Some days are pure joy and this one surely jollified my week. I had lunch today with Rebecca Brown, the novelist, and Burton Watson, translator and friend. Rebecca is in town this week holding forth at Tokyo University on topics ranging from Oku No Hosomichi to Frankenstein. She’s the author of The Haunted house (Picador), The Last Time I Saw You and The Terrible Girls (both from City Lights), and Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary (Granta), among others. Her work has been translated into Japanese, and this explains her visit. I handed over my well-read copy of Mary Miller’s Big World to Rebecca as well as Adam Shakur’s Don’t Forget to Breathe., and of course I gave her a copy of Tom Bradley’s Even The Dog Won’t Touch Me. (She loved the cover!)

To my surprise Rebecca brought out her Polaroid instamatic and started to snap away. She loves Polaroid shots–the gritty, unfinished feel of them–and she assured us that she had tons of film for her retro snappage. I suggested that they were the 20th century’s eqivalent of the daguerreotype, but now I’m thinking that perhaps Polaroid prints are closer to the tin-type.

A great day! My best to Rebecca and Burton