Plenty of Nothing

Earthrise

Henry Moore at the AGO

On this day in 1968 sculptor Henry Moore donated about 900 works of art to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where you can still see them. Source.

At Haneda Airport

Yasunari Kawabata and Mrs Kawabata at Haneda Airport on the way to the Nobel ceremony in Sweden, October 1968. Source.

1968 Tokachi Earthquake

The May 16, 1968 Tokachi Earthquke caused the partial collapse of this building at Hakodate University. Source.

Imperial Hotel 1923-1968

Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. Source.

Duchamp/Cage 1968

On this day in 1968 in Toronto Marcel Duchamp and John Cage played a game of chess on a board wired to convert the match into a musical composition. Source.

Hey Bulldog

The Beales recorded and were filmed recording "Hey Bulldog" on this date fifty years ago.

Zabadak

On this day in 1968 "Zabadak" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich reached #1 on the Canadian RPM singles chart. Here they are performing it on the BBC's "Top of the Pops" on Boxing Day 1967. I have absolutely no memory of this song. D

Edward Gorey on Kawabata's Nobel

    I feel the Nobel Prize has for once been given to someone I think is a good writer; what can they be thinking of? Anyway, Connie and I were sitting at breakfast talking about Kawabata, whose name I can never remember, and usually recollect it as being Watanabe, whoever he may be, when the radio suddenly announced that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize; at first I thought it was some aberration of sound in my head. He was the one I was complaining to you that he was so little translated, which will now change as I expect at this very moment the minions of Alfred A. Knopf are arranging for a great pretentious Collected Works or the like, which in this case is fine by me. Connie filched my copies of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes to take to the Vineyard to reread, else I would have sent them to you, but I think they can still be come by -- Berkeley has them out in paperback.

Edward Gorey to Peter F. Neumeyer, October 18th, 1968. In Floating Worlds: Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, page 72. Somehow, Watanabe seems to be the default Japanese name when you can't think of the right one. Genshiken chapter 59:

Cultural Differences

The morning of December 13, 1968, when Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata was in Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was awoken from his jetlagged slumber by a group of hotel employees celebrating the Feast of St Lucia. No doubt while they were thinking of this:

he was thinking of this:

(UPI photo. Carl Larsson, Morning Serenade for Prince Eugen in Sundborn. Koji Kumeta, Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, chapter 57.) About Ushi no Toki Mairi. About Lucia.

[Part 2: Reality check.

Edward Seidensticker writes about this incident in his memoir Tokyo Central (2002), page 202. One crucial difference is that Kawabata had been in Scandinavia for at least a week by St Lucia's Day, so goodbye jetlag. He writes, quoting from his own diary:

    On the next day, Friday the thirteenth, we had lunch at the Stockholm Opera House with the editor-in-chief of Bonniers, the most important Swedish publisher and also Kawabata's publisher. "The sun had come out and streamed through the southern windows, making the place seem like an orangerie, and Lucia of All Sweden came to greet us -- she was a robust blonde, said to be a swimming champion -- and I was happy." Lucia presides over the light festival at the dark time of the year, doubtless a pagan relic. Numbers of Lucias came into our several rooms at the Royal Hotel in the dead of night, their uniformly blonde hair crowned with a blaze of candles. There were photographers too. Photographs of me did not make the papers, but photographs of the Kawabatas, sitting up in bed and looking bemused, were everywhere.

Reality check on the reality check: they weren't all blonde.]