it Hot.‘Recipe for a chic murder,’ runs the blurb on the back of Death Likes it Hot. ‘Take a social-climbing dowager; a house-party full of bright, brittle, amoral idlers; let simmer for a long hot summer weekend, and you get the fanciest killing of the season.’ ‘Recommended to all but maiden aunts,’ said the Manchester Evening News. ‘Welcome to another 100 percent thriller by Edgar Box,’ said the Glasgow Evening News. The Spectator joined in the general praise: ‘The relaxed urbanity of Mr Box ensures a smooth surface finish.’ Indeed. Only it wasn’t by Edgar Box. Edgar Box was a pseudonym for Gore Vidal. After publishing The City and the Pillar in 1948, no mainstream newspaper in the USA would review his literary novels, so he decided to turn out thrillers.

Wednesday

23 Sep 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 23 September 2009

Ermyntrude and Esmeralda was written in 1913 but not published until 1969, long after Lytton Strachey’s death. The delay was not surprising: the book consists of an exchange of letters between two naïve 17-year-old girls who are determined to find out where babies come from. Ermyntrude theorises that ‘it’s got something to do with those absurd little things that men have in statues hanging between their legs’, and reports to her eager correspondent thatOnce, when I was at Oxford, looking at the races with my cousin Tom, I heard quite a common woman say to another, ‘There, Sarah, doesn’t that make your pussy pout?’ And then I saw that one of the rowing men’s trousers were all split and those things were showing between his legs.

Wednesday

9 Sep 2009
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 9 September 2009

Patricia Highsmith, as readers will know, was the author of the upmarket thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, among others. She was also a keen artist, and illustrated (rather than wrote) the rare book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, to text supplied by her friend Doris Sanders. Its pages, somewhat Seussian in tone, include statements such as: ‘Mabel Grable, a sable, reads a fable at the table in the stable near the gable with a cable’; ‘A monk and a skunk and some junk on an elephant’s trunk’; and ‘A veil on a snail.’ The book was published by Coward-McCann, who also handled her adult fiction. Until her mid-twenties Highsmith thought of herself as an artist, rather than as a writer, and, after she had made the decision in favour of writing, continued to turn her hand (a very large hand, as friends pointed out) to painting, drawing, wood-carving and carpentry.

Friday

12 Dec 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 12 December 2008

James Patterson likes rape, torture, mutilation and death. So do his readers. Who doesn’t? It has been estimated that Patterson’s lifetime sales of thrillers have now topped 150 million, and that one in every 15 hardbacks bought in the world in 2007 was a Patterson novel, which means that we must all like rape, torture, mutilation and death, perhaps with extra rape on the side, and then some child rape, child torture, child mutilation and child death, then some more rape, more death and more rape, and finally some rape, death, rape and death. But it isn’t all rape and death: James Patterson also wrote the book at hand, SantaKid. This is the heartwarming tale of ‘Santa’s little girl’, Chrissie, who lives at the North Pole with Santa and Momma Claus.

Wednesday

3 Dec 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2008

‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is full of delights. A submarine has stalled on the ocean floor, and Willy and his teddy bear, Randolph, set out on the back of the Rightwayup Bird to save it from Konrad the Killer Kipper. On the way they are helped by Sybil the Seagull, an aspiring author and correspondent for the Bird Times who talks loftily about how humans are always plagiarising her articles. Finally Willy and friends prevail, the submarine is saved from the Killer Kipper and the book ends with Willy, flying back home to Cambridge for tea, where his father announces that ‘a famous Hollywood producer is planning to make a film about the whole miraculous escape’.

Wednesday

19 Nov 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2008

Chekhov originally wrote the dramatic monologue, On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in 1886, and substantially revised it for a second version of 1902 shortly before his death. It deals with Ivan Ivanovitch Nyukhin, a hen-pecked husband who delivers a lecture (at the request of his wife) on the evils of smoking. The play has largely been ignored by Chekhov scholars in the West, despite the fact that the original version was popular in Russia in the 1880s as a farce: it was only published in translation in 1954, and appeared in the edition shown above in 1977. Nyukhin is a Chekhov stock character, a man utterly compromised by wedlock, whose wife calls him ‘dummy’, ‘viper’ or ‘Satan’ as the mood takes her (in real life, of course, Chekhov kept the various women in his harem firmly in their place and at the end married Olga Knipper only on the condition that ‘like the moon, she does not appear in my sky every day’).

Wednesday

5 Nov 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 5 November 2008

Ken Follett is a cult in countries such as Japan, Italy and Spain — in Spain, in fact, there is a statue to him, inaugurated in January this year, in the town of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque country. In Britain he is also loved, but perhaps not with the fanatical devotion he deserves. Most people don’t even know that he wrote under the pen-name, early in his career, of Bernard L Ross. In fact, most people haven’t heard of Amok, King of Legend, a book widely known in Holland, France, Tibet, the Republic of Ireland, Ghana and Germany, where it appeared with the title Amok: Der Killer Gorilla. The plot is as follows. A film crew go to a hidden African valley where they find a giant ape. The ape falls in love with the pretty production assistant, Purity Lane, and is captured and taken back to San Francisco, where he wreaks havoc.

Wednesday

22 Oct 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2008

The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of Hydra and became Mrs Yorgo Cassapidis). It was while living on the ranch that Huxley began experimenting seriously with psychotropic drugs such as mescaline and LSD. The story deals with two crows, the female of which wears an apron. Mrs Crow finds that her eggs are being eaten by a Rattlesnake, and after suffering 297 such thefts in a single year (she does not work on Sundays and public holidays) she begs Mr Crow to destroy it.

Wednesday

8 Oct 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 8 October 2008

Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his bow. He is, for example, an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, and has written or co-written several books in the field of law and medicine, among them The Forensic Aspects of Sleep, The Duty to Rescue and The Criminal Law of Botswana, all of which could serve as titles for No.1 Ladies’ Detective novels. Among the most obscure in this category, often unlisted in bibliographies, is the title at hand, an early-Eighties primer for children and teenagers on drugs such as ‘pot’, ‘pep pills’ and ‘zen’ (apparently LSD), which contains the perhaps outdated advice that ‘alcohol and tobacco .

Wednesday

24 Sep 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 24 September 2008

Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979), by Philip PullmanBefore Lyra, before polar bears and His Dark Materials, and before his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982, Philip Pullman was a lowly drudge in the very humblest halls of lexicography. Pullman in fact spent his earliest career in teaching, working at various Oxford middle schools before moving in 1986 to Westminster College, where he taught B. Ed. students. In 1979 he did some jobbing work for Oxford University Press and produced the booklet at hand, Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (his name appears only on the inside cover, though he is the sole author). It is the usual fare for small learners of English, with puzzles, mazes, games and jokes, and a selection of jaunty section headings such as ‘Vampire Stew’, ‘Savage Seagull’, ‘Writing about Wrecks’ and ‘Useful Nostrils’.

Wednesday

10 Sep 2008
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 10 September 2008

Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing to do with the Tube system, therefore, but is a plea to ‘give government back to the people’, published in the year of the introduction of the Poll Tax and a few months before the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. It paints the UK as ‘the most centralised state in Europe, with a few obvious exceptions such as Romania and Albania’ — an interesting conclusion by an author writing at the end of ten years of Thatcherite assaults on the socialist public sector — with a chokehold on local government, education and housing.

Saturday

15 Dec 2007
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 December 2007

Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously early in his career. Amazons is a woman’s first-person confessional account written covertly by a man. Not content to stop there, DeLillo makes this a book almost entirely about sex (there is very little hockey in it). Every ten pages is a new sexual encounter in which the characters go at it rather in the way Marvel superheroes fight — each coital manoeuvre is accompanied by witty repartee (‘Is that you?’ asks one character feeling for an orifice.

Surprising literary ventures | 15 December 2007

Saturday

1 Dec 2007
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 1 December 2007

A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt’s novels are The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan and The World of Null-A. He also produced this little book, published in 1992 but conceived much earlier, a pre-feminist and pre-pop-biology attempt to pin down the problem of the violent male, or as he also termed it, the ‘right man’ — ‘right’ in the sense of wishing always to be right. The ‘right man’ is abusive towards women, is prone to outbursts of jealous rage, has a secret death-wish, and can be found at the helm of ‘all Communist countries’. This places the booklet firmly in the 1950s: it is essentially a Cold War production, and the fear is that man’s innate psychopathology will result in annihilation.

Surprising literary ventures | 1 December 2007

Saturday

17 Nov 2007
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 November 2007

The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave themselves, in VERY LARGE RED CAPITAL LETTERS. ‘I have a VERY DIFFICULT JOB here,’ he admits in the first paragraph. ‘Young people are fed up with being told by grown-ups WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO ... and now I am going to have to tell you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO.... This is something I have never done in any of my books. I have been careful never to preach, never to be moralistic and never to convey any message to the reader.

Surprising literary ventures | 17 November 2007

Saturday

3 Nov 2007
Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007

The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after which they will be dealt a painless and compulsory euthanasia. The Fixed Period is similar in style to a book published a few years earlier, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in film perhaps its closest kinship is with Logan’s Run or Soylent Green. Let any man look among his friends,’ Neverbend says, ‘and see whether men of 65 are not in the way of those who are still aspiring to rise in the world.

Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007
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