Joyce, Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham

My lifelong fascination with James Joyce started before I left Japan. I did not discover him on my own. My brother-in-law, then my sister’s boyfriend completing his university degree in English literature, wrote his thesis on Joyce’s Ulysses and heard him talk about it. I was 18, and I remember vividly the letter S that covered the entire first page that started the opening line of the book: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. “ In 1952, after graduating from high school, I left Japan to study in the US, and Ulysses was one of my first books I bought for my bookshelf, the Modern Library reprint of the 1934 edition, with the memorable page-size S. I did not find the book easy, even though my English was good enough; but, armed with Stuart Gilbert’s guide, I read it through, and then picked up one by one the rest of Joyce’s oeuvre, including Finnegan’s Wake. For decades thereafter I kept up with Joyce studies compulsively. At first, I suppose, my attraction to Joyce was none other than its difficulty which nourished my youthful enthusiasm for anything deemed too unappealing to popular taste. For the same reason, Duchamp’s art and thought captivated me. So, in music, Stravinsky was my favorite but I soon discovered Anton Webern, Edgar Varese, and Harry Parch. My tutor in avant-garde music was the sculptor J. B. Blunk, at the time a ceramicist, whom I met when I was working as a counselor at the summer camp up the Russian River. And it didn’t take long before John Cage came to my attention. Sometime in late 50s I attended a concert of Cage’s music in San Francisco, which featured, if I recall correctly, Music for a Tape Recorder and Piano. After the first piece, the composer came on stage and addressed the audience that anyone who didn’t care for the first piece should feel free to leave the hall before the second piece started. Since then I listened to his music avidly and eventually proceeded read what he wrote. In 1995, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there was an exhibition “Rolywholyover A Circus,” dedicated to his musical and visual work; it originated in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and was “composed” by Cage himself in collaboration with the organizer Julie Lazar. As a part of the exhibition, Cage gave a talk and read from Finnegan’s Wake. Fascination with Merce Cunningham would have followed naturally from the interest in Cage’s music, since they were close collaborators. But my exposure to his choreography did not come until much later, not until the 90s. I have no memory how it came about but once I moved to New York, I have not missed a single performance by his company, until his last new work “Nearly Ninety” in Brooklyn and then beyond into the two-year Legacy Tour of the company which ends coming December. Cunningham, for me, embodied Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage and, no surprise, defined my intellectual life.