From Maine to Japan

Evolution to the Pig

2010-12-12T21:41:00.001+09:00

Japanese t-shirt commentary on U.S. culture, perhaps?

Francis Francesca!

2010-10-25T22:45:00.002+09:00

DO NOT BE A DOG! Wear the t-shirt you choose!

DO NOT BE A MONKEY

2010-10-05T23:44:00.003+09:00

This is from a line of Nagoya-specific t-shirts along the same theme (Do not be a cat! Do not be a rabbit!) Some people say the ability to communicate is what distinguishes humans from other animals, but apparently it's our ability to choose t-shirts. ^-^

Does All Undead...

2010-09-27T23:23:00.002+09:00

From a t-shirt:

Um, maybe? Is this a trick question? Actually, I mostly loved the use of blackletter font there, very Gothic. :)

Ulitemate!

2010-09-25T09:05:00.003+09:00

I've been on the road for about a month now. It's great to see my family and travel and relax, but it's also good to be home. Home, where the Janglish calls:

I confess the "ulitemate" caught my eye, and I only noticed "Microsoft Widows" later! Is that like golf widows? Women whose husbands play way too much Minesweeper...?

All Times You'll Feel Pleasant

2010-07-17T21:30:00.002+09:00

This notebook is pretty confident of its ability to impress:

It's a very assertive Note Book! Sadly, even though I've bought and used it regularly, not all times feel pleasant with it, especially when taking notes in meetings. But the English helps a bit, I must admit.

The Art of Hot

2010-06-30T21:45:00.004+09:00

I believe this is probably Jim's response to this plaint:

Lame Mirror

2010-06-15T19:41:00.003+09:00

A self-portrait of sorts.

To be fair, the Japanese below the label gives the correct pronunciation, but without the accent, at first glance it still just looks...lame.

I am unpleasant.

2010-05-30T23:58:00.002+09:00

Another wistful dog with a shaky grasp of English from another bag:

"If I am here, can you go out with you?" sounds like something of an existentialist Zen koan...

Foot Pee!

2010-05-18T23:19:00.004+09:00

I just bet it's a surprise...

In a related story, I saw a baby with a bib that had "Hi!!" on it. Because of the font and the el-to-exclamation-point issue, it looked remarkably like "Kill" The image of a baby with an adorable little "Kill" bib on kept making me giggle...

Your Word is Like Magic.

2010-05-09T22:46:00.007+09:00

A gift bag spotted in a convenience store featuring a loquacious dog with a tenuous grasp on the English language:

It's the "splease praise me" that clinches the deal, I think. I am sorely tempted to buy this bag and hold it between me and the world some days.

SPLEASE PRAISE ME

Awesomeness

2010-05-02T21:38:00.005+09:00

I'm trying to figure out where to go with this blog. I like keeping it, but I'm never sure what to post. If I had a gift for free-wheeling excellence in thought like Fresca and Margaret, I'd be home free! But somehow my thoughts never seem very free-wheeling when typed out. Alas! I am ploddingly linear, it seems.

But I do have an iPhone, which means I have the ability to take pictures on the fly. Also, I live in Japan, which does give some good opportunities for imagery (especially of amusing English used in advertising). So I'm going to try to post some photos of daily life here and there.

This one, however, has nothing to do with Japan--but everything to do with awesomeness:

Dolls purchased from www.thinkgeek.com and now adorning my bookcase! The eyebrows...the eyebrows...

"Ghazal" by Zeb-un-Nisa

2010-04-12T23:26:00.004+09:00

Ghazal

You with the dark burly hair and the breathtaking eyes,
your inquiring glance that leaves me undone.

Eyes that pierce and then withdraw like a blood-stained sword,
eyes with dagger lashes!
Zealots, you are mistaken - this is heaven.

Never mind those making promises of the afterlife:
join us now, righteous friends, in this intoxication.

Never mind the path to the Kaabah: sanctity resides in the heart.
Squander your life, suffer! God is right here.

Oh excruciating face! Continual light!
This is where I am thrilled, here, right here.

There is no book anywhere on the matter.
Only as soon as I see you do I understand.

If you wish to offer your beauty to God, give Zeb-un-Nisa
a taste. Awaiting the tiniest morsel, she is right here.

Zeb-un-Nisa (1639-1706)

---------

I'm not sure where I ran across this poem--it's by a Sufi poet whose name is a title that means simply "the most beautiful of women." Her Wikipedia page is sketchy at best and almost makes me think she's apocryphal, but that doesn't change my feelings for the poem, which is earthy and ecstatic, nearly pained with desire. There's something frankly appraising and rather possessive about it that saves it from sentimental swooniness for me. Who needs an afterlife when I have your face right now?

Variations on the Word "Sleep," by Margaret Atwood

2010-04-08T11:01:00.008+09:00

Variations on the Word "Sleep"
Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

----

That's William Blake's drawing of Virgil watching Dante and Statius sleep as they make their way toward Purgatory
in The Inferno. I know nothing at all about Statius, although Wikipedia tells me he is the character with the fourth-
largest amount of time in the Infero, after Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice. He was apparently another poet who Dante
meets on the way.

I went looking for a more traditional image of couples watching each other sleep, but was struck by the way Blake's
visionary, dreamy art fits the mythological overtones of Atwood's poem, which brings The 12 Dancing Princesses
and Orpheus' descent into Hades to mind for me.

Watching someone lost in dreams which you can't share is usually a melancholy image--Atwood adds another layer
to it by having the narrator long for even that level of bittersweet intimacy with the beloved.

"Bonnard's Nudes," by Raymond Carver

2010-04-07T23:52:00.006+09:00

Fresca has reminded me that April is National Poetry Month once more!

Bonnard's Nudes
by Raymond Carver

His wife. Forty years he painted her.

Again and again. The nude in the last painting

the same young nude as the the first. His wife

As he remembered her young. As she was young.

His wife in her bath. At her dressing table

in front of the mirror. Undressed.

His wife with her hands under her breasts

looking out on the garden.

The sun bestowing warmth and color.

Every living thing in bloom there.

She young and tremulous and most desirable.

When she died, he painted a while longer.

A few landscapes. Then died.

And was put down next to her.

His young wife.

-----------------

I'm sure this could be read as the folly of freezing an ideal in time, not allowing your mental picture to match reality. But I feel like if that were the message he could have gone on painting her without her actual presence, as her reality would have become superfluous to him. Instead I like to read it as a discussion of the kind veils our minds can place for us, the way love lets us see the other as glowing even when they are not (and perhaps never were, it probably doesn't matter). The way love transfigures. It's a dangerous power and one that can blind us, but it can also make beauty.

Also, I am quite a bit in love with simple language and grammar at the moment, and so Carver tends to grab me. I wish I could capture that plain luminosity in words half so well.

"I Love Me"

2010-04-06T20:51:00.003+09:00

One of the things that drives me craziest about romance comics is the advice columns. Most comics would run a "self-help" column--usually, not surprisingly, on how to catch and keep a man. This advice is usually completely crazy-making and I end up with a sense of free-floating anxiety just reading them. Like the following:

A lot of that isn't even bad advice! Don't be narcissistic, get a job (if your husband doesn't mind!), don't worry about your looks because your character is more important. And yet of course the underlying crazy-making is the message "Don't be too obsessed with catching a man--BECAUSE YOU'LL NEVER CATCH A MAN THAT WAY!" There's an insane catch-22 to a lot of this, like the upper right column: you shouldn't be a perfectionist. Why? Because people with unrealistic ideals of beauty often don't even bother trying anymore. So you mustn't be a perfectionist--because it will stop you from looking perfect!

And of course there's a definite feeling that staying too glamorous after marriage is just asking for trouble. No, you should be focused on being emotionally supportive to your husband, not on looking good (because there might be a chance you're dressing up for another man?) Be selfish by appearing to be selfless--men like that in a woman, and so you'll selfishly get to keep your man.

It's like reading a demented Alice in Wonderland set of rules in which every rule ends up doing just the opposite of what it says.

Find Me a Bride!

2010-03-27T22:28:00.002+09:00

From Young Brides, a truly nutty story of a guy who decides his widower father needs a wife. His father finally agrees to send his son down the "Frisco" to pick out a bride for him. Not terribly surprisingly, when the guy picks out the perfect woman, he promptly falls in love with her. When he gets all noble about it, the woman is refreshingly annoyed:

"Rar! I promised my Dad a woman, and I'm bringing him a woman!"

But when she arrives, she blurts out that she can't marry the father. The father is pretty phlegmatic about the whole thing:

As it turns out, he got married while his son was gone. :) Weirdest matchmaking ever? Perhaps! But everyone lives happily ever after...

A Rube Goldberg Life

2010-03-13T16:12:00.002+09:00

Ironically, just a day or two after posting about how Rube Goldberg machines reflect a way of thinking about life, I happened to see this video in which a young Japanese couple's life becomes a vast Rube Goldberg machine, full of items connecting them to person after person and providing impetus for the next encounter.

Viva Rube Goldberg!

2010-03-10T17:33:00.003+09:00

Why do we love Rube Goldberg machines so much? There's an undeniable thrill to the breathless curiosity of What will come next? and Can they really pull this off? I think it's the implausibility of it all. OK Go is famous for their viral music videos...I think my favorite moment of this is the delighted giggle at the end when you realize why they're all soaked in paint and what it implies.

I always think of the old saw "Life is just one damn thing after another" when I see these things. There's a sort of weird hope to them, like the one damn thing after another that drives us through our lives might actually end up being part of an obscure and intricate pattern that leads to something meaningful (a hope that is probably best off being tucked away somewhere, in my opinion, but I indulge it for goofiness like this).

Somehow the lyrics augment that for me, too.

Let it go, this too shall pass.
(You know you can't keep lettin' it get you down. No, you can't keep lettin' it get you down.)

When the morning comes.
(You can't keep lettin' it get you down. You can't keep lettin' it get you down.)

"Blame it on My Heart!"

2010-03-02T11:45:00.003+09:00

This week, the romantic story of two doormats who waste years of their life in service of a sociopath! He was an abusive liar, but the two who loved him would only murmur..."Blame it on My Heart!"

(I swear, I wanted to slap both of the romantic leads REALLY HARD in this one).

I think it's pretty clear Tod's got a thing for Jerry as well (I'm not sure why a boy would be showing another boy the "buttercup under the chin" trick, lol).

That...really should have been a deal-breaker. But no, darn that Jerry, his cold-blooded psychopathic charm is just too much!

And I can only conclude that these two wet sponges are perfectly suited to each other...at least until another crazy abuser comes along (or, more likely, Jerry swears he has mended his ways) and they both fall all over themselves to please him...

"Tragic Bargain!"

2010-02-24T21:40:00.003+09:00

Another romance comic about money! This one features a heroine who is apparently legitimately mousy but sweet, and who shows a surprising amount of spine and spark when betrayed. She crumples soon after, of course, but I still do enjoy the tongue-lashing she gives her brother and lover when she discovers their..."Tragic Bargain!"

The preponderance of men with pipes in romance comics cracks me up, somehow. It seems to have been a sign of...suavity? Sophistication? Something like that...which is odd as the romantic lead in this one isn't particularly suave at all...

Despite dedicating herself to her brother and niece's happiness to the exclusion of love, Fay happens one day to run into a handsome man. Later, he seeks her out and they fall in love. But after their clinch, trouble begins to surface in paradise:

I'm not exactly sure I follow the logic of that ending, but ah well. For a self-sacrificing Angel of the House, Fay shows a surprising amount of spine, all things considered. And I guess I'm glad to see her out from under her brother's paternalistic thumb a bit...I just kind of wish she'd kept walking until she found a job and a life somewhere else!

"Dangerous Corner!"

2010-02-07T11:20:00.003+09:00

I like this one not only for the melodrama of a woman falling in love the day before her wedding, but also for a couple of traditional romance comic tropes that appear.

The "trapped in a revolving door" moment is...surprisingly erotic there, I think.

They run into each other later the same day and he decides it must be fate, and takes her out to dinner.

I love the next set of panels for the romance comic tears--crying is of course very common in romance comics and yet very, very difficult to portray in art. So romance comics tend to have incredibly stylized tears, as below:

I also love the broken...language...of...despair! And yet despite the crushing melodrama I think the art and writing actually do pretty good job of conveying the rather ludicrous situation...

The next day she puts on her wedding dress, but cannot bear to go to the ceremony and wanders the streets aimlessly, finding herself back where she met her love the night before.

I assume this is a drawing fluke, but her true love looks rather taken aback to find that she's available.

And so stoic Donald goes off into the sunset, sadder and wiser, and hopefully less likely to get engaged to women who fall in love with people because they get stuck in a revolving door with them.

One Reckless Moment!

2010-01-31T00:13:00.003+09:00

I was mentioning to Rudyinparis that a LOT of women's comics plots revolve around class issues--either fantasies where love overcomes class barriers, or more sobering tales where even the deepest passion can't survive the pressures of class.

"One Reckless Moment!" starts with an impetuous young heiress going into a waterfront dive on a whim, where she meets Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome himself:

Mmm, a big, grimy hulk of a man. I'm struck with how the artist struggles with drawing a man who isn't a traditional clean-cut guy. He clearly feels a lot happier when Joe shaves later...

(He kisses her again...and she doesn't mind!)

I also like how his shirt apparently gets ripped open with the force of that blazing kiss. Though I must admit that panel has an energy lacking in a lot of romance comics...

They decide to get married anyway, but when they throw a party and invite both his and her friends, it becomes clear how impossible the divide between them is.

Well, that was a bummer. Love does not always conquer all in the heated prose of romance comics!

Forbidden Future!

2010-01-27T22:22:00.010+09:00

When I was a wee lass, visiting my grandmother's, my sister and I found a box full of musty romance comics that had belonged to my uncle. We consumed enough of them that we were capable of drawing our own "fake romance covers" later (I wish I could find those now!).

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I've gotten my hands on some vintage romance comics from the 50s-70s. Fun, sometimes very crazy stuff. For example: Forbidden Future! a cautionary tale of the dangers that divorce will wreck on your life, with a sentimental happy ending thrown in for the bargain (you couldn't count on romance comics having happy endings, by the way--each title had a different "tone," and some leaned heavily toward "she learned too late" sorts of stories).

In Forbidden Future! (yes, the exclamation point is necessary!), a young divorcee returns to her home town to discover that her reputation is permanently soiled by her hasty actions:

Our heroine explains her sad situation:

There's a pretty creepy near-rape scene:

The doctor and she fall madly in love, but she's afraid to marry him because his patients may shun him for marrying such a loose woman. He supports her, but she decides to flee town rather than ruin his life:

I love the 180 degree turn of the town scold there. :)

So in summary: divorce might ruin your reputation, but if you manage to save a busload of school children from a blazing death, you can salvage it somewhat! No problem!

Robin can sympathize

2009-11-30T20:39:00.002+09:00

From a very old Japanese manga that was--roughly--based on Batman and Robin. There's something about Robin's face, like he's seriously thinking this one over, that gets me.

Which reminds me that I've been meaning to post some random panels from romance comics here! There's something delightfully campy about the old 50s and 60s romance comics, and I also have fond memories of reading them in the attic of my grandparents' house, where my uncle kept a box of them. I'll have to do that sometime soon...

National Communication Association Papers!

2009-11-01T23:24:00.004+09:00

Next week I head to Chicago for the annual National Communication Association convention--my chance to catch up with old mentors, fellow students, and co-workers, and attend a few academic panels in the process. To give some indication of the range of topics and approaches available at this convention, I've culled a few titles here and there. Some I can understand, some I can not. :)

--Gossipy Talk in Organizations: When the Water Cooler is Virtual
--Hip Hop Goes to Washington: Boundary Work and Symbolic Capital in the Congressional Hearing on Hip Hop
--Let’s Talk About Sex: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in the Field of Family Sexual Communication
--Resuming a telling: well-prefaced turns after a parenthetical sequence
--HooCooks for HappyFeet: Discourses of stable and changing selves on the Appalachian Trail
--The Angst of Ambivalence, Child-like Dependence and Phallic Weakness in the Songs of Kris Kristofferson
--The Public and Scary Science: Biotechnology to Synthetic Biology

And my personal favorite, which I would go to if I weren't having to catch a plane at the time:

--I Can has Community: Translating and Writing about Norms and Language in a LOLcat Fan Group

Tofu Shop Open for Business

2009-10-25T23:06:00.006+09:00

From Donald Richie's A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, a quote from director Ozu Yasujiro:

"I've always said I don't make anything but tofu...I'm like a tofu shop--so even when making a brand new film, I can't suddenly change to comething completely different. It has to be something like maybe fried tofu or stuffed tofu, but certainly not pork cutlets."

I like creators who know their themes and prefer to make very good tofu as opposed to mediocre pork cutlets, myself. Though I suppose you'll never know if you can make good pork cutlets unless you try...

Awesome Women in Film Part II

2009-10-24T19:35:00.006+09:00

Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle/Catwoman in Batman Returns. Batman Returns came at a time when I was in a not-very-good relationship, and Pfeiffer's depiction of a women who uses her near-death experience to make herself over into a badass fighter who takes no crap from anyone was...inspiring. I loved that she rejected Bruce Wayne at the end despite admitting the appeal of being swept away like a fairy princess. "I'd love to live with you in your castle...but I just couldn't live with myself."

Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia. Fresca writes about Amy Adams in Julie & Julia, but it was Streep that captivated me. I loved her gusto, her passion and warmth, and the openly sexy and mutually-admiring relationship she has with her husband.

Emma Thompson as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Witty and sarcastic, caring and perceptive, Thompson brings so much crackle to this role and her scenes with her then-husband Kenneth Branagh as Benedict, as their battle of wits becomes a cover for more tender feelings.

Michelle Yeoh as Yu Shu-Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I could just watch Yeoh's face for hours in this movie. She's so contained and restrained, and the death scene with Chow Yun-Fat is heartbreaking as they realize they're out of time to say the things they never said to each other. Plus, she kicks ass and her martial arts scenes are totally believable (well, as believable as any of the fight scenes in this movie that relies heavily on nicely done wire-fu).

Awesome Women in Film Part I

2009-10-24T12:53:00.003+09:00

So Fresca did some posts on women in movies, promping me to ask myself which women came to mind when I thought of my favorite actresses and characters. The ones that most immediately leapt to mind:

Dame Judy Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love. I liked this movie, but it did tend toward the glurgy...but Dench cut through any glurge in her brief appearances as the cynical, world-weary Virgin Queen, raising a dubious eyebrow at the shenanigans of the young lovers.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee Holloway in Secretary. Secretary is a love story about a shy, damaged woman who wants to be dominated sexually, and the man she finally cajoles into doing it. There's lots of room for squick in that description, but Gyllenhaal completely sold her part and made me believe totally that this was what she wanted and what she reveled in. In fact, she was so convincing that I found the end of the movie--a more conventional sort of happy-end where it's fairly clear that the humiliation and BDSM are more safely compartmentalized into the bedroom--rather disappointing.

Katherine Hepburn as Rose Sayer in The African Queen. Resourceful, passionate, intelligent and funny, Rose discovers the depths of her abilities over the course of the movie and ends up grabbing life with both hands, fighting Nazis, and falling in love. She's awesome, and of course Hepburn plays her with zing and energy.

Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton in Vertigo. Yes, she's a cypher. But what a cypher she is! Novak's tormented performance in the second half as the man she loves slowly remakes and destroys her is stunning and terrifying.

Walk, Don't Run!

2009-10-17T12:06:00.003+09:00

U900, a Japanese ukelele duo composed of a knit rabbit and knit bear. Only in Japan, I swear. The video is a cover of the Ventures tune "Walk Don't Run." The rabbit starts off by saying "All right, the faster we finish this the faster we can go eat," and the bear agrees. The translated lyrics are basically like, "If you rush things, you'll get it wrong...you should take your time, relax. It's no good if you get it wrong." At the end the rabbit announces, "That was perfect!"

The really funny thing is that on the full video, found on their official DVD (which I might have bought), it closes with a voice off-screen saying, "Uh, guys? The tape wasn't rolling yet." And which point the rabbit and bear get appalled looks on their faces and mutter "If you rush things, you'll get it wrong."

Words to live by! I've taken to muttering "Isogaba (gabagaba) maware!" when I'm feeling stressed recently.

Also, their cover of "Tequila" is amazingly cute. :)

Culture Shock in Many Directions

2009-05-05T22:53:00.002+09:00

I haven't posted for a while because my mother-in-law has been visiting, spending the last few weeks in April here. She just returned to America yesterday.

My mother-in-law is Japanese, but moved to America when she got married and has lived there for forty years now. It was an odd visit, because she so clearly suffered from terrible culture shock...all the more painful to her because it feels fundamentally wrong to have culture shock in the country you grew up in. But she doesn't know any modern slang (imagine someone whose English is frozen forever in the early 70s, how many terms they wouldn't know), no words for computer terms or new technology, none of the modern media. She was so exhausted by the time she was ready to go. "I'm tired," she sighed. "Everything here makes weird chirping sounds and talks at me, it's overwhelming. I want to go home."

Being an expatriate means, at some level, to resign yourself to a life of culture shock. No matter where you go, it's not quite what you're used to anymore. The Internet helps. I at least know what American Idol is, what music is popular, the latest slang I see in Youtube videos and from my friends' emails. I don't feel completely unmoored from the world I spent the first thirty years of my life in.

I've spent a quarter of my life living abroad now. That's an odd thing to realize.

Mary Oliver, "The Kookaburras"

2009-04-09T16:21:00.002+09:00

Mary Oliver can lapse into triteness, but she also has poems that touch on topics like the weakness and failures of the human heart:

"The Kookaburras"
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,
asked me to open the door.
Years later I remember how I didn't do it,
how instead I walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn't want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

Truck stop flowers, and a poem

2009-04-06T19:09:00.004+09:00

We were traveling home from the coast today for Encounter Camp--an overnight trip where the professors from my university meet up with the new students in our department for introductions, orientation, and awkward ice-breaking games. On the way back today, the tour bus driving us with the students made a pit stop at what is basically a truck stop, a large travel plaza for travelers. I went to use the restroom--one of those charming Japanese-style ones where squatting is necessary--and as I went to wash my hands I noticed, carefully placed at the corners of the banks of sinks, paper cups full of fresh-cut flowers, unmutilated and unmolested. I had to touch one of them before I could really believe it.

Fresca reminds me that April is National Poetry Month, so I decided to take a look at some poems I bookmarked last summer for later contemplation. I love this poem for its cataloguing of a man's life, the things he finds valuable and holds in his memory, and its deft touch with father-son relations.

Wrist-wrestling father
by Orval Lund

On the maple wood we placed our elbows
and gripped hands, the object to bend
the other’s arm to the kitchen table.
We flexed our arms and waited for the sign.

I once shot a wild goose.
I once stood not twenty feet from a buck deer unnoticed.
I’ve seen woods full of pink lady slippers.
I once caught a 19-inch trout on a tiny fly.
I’ve seen the Pacific, I’ve seen the Atlantic,
I’ve watched whales in each.

I once hear Lenny Bruce tell jokes.
I’ve seen Sandy Koufax pitch a baseball.
I’ve heard Paul Desmond play the saxophone.
I’ve been to London to see the Queen.
I’ve had dinner with a Nobel Prize poet.

I wrote a poem once with every word but one just right.
I’ve fathered two fine sons
and loved the same woman for twenty-five years.

But I’ve never been more amazed
than when I snapped my father’s arm down to the table.

Ou sont les sakura d'antan?

2009-03-27T10:09:00.007+09:00

Among the many things that I enjoy about living in Japan: specialty flavored KitKats. That one is jasmine tea-flavored, and very delicious. They're usually seasonal, and many never appear again.

Sometimes that's okay. See below for examples of powdered soybean KitKat and edamame KitKat.

Most are delicious, though. I'm looking forward once again to the cherry-blossom-flavored KitKat that are timed to come out when the blossoms do, which is also (not coincidentally) the beginning of the new school year. Parents see their children off to a new year of school as cherry blossoms--the ultimate Japanese symbol of ephemerality and the sweet sadness of passing time--float down around them.

Ephemerality in chocolate form. I like it.

"The Mother of All Funk Chords"

2009-03-14T20:42:00.002+09:00

This here is awesome.

Someone named "Kutiman" collected a whole bunch of amateur Youtube videos of people goofing off on musical instruments. Then he remixed them all and spliced them into an actual song to make it look like they're all performing together. Once the theremins kick in and the Asian schoolkids start dancing, well, it's infectious.

Part of what's cool and spooky about the video to me is how well it works as a metaphor for communication on the Internet. Each of these folks was just doing their own thing, and yet--without their even knowing it--somehow they were also part of a gigantic funk jam. Ah, Internets.

Jen's Writing: The Early Years

2009-03-11T23:53:00.002+09:00

My mother sent me some boxes of stuff from my youth. Some of it is impossibly cringe-worthy--God, could one be more pretentious in high school? I want a TARDIS just to go back and slap myself upside the head.

However, my early attempts at fiction writing reveal a...vigorous style. All misspellings are retained from the original!

From third grade:

I'm Grumpy

My mother doesn't understand me. Once I was talking with my sister and she said. I lost some of your marbels No. I fond some of your marbels. I said who did wat and wat did who?! Unlukuly. I said it vairy lowd my mother head and Zap! I was on my bed in my dark gloomey room.

----

Only a year or so later, I had developed a great deal as a writer, one suspects by cribbing phrases and plots from books I was reading at the time:

My Freind Bananas

I had just gone to bed on the Lynn Rose, a real good ship. I am twelve and just been sent on a vacation to England. I had broght my pet dog Darcie, a dachound. Suddenly someone yelled "The boat is sinking! Abandon ship!" I was scared silly. I put a life raft on me and one on Darcie. Then I dived into the ocen. There was only one problem. Darcie is terrifide of water. I finley got her to stop yipping by putting her on a piece of drift wood. By then it was dark and I went to sleep. The next morn I was awakened by Darcie's yapping. "Be quiet" I said but then I relised we were not moving! I looked around. There was a sparkling stream, a cave, and wonder of wonders, trees full of bananas! "Darcie!" I cried "Lets roast bananas!" Darcie started to howl. I said "ether shape up or starve!" So I made a fire and roasted bananas. One taste and Darcie dissipered in to the woods. I've often heard dachhounds are hunting dogs but that was redicules! Darcie brought back three spparrows and one parrot! I ate the parrot and Darcie got the sperrows. One day I went down to the beach and I brought some bananas. Suddenly I heard a wislling and I turned around and saw that a dolfin had eatin all of my bananas and wanted more! I laghed and laghed. After I stopped laghing I said "I'll call you Bananas." I told Bananas all about my seaside home at Burrow. Bananas dived below the surfase of the water. When he came up, he "told" me where my town was. I worked days on my raft and then I filled the raft with bananas, roasted and raw, twelve coconuts, six parrots, two cockatos, and ten sparrows all cooked and ready to eat. I tied the rope around Bananas waist, Darcie and I got on the raft, and we sailed toward Burrow. It took us twelve days to get home, and by the time we got there we had eaten: all of the coconuts, both cockatos, three of the parrots, twenty of the twenty-five bananas, and Darcie ate all of the sparrows. And now whenever I go to the beach, I get to play with my freind Bananas. The end.

---

I'm "laghing" at the stilted language: "In the morn I was awakened"? I can't help but wonder what in the world I was reading to get such archaic forms from! Sadly, these stories eventually give way to gloomy emo poetry about being the only soul who has ever suffered as I have. I clearly should have stuck to fiction!

In Search of Lost Time

2009-03-07T12:28:00.004+09:00

Fresca encouraged people to answer "The Proust Questionnaire." So here it is! Happy birthday, Fresca!

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Wanting what you have.

2. What is your greatest fear?
Letting people down, failing in my responsibilities.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
A need for approval by everyone and an inability to understand that's simply impossible--by taking action to please person A you are inevitably going to displease person B and so on.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
At the moment (it changes week to week): narcissism, an inability to see other people as persons separate from yourself.

5. Which living person do you most admire?
Tough one. Possibly Neil Gaiman, for being insanely talented and wry and humane.

6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Probably food. I decided years ago that to keep my id satisfied living in Japan I wasn't going to wince at the cost for imported Western food, so I pay a lot more for Doritos, pasta sauce, and bagels than I probably should.

7. What is your current state of mind?
Well, the sun is out and I have no meetings, so I'm feeling pretty content and happy.

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Moral purity, usually a nice phrase for "passivity."

9. On what occasion do you lie?
When people start wondering how involved in fandom I am. Unfortunately, I am a crap liar.

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I suppose my toothy smile.

11. Which living person do you most despise?
Probably Fred Phelps, the guy who goes around protesting gay peoples' funerals and saying God is laughing because they're dead.

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Compassion.

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Uh...compassion.

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
"I can see that."

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Trite, but my husband.

16. When and where were you happiest?
One morning when I was coming out of a long time of deep stress and personal pain (losing friends, failing at my job, pets dying). I woke up at 6:30 with the sun streaming in and instead of feeling depressed resignation I felt happy to wake up, eager to get out into the day and start living it.

17. Which talent would you most like to have?
The ability to pick up languages easily.

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Moderate #3 a bit.

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Probably passing the second-level Japanese Language Exam.

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Maybe a sparrow? I don't know why, I just like them, they're scrappy.

21. Where would you most like to live?
Anyplace with Internet access would make me happy, but either San Francisco or Boston if I had my choice...

22. What is your most treasured possession?
My house? Is a house a possession?

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
I have to agree with Fresca's answer to this: watching people suffer and being powerless to help them.

24. What is your favorite occupation?
I assume this means "Way to pass one's time," in which case, probably writing.

25. What is your most marked characteristic?
Probably timidity.

26. What do you most value in your friends?
Introspection and self-awareness.

27. Who are your favorite writers?
Ursula LeGuin, for humaneness and world-building.
A. A. Milne for whimsy and wonder.
Neil Gaiman for a little of all of those.

28. Who is your hero of fiction?
Stupid answer but true: Superman, who in the more modern versions is a much less shallow and much more existential hero.

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Abraham Lincoln--not so much for the greatness as for the constant self-doubt and desire to do the right thing.

30. Who are your heroes in real life?
Teachers, social workers, nurses--anyone who manages to get up in the morning and keep going despite high levels of burnout and little hope of making a difference.

31. What are your favorite names?
I always liked Tristan for a male name, maybe because the idea of "sadness" being a name pleased the romantic in me. I always liked Genevieve as a female name because it seemed to be a prettier (and less common) version of "Jennifer."

32. What is it that you most dislike?
People treating each other badly, especially for petty, selfish reasons.

33. What is your greatest regret?
Treating people badly for petty, selfish reasons while in college.

34. How would you like to die?
"Like" is such a strong word...I guess fairly quickly and without losing my mental abilities beforehand?

35. What is your motto?
When I was in high school some gifted class required me to create a motto. I went with "Je Cherche, Je Trouve," which is French for "I seek, I find." Rather more an ideal than the actual way I live my life, but it will do.

Spring Cleaning

2009-02-28T09:38:00.004+09:00

Not my mess, but it's good to know Al Gore has similar problems

The sun has come out! Huzzah! The house desperately needs cleaning as it seems my mother-in-law will be coming to visit in April. Mostly this week I've been cleaning my office while classes aren't in session. The problem is the early stages of cleaning look a great deal like "making things much messier."

Cleaning the office is stressful because I keep coming across things I probably need to do, memos in Japanese about things that probably were important but the deadline was in, uh, 2006 so probably it's a bit late. I tell myself they would have contacted me if it was urgent and drop it in the trash, but I feel horrible and incompetent.

But at least the office is cleaner!

"Time After Time"

2009-02-20T22:56:00.004+09:00

I'm in the middle of re-watching "Time After Time," the 1979 movie in which H.G. Wells follows Jack the Ripper to the future and tries to stop him. It made a huge impression on me as a kid, in part because it was certainly the most violent movie I had ever seen at age 10. But I remember the romance between Wells and his 1979 girlfriend was the first on-screen romance that really sparked for me. Later I learned that McDowell and Steenburgen met, fell in love, and got married working on the film. How's that for method acting? ;)

Crying Men

2009-02-13T16:39:00.003+09:00

My friend Mina recently shared a link with me to a photo exhibition: Crying Men, in which movie stars were asked to produce tears for the camera. I spent maybe two hours scanning the pictures, totally absorbed by them, by the images of men weeping for the camera. Which ones are "sincere"? And what does "sincere" mean here, anyway? Clearly all are crying on cue, and yet some seem to be "acting" more than others (and I'm not at all sure my intuitions on who is doing what are valid at all!) Some made my heart break just looking at them...I want to take Jude Law (above) and Robin Williams home and give them some cocoa and tell them things will be all right, they will. Somehow!

There are the men who look directly, almost defiantly at the camera, like Daniel Craig and Laurence Fishburne: Yeah, I got nothing to be ashamed of, this is me crying. There are the ones who seem so racked by emotion that they've forgotten the existence of the camera: Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Michael Madsen. There are the ones who seem lost in an abysmal, almost existential pain: Jude Law (my God, his posture), Sean Penn, Tim Roth. There are the ones who seem unable to quite manage it: Ben Stiller, Woody Harrelson, and Benicio del Toro all seem mildly bummed about something.

Then there's Robert Downey Jr., who's doing something pretty amazing with the whole form and assumptions behind it, but I'm not sure exactly what.

Chickenpox at age 39

2009-01-22T21:19:00.002+09:00

Came home late from work yesterday (8PM) and took off my dress shirt to find my chest and back peppered with what looked like bug bites. As I took my bath, I remembered two unfortunate facts:

1. My mother-in-law came down with a mild case of shingles over New Year's, and shingles are a form of chickenpox.
2. I've never had chickenpox in my life.

By this morning the sores were covering just about every inch of my chest and back and were creeping up my neck and down my arms and legs, so off to the clinic it was. "You think you have...chickenpox? At your age?" said the doctor, flanked by two nurses. In reply I took off my shirt. Dan says the reaction from the nurses was like something from the Exorcist--they drew back in horror and he half-expected them to cross themselves. "Oh, yes, that's chickenpox" said the doctor. She gave me some ointment and anti-virus medicine and sent me home to quarantine.

Chickenpox tends to much worse when contracted as an adult--I kind of hope so, because I certainly wouldn't wish this on any child. I don't have a fever, but the sores are everywhere, including places like the inside of my mouth and, well, other places the sun don't shine. They don't hurt, but the itching is unbearable, and I can get very little done because a good portion of my mind must always be on focusing and making sure I don't scratch. It's surprising how much mental energy simply not scratching your body can take!

Well, a new experience. Chickenpox in a post-Bush world. I can take it, I think.

Jumping Jacks

2009-01-16T11:31:00.004+09:00

I'm standing in front of a class full of Japanese high school students. This is a special class for high school seniors who've already passed early admission into college and thus have no burning incentive to sit through regular classes. The high school brings in college professors to teach a "college class" for them.

My class is a lecture on images of Japan in Western media. I've taught a variant of this class each year for four years now, and here that moment comes again. I finish showing them a clip from the 80s Michael Keaton movie "Gung Ho." In the movie, a Japanese company buys an American car maker and the Americans have to please their new Japanese bosses. On the first day of work, the Japanese bosses have the Americans gather in the factory courtyard for exercises, as is traditionally done in Japan. They exhort the Americans to work as a group, then launch into a series of perfectly-synchronized jumping jacks. The Americans slouch and scoff and mock them openly, disbelievingly. The poker-faced Japanese men in their identical suits wave their arms robotically and glare disapprovingly.

The clip ends and I bite my tongue, trying not to say what I always say next. But it's no use: try as I might to resist, it's an involuntary reflex. I open my mouth and, as I do every year, explain to the students:

"This is a stereotype, of course. It's America's image of Japan, not how Japan really is. It's an exaggeration, for comedic effect. It fits the basic culture of each country, but of course Japanese people aren't really like that."

The students blink at me, as they do every year, and I kick myself. I've had this conversation. I know that the students, on the whole, find the slovenly, slouching, selfish Americans pitiable. My instinctive cringe at the robotic, obedient, humorless Japanese is culturally-bound and not necessarily one they share. I'm apologizing to them for a movie that presents Japan in a positive light, I'm saying "Don't worry, I don't think you're really like the efficient, selfless people in this film". I'm speaking gibberish. They smile at me politely and wait for me to start making sense again. I try to do so.

After the lecture, I pack up my computer and notes. As I leave the building, a group of students has gathered outside in the chill, thin January sunlight for a PE class. They're all wearing identical PE uniforms.

As I walk by, they start doing jumping jacks in perfect unison.

To-Do

2009-01-11T18:07:00.003+09:00

So true. So, so true. Wondermark.com speaks to me once again.

Top of my to-do list is to be healthy sometime in 2009. I've got a cold that seems to have settled into my sinuses with the intention of making it a permanent residence. A friend recommended pouring large quantities of warm salinated water into my sinuses and letting it drain out. Doing this made me so wretched it overshadowed the cold, but had no other clearly beneficial effects, alas.

Yuletide Recommendations!

2008-12-28T13:53:00.002+09:00

Yuletide is a yearly fandom gift exchange specifically for rare or minor fandoms--it's grown yearly since 2003 and this year has over 2,400 stories in its database. It tends to elicit some truly wonderful stories--thoughtful and carefully-written. I've just spent three days reading through a huge variety of stories and ended up with fifteen that really struck me as particularly good. My favorites in Yuletide tend to be stories that provide "more of" (in Sheenan Pugh's phrase) canon rather than "more from"--that is, that feel like continuations or missing episodes. With small fandoms like this, there's often a yearning for a little extra that could fit with the original.

The Fionavar Tapestry:
No Man of Fionavar. A look at life in Fionavar eight years later. A wonderful exploration of the goddesses Ceinwen and Dana, who are lovers of two major characters but get very little character development within the series. Lots of other wonderful touches about all the other characters and how their lives unfold.

In the Colours of All Countries. Another story set after the series is done, this one is shorter and focuses more closely on the main characters more shortly after the series. A look at three children named Diarmuid born shortly after the series ends, and their parents and the people who care about them.

Greek Mythology
Small Step for Man. A history of Apollo and Artemis through the ages. Probably one of the darkest and most disturbing of my favorites, with incest and violence and an overall feeling of terrible pain as history progresses. Very powerful and painful.

Anne of Green Gables
Keeping Faith. Unlike most of my other favorites, this couldn't have ever been a missing chapter of the original, because it has a rather explicit sex scene--and yet the sex manages to retain some of the tenor of Montgomery's work: shy and wondering. She'd probably be horrified by it, but I liked it. This is a story set quite late in the series and about one of Anne's children--Walter, who in the original dies in WWI. In this AU he survives and returns to Canada, but striken with shell shock and terribly wounded. This story unites him with his love, Una, and shows his slow healing with her help. It's hopeful and sweet and yet true to the reality of the horrors of war, while retaining Montgomery's idiom.

The Pretender:
The Hound and the Hare. This story nicely captures the feeling of the final act of an episode of "The Pretender," with the edged-yet-hopeful banter between Jarod and Parker. Broots and Sydney make spot-on appearances. Jarod exposes a racetrack that abuses its grayhounds and introduces Parker to his own rescue dog:

"Miss Parker." His eyes and voice were hard. "Come to see my prize bitch?"

The Dark is Rising:
Sense and Notion. Every Yuletide there are a few stories that deal with the heartbreaking ending of the original series and the fact that characters we've come to love deeply lose their memories of all that's gone before. This was my favorite this year--a stubborn and baffled Bran, somehow certain that a summer that he remembers as mundane had deep meaning in it, insists on reaching out to a reluctant Will.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
Metamorphosis. Probably the second-most disturbing story of my favorites, but in a very different way. This one manages to capture fairly well the tone of the play (an amazing feat, frankly). At turns ironic, witty, savage, bleak, and desperate.

Guildenstern watches Rosencrantz standing before the mirror, modeling the doublet that Ophelia has loaned him to wear for the play; he finds the image disturbing, and for a moment, he cannot place why. Surely they have stood before mirrors before, together--although Guildenstern cannot quite remember a specific instance, now that he thinks on it--and surely it has never been disturbing before. That is the very nature of a disturbing thing, after all; it is something which isn't usual, ergo necessitating the existence of a usual.

Portal:
Pre-test Diagnostic Log #045216/F/4. Portal is a bizarre video game in which "you" are a test subject in a lab experiment gone horribly wrong, attempting to outwit the passive-aggressive and homocidal AI GLaDOS. GLaDOS has...a distinct voice and personality, to put it mildly, like a hectoring and totally insane mother. There were three Portal-based stories this year, and this one probably comes closest to replicating the tone of the game.

1983. This story is less canon-compliant, but perhaps funnier, as it features a bizarrely funny and disturbing segment where GLaDOS tries (ineptly) to seduce the test subject:

You could argue that I do not wear pants but at least I can tell you that I do not wear pants. If I tell you about the pants then you can imagine the pants. The pants are not a lie. The pants are real. The pants are as real as you imagine them to be.

My voice is not suited to being a boy. I can tell that you are disappointed. Now you understand how I feel. I am often disappointed. You disappoint me.

The Silmarillion:
A Spirit of Fire. A character exploration of Melkor. I don't usually enjoy character studies of villains, because they usually strike me as contrived--especially theatrical villains who seem to cherish evil for evil's sake, like Melkor. But this presents him reasonably and interestingly, without minimizing the cruelty and evil of the character.

Breath of Hope. Another character study, this one of Brandir, Turin, and Niniel. It's Turin/Niniel, but nothing explicit or disturbing. Brandir confronts Niniel about her decision to wed Turin, and Turin confronts him about the conversation later. A thoughtful look at three fascinating characters.

Bright are the Stars Upon the Margin of the World. An in-depth exploration of Beleg, one of the many interesting characters Tolkien introduces and then leaves mostly hinted-at in The Silmarillion. This is a long, leisurely look at Beleg's early days, and his first intimations of his fate. Full of resonant symbolism and a good capture of Tolkien's style of writing--no small feat at all.

He looked up into the heavens, and still the stars were shining brightly down, his keeper brightest of them all: red the shoulder of the sword-arm and brilliant the girdle, fearsome the stance of the warrior eternally suspended against the vault of the sky.

Galaxy Quest:
Never Give Up, Never Surrender...To the Power of Love? This is a parody of the bemused and confused tone of news articles about fanfiction, written within the Galaxy Quest universe (i.e., Lazarus/Taggart slash, for example). Funny at two levels--a discussion of the show and a discussion of news articles of this type.

The Show Must Go On. A wonderful, wonderful story that perfectly blends humor and deeper emotion in the same way as the original. The cast (shooting the New Adventures of Galaxy Quest) is approached by the Thermians once more, only to discover themselves facing the most cliche of cliches: the mirror universe evil doubles! The plot is engaging and fun, with a wistful, hopeful (and slashy) subplot about Alexander Dane finding love at last. I'll confess the ending choked me up.

The Chronicles of Prydain
The Kindly King of Strummings and Hummings. Another beautiful story that could be a lost chapter of canon, featuring Fflewddur Fflam and Gurgi, two of my absolute favorites, and a cameo by the always-delightful Eilonwy. Fflewddur has to deal with a dragon infestation. Charming and gentle and homely, like the original.

Stepping Back

2008-12-23T13:24:00.002+09:00

So I posted an image yesterday of the Three Magi gazing up at the Star of Bethlehem with one of them murmuring, "Oh, I am so blogging about this."

It made me laugh because blogging--and the whole online existence of interacting largely in print--encourages a sort of self-aware distance from one's own experiences. I compose a LOT of blog entries in my head, usually as a sheerly theoretical exercise--"how would I describe this experience? What are the words I would use to capture this?" I almost never post the results, but it's fun to think about. Mind you, this can escalate into narcissism--or worse, Twitterism (I don't get Twitter! I feel like the worst Luddite in the world, but I hate it so much...)--but I do like the extra emotional distance blogging fosters, the ability to step back and narrate your own life a bit. It reminds me of a Zen meditation technique--how you're supposed to step back and think "I'm having a feeling I'm hungry," "I'm having a feeling I'm bored," and be aware that you are not your reactions. A certain ironic distance, a reminder that yours is just one of many stories going on...

In Minnesota for Christmas!

2008-12-22T13:43:00.001+09:00

Review: Always Coming Home

2008-12-19T22:45:00.004+09:00

(Map of the Valley. North is to the left of the map)

"The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. . . The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn't yet exist is considerable, but there's no need to exaggerate it."

So begins one of my favorite books by Ursula LeGuin, and probably one of her lesser-known works, "Always Coming Home." She calls it "an archaeology of the future," and it's a beautiful example of world-creation. The main narrative of the book is the autobiography of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Valley, but her story is broken up with digressions into songs, recipes, rituals, novels and other anthropological observations of her people. I desperately want to put "digressions" in scare-quotes, to make the implicit argument that they're actually quite key, but since part of what LeGuin is positing is that digressions are part of the dance, I'll let it stand.

This is a slow-moving book and I was about halfway through it the first time before I realized that things were not entirely as they seemed at first. It's nothing shocking like Sheri Tepper's also-wonderful speculative feminist novels like "Grass" and "The Gate to Women's Country," but it's a beautiful unfolding that invites you to see what you've been taking for granted, what you haven't noticed, and what the Valley narrators have been taking for granted themselves.

LeGuin is a Taoist, and this time through I noticed what I hadn't before--that the ritualistic Valley symbol of the gyre or hinge creates a stylized yin-yang symbol that weaves its way through society. This is a Taoist utopia, but achieved at prices LeGuin doesn't gloss over--staggeringly high infant mortality being only one of them. And it's got a self-aware irony that cuts some of the inevitable utopian smugness: LeGuin imagines herself in a conversation with an archivist of the Valley in which she sighs "I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends."

The book is a beautiful example of world-building, based on a deep and lovingly intimate knowledge of the Northern California landscape. The world unfurls around the edges of Stone Telling's story, alluringly realized and temptingly unfinished. I remember the first time I read it studying the charts of the different clans and deciding that the me that lived in the Valley would be a member of the Serpentine House and the Oak Society, which covered the areas of writing and poetry. She'd make beautiful paper and raise sheep and live near a stream. Her name was Ubbuarra, Words in the Middle. She still lives there, always.

"The Greatest Gift of All"

2008-12-11T20:40:00.003+09:00

I find Stephen Colbert fascinating and challenging. Part of why he's both so funny and so appealing are the moments when the mask of his savage irony slips away and you see just how angry he is about exactly all the things "Stephen Colbert" is pretending to celebrate. He does a delicate sort of scarf dance of persona--for example, I watched the election night special he and Jon Stewart co-hosted. Now, "Stephen Colbert" was miserable at every state that Obama won, and kept wistfully predicting a comeback from McCain. But at the moment when California was called for Obama and it was official, both Colbert and Stewart stopped talking. For a long, long moment they both looked away from each other, shuffled papers, took a drink of water, and took a couple of deep breaths. It was like...they didn't really trust themselves to stay in character at that moment, so they just did nothing at all until the information processed. I have no idea if they planned it or not--they must have--but it was oddly moving.

I watched Colbert's Christmas special this week, and it has that same strange mix in it. "Stephen Colbert" waxes eloquent about the War on Christmas and other conservative topics, but when he and his guest stars (an improbable lineup of Elvis Costello, Toby Keith, Feist, and Willie Nelson) sing "What's So Funny Bout Peace Love and Understanding," it's all the more moving because "Stephen Colbert" is not supposed to mean it, and yet Stephen Colbert so clearly does. The duet he sings at the end with Costello is a beautifully complicated brew of cynicism and hope, and it becomes impossible to tell what's "Stephen Colbert" and what's Stephen Colbert:

Elvis: There are cynics, there are skeptics
There are legions of dispassionate dyspeptics
Who regard this time of year as a maudlin insincere
Cheezy crass commercial travesty of all that we hold dear
Stephen: When they think that
Well, I can hear it
But I pity them their lack of Christmas spirit
For in a world like ours, take it from Stephen
There are much worse things to believe in.

Stephen: Believe in the judgment, believe in Jihad
Believe in a thousand variations on a dark and spiteful god
Elvis: You've got your money, you've got your power
You've got your science, and all the planets going to end within the hour
Stephen: You've got your dreams that don't come true
Elvis: You've got the ones that do
Stephen: Then you've got your nothing
Both: Some folks believe in nothing
But if you believe in nothing
Then what's to keep the nothing from coming for you?

"Christmas: There are Worse Things to Believe In" is a motto I'll remember when I get too grouchy about canned carols and forced cheer.

The special ends in one of the weirder recursive loops I've ever seen, when Santa shows up to give Colbert "the greatest gift of all": a DVD of Colbert's Christmas special "The Greatest Gift of All." "So wait," barks Costello, "That's the DVD of the special that we're in the middle of making right now?"

Ow, my brain.

Friends of Friends of Friends

2008-12-05T21:40:00.002+09:00

A friend of a friend of a friend of mine died last week. That wouldn't usually cause much disruption in the space-time continuum, but in the online world it can set of ripples that wash on relatively strange shores.

In this case, it prompted a friend of a friend of mine--Merlin Missy--to write an essay about friendship and fandom. I think she captures really well the sort of community/friendship online interactions capture, and the ambivalences and joys of it.

I know things about relative strangers online that I have nothing similar for with some of my oldest friends. I have an acquaintance--really not even a friend!--who I've watched go through a horrible, difficult pregnancy that she doesn't want, watched her agonize over how she thought her husband would love and cherish her more if she did this (he doesn't). I see people's posts made late at night, maybe when they've been drinking a little more than they should, and they can wail about everything bad in their lives. People spill their dreams and hopes and fears out into the ether, and how can I not know them in a way that's both more facile and more meaningful, perhaps, than the people I see face to face? Maybe it's not quite the same as tried-and-tested friendship, but it's an undeniable sense of intimacy.

As a side note of oddness, Merlin Missy mentions in her article that weird sense of intimacy--"Reminder to self: Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman are not your friends, no matter how well you think you know them." Well, Wheaton (child star of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and UberGeek of the Internets*) linked up to her article. In the comments on his article, I see the name of another friend of a friend.

The Internet: most gigantic small town in the history of humanity.

It's like last week fellow-blogger Fresca mentioned Samuel Delany in a post and he stopped by to compliment her writing. Uh...I was the person who commented after him and I tried to stay cool, but I was so tempted to write something like "HOLY CRAP FRESCA THAT'S DELANY COMMENTING ABOVE ME OMG OMG OMG!!!!1!1!!!"

Life is a strange and wonderful place.

*True story: Wil Wheaton's cat died slightly after mine did a few years ago, and I wrote him a quick note to tell him he was in my thoughts, never really expecting he'd read it. He wrote back a personal email. I almost died. How can Wil Wheaton possibly answer even half of the email he must get, it would have to be a full-time job! He's just the coolest.

A Few Recently Bookmarked Links

2008-11-29T18:35:00.006+09:00

The Top 60 Popular Japanese Words/Phrases of 2008. Provides an interesting snapshot of Japanese society this year. I was happy to find out that the garishly overdecorated cell phones my students have (#9) have a name ("Princess Phones"), and the video of the "Whispering Matron" from #50 is pretty amazing.

The Orality of Twitter. I've been trying to get my poor head around Twitter. This didn't actually help. But it was an interesting look at how the very mundanity of Twitter is a sign of our secondary-orality culture.

Wow! America is Cool. Garrison Keillor on the election, with his usual grace and understated wit.

The Blitz Line Starts Here. James Wolcott writes for Vanity Fair about the recent trampling to death of a Wal-Mart employee. "What you don't see in these Black Friday updates are interviews with the people who work in these mall chains, who have to show up at even more ungodly hours than do the shoppers in order to stock the shelves and prepare for the store openings." A vicious, incisive analysis.

One Who Helps People Throughout the Land

2008-11-23T23:30:00.003+09:00

Spotted this ad hoc sign posted in the subway station on a bigger sign for a nearby Native American jewelry store. Failed to get the first printout in the picture, but the ones I got (if my shoddy Japanese is right) explain that Obama has been elected the 44th President of the USA. "There are neither white nor black people, yellow nor red people, but a Rainbow Tribe, as the Crow Nation used to call it." The poster continues that Obama has been made an official member of the Crow Nation and they've given him an official Crow name: "One Who Helps People Throughout the Land."

I'm sure people wondered why the crazy foreigners were snapping pictures in the subway. :)

As a side note, there's a town in Japan on the northern coast called Obama (小浜, or "Little Beach.") Apparently they're pretty happy Obama won and are peddling Obama merchandise. Dan and I have been thinking about going there, just to say we did it. :) Maybe bring back some Japanese Obama keychains...

Explaining Religion in Japan

2008-11-21T22:34:00.008+09:00

So I was in argumentation class and mentioned that there was a church in North Carolina that told its members hat they couldn't have communion if they voted for Obama until they confessed and did penance.

Students: Communion?
Jen: Yes. Well, it's...see, in the Bible, Jesus gave his followers bread and wine and told them it was his body and blood, and they needed to eat it to go to heaven.
Students: [look slightly appalled]
Jen [struggling to keep the English simple]: So...in most Christian churches we eat bread and drink wine together, and it means our sins are forgiven and we can go to heaven. So by telling people they can't eat the bread, this church is telling people they can't go to heaven.
Students: So...Christians believe that if you don't eat special magic bread, you don't go to heaven?
Jen: It's a little more...complicated...well...uh, sort of, yeah.

Moral: Everyone should have to explain their religion in language simple enough to be understood by people who've only studied it a few years. It definitely forces you to look at it in a different way.

We went on to discuss snake handling (when discussing stereotypes of Southerners, one of the arguments we were looking at mentioned the practice). So I found them the passage in the Bible that explains that followers of Christ have "power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you" (Luke 10:19), and explained that a few churches have been known to use that as a reason to handle poisonous snakes in their ceremonies.

Students: This seems a case of excessive literalism to us. [I'm paraphrasing here just a bit].

Living abroad is a lot of fun some days, even when it's very surreal. :)

Still pretty giddy

2008-11-09T19:57:00.004+09:00

I promise--really!--that I will stop talking about President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama real soon.

Wait.

President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama.

Hell yeah.

*ahem*

But I did want to mention a couple of things that I enjoyed reading recently on the topic.

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The Onion has owned my heart and soul since it came back from hiatus after 9/11 with this story: Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake. I remember being really reluctant to read it at the time, because I didn't want how I was feeling to be mocked, but the Onion managed to delicately and tenderly break my heart with it.

It re-captured me with this week's Kobe Bryant Scores 25 in Holy Shit We Elected a Black President. It's beautiful, beautiful writing, and the last two paragraphs made me cry all over again.

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Newsweek has an amazingly detailed and fascinating account of the race for the presidency, Secrets of the 2008 Campaign. It's a long read--seven chapters of five or six sections each--and totally worth it. This is the report you've been getting all those horror stories about Palin's ignorance from, but I was a lot more interested in what I learned about Obama from it. Three things especially caught my eye:

--The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

--Holder, a former deputy U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration and an old Washington hand, was struck by Obama's half-open, half-inscrutable manner during the nearly eight hours of meetings they spent together going over potential veeps. Obama was diligent, bringing up small morsels of information hidden in the fat briefing books, and he acted like a law professor who calls on reluctant pupils ("I haven't heard from you," he'd say to anyone around the table who had been silent too long). A lot of politicians pretend to be inclusive; Obama actually was. But "at the end, you didn't know where he stood. When you got down to the final judgment, I had a sense, but I didn't have any kind of certainty." Holder thought Obama was being shrewd to not signal his intentions too clearly—since "people want to say what the boss wants to hear, and if they don't know, you'll get more honest advice."

I find this one of the most encouraging anecdotes about Obama I've heard. It's a sign of a person who knows how groupthink works and wants to make sure to avoid it whenever possible.

--Obama's debate coach, Michael Sheehan, a veteran of many campaign psychodramas over the years, was struck by the senator's calmness. The candidate was always in control of his feelings. During one afternoon prep session, Obama begged off. "I'm a little tired and a little cranky," he told a roomful of aides. "I'm going to my room for a half hour and I'll be in better shape to work with." He reappeared 30 minutes later, ready for work. Obama was, as ever, self-possessed—his own best judge of his mood and strength. After a full-dress mock debate in the evening, when it was time to review the tape of his performance, Obama turned to Sheehan and said, "Michael, I'm tired." He was not complaining, Sheehan recalled; he was just being matter-of-fact. Nothing seemed to rattle Obama. He had a way of retreating into his own little world. During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song "Disco Inferno," last popular in the heyday of "Saturday Night Fever."

I'm especially struck in the essay with how distant Obama is. People who work with him say consistently that he's not a huggy, affectionate man. He keeps people at arm's length. Staffers were constantly disappointed that he didn't enjoy hanging out and schmoozing with them like Bill Clinton always did. He's very self-assured, very self-contained. He doesn't seem to crave approval from the people around him. All of which suggests that America has managed to pull off something almost as unthinkable to me as electing an African-American: we've elected a cerebral, intellectual man. Unbelievable.

Okay, I promise I'll try to get back to discussing books, movies, work and other fun things. But just one more time for the record:

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

A couple of videos today

2008-11-06T10:36:00.002+09:00

I woke up this morning to greet the first full day in which Americans elected an African-American president.

So much hope. So much promise. Surely so much of it will go unfulfilled, but I didn't even think I could feel it anymore.

When I see those two little girls and think how their ancestors were kidnapped from Africa, hauled across the hideous middle passage and enslaved, how this country was built on the backs and blood of their ancestors, and how soon they will play in the Rose Garden and their father will be the leader of the free world...it's enormous.

Martin Luther King's last speech: "I Have Been to the Mountaintop"

Martin Luther King: "I Have a Dream"

We haven't gotten there yet, Rev. King. It's just another step. But I wish you were here to see it, to hear freedom ringing.

Tuesday Can't Come Too Soon...

2008-11-03T14:09:00.002+09:00

Let's see...this weekend I saw people discussing how Barack Obama is the son of Malcolm X AND a discussion of how Obama is using hypnotic mind-control techniques to brainwash the masses. I've also seen McCain supporters quoted as saying they believe Obama is secretly raising an army of stormtroopers to impose his will upon white folks and that he plans to change the American flag to something with Muslim themes.

These people are all totally sincere. They really believe all this. They are completely insane. I'm actually totally terrified of what they're going to do if he wins. I like Obama. I don't think he's the Messiah, but he seems a decent and thoughtful man with two lovely little daughters, and I dread what will come to him in the next four years if he wins. I think he's willing to take that risk, and I admire him for that. As Greil Marcus closes in a beautiful essay called "I Believe All of the Polls, and None of Them,":

There are also comparisons to Lincoln, and these map the desert Obama as president would have to cross. "Instead of glory, he once said," the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of Lincoln, "he found only 'ashes and blood.'" For the moment, for the country, perhaps for Obama too, that would be reward enough.

A couple of videos

2008-10-31T09:32:00.002+09:00

Oh my God, noooo! But...but I mailed in my vote two weeks ago! *sobs inconsolably*

I love viral ads like this and I think Obama has used them to great effect this election.

I also think his "infomercial" was sedate to the point of dull, and that's exactly how he wanted it. Nothing at all in it that could seem "Marxist" or "terrorist." A lot that said "presidential" and "stable."

And a final thought:

It's McCain's zombie grin that gets me in this one.

Obama's natty fashion choices

2008-10-19T22:11:00.006+09:00

Hm, I made an amusing post about cultural misunderstandings in class, but Blogger has eaten my witty words and now they are as if they never were.

So you get this instead--a photo my mother took of a political billboard near my home in Maine:

What a world, what a world.

I think it's the cheery jack o'lanterns in the back that get me. And you know what? I still find Barack Hussein Obama the Terrorist Muslim, with his downcast eyes and pensive look, more appealing than John Sidney McCain the War Hero, with his clenched fists and accentuated crotch.

I filled out my absentee ballot today, by the way, and will mail it proudly tomorrow.

Fall

2008-10-11T22:16:00.003+09:00

It was a strange day weather-wise, starting drizzly and damp, becoming sunny and beautiful, and then the wind picked up and gusted clouds in. It matched my mood as well.

October is a transitional month, getting ready for winter and the long darkness. Novembers have traditionally been bad months for me--for some reason, every kind of tragedy and inconvenience seems to wait until November to strike me. So October has an uneasy feeling, tense. Uncertain. I feel the urge to store up against the coming cold, like a squirrel stores nuts. But you can't store up light and happiness, security and creativity. They're liquid assets, they trickle through your life like water and are gone, beyond your power, only to rush back up when you feel certain the springs are dry forever.

Obviously changeable weather makes me wax poetic!

Drat.

2008-10-02T23:58:00.003+09:00

Oh, threaded comments. Threaded comments, how I will miss you. But the program that was threading my comments was apparently making it impossible to get alerts, so comments were going entirely unnoticed by me. So I reverted to the old template and discovered that wiped all the old comments, so I'm in a bit of comment mourning at the moment. *mopes*

A culture-shock moment to make the post more worth reading: we went out to dinner with our neighborhood to a Chinese buffet. There were plates and plates of...stuff, heaped high with...things. All entirely unlabeled. And Dan and I were the only people unfazed by this--everyone else just happily ate anything that looked kind of interesting. Only Dan and I poked at everything and debated: "Is this fish? Chicken? It's not tripe, is it?" (We ordered tripe by accident once. It's...chewy). When we asked our neighbors, they shrugged and kept eating: "Why do you even ask?"

Our Japanese friends seem able to consume just about everything without knowing or caring what it is. I would blame our squeamish caution on growing up in a country that's hyper-aware of food allergies, but I think it's really just a need to know what it is we're putting in our mouths.

At the other extreme, there's a lot less squeamishness here about detailing exactly where one's food comes from. Groceries usually have cute little anthropomorphic pictures of the animals in question--"Hi, I'm Kimiko Cow, and the flesh you see in front of you belonged to me!" We went to a pork cutlet restaurant only to find it festooned with pictures of Babe, the adorable pig. Talk about off-putting!

In English, of course, we even distance ourselves from our meat linguistically--we don't eat cows, pigs, and sheep, we eat beef, pork, and mutton. Baby cows are veal. We don't like to think about those baby cows at all, much less have them hawking themselves to us in the supermarket. There's a wonderful scene in Douglass Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" where the main character goes to an exotic intergalactic restaurant and is confronted by a talking cow-waiter explaining which parts of itself were particularly tender tonight. After the rest of the table orders the cow says "I'll just nip off and shoot myself now" and wanders off after reassuring the horrified main character, "Don't worry, sir, I'll be very humane." It's hysterically funny, but in a very black sort of way, and touches on a truth about Western eating--we usually don't like to be faced with the reality that we're taking a life to sustain our own.

My Favorite Canon Pairings

2008-09-26T08:14:00.004+09:00

Fresca asked me which canon pairings I really like. Let's see...the ones that come in just off the top of my head:

1. Jarrod/Miss Parker, The Pretender. I loved "The Pretender." It had a clear formula--super-genius Jarrod, hunted by Miss Parker from the sinister Center, travels the country avenging wrongs--and it followed it beautifully, with strong acting from all the cast. The semi-romance between Parker (who is never given a first name) and Jarrod always delighted me. Jarrod is a sweet-natured naif with a wicked streak, Parker a tough-as-nails cynic out to capture Jarrod at all costs. They rarely meet in the show, but he calls, leaves clues, sends email--their relationship is antagonistic and yet respectful and eventually sweet, as we learn that the two of them were childhood friends (Jarrod was kidnapped by the Center as a child, Parker is the daughter of the head of the Center).

2. Odo/Kira, Deep Space Nine. Maybe even more than the friendship between Garak and Bashir being disrupted, I was unhappy this romance was aborted. The two had been friends for so long, and Odo's wistful longing for Kira so subtle and well-played, that the process of them getting together was hesitant and lovely and filled with affection. They were good for each other.

3. Batman/Catwoman, Comics and Batman Returns. Really the only woman I can see with Batman, and in "Batman Returns" Pfeiffer and Keaton really hit this relationship out of the park for me--the vulnerability so carefully hidden, the complications of their many identities, the complete inability to connect combined with the passionate desire to. When Catwoman rejects Batman at the end of "Batman Returns" ("I'd love to go home with you and live with you in your castle...but I just couldn't live with myself") I wanted to cry and cheer at the same time.

4. Beauty and the Beast. The fairy tale, not the TV show, and not simply the Disney version, although I always liked that version as well. This fairy tale was always my favorite--as a child, addicted to fairy tales, I would happily skip any version of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty for a version of Beauty and the Beast. The difference, I think, was that they spend time together and get to know each other rather than falling in love after one dance or one kiss. When Beast offers Beauty his library and she's all starry-eyed about it, that was a revelation to me--romance based on a respect for the intellect and shared interests. As you can see, I'm not much for "love at first sight" sorts of romances.

5. Noah/Cassandra Bennett, Heroes. When we first see Cassandra Bennett, she seems entirely vapid, a total fluff-head. But slowly we come to learn that her husband, who's involved in a clandestine government organization, has been mind-wiping her over and over through the years, each time she finds out about his activities. Her strength of character emerges as she re-discovers the truth and she turns out to be one of my favorite female characters on the show (which isn't saying much...I like Heroes but I find it distressingly weak with the female characters). The sense of relief that Noah displays as he begins to enter a truly honest relationship with his wife for the first time in decades is palpable and heartbreaking.

Runners-up: Han/Leia (Star Wars), Elizabeth/Darcy (Pride and Prejudice). I seem to have a fondness for either slow-blossoming friendships or relationships that follow the traditional romantic formula of the leads misunderstanding each other at first sight and slowly learning to love...

The Standbys

2008-09-18T21:46:00.002+09:00

What 5 series/books/movies can you rewatch/reread time and again?

Batman: The Animated Series. The pinnacle of human animation. The first three seasons were among the last cartoons to be fully non-computerized, and they're beautiful. The last season is cleaner, sharper...but it lacks something. Beautiful, Art Deco animation and set designs aside, this show is awesome. Kevin Conroy is the voice of Batman, the reason Christian Bale's attempts never quite ring true. He inhabits the role entirely. Mark Hamill (yes, Luke Skywalker) is the best Joker voice ever. The whole series is brooding, dark, thoughtful, at times utterly heartbreaking.

Galaxy Quest. Fresca reports that David Mamet declares Galaxy Quest "a perfect movie," and I agree. It sets out to tell a simple tale of humor and heroism, hits every mark along the way, and concludes sweetly and completely. The washed-up actors from an old science fiction show find out their show has been mistaken for the truth by sweet and gullible aliens who now need "them" (their characters) to save them from a terrible warlord. The show is generally taken as a spoof of Star Trek, but there are perhaps even more references to Blake's 7, and the save at the end is very clearly a bittersweet attempt to fix the end of that series.

My favorite moment: at the beginning there's a teen-aged fan who the star of the show chews out for being a clueless fanboy and basically tells to get a life. At the climax the hero contacts him on the phone to ask for help, and the boy cuts him off and says "I just want you to know, I know it's just a show. I know it's not real." "But it is real," says the captain, "It is and I need your help." With no transition at all the kid leaps from his chair: "I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT WAS ALL REAL!" he cries.

Ah, the fannish soul.

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The whole series if I could, but the Silmarillion at all costs. As majestic as the Bible without the pesky religion parts, The Silmarillion is crammed full of characters at the heroic scale--Luthien and Beren, the lovers of whom Arwen and Aragorn are just echoes; Turin Turambar the doomed, Feanor the cursed and prideful crafter, the hidden city of Gondolin (of which Gondor is but an echo). I don't think I realized until I was reading The Silmarillion that Middle Earth is meant to be our own world in an earlier time, and the shock of surprise and joy I felt on realizing the constellations were the same was immense.

Star Wars (the first trilogy). Okay, I doze off during the Ewoks, but every movie has something in that I love: the sheer massive scale and sweep of the first movie, the romance of the second (the only Lucas movie to ever have a convincing romance, mostly because he wrote none of it and the director had the good sense to overrule his attempted changes to Han and Leia's dialogue), and redemption of Anakin in the third.

The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddings. Written in 1926, Eddings' novel is epic fantasy with the dial set to 11. An envoy from the nation of Witchland arrives at the palace of the Demons and sets in motion a massive war between the two nations. Both sides are populated by characters larger than life, magnificent, glorious and terrible in their grandeur. Quests are achieved, impossible summits scaled, vile treachery and gallant deads accomplished, and in the end the Witches are defeated utterly. And then the Demons discover they're hideously bored and use their one precious wish from the gods to start the whole thing again: the book ends with the announcement of an envoy from Witchland. Eddings is desperately in love with the sound of language,　and I'll pick up this book or one of his others at times just to remind myself what amazing effects can be achieved with it. He builds tapestries of words, rich and opaque and glowing. A totally random sample:

They stood at a cave's mouth on a beach of sand white and clean, that was lapped by the ripples of a sapphire lake: a great lake, sown with islets craggy and luxuriant with trees and flowering growths. Many-armed was the lake, winding everywhere in secret reaches behind promontories that were spurs of the mountains that held it in their bosom: some wooded or green with lush flower-spangled turf to the water's edge, some with bare rocks abrupt from the water, some crowned with rugged lines of crag that sent down scree-slopes into the lake below. It was mid-afternoon, sweet-aired, a day of dappled cloud-shadows and changing lights. White birds circled above the lake, and now and then a kingfisher flashed by like a streak of azure flame.

Runners-Up: The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Tick, Much Ado About Nothing (the movie), The Oz series by L. Frank Baum, Tonari no Totoro.

Five Canon Romances I Do Not Like

2008-09-14T17:09:00.004+09:00

There's a great livejournal community called fannish5, which asks a question every Friday. I've been going through some of the older ones and I figured I might as well answer some here, so without further ado:

What are your five least favorite romances, in canon?

1. Ron/Hermione, Harry Potter.
I didn't want her to end up Harry per se, but I just...kind of wanted her to not end up with Ron. Well-intentioned, doltish Ron. *sigh* I fail to see the attraction for a woman like Hermione, but maybe that's just me.

2. Worf/Deanna Troi, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I liked Deanna's understated romance with Riker. And I really didn't like Riker and Worf bristling at each other like two dogs wrangling over a juicy bone.

3. Garak/Ziyal, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Aside from the fact that Garak was way too canny to get involved with the daughter of a crazy crackpot like Gul Dukat, I was annoyed because the romance seemed a deliberate attempt to de-intensify Garak's friendship with Julian Bashir.

4. Batman/Rachel Dawes, The Dark Knight
Just very unconvincing. Other than Catwoman in Batman Returns, I have yet to see a Batman movie with an even faintly believable relationship with Bruce Wayne, and yet they insist on shoehorning love stories into every one of them.

5. Sheridan/Delenn, Babylon 5.
I insist, insist, insist it was meant to be Sinclair/Delenn. It should have been! Damn it...

"This is the world I want to live in. The shared world."

2008-08-26T00:35:00.003+09:00

Airports are odd liminal spaces, where everyone is on their way to somewhere else. I always get an first impression on coming back into an American --it varies according to the times. I remember times in the last few years when I immediately felt oddly muzzled on entering the States again, like certain things couldn't be said loudly, like people were watching their words carefully. I haven't felt that way the last few times, however, which is reason enough for hope of a sort.

A poem about that sort of feeling that I came across just before flying:

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal

by Naomi Shihab Nye

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her.
What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew -- however poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her -- southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag --
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers --
Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands --
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped
-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

Packing

2008-08-18T15:09:00.003+09:00

Packing for ten days in Maine and ten days in San Diego.

Music synched on iPod: check.
Books downloaded to ebook reader: check.
A couple of books picked out in case ebook reader breaks: check.
Digital comic books downloaded onto memory stick for reading: not yet.
TV shows loaded onto digital media player for watching in San Diego: about half done.

Anything else? Oh yeah.
Clothes: check.

The Dark Knight, Take 2

2008-08-13T16:28:00.001+09:00

Went to see The Dark Knight again and this time watched more carefully for specific things.

--The plot. The plot...made no sense. There were so many plot holes and improbabilities (right up to impossibilities) that the whole plot structure felt like a very fine lace doily, just barely holding together. Example one: There's no reason at all both Rachel and Harvey couldn't be saved if the police had just gotten to Rachel in time. And they should have been able to, since there should be patrol cars in the area. There was no real either/or there. Example two: Okay, how does this work? Reece goes on television to announce he's going to reveal the Batman's identity. Cut to the Joker setting the pile of money on fire and lecturing the mob guy. Suddenly the Joker pulls out a cell phone and calls in to the tv show to announce Reece dies or the hospital gets it. Uh, how did he even know Reece was on television and why? And when did he have time to rig the bombs? Did he have a whole hospital rigged with massive amounts of explosives (which none of the police found while evacuating) just in case he might need it that evening? *scratches head* Now, I believe plot is less important than story, and the TDK's story themes blew me away so completely that I was willing to ignore the plot issues, but I can see how a more detail-oriented person (like my husband, who kept twitching and muttering next to me) might find it really annoying.

--Speaking of convoluted schemes, the Nolan Joker has to have some kind of amazing psychic superpower, like an evil Hari Seldon who can predict human behavior to the finest detail. Either that or Longshot-level luck (to pull in a Marvel character whose superpower was just that, he was always lucky). Nothing else could make his plans, which are the most labyrinthine, Byzantine, Rube Goldbergesque plans in the universe, work. He knows how to manipulate that cop into getting too close to him just in time to blow up his stooge before anyone notices he's got a bomb in his stomach, while knowing the explosion will kill or disable everyone in the HQ except him and Lau. Impressive! Even the bank robbery at the beginning involves such amazing levels of meticulous, minute planning, down to making sure the last robber stands in just the right place to get hit by a bus. All of which makes it the more ironic when Joker gives his speech to Harvey about how everyone in the world is a schemer and a planner except him, how he doesn't plan, he just does. He's an agent of chaos, yes, but he uses both order and chance to further chaos--in exactly the same way Batman uses chaos to serve the law.

It's interesting to me that one of the only times Ledger's Joker actually seems to find something legitimately humorous is when the last bombs don't go off at the hospital--that is, when his own careful planning goes awry on him.

--Rachel is frustratingly chemistry-free with everyone, and yet Bruce, Harvey and the Joker all clearly find her completely compelling. This makes more sense if you think of Rachel as somehow embodying and symbolizing all of Gotham--which makes her choice of Harvey and Bruce's agonized wish/belief that she would have chosen him much more resonant for me. It's cliche and robs the character of actual character, but it makes some sense within the movie.

As a side note, this movie could arguably pass the Bechdel test, as Barbara Gordon discusses her safety with Anna Ramirez (they're discussing Jim's reported plans, so I'm not sure it quite works, but it's closer than a lot of movies I've seen).

--The ending. *sighs* I've gotten in some rather spirited arguments elsewhere, both with people I respect and people I do not, about Batman taking the blame for Harvey's wrongdoing. Some people apparently deeply dislike this ending. Phrased in the form that I find most reasonable, they say that it doesn't make any pragmatic sense for Batman to be blamed for what Harvey did, that the people of Gotham should be able to be good on their own without having a symbolic hero to look up to. It serves no practical purpose to have Batman be seen as a murderer.

I understand that argument. Really I do. And I find myself, when responding, to be completely unable to explain the power of the ending in any terms that make sense to the people I'm arguing with. Because maybe it doesn't make practical sense, but it makes a deeper, more primal kind of sense to me. It may not fit the facts, but it tells the truth-- the truth that there's a deeper heroism than the flashy public kind, that a true hero is a darker, more lonely role than we would like to think it is. Harvey's story of the champion chosen to defend the gates of Rome, and how being chosen was not an honor but a sacrifice, rang very true for me. Batman is the scapegoat that bears the sins and guilts of Gotham, because he's strong enough to endure them and brave enough to transmute that outcast status into action. It's a story of alchemical transcendence that appeals to me at an intuitive, pre-rational level, impossible to explain in pragmatic terms. Which means I'm constantly backing down in arguments I've been having about the movie, because there's really no way to say "I'm sorry, I love the ending because it appeals to the spiritual and romantic side of me, transcending brute facts and illuminating truths beyond those of simple pragmatics" without sounding like a condescending putz.

"It's not FAIR!" cries Harvey in anguish from his hospital bed. I'm working on a textbook and have to write sample dialogues in English. In one, either Dan or I wrote a grieving relative at a funeral, saying "It's not fair they died so young." Our Japanese co-writers were puzzled by this. "What has fairness got to do with dying? How could it be either fair or unfair to die? It simply is." We could not make them understand the deep-seated feeling in the Western world that things must be fair. They must. Harvey's sense of unfairness is what snaps his mind. And I love this movie in part because it puts an arm around your shoulders and says "Life isn't fair. Horrible things happen to people who don't deserve them to happen, and there's nothing that can be done about it but endure. Endure and fight. But it will never be fair." What happens to Batman isn't fair, and I think that bothers some people a lot, at a very deep level that they don't want to think about. If life isn't fair to handsome, wealthy, charming, intelligent Bruce Wayne, who fights crime tirelessly and selflessly, what can it possibly offer us? And the answer is: nothing. The world offers us nothing. You have to take what you can from it and claim it as yours.

Watching the Olympics in Japan

2008-08-10T16:01:00.003+09:00

I always feel vaguely guilty enjoying the Olympics: the glitz, the jingoistic subtexts, the nationalism. And yet... At their best (which they're often not, I grant) the Olympics really do have some transcendent moments. Somehow I always enjoy watching the medals ceremonies and the different ways people respond to the moment--the ones who just grin all the way through, the ones who suddenly look like they've been hit between the eyes, astonished to find themselves there, the ones who cry.

Watching in Japan is always odd. I'd never realized how much one relies on the announcers to make sense of what's going on. I have no way of understanding judo without a helpful announcer. Two guys stand there and hold each others' gi for a while, then there's a flurry of motion and the announcers start screaming--and I can't even tell who just won a point. :) And there are none of those soft-focus athlete profiles. I always kind of disliked them in theory, but watching an Olympics without them makes me realize how helpful they are in framing what's going on, personalizing it.

On the plus side, there are three channels running the Olympics here, all of them absolutely commercial-free. Envy me, muahahaha! I've watched badminton and air pistol and women's weightlifting. And I've already watched a lot of very grim judo wrestlers (in judo for Japan, it's gold or you might as well have stayed home. Like American basketball times about a million). I can't understand any of it, but it's really fun to watch. :)

Long Review of The Dark Knight

2008-08-04T21:34:00.002+09:00

I came out of The Dark Knight with a tickling memory of another scene from a book in my head. I couldn't pin it down for a long time, and finally it clicked: "1984." In George Orwell's book, the crisis of the story comes when Winston Smith is being tortured with rats, his greatest fear. A cage is strapped to his face and he's told that when the gate opens, the rats will be released to eat his face. In a panicked moment, he begs them to torture his lover with them instead:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then -- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment -- one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'

Faced with the proof of his own cravenness, with the fact that he would sacrifice anything he said he loved to save his skin, Winston is broken. His spirit gives up, he capitulates to Big Brother.

In The Dark Knight, the Joker's purpose is to reveal to as many people as possible how craven, cruel, and self-serving people are; how when given a choice between our ideals and continuing to draw breath without pain we'll sell our ideals, our loves, any of our cherished values in a moment. The theme starts with the bank robbery, in which criminals gladly kill each other for some cash. It continues through scenes such as the one where he gives the two thugs the broken cue and tells them to kill each other, to the one where people have to kill an innocent to save the hospitals, to the final climax with the ships. Over and over again, he tries to force people to choose--and to reveal to them that their choice will always be cruel and cowardly, to render their lives empty of meaning beyond chaos and self-interest. He wants to make clear to Batman that the people he serves are merely animals, slavering dogs. And sometimes people do fail the test.

This is why, in my mind, the scene with the two ships is the emotional heart of the movie. Everything after, with Harvey, is merely a gripping anticlimax. The scene with the ships is where Gotham--not Batman, but Gotham and the human spirit--triumph over the Joker.

This is a movie which manages to be dark and inspiring. This is a movie in which, given a perfectly reasonable opportunity to harm others in order to save themselves, average people choose to risk sacrificing themselves instead. (Yes, pragmatically it's likely that whoever pushed the button would blow up their own ship, but the decision is framed ethically, not pragmatically). This is a movie in which, given the opportunity to kill a bunch of criminals in order to save themselves and their children, people take a vote! And then even when the choice is reached democratically, they still know in their hearts the truth of what Socrates says, that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil, and they turn away from their reasonable, democratic choice to resign themselves to sacrifice. The moments when both ships turn away from killing are transcendantly, ludicrously optimistic about the human spirit. These are people who aren't inspired by Batman, they're not asking "What would Batman do," they're not afraid he'd disapprove of their choice--they're merely acting from the depth of the human soul's ability to sacrifice itself.

And Bruce has total faith that they'll choose right. He tells Gordon so, he tells the Joker so. He knows that human beings will not choose to deal death, and he's vindicated. Gotham wins, and in that moment justifies Batman's love for it and his continuing sacrifice for it.

Batman says he isn't a hero, and I think by that he means more than "people won't see me as the hero I am." He's not the hero. The hero of this movie is the human spirit, which is what Bruce fights for. Bruce himself makes plenty of mistakes in this movie--his extreme interrogation tactics aren't treated as heroic or satisfying, and in nearly every case they're either futile or they actively help the enemy. But even though some people do give in to the Joker's nihilism, in many key instances they don't. In fact, even Harvey repudiates the Joker's thesis at some level, as he's broken not by realizing he cares about his own life more than Rachel's, but by being unable to bear the pain of failing to make the sacrifice.

The moment when the Joker waits for one of the ships to explode, and waits, with disbelief dawning in his voice, while Bruce knows the people he protects are worth the sacrifice--civilians, policement, and convicts alike--they're all capable of making the right choice...that's where the Joker loses. Harvey, for all the attention given him, is just one man, and any one man can fail. But if normal people--thugs and accountants, mothers and muggers--can make the heroic sacrifice, how can Bruce ever consider his mission a failure?

Other thoughts:

--Ledger's Joker. I've talked a lot about the Joker's "purpose" and "goal" here. I appreciate the theme and the way it's played out very much, but...I'm not sure I like a Joker with a purpose. I tend to prefer him as more truly capricious and, well, having fun. Ledger's Joker is oddly, ironically, serious. He's teaching us an important lesson, why won't we listen to him? It works very well in this movie, but it's not a version of the Joker that will stick in my mind in the long run. The basic theme might have been better played out by a villain like Mr. Freeze...but I understand that the Joker is, like, a zillion times creepier, so I can't really blame them for using him. I did like that they kept the conceit of a totally unknowable background, a true cypher.

--The politics are iffy at times, I'll grant. Batman's always been about the willingness to take the morally gray path in order to serve the greater good. He's a fantasy of the idea that the man outside the law can still preserve the law, like the old cowboy dramas such as "Shane." Although I believe that in reality it's a dangerous concept, in a fantasy world (even Nolan's "realistic" Gotham is still clearly a fantasy world)it has a mythic resonance. The movie's about a lot more than terrorism and current world politics; it speaks to much deeper themes.

--I'm struck and moved by Bruce's essential aloneness, which is different from loneliness. There's a beautiful, sparse bleakness in his Mission in this version, his embrace of a life and a philosophy that transcend what most people are able to do. I've been rolling over in my mind images of the traditional scapegoat, who bears the sins of the community (the constant theme of being pursued by dogs seems to reinforce this), the Suffering Servant of Isaiah: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted."

Yeah, Batman makes me think about religion. *grin*

Mandalas online

2008-08-01T12:15:00.004+09:00

I've been mesmerized by Myoates, which is a web tool that allows you to basically create sophisticated Spirographs online. I loved Spirograph. My sister and I spent hours making designs and coloring them in, cutting them out and painstakingly putting them in a photo album which I am certain is still lurking around somewhere. With some effort, one can make designs with Myoates like this one:

Not my work, I assure you. Mine have all looked mostly like sophisticated doodles. But I love the almost mandala-like feel of the result, and the hypnotic quality of watching my casual scribbles be mirrored into near-infinity and given structure and symmetry...

The Marvellous Land of Oz

2008-07-30T22:17:00.005+09:00

I've been re-reading some of my Oz books. When I was a little girl, our library had all 14 of the books about Oz written by L. Frank Baum, and the little cards in the back of them (our library books had little cards in the back of them! I miss those) had my name over and over and over again, from the painstakingly scrawled "Jennifer" to the whimsical, bubbly (and short-lived) "Jenni" to the terse and businesslike long-term-winner "Jen."

I. Loved. Those. Books.

I loved the idea that ordinary girls--Dorothy and after her Trot and Betsy Bobbin--could find themselves whisked suddenly away to another world. I adored the gender-bending Ozma. In retrospect, I believe I was very taken with a world in which all of the major powers for good and evil were women. Men tended to be either humbugs like the Wizard (who could only do magic he learned from Glinda) or ridiculous (like the threatening but ultimately comical Nome King). Women were magical, forces to be reckoned with. As an adult I can see the pitfalls of this, but as a child I loved all the women of Oz, from the selfish Princess Langwidere, who changes heads every day rather than hairstyles, to Red Reera the Yookoohoo, the isolationist witch.

I owned a copy of the first book. On the cover, it showed Dorothy and her companions coming to a place in the Yellow Brick Road where the road halted and gave way to a wide river. The party was getting ready to board a raft and try to cross to the unknown wilderness on the other side. On the cover, under the title, was a word that I found mystical and magical:

Unabridged.

In my young mind, I was convinced that "unabridged" referred to that cover illustration and the difficulty of crossing that river. The river was unabridged, and if they could get beyond it who knew what wonders and perils awaited them? I loved that word. It seemed to breathe potentials and possibilities.

I wanted to live an unabridged life.

Mary Oliver, "Goldenrod"

2008-07-23T19:53:00.002+09:00

Is it terribly trite to like Mary Oliver's poetry? Possibly. Yet she manages to pull more than sheer cliche from the nature images she uses often enough to keep me loving her work.

Goldenrod

On roadsides,
in fall fields,
in rumpy bunches,
saffron and orange and pale gold,

in little towers,
soft as mash,
sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
full of bees sand yellow beads and perfect flowerlets

and orange butterflies.
I don't suppose
much notice comes of it, except for honey,
and how it heartens the heart with its

blank blaze.
I don't suppose anything loves it, except, perhaps,
the rocky voids
filled by its dumb dazzle.

For myself,
I was just passing by, when the wind flared
and the blossoms rustled,
and the glittering pandemonium

leaned on me.
I was just minding my own business
when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
citron and butter-colored,

and was happy, and why not?
Are not the difficult labors of our lives
full of dark hours?
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
All day
on their airy backbones
they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one's gold away.

Oh, so THAT'S what people hate about "Uncle Tom's Cabin"...

2008-07-23T10:35:00.003+09:00

All right, I've gotten further into "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and one of the major reasons people dislike it has become clear to me. It can be summed up in three small words:

Eva St. Clair.

"Little Eva" is the daughter of the man Tom is eventually sold to. She's a little girl whose golden curls frame a perfectly seraphic face. She's adorable and sweet-tempered, and treats everyone, white or black, with perfect respect and dignity. The slaves all adore her and gather around to watch her pretty little face and hear her beautiful, angelic voice as she speaks of forgiveness and mercy.

I remember the story well enough to know she dies later, and a mean-spirited part of me is rather looking forward to it.

Her father, on the other hand, I rather like! He's a wastrel and cultivates a deliberate air of carelessness and frivolity, but it's framed as a man who loathes slavery and yet isn't quite strong-willed enough to actually struggle against the whole system he's so deeply implicated in. It torments him, but he just doesn't have the spirit to rebel, either, so he just hates it quietly and is cynical and ironic. When his Northern cousin says she doesn't feel his slaves are "strictly honest," he starts laughing: "O, cousin, that's too good--honest!--as if that's a thing to be expected! Honest!--why, of course, they arn'. Why should they be? What on earth is to make them so?" I like him much more than his perfect little daughter, I am forced to admit.

One passage struck me based on what I was talking about with Joss Whedon. St. Clair was in love with a Northern woman, but her family spread rumors that she was cheating on him and in a fit of pique he married a woman totally unsuited for him, only to find that his first love was true to him. But of course it was too late and his life was ruined. Stowe notes wryly:

"Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone though."

Over-Investment and Fiction

2008-07-19T18:49:00.004+09:00

Joss Whedon--best known for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly," is something of a Geek God. Yet I've never watched anything by him! My geek cred has been damaged...

Well, during the last writer's strike, Whedon and some friends got together and produced a little three-part web drama they called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," just released in three installments last week. The conceit is that it's the video blog of a wannabe villain, Dr. Horrible.

As you can see, Dr. Horrible (he has a PhD...in horribleness) is adorable. He's inept and rather sweet. He wants, more than anything, two things--1. an invitation to the Evil League of Evil and 2. To win the heart of the earnest young women who uses the laundromat next to him. There's singing! And goofiness!

In the course of the first two parts, he gets Penny to notice him, only to lose her to the smarmy and loathesome "hero" Captain Hammer (who has a tendency to beat up and/or give wedgies to Dr. Horrible). The Evil League of Evil invites him to join--but first he must murder someone to prove his villain status. Despite feeling like killing "isn't his style," he decides to make an exception in the case of Captain Hammer and sets out at the end of Act II to kill him.

So far so good! In fact, so far so excellent! It was funny and disarming and adorable, and I was so rooting for Dr. Horrible, although I was pretty sure he'd have a change of heart and maybe stick to petty villainy and win Penny's heart. I'd had a pretty bad couple of days and when I saw Part III up I was like, "Thank goodness, something that will make me happy to see."

And in Part III, he attacks Captain Hammer at a dedication ceremony, Captain Hammer grabs his weapon from him and tries to shoot him with it, the weapon blows up at random and Penny is killed by shrapnel. Now he's killed someone, so he's allowed into the Evil League of Evil and he becomes a full-fledged arch-villain in a montage showing him ruling with an iron fist. The story ends with him singing that now that he has the world in his command, he feels... "...nothing." The last shot is of him staring bleakly, blankly into the camera.

...

Apparently, based on other people's reactions, if I had known Joss Whedon better I could have avoided the worst of the shock. But this kind of bait-and-switch seems fundamentally unfair, somehow. There was no foreshadowing of it, no warning, it was as if Whedon just set out to create a likeable character in a situation that made us root for him--and then laughed and smashed the whole contraption to the ground. It seemed oddly contemptuous from a man supposedly famed for being humane and witty. And it victimized the female character (she dies hoping Captain Hammer will save her, which is pretty damn stupid since she just watched him gloating he was going to murder someone and then running away after getting scratched by shrapnel)--also an odd move for a man known for his feminist sensibility.

All in all, Whedon, I'm not impressed. I'm impressed (if chagrined) by my ability to get into a nicely-told story and empathize with the character, but I end up feeling pretty stupid and used, frankly. I was about ready to swear off all fiction this afternoon--it all seems a rigged game where the author's just mocking you beyond the pages of the book. If you take the characters more seriously than the author does, the message seems to be, you're the idiot when you feel badly that bad things happen. I felt like a real tool, and I'm not really recovered yet. Not really the results I was hoping for from this little Web drama.

*heavy sigh* I am apparently painfully un-hip...

"Uncle Tom's Cabin"

2008-07-14T21:12:00.004+09:00

One of the things I appreciate most about my parents is that they always encouraged me to read books that widened my horizons, as a kid growing up in rural Maine. It was, alas, an encouragement doomed to some level of failure. Books with protaganists outside of my range of experience were more unintelligible to me than the fantasy that was my default reading. I remember being mystified by "Harriet the Spy"--the main character walked to her friends' houses? How was this possible? I had no idea what a "city block" or a "park" was, and the idea of having a nanny was simply gibberish. "Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry" was much less comprehensible to me than the Oz books. I simply have to hope that some of it stayed with me by...osmosis or something.

I remember my father encouraging me to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" when I was in fifth grade. I know I read it, but I'm re-reading it now and it's all new to me. But it's good. The introduction of the new edition I'm reading is quite dismissive of the book, sending it off rather with a pat on its head for trying hard but ultimately failing to be fair to the slave experience. And yes, Stowe tends to dwell a great deal on the "simple, childlike nature" of most black people. I assume this is a natural result of attempting to appeal to an audience that probably isn't going to take well to images of really, really pissed-off slaves.

And yet...one of her main characters, the escaped slave George, is proud and bitter and quite ferocious in his denunciation of the United States, declaring he is no citizen of America and has no need to abide by its laws. He intends to fight being re-taken to his death or the deaths of others. He's pretty glorious, actually, and not simple and child-like at all.

I also feel rather like Uncle Tom gets rather a bad rap in history. His name has become synonymous with an African-American who cheerfully colludes with the system, and yet he's anything but. Admittedly, he does refuse to run away when his owner sells him--but not because he's faithful to his master, but because the deal was either Tom or all the other slaves on the plantation. He's doing it to save everyone else he cares about, not because he's fond of his Master (although, mind you, he is also that).

And although Tom is very religious and Stowe comes from a very religious background, Christianity isn't presented as some kind of sentimental cure-all. George is bitterly dismissive of Christianity, and everyone other than Tom has their outbursts of how no God could ever allow something as horrible as this to happen. Maybe the most interesting passage is when Eliza and her child make it to the other side of the Ohio River and are helped by a farmer, who is moved by her plight. Stowe says something like "Obviously this was an unlettered man; if he had more Bible learning as the learned classes have, he would have known it was wrong to help an escaped slave." Strong words for the sister of an renowned preacher...

Anyway, I have had reason lately to be appalled by how little I know of the "Peculiar Institution" of American slavery, so I've been trying to fill in the gaps. It's horrifying but oddly uplighting reading. The indomitable human spirit finds a way to survive and resist.

First Post!

2008-07-12T11:29:00.000+09:00

Tinkering around with this formatting. Thought I'd try to embed one of those widget-thingies I've heard about here. :)

Last.fm is an interesting service that syncs up with your iPod and keeps track of what you listened to over time. Is it a willing embrace of the Panopticon? Perhaps. But it's also really cool to see your musical tastes tracked like that.

I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" a lot lately. His voice is so well-suited for protest music it's uncanny. Of course, he's been singing protest music for decades, the people who badly misinterpret "Born in the U.S.A." notwithstanding...