Sunday Papers: James Kirkup

"Life in Japan made a new person of me.  I learned here, sometimes painfully, how to live and how to write.  Japan has taught me to have to courage to be myself, to be an individual and solitary in a civilization where conformity is the rule and solitude the exception. [...] Beyond the pettiness of much of Japanese life, and beneath much that is ugly on the surface, there is a profound, vast, resonant affirmation of life, a sense of ultimate quiet and eternity in everything, a mythological unity."   


On the turntable:  Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, "Will the Circle be Unbroken"
On the nighttable:  Brian Moeran, "A Far Valley"