The short reading list

Trendy Japanese Flock to Hybrids. New York Times. The third generation Prius was in June the best selling car in Japan.

Japan’s Jobless Rate at Six-Year High, Prices Drop. Bloomberg. Unemployment at 5.4% in Japan, half of the U.S. rate. Deflation continues as well.

'The Cove' movie review: Exposing the cruelty of Japan's dolphin industry. NJ.com. But this film is less a work of journalism than a call to activism, it writes.

Cooking With Rice. New York Times. A blog post by Tara Parker-Pope has some appealing recipes.

Google Book Search worries Japanese authors

Irate Japanese authors see Google Book Search as 'black ships' of digital era -- The Mainichi Daily News.

Interesting piece. The thrust of the argument is that books written in English get higher rankings in Google's Book Search. The article's undercurrent of U.S. cultural hegemony via search engine dominance is balanced and interesting.

Related reading: Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) by Tomiko Yoda, Harry Harootunian, and Sabu Kosh.

A Posthumous Existence

I just read an article, Keat's Afterlife in the New York Review of Books. It's about his last three months of the poet John Keats before he died at 25.

It is a stirring look about how Keats assembled his words, thoughts and ideas in those final months. It's a review of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly. Excerpt:

Stanley Plumly's profoundly humane evocation of Keats's life and his immediate afterlife is better than magisterial, for it is masterly. Characteristic of the attentive powers is his pausing upon Keats's word past: "my real life having past." The last word does double duty and more than duty, this having passed into the past

The NYRB reivew probably won't be freely available for too long before it is moved into paid archives.