jasonは

Winshluss's Pinocchio

2012-02-14T18:13:00.000+09:00

This was ~~a birthday present to~~ one of many birthday books I bought myself. It's by Winshluss, a French cartoonist who was also, with Satrapi, behind the Persepolis movie that I still need to see. Quick review to spread the wealth around:

The basic story is a darkly comic retelling of Pinocchio, all sans (it's French!) words except for occasional interludes of Jiminy, the born loser cricket what lives inside Pinocchio's head.

I was surprised how funny everything was. It's not too often that I laugh out loud at comics anymore(--I submit that there is a definite minimum reading-speed limit needed in order to make a laughoutloud joke funny, and my Japanese reading-speed ain't it--)but I did a handful of times with Pinocchio. Like, there's this one bit where Pinocchio meets Candlewick (called 'Lampwick' in the Disney movie; called 'that kid who becomes Pinocchio's friend till he starts smoking cigars and turns into a donkey' by everyone who saw the Disney movie) and Candlewick offers out his hand to shake, only to pull it back and laugh like mad when Pinocchio tries to. Syke. Later in the book, Candlewick is being chased by soldiers and he begs Pinocchio to help him up a wall and to safety. Pinocchio holds out his hand to grab Candlewick's, who pulls it away again and laughs his head off. Oh wait, no, the soldiers chop his head off. He totally dies. Syke.

Anyways, really charming book. It won the Angouleme Best Album Award in 2009, if that helps. (Angouleme is like Comic-Con but less Hollywood; like Comiket but less porn. One hopes one can go one day, but sending one to Europe to buy comics would not be unlike sending a gambling addict to Monte Cristo to sightsee for a weekend.)

On hearing the announcement of Before Watchmen

2012-02-02T14:37:00.000+09:00

So DC announced today the forthcoming Before Watchmen series, and the Blogosphere scrambled to fire back in kind. It's pretty interesting how the commentary's shaping up so far, though.

Like any political announcement, two groups of voices welled up in the aftermath, the yay-sayers and the nay-sayers. But the for and against crowds aren't blasting off their usual talking points--at least the for-crowd isn't. Usually the stuff you hear from that group is story-based. They're into the characters, or the story has a lot of potential, or whatnot. Take Civil War for example, where the people who liked it generally pointed to the dichotomies that were played out, especially between Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. Or the current events charge of the story, as it reflected a number of American political news at the time. The people who didn't like it (I say people, but it might've just been me) pointed to the sloppy pacing, writing, plot-twisting, side-changing, and overall pro wrestling/soap opera-esque air of impermanence of the story, reflected best by the temporary he's-really-dead-iness of Captain America (RIP Steve Rogers, April 2007 ~ August 2009).

(Or or! Spider-Man: Reign, where..where...let's call them likers...likers were like, 'It's The Dark Knight Returns, but for Spider-Man!', and ol' Jason the hater was like, 'Yeah, but Batman and Spider-Man aren't anything alike, so why should they both go dystopian in the future?' Wouldn't something really unique--like All-Star Superman was to Superman or Dark _Knight was to Batman--be better for the character? Or is that just me?)

(Speaking of, where are all the nosebleed-level good Marvel non-canonical one-shots?)

(Anyways:)

What you have here, it looks like, is one side saying that Before Watchmen should be permissible, because Alan Moore makes money doing fanfics for a living, so why not let other people fanfic his work?, while the other side, Alan Moore among them, are grumbling that they shouldn't try to milk further the golden Watchmen cow, it's perfect as it is except for that one teat Zack Snyder lopped off that one time.

Well, ethically speaking Moore is wrong. I mean, it's hardly worth writing complete sentences over. Lost Girls. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Miracleman. His original idea for, get this, Watchmen. From Hell fanfic-ized a real London doctor into Jack the Ripper. We might imagine Dr. Gull would not be terribly entertained by such a story.

But who cares what Alan Moore thinks about stuff that doesn't have anything to do with him. (Well, why do people read celebrity gossip magazines...ah, anyways,) The interesting point is that the masses have come out and voiced their opinions, and their opinions, instead of being straightforward 'I think it'll be a good/bad story'-type opinions, are more 'I think it is/isn't a worthwhile piece of art'-type opinion. Less entertainmenty, more literary theory-y.

And that's pretty cool, for one. For two, it shows how easy it is to make lit theory (or art theory in general) a worthwhile subject in schools. In this case, for a handful of exceptional reasons, Alan Moore was well known, his personality and opinions towards mainstream comics were well known, so most people interested in these kinds of comics pricked up their ears when DC made their big announcement. Just imagine if we could teach people Shakespeare in such a way as to garner opinions and fanfare like this every time another version of Hamlet debuts.

Anyways, I think the project is dangerous. (I mean, really. Alan Moore knows his way around a curse, people.) It's fine what they're doing, of course. On every level; DC owns the copyrights. But think about this on an artistic level. If you make new Spider-Man stories, there's no issue because the character is essentially meaningless. He and Wolverine and [take your pick] were designed from the outset to be rehashable, ageless characters. The difference between one monthly superhero and another is the difference between a red gum ball and a blue one (unless you find a milk crate of really old, mint-condition, first edition red gum balls, in which case you're rich). Superheroes can take on a bit more weight if an artist does something really special with them in a non-continuity one-shot--like Mark Millar did with Superman in Red Son--or if the character's story is endable, like Toriyama Akira eventually did with Dragonball.

But with something like Watchmen, you're dealing with a real piece of gold. Watchmen is different. It's beautiful from almost every angle. (Here's where I'd describe how and why if there weren't already a hundred million articles on that elsewhere on the Internet.) Like a Mozart symphony, a Sappho poem, a Shakespeare play, or a Beatles song, you don't talk about Watchmen like you talk about an off episode of Battlestar Galactica. You don't talk about what could have been better, you talk about why this or that good bit made the whole extraordinary. You assign the work for study in a college class and you scrape it down to the spine, looking for as many patterns and near-patterns as you can find, and when you're done reading or dissecting you sit back and you breathe out and you say, 'damn. I wouldn't have thought of that, but I'm glad someone did.'

So that, I reckon, 's why people generally fanfic open-ended, lighter stories rather than Hamlet or Moby Dick. If the artist has created such a beautiful shape that there's nothing to really add to, then why bother? In trying, there's a danger in damaging your artistic reputation. 'You think you're good enough to entertain me more with Watchmen's characters than Alan Moore? Good luck, buddy.' I guess that's how I feel. But those books have got to get some pretty exceptional reviews before I let DC Comics near my cash-udders.

It's possible, though. Moore's proven that throughout his career, that you can take characters set in stone and do something interesting with them. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn't a good example--most of those characters were pretty pulpy to begin with, and so, in my opinion, they fall pretty close to the guilt-free zone of rehashing monthly superheroes. But Lost Girls was a big gamble. It could have tanked (like the Star Wars prequels! I said it!), and while it didn't fully...(what's the opposite of tank?), it did well enough to justify using the characters, methinks.

The Dragonball Litmus Test 1

2011-12-25T13:03:00.003+09:00

I read this LessWrong article the other day and I got to thinking that, while I was studying more and experiencing more overall Japanese on a daily basis than I had been all year, I still wasn't improving as fast as I could be, or even as fast as I was at the beginning of the year. And because the article was well written, I could see exactly where my problems were: (b), (h), and to a lesser but still annoying extent (f).

(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
(h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
(f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;

(h) is mostly hereditary, in the form of my pap's short temper. I'm working on it. (f) is something everyone deals with, usually in the form of mindless Facebook surfing. I also have a hard time not checking Newser.com at least at the beginning and end of every day, but that's really the last of a long process of whittling down fun-but-useless English distractions off of my free time.

But (b) is something I stopped thinking proactively about a while ago, probably mostly because I tend to look at the handful of popular language tests available in Japan like an old man looks at these damn kids these days what have no respect. (As in with grumpy contempt, in case that metaphor wasn't clear.)

But I missed the point about tests being a useful indicator of how you're advancing in a given subject. (And uh, sorry to my friends who said those exact words to me any number of times over the past few years while I nodded off.) So I got to thinking how I could measure my language ability in a way that I would deem appropriate to my methodology (e.g. fun) and effective (e.g. evaluating a real skill that I would use in my daily Japano-life).

So I've come up with a reading test so far; hopefully speaking, reading, and writing will follow. I'm going to evaluate myself with Dragonball. The manga series has dozens of volumes, the themes are consistent throughout, and I can evaluate my both my average reading speed and vocabulary comprehension.

I reckon doing one of these reading tests once a month or more will be an interesting experiment.

I just finished my first text, in fact. I set a timer for an hour and opened up vol. 6. (I finished vol. 5 a few months ago and hadn't touched the series since.) After an hour, I'd gotten through 63 pages and had to look up 42 words. My iDictionary lets me bookmark all the words I can (quickly) look up in a Dragonball folder, so I'll be able to keep track of whether or not the average number of words I have to look up in a session goes down or stays the same over time.

I reckon it'll be an interesting experiment. It's already turned out to be a good reason to restart my blog, anyways (^_^)

Add more years to your life, and life to your years.

2010-01-07T19:42:00.003+09:00

This is a good one. About longevity and places in the world that excel at it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html

Ulysses

2010-01-02T18:31:00.004+09:00

I finished Ulysses as the sun was going down on 2009. I want to write something long about it, but till I find the thyme I'll just post a few notes here.

Alright, first off, this book is to normal novels as Shakespeare is to elementary school Christmas pageants. The latter are good--or cute--but the former are works of nigh-unachievable genius, of enough depth to last centuries.

Second: if you haven't read Ulysses yet, what you've heard about it probably consists of 1) the book takes place during a single day, and 2) nothing extraordinary happens. That's essentially what I learned about the book, indirectly, over the past handful of years. But that's a bad assessment. That's like saying the Moonlight Sonata is for the piano and doesn't have any lyrics. Ulysses isn't about an unextraordinary day--it's the opposite of that. It's a baptism for prose.

Here's an anecdote for how to approach Ulysses. One day in the 19-teens, a buddy of Joyce's said to the man himself, "Some of your contemporaries think two books a year an average output." To which Joyce replies "Yes, but how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what's the use? It isn't worth doing."

I disagree that it's not worth doing, but I get his point. To Joyce, a story is something you tell your child before they go to bed, or to your buddies at the bar. A novel, though, is a work of art, and it should be distinct from speech. With Ulysses, Joyce took prose from its rank as stylized speech and promoted it to poetry. The chapters are structured like symphonic movements, echoing their distinct styles and themes forwards and backwards into one another. This is different from a straightforward story like Harry Potter, where the only thing that separates one chapter from another is the plot.

I also have a gripe with the stream-of-conscious label that surfaces in every introductory conversation about the book. Through the story the thoughts that flash across the characters' minds also flash across the pages of the book, but that's an awfully limited (and boring) explanation of how the book's written. In fact, this is another way Joyce separates his story from the rest of the rabble: most books on writing will tell you the most important part of style is to not have one--writing unobtrusively is the safest bet for a readable story. Thinking of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling is wonderful at this kind of writing, which is one reason why her stories are so readable. She puts the images right in our heads for us, almost like TV. She's smooth as butter.

James Joyce isn't. He makes you work for your $13.99, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass.

But to be fair, it's really only novelists that are hounded for allowing themselves to be seen working the strings behind the curtain. We don't look at Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Tarantino hoping to not find the essence of their personalities in their work. If Tarantino's movies were as singularly story-driven as Peter Jackson's or Stephen Spielberg's, I might not've gotten Inglourious Basterds for Christmas from my dear friend Matthew. And likewise: Da Vinci's not as realistic an artist as my iPhone, but I still likes him.

Which all means, since I don't think I've mentioned it yet, that Ulysses isn't just about a few Dubliners walking about the city on some unremarkable day in June, 1904, nor is it narrated just through their eyes. One episode is a symphony. One is a play. One is "a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude, then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon, then by way of Mandeville, then Malory's Morte d'Arthur, then the Elizabethan chronicle style, then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque, after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn, and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel [which is] linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general." The last one is a single sentence in five or six paragraphs, 40 pages long.

Ulysses isn't an easy read, but given that all the conversations I've ever had about the book have consisted of bragging about having read the thing, I think a new approach has to be established. I shall take this opportunity to my stab at it.

Ulysses is a novel about how utterly remarkable a day is if we apply significance to it. He uses as his setting Dublin, and gives it to us through the eyes of Jamesapold Joycebloom, et al.

So how and why does he apply significance to it?

The way I see it is, Joyce was a Catholic, and everything about him as an artist can be understood through Catholicism. So what's Catholicism? A church with longstanding traditions and an incredible attention to extravagance and detail.

If you look at Ulysses like a Mass, it all comes together. At least it does for me. Ulysses is complex is its delivery (like the Mass) but it's very simple at its center (also like the Mass). Masses congregate the faithful around the word of God, to offer confession and forgiveness of sins, and they take their good old time doing it with all the standing and sitting, the kneeling and praying, the singing and bell-ringing, the eating of bread and sipping of wine, the shaking of hands and passing of envelopes. The God of the Mass is God, through his son Jesus Christ. The god of Ulysses is James Joyce, through his sons Leopold and Stephen. Ulysses shows us Dublin circa 1904, but it takes damn near 800 pages doing it with all the lists, themes, obscure details, inner notions, wordgames, fantasies, hallucinations, styles, moods, colors, body parts, and references to the Odyssey so as to match the exact layout of the part and place of the day we're experiencing at the time.

Yes: Ulysses at its core is about Joyce and how cool he is. Stephen is young-Joyce and Bloom shares many of the traits of older-Joyce. Molly Bloom is probably verymuch like Nora Joyce, and most of the rest of the characters in the book were connected to Joyce in some real-life way. Joyce didn't write stories to make stuff up--he wrote them to show the world around him in a legitimate, artistic portrait. Joyce always saw himself as a martyr and the subject of conspiracies, and so he made a book about the people he knew in Dublin functioning around two aspects of himself, who fight the world around them inch by inch as Telemachus and Ulysses.

It's conceited, but Joyce was a conceited guy. But so was Beethoven. It doesn't lessen the effect of their art. Ulysses is certainly the most complex (readable) book of the last century--if not ever--and it deserves a place in every lit major's undergrad canon. It can be a gradschool book, but it doesn't need to be. Anyone can read the thing with a Sparknotes handy: it's coming on 90 years since it was published, so enough highbrow folks have sat around considering the thing for a bunch of handy guides to've been published by now.

Anyways, I thought it was as good a book as humans were likely to produce before the asteroid. You might give it a go.

冬休み　(today has thus far rocked)

2010-01-02T16:26:00.005+09:00

(Thems pretty whachacallems up there mean winter vacation, with the first character meaning winter and the remaining meaning vacation.

Today I didn't get out of bed till 2:30, and after a shower went shopping for bread for lunch. Two things of note happened:

WON: Jason found for sale in a pretty bottle with a label of authenticity a brandy-colored altar wine from Spain and subsequently bought it.

TO: As he was leaving the mall with his purchases, the no-spreche-ze-English owner of a bar he went to on the 29th called out to him, Sensei! Sensei! and treated him to a sushi-and-wine lunch.

Just to recap:

Got up at 2:30.
Decided on PBJ for lunch.
Went to the mall.
Found holy wine.
Was bought raw fish and alcohol by an old lady whose bar I sometimes go to and can't, strictly speaking, communicate that well with.

Happy new year, God. That's proof enough for me. (But she did put on a bloodred coat as she got up to leave...)

2009-12-28T22:59:00.001+09:00

I changed the layout. The background is a boring black till I learn how to work with XML without visions of apocalypse dancing in my head.

Some home movies.

2009-12-28T18:47:00.002+09:00

I posted a bunch of pictures on my picasa, but I don't think I can publish videos there. So, to showcase the power of my iPhone--and the cuteness of penguins--here are some videos I shot during my Hokkaido trip.

This is on the bus to the zoo...

These are the penguins...

And these are the penguins marching...

Inglourious Basterds

2009-12-11T23:14:00.004+09:00

I finally discovered iWeb on my computer and spent a good many hours making a website for myself, complete with witty title and minimalist layout. But then I went to publish it and it said I'd need to subscribe to MobileMe for the lowlow price of $99. Per year. Apple, really, that's so 1999.

It said I could publish the webpage if I had an FTP server or some suchness, but I'm willfully ignorant of anything to do with the Internet that doesn't involve pictures as a matter of course. I didn't drop out of my computer science course for nothing, thank you very much. And besides, publishing iWeb pages outside of MobileMe's subscription service eliminates the option for blog comments, which is pretty much the same problem I'm suffering from now. If anyone knows the code for adding a comments section in, I'm all ears...

Look for a trimmed down and possibly revised version of this over at the Pittsburgh Observer in the next week or two.

I think Inglourious Basterds is THE MOST SUBVERSIVE MOVIE OF ALL TIME EVER, and here's a review proving it. You'll regret reading this if you haven't seen the movie already.

So I likes a good analogy like I likes a good mountain. And being what you might call a mountain enthusiast, that’s no small statement. The problem with mountains, though, is that you can’t explain the how and the why of one and expect someone to really get it. The limits of expression are tighter than LA traffic when you’ve got to explain why something was moving or worthwhile. All we’ve really got are adjectives to string together to try to describe something beyond your average lexicon. Likewise, you can explain the proportions of an analogy easily enough to any Jenny from the block, but expecting her to understand the why of the analogy—the reason it’s important—is a wholly different game.

Which is to say, this is a review of the big analogy made by Inglourious Basterds and why this film is Tarantino’s masterpiece to date.

Now, I realize you can’t start labeling things masterpieces without just cause, especially when Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and even True Romance earned higher Tomatometer ratings. But I think Tarantino’s behind me on this one. At the end of the movie, when Captain Apache finishes his business with Landa’s forehead, he says, looking down into the camera,

You know something, Uitivich, I think this just might be my masterpiece.

There you go.

For my money, Tarantino didn’t toil away hundreds of hours on his script to end on a whimsical line. Let’s take it in context. Inglourious Basterds was billed as being “An Inglourious, Uproarious Thrill-Ride”—not much different from the rest of his movies. But most of the cast are connected to the film industry in some significant way: Bridget von Hammersmark is an actress, Frederick Zoller is a war hero-turned-movie star, Lt. Hicox is a film critic, Joseph Goebbels is the director of Nation’s Pride, and of course Shoshanna owns the movie theatre where that film is set to premier.

“I think this just might be my masterpiece” isn’t just Captain Apache admiring his work to roll credits on a morbid note—it’s also Tarantino giving himself what he considers to be a well-deserved pat on the back. Let’s take a closer look as to why he might think so. It won’t take long.

As I see it, Tarantino makes two important analogies to get his point across. You can consider the first one the serve—he gets his idea up in the air for everyone to see. The second one—the point of the film—is the spike.

The first analogy is the King Kong bit. Again, my hope is that anyone reading this will have already seen the movie—or at least read the script—so I’ll skimp on the details. We’re in a tavern—in a basement—in cozy, Nazi-occupied Nadine, France. Lieutenant Hicox and the Bastards expect to meet Bridget von Hammersmark with little incident, but ol’ Quentin proves to be a cruel god. After a small altercation, our Gestapo friend from chapter 3, Major Hellstrom, reveals himself and takes issue with Hicox's accent. Soon enough he has them playing a card game. The idea of the game is to guess the name written on the card on your forehead. Hellstrom goes first. He’s sporting King Kong between his eyes. Being a Gestapo, he asks good questions, and soon he’s confident enough to answer.

Only he’s not right.

His answer is “the story of the Negro in America.”

If you felt odd after this scene, it was because you just got punched with an unexpected analogy, right on your frontal lobe. King Kong is similar to the story of the slave trade in America. It’s a neat comparison. Interesting, even. Move on.

Well not so fast. You can move on from that analogy, just consider it a fun tidbit, but you’d have missed the point.

Before I get to what exactly that point is, let's by way of a fer’instance think back to Kill Bill, vol. 2. There’s a scene near the end that offers us a similar but more explicit example. Right before the climax Bill and Beatrix are having a long heart to heart. Bill gets to talking about superheroes. He says that when most superheroes put on a costume, they become a superhero. But in the case of Superman, you have a guy who dresses from hero to zero, not the other way around. Clark Kent, Bill concludes, is Superman's "critique on the whole human race." He's a clumsy, self-conscious coward, and ultimately just a costume, beneath which lies the man of steel. And just as Superman will always be a superhero, Mrs. Arlene Plimpton, regardless of how many beers she drank or how much barbecue she ate, would always be Beatrix Kiddo, killer extraordinaire.

"Ah, so," says the Bride. "The point emerges."

The trick is seeing beyond the poetry of the analogy. The Bride did it without too much trouble, but that was the nature of the film. Kill Bill was all about straightforward revenge. Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, is about Nazis, the scariest human hunters in recent history. (The main antagonist of the film, Colonel Landa, is smarter and cleverer than everyone else and spends his screen time showing off the systematic prowess of the Third Reich at its best. The other Nazis don’t do a bad job either.) The analogies Tarantino makes and themes he works with in this film, then, might be expected to be more complex.

Back to Nadine.

Consider what happened with Hellstrom’s botched guess: Hellstrom was a Gestapo, and it’s a Gestapo’s job to figure stuff out. Thus, subtly, Tarantino set the audience up to expect the Major to get the answer in ten questions or less, and our expectations are reinforced by his performance—not to mention that “King Kong” was scrawled on his card for us to see. But at this mini-climax, when he answers wrong, something complex happens. The moment is passed over in a hurry, but it’s such a shock, trivial though it may be, that the audience is left confused, surprised, and—if we never thought about King Kong being like the slave trade before—fascinated.

Ultimately, we were tricked. We were right to expect Hellstrom to answer King Kong, because that was the right answer. It was a trick, and our being tricked was harmless. But this was just Tarantino serving us up an idea to consider. The King Kong bit was a trick, but more than that it was a microcosm. Which I guess makes it an analogy about an analogy. How neat.

Now let’s consider the real fireworks. The second analogy, of course, comes at the climax, when the giant face has her revenge.

First, let’s consider our cast of characters. We’ve got as principle members the Basterds, Shoshanna/Emmanuelle, and Colonel Landa.

The Basterds are the heroes of this flick. Some say there are no good guys here, but that’s thinking too far ahead. They’re mean guys to be sure, but whenever they’re on camera there’s a sense of comedy and even lightheartedness, as opposed to scenes with Colonel Landa and the other Nazis, which are tense and scary. Now, despite their being the protagonists, the Basterds go about their business by committing war crimes and acts of terrorism to frighten their enemy. They’re treacherous and they scalp the dead. They’re also not very smart: Colonel Landa laughs himself into a fit when he hears the Basterds’ cover story at the movie premier.

Now, as was mentioned before, Colonel Landa is calm, cool, collected, and several steps ahead of anyone he speaks to. Nobody in the movie is a match for his prowess. He’s a detective, a damn good detective, and we hate him for it. There’s a telling line in the restaurant when Landa is about to make the deal with Lt. Raine. When Landa mentions the Basterds by name, Raine reacts with surprise. Landa, frustrated, says, “We simply aren’t operating on the level of mutual respect I assumed.” Raine guesses not.

It’s an interesting line, because Raine essentially admits to thinking the Nazis are dopes, when in fact he and his men are the fools, just very lucky fools with lots of guns. But Raine’s not entirely wrong: the Third Reich has in this movie decided to put all their highest ranking officers in the same place at the same time in territory awfully close to the Allied front, just for a night at the movies. In a film glorifying the fall of Nazi Germany, we might expect this kind of bad foresight and poor insight from the Nazis, but Tarantino has it coming from both sides. The only two characters who ever successfully think their way through situations are Landa, and the only person to escape him, Shoshanna.

So what have we got here so far? Inglourious Basterds is billed as a movie about Nazi-killin, and it delivers pretty much as thoroughly as it can. We’re privy in a few hours to deaths by clubbing, stabbing, gunfire, real fire, and explosion. People are killed via their heads, necks, chests, and genitals. People are killed on the battlefield, in private, in public, and in between.

Tarantino delivered on Nazi-slaughter promise, and he did it using lowlifes as heroes. It’s an interesting concept, but if that’s all he did then this film certainly isn’t a masterpiece. Let’s take out the scoreboard. Wild killing sprees? The Bride vs. the Crazy 88 beats the climax of this film, and more tastefully to boot. Big, disconnected cast? You won’t find one better than Pulp Fiction’s. Witty banter? All of Tarantino’s films deliver big time. So where does he get off rolling the credits after the word “masterpiece”?

Nation’s Pride. The fictional propaganda film Goebbels made after Frederick Zoller’s heroic exploit on the Italian front is set to premier in Mademoiselle Mimieux’s (aka Shoshanna’s) theatre. It’s the premier of this film that the Basterds plan to blow up, and that Shoshanna and Marcel plan to burn down.

The movie was written to be the epitome of Nazi propaganda films: blindly patriotic, highly unlikely, and tasteless in the extreme. Still, the audience goes wild and Hitler even remarks to Goebbels that it’s his finest film yet. Nation’s Pride is a film about a heroic Nazi taking down hundreds of idiot American soldiers. The audience at Mimieux’s theatre, Hitler included, go wild when they see it. We expect them to die spectacularly at the height of their hate, but when Shoshanna’s movie comes in on reel 4 and the bullets rain down and the flames fire up and the bombs go off and everyone dies, something complex happens.

Something connects.

We’ve been watching a movie with an unlikely plot, where the heroes were admired despite their faults, the villains reviled despite their virtues, where war crimes and acts of terrorism were glorified and history was rewritten to have us win the war more gloriously than we actually did. When Shoshanna Giantface exacts her revenge, the analogy comes full circle. Nation’s Pride was a Nazi propaganda film—and Inglourious Basterds was an Allies one.

Ah, so. The point emerges.

Nation’s Pride is a mirror set up at the heart of the film to show us what we’re like when we’re not paying attention. What are we like when we’re at unawares? Nazi scum. Tarantino managed to trick us into enjoying a movie for visceral reasons, and at the end he showed us the most notorious war criminals of the 20^th century doing the same.

It’s one thing to be entertained. It’s something else to be entertained by something Hitler found entertaining. And it’s a whole different ballgame altogether to be entertained by something Hitler found entertaining because he was a monster. Now there’s an analogy for you. I doubt the line between entertainment and social experiment has ever been defined, but Tarantino has made a film that puts people in a situation where their natural reaction may or may not be akin to how the average German citizen would have reacted during the propaganda blitzkrieg of the 1930s—and our reaction tended to be just like theirs. If you’re the kind of person who thinks art can convey messages worthy of consideration—and if you’re the kind of person who thinks masterpieces are justified as such by the beauty or import of their message—Tarantino’s just handed the West a big bag of implications wrapped in a masterpiece package.

The oceans will turn to blood, etc.

2009-10-05T17:46:00.001+09:00

This was supposed to be a Facebook status update, but it's too juicy to cut down to so few words.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the carbon dioxide being released by the dire melting of the Arctic icecap (dire lest ye be a government or a crazy person) is turning into carbonic acid in the cold waters up there, which will triple the acidity of the 10% of the ocean within 10 years, and a whole bunch more by 2050. Unlike global temperature fluxes, acidity like this hasn't been seen in the ocean in at least 20 million years, and all the yummy shellfish are rather ill-adapted for the storm. Their shells will melt, and the food chain will have a bad day of sorts.

A few things crossed my mind while reading the article. I think the one least likely to be all over the this-is-what-we-oughta-do blogosphere over the next few days is this:

As the oceans are turning acidic, the shellfish are literally melting away. The way I see it, the demographic with the biggest dilemma to solve isn't a government or an island society with a heavy fish diet--I rather think those people would've started working harder by now if they really intended to change anything--but rather the chunk of conservative Christians who deny global warming is happening. Because ten years down the road the oceans will start to turn to blood. Now, it won't be the familiar red blood of fish or whales, but it'll be blood all the same. And it will've come to pass because of all the carbon dioxide the icecaps absorbed, absorbed by people polluting, etc etc.

And, oh my. If I'm not mistaken, the oceans turn to blood just before the antichrist takes his throne. If only we kick up our emission output a notch, we can have an end-of-days-esque ocean before Obama's out of office. Then he can introduce legislation to void whatever amendment it was that limited one's presidency to two consecutive terms. If a sizable swath of America is going to be convinced of the existence of global warming, I bet that'd be a deal maker.

But then again, I do suppose in their crew the end of the world is something to look forward to.

Brian Boyd, Someone in Japan Loves You

2009-09-15T19:40:00.002+09:00

This need be read only by litcrit nerds, with my apologies.

Once upon a time I was in a writing student. From my extensive and expensive schooling I learned two very important rules about writing: 1) writers write, and 2) that if ever I should find myself hankering to write about a book, I should do a book review instead of a litcrit essay. Book reviews, aside from being publishable in places that people go to read, are also rich in straightforward, practical point—they tell you what the book’s good for.

Let’s jump right into it, then. This’ll be inflammatory, so get your salt ready. The current state of literary criticism rather sucks. It’s a knee-deep theoretical marsh lit with the fires of the souls of the dead and through which you’d need a Gollumesque obsessive recluse to find your way. In college I was always frustrated by the lines of thinking of many literary critics. These people could dissect a text for hundreds of pages without my understanding the importance of what they were saying. For years I thought it was my simpleminded approach to literature fostered by an adolescent obsession with superheroes. But as I piled the semesters under me—and the accompanying bills—I got bitter about it. I could follow the arguments they were making, but for me it was like going to a baseball game. It’s very exciting indeed when someone actually hit the damn ball, but in the interims I couldn’t be bothered to focus on people standing around intensely being paid hundreds of dollars per hour for their trouble.

To put it another way, I felt there were a good many things to be said about stories and authors and the way people reacted to them, but that litcrit was at best a shotgun trying to pick apples at fifty feet. There was too much being put out there and the worth of any one contribution made to an understanding of literature was questionable.

(Well, the same thing can be said about biology and mathematics, but in those fields of science, insignificant contributions are arrived at after empirical research. Contributions to literary criticism come from a long history of people’s good sense, the same process that brought us Freudianism and Creationism. They were useful in their time, and certainly interesting ideas and worldviews can be generated under these schools of thought, but schools of thought are the lower-level memes that evolve into the sciences. As we have empirical alternatives in sociology, biology, and meteorology, we shouldn’t defer to Freud to explain the human condition anymore, just as we shouldn’t use God to explain the existence of Man or the occurrence of natural disasters—in the realm of serious scientific study, at any rate.)

I was slowly moving towards the assertion that the study of literature should be a science instead of the schools of philosophy that it is now. Until now there hasn’t been a thesis strong enough to help literature crawl out of the lower subjective echelons of the humanities, and it’s been rollicking there, obscure but egoistic, since the Enlightenment.

I just finished On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd, a 150-year anniversary tribute book to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It’s a well researched (the bibliography is 50 pages!) but readable analysis of why storytelling is so pervasive among Homo sapiens, and an argument for a new kind of literary criticism, provisionally dubbed evocriticism, which analyses texts from various focuses through an evolutionary lens.

If I were disposed to hyperbole and fits of rapture—and I am—I would suggest that this book will win Mr. Boyd no few props and herald the end of literary Theory as a serious academic discipline. That is not to mention the slew of essays and research papers by a certain Mr. Downey that will appear on the Internet machine or in print over the next several years.

From the beginning: I bought this book at its Japanese-import price because I’m way interested in the cognitive sciences and way interested in why litcrit is so uninteresting. The former interest comes from my search for an answer as to why I’m so very strange indeed in the context of my family; the latter, as I’ve already expounded upon at length, comes from me being forever annoyed with the superfluousness of most essays on stories I’ve ever read. And I’ll be damned if this book didn’t turn out to be a soothing aloe on the rash of my litcrit frustrations.

Here’s my problem with large swaths of litcrit: By and large, litcrit takes a discipline that is linked directly and deeply to the human psyche and doesn’t justify it, doesn’t explain its origins, doesn’t offer any bigger answers—and certainly doesn’t ask any big questions. By doing so, it differs substantially from the sciences and even from philosophy. By doing so, it comes close to religious tradition.

Boyd’s book showed me that literary criticism doesn’t click with me not because I’m impatient or dense (I do like books, after all), but because I’m inherently frustrated with its impractical denominationalism. (Well, that’s my interpretation at any rate. I minored in religion and was frustrated by denominationalism there, too. Education made me too snooty for churches; given thousands of choices I was unsatisfied with them all. The same thing happened with me and literary criticism: initially I was impressed, but I grew to be baffled and finally annoyed.)

Denominations aren’t bad in every situation, but they have places where they belong and places where they don’t. The Flat Earth Society is a denomination that doesn’t belong, for what I might suggest are obvious reasons. The various schools of thought working out an ultimate unifying theory in physics do belong, because they’re all trying to come up with a solution from various models. The schools of thought in literature are different in that nobody’s proposing a solution because nobody knows (or even thinks) there’s a problem. We end up with a slew of non-falsifiable denominations. All interpretations of a text, so long as they’re backed up with textual evidence, are valid, because who’s to say they’re not? Or, worse, texts are dissected according to arbitrary limitations, like through a structural, or colonial, or post-colonial lens. There are certainly interesting things to be said about Hamlet if interpreted by feminist theory, but what does it say about the story that makes a difference? At most these papers are pointing out things we can label neat, not useful and certainly not important. And really, neat things are for blogs and trivia games, not doctorial theses.

Boyd’s book submits that there is a problem: that humans evolved to tell stories, and that works of literature live and die by how well those works captivate an audience’s attention. He goes on at length about how and why our brains evolved to use fiction as a tool, and how and why we use it in our day to day lives, even from early childhood. He uses that information to develop a theory of literary criticism that he goes on to apply to Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, looking at each text from standpoints universal (e.g. from a cross-cultural, biological point of view), local (cultural), individual (from the author’s perspective), and particular (from the story’s perspective). His method shows that not only does this theory provide fresh (and empirical) angles explaining why classics and modern classics remain so ingrained in our imaginations, but also that many of the modern schools of litcrit aren’t useless, just limited in scope. Postcolonialism still has a place in the world, albeit as a part of something bigger.

Fuck, I’m burned out. This is a blog, not a scholarly journal. I’ll leave the argument there, incomplete, with my highest recommendation to sit down with the book and a highlighter. I’m really interested in anyone else’s opinion on the issue, especially since I was being so belligerently dismissive of three centuries of literary criticism on the grounds that it always skipped over why I should read Othello, whereas an Amazon user-submitted review would get straight to the heart of the matter. I think evocriticism is going to rock the next generation of lit majors, once someone comes up with a better name. I call dibs on Social Theory.

QI

2009-09-03T17:57:00.002+09:00

I've been watching this show for 13 minutes and I think I've understood 20% of it. It seems to be a gameshow based off of sitting around with a bunch of unlikely academics, trading quips and referencing obscurenesses. The longer I hear them talk the better up I can keep up with them, but I think the Cockney rhyming slang they use at the beginning is too much a task for my time.

Also, it has the most annoying intro sequence for any show ever. Facebookers go to blog.

Please Say Something

2009-08-31T19:14:00.003+09:00

I stumbled this and it's one of the more original short films I've seen. A love story, avant-garde and encyclopedic. Facebookers go to my blog.

Please Say Something - Full Length from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Utah rocked the 4-day workweek

2009-08-26T23:03:00.002+09:00

The governor of Utah instituted a 4-day workweek for a number of government workers some time go and the results are in. Good news for people who don't want to break their back Industrial Revolution-style anymore. I knew the good folks of Utah were good for something.

(Besides education, strong marriages, and Olympic opening ceremonies, that is.)

http://www.good.is/post/tgithursday/

Monkey Magic

2009-08-24T16:54:00.003+09:00

I don't usually fall in for cute animal videos, but this segment from a Japanese TV show of a magician doing a show for a monkey melts my icebergy heart.

My Colbert moment.

2009-08-19T12:48:00.003+09:00

I called it!

In my last post, "politico," I wondered about the internal ideologies of democrats and republicans, suggesting that ultimately blue-minded people, in general, approached political problems more rationally than red-minded people, who were more passionate in their approach, nevermind the foundations of their passion. Not always true, mind you, but in general it seems to be that way for politically active people lately. Anyways, the post is right below this one on my blog.

Well, here's some loose evidence in support of my future honorary degree in poli-sci. Maddow reported on the data suggested by a wide variety of polls conducted by various news agencies across Medialand, especially Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. The data suggests that politically active Republicans' beliefs about recent heated issues are to a much larger degree compared to independents' and Democrats' based on false information. Issues like whether or not the new health care bill has secret provisions designed to weed out the old and infirm from the population.

Polls, I figure, provide a loose indication of demographic mindsets at best. And these polls seem to be exclusive to the major media outlets, of which I have none too much faith in the viewers, including myself. Also Maddow, to say nothing of myself, is as liberal as a harem of walruses. But convinced as I am of the rational base of her arguments, I'll post her report as evidence for my own. It's interesting, at any rate.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

politico

2009-08-08T11:45:00.002+09:00

Not living in America, I always try to take the news with a grain of salt, but there's been a persistent theme to politics since last summer and especially since January, whereby you see Democrats propose new legislation and a lot of Republicans, instead of debating the legislation, rail pretty vehemently against subversive, hidden consequences they assume (or purport to assume) the administration to be forwarding. Instead of trying to work with the political majority for this term, they seem to be turtling back into their own ideology and not budging for anything.

I have pretty strong democratic leanings, so certainly my opinions are bias, but I sincerely don't remember public opinion being so dangerously fiery under Bush. When he did something Americans didn't agree with, people seemed to rail against him on intellectual grounds which resulted in mostly ineffective protesting. But with each new major legislation out of Obama's office--the stimulus, Guantanamo, and now health care--seems to boil closer and closer to the top of the pot--and for reasons that are almost entirely driven by scare tactics rather than reasoned consideration of the issue at hand. When people argued against going to war with Iraq, it seemed to me they were arguing against the shaky foundation for war as opposed to Afghanistan, which almost everyone supported. But the arguments against, for instance, health care, are touting absurdities like forced euthanasia.

I want to keep my political cool so as to seem fairminded in my arguments, because certainly my opinions stem from my background and more conservative-minded people have arrived at their opinions from equally legitimate experience. But I'm thinking this through as hard as I can and the only conclusion I can come up with is that at the moment, left-leaning politics are just more rational than right-leaning politics, which have become ardently emotional. I figure that's the case partly because of the 2008 election, where lots of formerly red states voted for democrats: since fewer swing states voted republican, it had the unintended effect of "purifying" the Republican party, so that now the mean political slant of elected republicans is further to the right than it has been in decades.

Anyways, I don't live in America anymore. If this sounds way too influenced by scouring news sites every day, I'd like some of my friends to talk me back to a less paranoid state of mind. Because as it is, I see the video posted below (on my blog, Facebookers) as being a legitimate appraisal of the state of the union.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Trainride Hikeathons

2009-08-07T15:18:00.004+09:00

I put like a hundred new pictures up on my Picasa and will post a video I took from atop a mountain at Fukuroda Falls with my lovely Chiharu by my side, striking me relentlessly with her towel. I rather suspect she'll not be happy about being put on the Internet, so let's keep this between you and me, ね? Also, forgive me for singing English instead of speaking it. I'm one of those boyfriends.

Curses and photoblog update

2009-07-20T11:43:00.002+09:00

I found a few extra pictures on my camera from America. I added them to the Homecoming album on my Picasa. Also I started a Matsuri (Japanese festival) album which'll be updated as I hit the various festivals over the next few weeks.

Also: I was eating a large gooey PBJ sandwich just now and using a napkin as a plate, onto which dripped the extra jelly, which promptly flipped over onto my keyboard. Bah.

Bookshopping

2009-07-13T06:51:00.003+09:00

I fell off the wagon again and went bookshopping over the weekend. I was in town for other business and, well, you know how it is. Jimbocho is the used bookstore aisle of Tokyo, and I stumbled into a few new corners of it even after having lived over here for just about two years. I got!:

James Joyce
Annotations to Finnegans Wake
The Evelyn Wood Seven-Day Speed Reading and Learning Program
and The Book of Thoth

Mostly I got them because they were awful cheap and I was suddenly interested--but that Joyce biography I've been on the prowl for for some weeks now. The Evelyn Wood speedreading business seemed like a gimmicky self-help book, but it was only 400 yen, so I scooped it up. (I would've held off if I knew they were selling it for a penny on Amazon.) I burned through 150 pages of it using its speed reading techniques...I now know that my natural reading speed is a just-about-average 305 words per minute and that my underline-the-text-with-yer-hand reading is a wee bit faster at 399.7wpm. As for all the wacky tricks they go into after that...my reading speed picked up a good deal, but my comprehension dropped. I feel pretty certain the program works if you set yourself to task--and I intend to--but it's nuts how worn out you get. I slept like a baby at any rate.

After reading this article on the best and worst karaoke songs, I'm reminded of the book that was never written on mountainclimbing by the guy that never set foot outside of Pennsylvania. Because that book would've been trash. I haven't come close to figuring out what songs are and aren't definite hits in the karaoke box, but I didn't notice Life Goes On (Beatles) or Piano Man on their list in any event. Abominable.

Chesss.

2009-07-06T07:01:00.002+09:00

I think I'm entering my second I want to be defined by something quirky material phase of my postgraduate life. The first was the Wii, which only lasted as long as good games were coming out for it. Now that that's done, I've got a hankering for chess. Particularly pretty chess...like this and this.

Any nice suggestions that aren't so ruddy expensive would be welcome. I'll have to see what I can do about getting a comment section programmed onto this blogomine. Otherwise, there's always the facebook.

Argumentum Ornithologicum

2009-06-30T07:06:00.002+09:00

A fun short story from Borges, whose copyright may not be entirely superfluous:

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see none, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer--not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.--is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

So now you know.

The Tempest

2009-06-13T20:47:00.002+09:00

I read my first Shakespeare in...eight years? Nine? Za Tempest. Last apparent solo play by Shakespeare, first in the First Folio put together after his death, so first in this sweet first folio edition by the Royal Shakespeare Company that I splurged for the other week. Wizard name of Prospero crashes a ship of his enemies on his island that said enemies incidentally crashed him on twelve years previously when they were putsching over his dukedom. The party of aristocrats, servants, and boatmen are split apart, assume one another doomed and dead, and subsequently embark on their own adventures. It's all a part of old man Prospero's plan, however, to bring them all together in Act 5 and graciously forgive the lot of'em for all the wrongs they've done him and get back to Milan to be a good Christian and fairly very wealthy duke. (Antonio, Prospero's brother and usurper, doesn't have much to say when the king of Naples returns Milan to Prospero. But since Prospero's taken up sorcery in his recent extended exile, that's perhaps not unwise.)

Rant uncontentedly about my university education as I might, it's nice to feel my consciousness glide over Shakespeare like this. Back in high school I was in that minority that needed the ModernEnglish transationcrutch for the bard and his plays, even though I acted in a few of them. I couldn't assimillate the language very well for whatever reason. Seven years and a college degree in English later, it's not just cake, it's pretty. The Tempest was an easy read, a quick one, too, and I recommend it to all you fine folks out there looking to step into the pool of Shakespeare from the shallow end. There's drama, comedy, Tarantinoesque tellings off, breezy romance, trechery, a handful of famous quotes, magic, and monologues that press right up against the 4th wall. And also a big storm that nobody seems to be able to shut up about.

Alphonse Mucha

2009-05-14T18:51:00.002+09:00

He's great, and here's The (A?) Slav Epic by him. Never heard about it before; I only ever knew about his posters and perfume ads. I'd love to have a calendar of this stuff.

O hai

2009-05-12T20:31:00.002+09:00

Lately I
-started my new job
-met a man from Darjeeling
-rented a car
-trailed a biker gang
-was trailed by a biker gang
-got addicted to Oboro Muramasa, the button-mashiest game of the year
-read Lovecraft for the first time
-bought new sheets
-bought a tree.

That's all.

some nice books

2009-03-24T07:26:00.003+09:00

I've been reading.

Book: Hicksville, by Dylan Horrocks.
History: I bought it before I left for Japan but I never got around to reading it. Happy I did.
Story: It opens up like a Twilight Zone episode: we're in a wee small town on the northern coast of New Zealand, and everyone's a comics scholar. There's a Canadian journalist looking for the town while being plagued by a mysterious cartoonist who plants excerpts of his indy strip in the journalist's vicintity at intervals. And there's a dark history concerning Dick Burger, the world famous Hickville-born-and-bred cartoonist and comics tycoon. Better synopses at Amazon for your reading pleasure.
Impressions: The everybody-reads-comics bit was enough to hook me for a book this size despite the story. Having been in Japan the last 19 months, this was the perfect comic to start with, with enough inside jokes and fun trivia mixed in to reinflate my nerd-libido. The art was monochrome and minimalist, which was a nice mild transition after having browsed manga for the last long while. I popped open a Batman comic the other day and the colors and splash pages made me dizzy.

Book: The Black Diamond Detective Agency, by Eddie Campbell.
History: I've been waiting to get my hands on this forever. I bought it so fast I got a papercut.
Story: It's a Western. It was originally written for the screen by a Mr. C. Gaby Mitchell. A certain John Hardin is the only suspect in a train bombing in a cozy Missouri town. But! And so on.
Impressions: In this guy's opinion, the only publisher that has a snowball's chance in hell of penetrating the Japanese market is [this volume's publisher,] First Second. Their comics aren't as small as manga digests, but they're much easier to handle than typical Marvel/DC trades, which is essential to the practical Japanese reader.
In terms of the story, it was an interesting translation. I'd never read a Western before, let alone in comic form, so I wasn't sure how well it would translate for me, given that I'm used to the long silent shots of the moving picturefilms. While some scenes did feel a little fast, the amazing remarkable Monsieur Campbell really hit the nail on the head with setting the tired atmospheres of the wild west. He's one of the best cartoonists in the business in terms of page layout, texture, and body language, and he was at his best in all three categories in this novel. I don't know jack about painting materials, but the kind of paint or colors he used matched the atmosphere perfectly, but in what I felt was a completely novel way. My impression of artistic interpretations of the wild west were Spaghetti Westerns on the good side and cheesy Native American-and-spirit animal paintings on the bad. This was neither, and wonderfully refreshing for it.

That's it for now. I recommend Campbell's book to anyone; Horrock's book is more for folks interested in comics already, methinks. More reviews tomorrow.

checkinin

2009-03-23T13:24:00.002+09:00

I have a new blog layout. I like it. Mr. C--- Winsor helped me with the code, esp. cncrn. the dropdown links.

Well, home's nice. And my family's nice and my friends are nice and access to comic shops is quite very nice indeed. Running around wasn't so nice, and I feel bad for yesterday night when I apparently hit my run-around limit and was a crab to Steph and Jeff, but we managed to have a good time despite me. I've been having an awesome time and haven't managed to waste a day yet, despite the jet-lag lingering for the better part of a week.

Now about that job-o-mine. A few updates:
At Narita (Tokyo's airport) I got a call from my new company. They said they had no placement for me, and best of luck. So I e-mailed my old company, saying I was begging for my job back as of now. Two days later, I get an e-mail from my new company, saying someone's cancelled their contract, and would I like to teach in Moriya. I sent an e-mail to my old company, very humbly and embarassingly explaining the situation, apologizing, and withdrawing my alms-begging. A day after that, my old company tells me they can't place me in Moriya, and a few days after that, that they can place me in a nearby town, prompting me to humbly and embarassingly explain the situation again because my first e-mail apparently didn't go through. So in the end it worked out for me, but I'm rather worse for wear with the added stress of having jerked my old bosses around--good folks who as it is have it harder than I'd like to imagine.

That's all I've got the energy to type for now. I've been reading comics like it was nobody's business but my own. And I spent 50¢ on two countem two workshirts today at Goodwill. And I still have no idea what I can get my former students as an I'm Back, He Said souvenir. Any suggestions are welcome, esp. via e-mail.

There was

2009-03-10T01:37:00.002+09:00

a Thaine I was supposed to see on Friday, but apparently he had to move to D.C. in a hurry, things being what they are stateside, so I won't be. I'm not convinced it's not a joke, but because it's probably not I'm letting myself grieve. Thaine: dammit. But I understand; folks gotta do what they gotta do. Send me an email.

In other news, I've been getting job offers even this late in the game after being alerted last week that I oughta move a few hours away if I'm looking to be employed come April. Which in turn prompted the rather panicked post last week and a hearty thank-you to those who had reassurances for me. So that's good anyways, about the job offers. I just hope the companies are open to doing intercontinental video interviews over the next fortnight.

Oh my do I love extortionate locutions.

Well anyways. I put up pictures of my GEOS sayonara party over at my picturesite. Hopefully that will remain my Sayonara Party and not just Some Party Jason Had Where Everyone Bought Him Beer, He Took a Two-Week Vacation, Then Begged for His Job Back When the Other One Fell Through. We'll see!

It's curtains for you, Charlie Brown

2009-03-04T09:19:00.002+09:00

The problem with being so interested in sociology and the wide sweeps of history is that when you encounter a crisis of your own, any emotional explosions you experience tend to feel whiny and useless. Yesterday my new company told me I'd have to move to another prefecture, effectively closing the book on my life in Japan and cracking open a new one, most unwelcomely. I don't know whether to fight it or go with it. On the one hand, to say I don't feel like moving is to insult with understatement, and on the other, 2009 is no year to be gambling with employment opportunities. I've never been so confused in my entire life, and I'm fairly well sure nobody could give a damn if they tried.

Well anyways. I'm in a world of trouble and have nobody to turn to. Good night.

Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story

2009-01-08T00:45:00.001+09:00

http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/09/23/federal-reserve-skateboard-a-short-story/

Not by me. I can only think like this when I'm far away from a word processor.

New Jeans Day

2008-12-26T22:25:00.001+09:00

I'm happy to see Japan also has After Christmas sales, even if they're not as flamboyant as America's. I bought a new pair of jeans. They're the kind that look like I tried to buy nice jeans, where the faded bit is a dirty gold color instead of a faded blue. I'm not sure I don't feel self-conscious about that. They had the faded blue kind there, but they hugged my hips in a suggestive way I thought inappropriate for my structure.

Dear My Family

2008-12-24T10:29:00.001+09:00

If you're going to call me tomorrow, I'm working till 8:30am, your time.

Norwegian Wood

2008-12-22T01:52:00.002+09:00

I finished Norwegian Wood just now. Haruki Murakami's one of those guys who, like Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman, can run paragraphs as smooth as tap water from old Victorian sinks. What Murakami does that I haven't seen Vonnegut or Gaiman do, though, is he fills his pages with an atmosphere of utter lonliness, and he manages it in a way that's idd'n overly dramatic or depressing.

I think it's the Japaneseness of his writing style that's doing it and, if I'm not mistaken, that's the point. The first time I cracked this book open was at a party and I only read the first page-an-a-half. I had a beer in me and I almost cried. I mean damn. Maybe it's all the music he studied. Maybe that's the secret. Vonnegut's prose sings and makes everything gold, even the bad things. Gaiman's sings too, in a kinda storytime-nostalgia-nouveau way. Everyone sings, I guess, if I'm going to be a dancing litcrit stoner about it, but I can't get away from the one-part-beautiful one-part-horrifying sense of the expansion of spacetime that Murakami brings to sociology in his books. At least the two I've read.

Anyways, now that I'm in the happiest state of sad I've been in since the last time I finished The Little Mermaid, I'll be going to bed. Jamie, if you're reading this, I can near guarantee your gift'll be late, as I've yet to send it. I got you a Nintendo game. Don't buy a Nintendo; I've taken care of it.

Somebody's messing with me.

2008-12-21T15:26:00.001+09:00

This morning, and all mornings previous to this one, I could close my window; now I can't. It doesn't seem to be a problem with something blocking the window, but rather the physics of the window or windowframe has changed, and now there's no logical way the thing could close. What the hell.

More on this story as it develops.

Hungover

2008-12-11T10:11:00.001+09:00

In hindsight, it wasn't that I missed whiskey, but only that I hadn't drunk it in a while. You figure a teacher of English might make the distinction more immediately.

late to the party

2008-11-27T22:46:00.002+09:00

I Stumbled The US vs. John Lennon yesterday, which was the first really in-depth look I've had at Lennon since the 11th grade, when I didn't appreciate him because of certain fangirls in the class. Well, that was my loss; the movie wasn't brilliant or anything, but it did what it was supposed to do in showing me what was so cool about Lennon in his later career. I've been listening to "Instant Karma!" in between breaths for the last 48 hours and I haven't gotten sick of it yet. Power to the people and all that. It really highlights the differences between the struggle against Vietnam and the one against Iraq. I think it kind of deflates the latter, but maybe I've just forgotten the energy of the height of the anti-war movement after seeing this movie. I think I'll go the Lennon Museum in the next few weeks; it's a half-hour ride from my house or something like that. Right on.

Who do you think you are? A superstar?
Well right you are.
Well we all shine on
Like the moon, like the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on.
Everyone.

That's crazy beautiful. Like, tear-jerkingly beautiful. Or maybe I'm just a hippie. I don't know, I like the lyrics of Imagine but I don't like the song all that much. Instant Karma mixes emotion and poetry in the perfect moments and gets me but good, especially that chorus. Motherfucker.

nou pictures

2008-11-26T12:18:00.001+09:00

I. I added three new albums to my picasa. You can ask what's up with ironing on top of Mt. Tsukuba, but it's probably more interesting just to guess.

Outliers: a book review to end the world by.

2008-11-21T22:59:00.004+09:00

One day, somehow or other, I dropped a lucrative but ultimately unappealing career in computer science for English Writing. This led, more or less, to my deciding to come to Japan and live what's turned out so far to be the very rest of my life.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is nifty because it goes ahead and explains "somehow or other" and "more or less" in detail bordering on surefire social physics. Did you know that if you're an aspiring Canadian hockey player born in January you're in a world of luck, but if you're born one month before, you're shit of of the same? Or that East Asians really are better at math than Westerners? True stories, statistically and causally speaking. The reasons why are meticulously set out like a dinner banquet at the Kremlin, so I don't wanna vulgarly ruin the endings for you, but hot damn are they nifty.

The book's profound for the same reasons. It turns out back in the 1970s and 80s, all the way up through the mid-90s, Korea crashed more planes than most any other place in the world because they were letting Koreans fly their planes. You're more likely to piss off a Southerner by calling him an asshole than you are a Northerner. Jewish immigrants of the early 20th century really were better prepared to be businesspeople than Irish or Italian peasants, and their sons were better prepared to be doctors and lawyers as a result. And a good majority of the folks at the top of Silicon Valley right now were born in 1954 and 1955, including Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google.

Like. This should sound at least mildly offensive. But Outliers is wonderful like a crystal fucking waterfall because it explains the whys of all these generalizations and success stories in a beautifully succinct way, with the ultimate conclusion that it's neither genius nor genetics that seperate any of us. It's only culture and good luck and that the realization of that, properly applied, will lead to a more opportunity-filled world for our kids. It could stop there, having made an interesting cross-discipline case for causality, and left me in the bottom of the Well of Misery, but it didn't. And in not doing so, it became an apocalyptic book in the Greek sense of the word. It suggests and downright proves via multitudinous examples--and I'm gonna go ahead and ruin this--that since the success stories and tragedies of the past fall into patterns, even though they're often the result of innumerable chance occurences, we can better organize our society to promote successful citizens and diffuse culture-based tragedies long before they pick up momentum.

A lot of it has to do with proper education. Time to nix summer vacations in their current form: it seems that the smarts gap that typically forms between rich kids and poor kids happens primarily because over the long summers, rich kids have resources to enrich their minds (books, summercamps, educational encouragement) while lower-class kids don't, or don't to the same degree. Lower-class kids are less likely to be comfortable asserting or even expressing themselves to people in positions of power than upper-class kids. This isn't something the schools teach, but the parents. And in the case of lower-class kids, the parents apparently tend not to explicitly teach those lessons, while upper-class parents do.

The idea is that it's all momentum. If you take a human of average intelligence and put them in an environment to succeed, most of them will. Not all of them will become legends in their own time like Bill Gates or JP Morgan, but certainly the quality of their life will improve greatly over what it would've been. But they need a lot to go their way that's especially at an early age outside their control: proper schooling, proper parenting, proper opportunity.

Anyways I recommend this book.

Sleepless

2008-11-21T12:07:00.001+09:00

Does anybody know any fixes for sleeping too much? I've been plum unable to sleep less than ten hours recentry (sic).

Also, if you have any interest in sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, linguistics, or causality, you're gonna wanna pick up Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. The guy is really good at recycling down complex and varied series of statistics and explaining them in simple why-didn't-I-think-of-that English. My outlook on myself and other geniuses has changed repeatedly over the last couple of days, and my understanding of the dance of civilization in general. It's as worth your time as Guns, Germs, and Steel was.

for Johnny

2008-11-19T12:21:00.003+09:00

I could..., v3.

2008-11-19T01:46:00.006+09:00

Last video, and a story.

Met a guy name of Daiki over the weekend. Dai-chan for short, kinda. He's the rare kind of guy that exudes cool while not being an asshole, and not even trying not to be one. He took us to an izukaya (Japanese bar) in his hometown, next to Nagano. He ordered us the house specialties, which were mostly pork from areas you increasingly shy away from on pigs. In my opinion the heart beat the tongue, the tongue beat the liver, the liver beat the intestinal lining, and the intestinal lining beat the vulva. I didn't get to have any scalp. The c___, so-called ふくろ (fukuro), has the same name as a town up the road from Moriya. There's a nice waterfall there I'll be visiting on Sunday. It was springy in the mouth. The tongue, too.

Dai also kanjified my name. Your average Japanese'll have two kanji for his family name and two two for his given name. I usually write my name in katakana--ジェイソン--but the symbols are just sounds like our ABCs. Kanji's got both sound and meaning. Jason's a fairly unusual combination of sounds in Japanese, so Dai-chan had to stretch his imagination a bit before he cracked my code. Eventually he matched up all my syllables to kanji and--

--eventually I did too. (Most kanji have a few pronunciations/spellings and I couldn't nail the ones the computer had programmed for the last two for like a billion years.) Anyways, I've got five kanji for Jason. Countem. 侍衣移疏尊 means, in the order of appearance, "samurai-clothes-movement-spiritual-preciousness" or, if I'm at liberty to rock my name, "flow of the pious warrior's garments". It's a bit unwieldy, but I bet I could make a badass acrostic tanka out of it. I didn't worry about doing Downey, because I'd already won.

Here's a video of me in a car with people.

I could slit my throat with a book on Nagano, v2

2008-11-18T15:11:00.004+09:00

Other video, this one of us screaming after we discovered beautifulawesomenature. The plan for the day was to do something or other. Being unable to decide on a destination per se, we just took to the road. It was the best of choices because we ended up winding up the mountains on the other side of the valley where I'd never been before, and winding up them forever and ever. If you'll notice, I'm looking down on clouds over yonder. Maybe for all you high-fallootin' Coloradites that's none too big a thing, but ol' Jason D's from Pennsylvania, and though our hills shine in the autumn, they roll sleepy and not much else year-round. But these mountains? They scream. Watch and see.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and when I say "Aunt" in the video, of course I meant aunts. And uncles. And gram. Sorry about all that; I misspoke.

I could slit my throat with a book on Nagano

2008-11-18T14:58:00.003+09:00

The title being a modified version of my favorite quote of the weekend. And here are some videos for you from my umpteenth weekend there. On the one hand, I have both good friends and good reasons for staying in Moriya, but damn do I want to live in this city. And it's so so easy. At least hypothetically.

Pictures'll be up on my Picasa in a few days. They. Are. Fabulous.

Aaaaand, while I'm waiting for this video to finish uploading, I'll ramble on more about the weekend. It was one of those 3-dayers that felt like ten times that, which was nice. I remember someone telling me it was 7:00 at one point and feeling like Swartzenegger in Total Recall when he Recalled.

I was walking up the mountain near Tina's apartment and hearing what sounded like gunshots, but which didn't have the forever-echoing property you'd expect in mountains. At some point I was walking down this deep-rutted dirt road alongside an apple orchard when I saw one go off--it was a kind of long post with a noisemaker at the top that sounded sometimes like a pistol and sometimes like a slug to a punchingbag. Like the Test-o-Strength bell-ringer thing you find at carnivals, but this was to scare away birds what'd munch away apples. Scared me away, at any rate.

Op, video's uploaded. 1 of 3.

A sentence for you.

2008-10-25T01:40:00.000+09:00

After absorbing the news for the last few weeks, I wanted to write one of those I-figger-I-got-more-common-sense-than-yer-average-Joe-Political-Analyst kind of posts but I figure the Blogosphere's saturated with them, so instead of spelling out why I think everyone else should think A) the rich should be taxed more for making more, B) the corporate media is feeding the recession through panicked rather than informative headlines, and Γ) sacrificing huge chunks of the deregulated free market system in exchange for socialist reforms in the markets would not only help the economy in the short term, but probably set us up for a better socio-economic society down the line, I'll just go ahead and post this reference in marked deference to them.

New pictures (of old)!

2008-10-21T11:17:00.003+09:00

I finally uploaded my Kamikochi photos after, what, almost six months. I'm planning on going again right before it closes for the winter in a few weeks, so I figured I might get the first roll off my chest before I've got another one gathering dust.

Speaking of dust, I've had a sore throat since I can't remember when, and I'm sure it has to do with the dusty air in my apartment that no amount of cleaning or ventilation seems to fix. I have a bad feeling it has to do with that poem I wrote ("Dust") for the first quarter of this year. Goes to show the power of words, I suppose.

A lot of stuff has been happening lately, mostly good, some interesting. I'll update when I can. Till then, here's a random video I took over the weekend when Sane and Ino and a few friends of theirs went, with me, to Mt. Tsukuba. As a prelude, it should be known that Sane prefers learning casual English, and a few months ago I bought him a book of very casual terms.

quick paranoid observation

2008-10-12T00:18:00.000+09:00

Been reading the news. McCain's been losing ground in a big way these last few weeks, and his campaign seems to've turned to a sort of last resort with their character-smearing strategy against Obama. That's understandable, but I'm really worried that they've gone too far in kindling ultraconservatives' paranoia bone. The other day, McCain was booed by his own supporters by suggesting that Obama wasn't somebody you needed to be afriad of, and he had to take the mic from a woman who lambasted Obama as an Arab. It's a disturbing series of examples that suggest to this guy that McCain and Palin and their campaign team have lit a fire that they can't control, and some crazy sumbich's gonna take the unintended message too far and try to assassinate Obama. I damn well hope not, but I've got a bad feeling about this.

Presidetial Debate 2 Recap

2008-10-08T11:09:00.000+09:00

The debate tonight was like watching a waltz. It was four steps:
1) Senator questioned,
2) Senator sidesteps a direct answer,
3) Senator rebukes the other senator,
4) Senator rambles.

For example,

1) What'll you do to make sure congress will move quickly on alternative energy development?
2) McCain: Nuclear power is the future.
    Obama: And other stuff, too.
3) McCain: Obama hates nuclear energy, btw.
    Obama: Not true. He is.
4) McCain: There were really like three dozen times, my friends, when I saw him snub nuclear power.
    Obama: Jim loves Bush. Loves 'im. Just look at him.

Some tings.

2008-10-03T14:47:00.000+09:00

My Internet left for a while, but it's back now.

I've been listening to audiobooks on my walks to work. I just finished Einstein's biography and Plato's "The Apology of Socrates." Alan Moore, I think, would consider audiobooks to be inherently inferior to paperbound ones, on the grounds that listening was more of a passive method of reading than reading itself, but damn if I haven't been getting a lot of reading done this last week.

Along the same lines, I'm now a student of Japanese. I have textbooks and notebooks and weekly classes. Hip-hip-it's about time.

I have received gifts of chocolate on five occasions in the last several weeks, two boxes of which came from the folks who do my dry cleaning.

waterart.

2008-09-14T19:31:00.002+09:00

I wanted to post a video tour of my apartment, but it became night all of a sudden. Until I get that up and running, hold yourself over with the most original piece of hydro-art ever.

obligatory my-new-apartment-rocks post

2008-09-08T23:50:00.001+09:00

So my new apartment rocks. It came with no less than everything I could've asked for, and several tings besides. Not least among these are:
a bed, a mattress, pillows, coverings for the aforementioned in abundance;
pots, pans, dishes, silver- and woodenware in every shape and size as I shall ever have need for;
electronics, including a television and a rice cooker;
an A/C, a heater, and a fan;
closet space enough to reenact the Tale-Tell Heart without the messy business of cutting into the floor;
a writing desk with accompanying chair;
two leather chairs of bucket variety;
a bookshelf;
a Japanese-style bath;
yellow curtains and faux-glass spikey plastic light coverings so every morning streams in with a definite 1973 vibe;
an upside-down carpet because the rightside-up part's all vomity;
a microwave and toaster oven;
cockroaches;
a shoe shelf;
and a glass-topped coffee table.

My word. Though Moriya's not much to look at, I dare say I've lucked myself right outta here. Especially the writing desk part. My Shin-Matsudo place had no Western-style chairs so everything was at ground level, and since I haven't got the well-developed back muscles of the Japanese I usually found myself slouching in such a way as to provoke sleep quickly and easily, and it was shit for writing. Now much morningtime will be devoted to fictions and business models and plans and schemes of every sort. O how the schemes will come.

In other news, being a fish must be terrifying. It's no way to live a life; no, not at all.

New Things

2008-09-07T13:33:00.000+09:00

I

gave what I consider to be a pretty good business presentation on Wednesday, explaining how in the absence of budget, teacher quality and customer satisfaction could be improved by providing teachers with and the ability to create teacher's manuals wikis to help them strategize and plan their lessons based off classroom demographics. I talked a lot about perfect Pepsis and spaghetti sauces, à la Malcolm Gladwell's spaghetti sauce speech.

moved to Moriya, and found someone's wireless Internet there off which to mooch, till I sign up for my own service. Or deviously don't.

have little else in the way of news. But I do have a bookshelf and fire insurance now. In the immortal verbosity of Master P, ナナナナ　ナナナナ.

Beautiful Things

2008-09-02T10:04:00.001+09:00

This week, if you should see, speak to, hear of, or otherwise directly or indirectly interact with me, you might notice I'm 1) fatigued or 2) energetic to the point of annoyance. This week our school's got only one teacher, me, and resultantly I offered to teach all the school's classes, so as not to have to cancel the other teacher's classes for a second time. It's something I volunteered for, and I likes me some teaching, so I'm rather looking forward to it. But a monkey's uncle I'll be if I pull through without any temporarily apparent mental side-effects.

Also, this is beautiful. It's a compilation video of the sky all moving and stuff, which you've seen before, but this one does it rather well.

Also, I was invited to a fashion show yesterday. The forthcoming Spring 2009 collection of a certain Ritsuko Shira...hama? Perhaps. It doesn't matter. It went about how I expected. The models looked about how I expected, but they walked a little more nervously than I expected, at least at first. I can't imagine under which circumstances the designer expects her clothing to be worn. The pink-purple bubbly-billowy regal robe-thing was cool to look at, but I'm fairly sure it was made of plastic the texture of garbage bags, so it's not terribly practical, whatever your threshold of eccentricity. Some of the other stuff I can imagine seeing out-of-doors, if only in the parts of the city that I feel dangerously lower class, or at the Emmy's. I took a video at the end as they were filing out. The models are the ones drowned in light that you can't quite detail:

Vlog3

2008-08-25T23:58:00.003+09:00

I made this after watching an anthropological video about the growth of YouTube and a subsequent feeling of lonliness. The first part's random, the second's about my roommate, and the third's about teaching methodology that's filled with logical and logistical and observation errors, but I threw it all out there to have people help learn me. Be liberal with your advice.

200th postparty

2008-08-24T19:07:00.001+09:00

If you read this at the blogsite, you can see I've remodeled. Make yeself at home; I'm cleaning up and packing things away. There's nothing to eat, but here's a poem about my enemy's book having been remaindered here, an essay on Joyce's use of the history of science and various principles therein in Finnegans Wake, and a largely insightful video on how Tool uses the Fibonacci sequence in "Lateralus":

I'm in one of those thematic moods where I don't feel particularly significant in the world and want to pick up a cool talent to prove me to myself. I should like to buy a keyboard, but I'll probably just work on relearning how to write again.

interglacial.

2008-08-15T22:43:00.004+09:00

Some things.

I ate yellow watermelon yesterday.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3 isn't as bad as I thought everyone was saying it was. Spider-Man 3 remains worse.

My kitchen sink smells like yogurt and I've not had yogurt in or near my kitchen in long months.

This is a 20-part video crash course of the economic structure and history of the United States that suggest some disturbing futures for the First World. It's hellfire and brimstone, but should you be the level-headed type to veer away from such darkness and doomtalks, it's worth watching the first twelve parts to get a basic understanding of how the economy works.

I met my apparent wife-to-be today. We ate sushi and drank coffee and her mother, who was with us, asked me (in front of Daughter) what I thought of her at the end of our luncheon. So that was a little awkward, but everything else was fine.

I started my passport-renewal process on Tuesday morning. I gave them the papers I had, and they shuffled through them and gave me the OK; stamped my passport and sent me on my way. An hour or so later I found a stamp that I needed to give them hiding in my pocket. I'm not sure why they need it, but I'm pretty sure they do, because the stamp was $40, and you don't charge $40 for a stamp unless it's damn important. I'm also pretty sure I put the stamp back in my pocket, and put that pocket and the shirt it was sewn to in the washing machine later that night. But I digress. Basically I'm hoping not to get deported because of a stampy oversight.

I move to my new apartment on September 7th. I'm not sure if it's got the Internet yet. The landlord told me it did but I'm not sure if he meant the service was available for setup or if it was already active for some reason. Anyways, if I pop offline for any extended . of time for no particular reason, it was that. This was my 200th post, thanks goodnight.

LATER: I also want to add this because it's one of the perfectest comics ever drawn.

and our kids shall be born in international waters

2008-08-08T11:52:00.001+09:00

Have I mentioned the plot that's being hatched in Moriya to marry me off to the daughter of one of my students? Because I thought it was a cute joke at first, but I'm slowly coming to realize that it's perhaps not cute, and is perhaps rather serious. The woman lives in Paris now, but she's coming back in a few months. Her mum brought in photos of her for me the other day and I heard tell those selfsame photos came to me at the daughter's behest.

Now, Tokyo's rather like America insofar as the rapidly maturing marriage age is concerned, but Ibaraki's still fairly traditional with regards to that, and apparently she and I are both ripe for gettin hitched. And whenever I try to talk to my friends in this area about it, they--who're also from Ibaraki originally--kind of empathize for a bit, then say something along the lines of, "But hey, you might as well, you know; it's good for you and it's good for them, you know what I'm saying." And I do and that's scary.

Also I stumbled this video and like it for reasons utterly otaku. I think Thaine will enjoy it, and Takuro, too, if he's reading this. And no one else.

Several unexpected things:

2008-08-06T00:26:00.002+09:00

1) Last Thursday I got new glasses and they're cool but they're a bit tight and I thought I was just being a bitch about it till I looked in the mirror today and saw that the epidermis under the nose-pad-thingies had quite worn away. I'll be requesting a readjustment at the optometrist's as soon as is convenient.

2) On Monday I had sushi with Dan and when I stepped outside afterwards my glasses fogged up from all the humidity. I didn't realize it was possible to be that humid after sunset. Or before, for that matter.

3) They closed the only worth-a-damn American comics shop in Tokyo on Monday also, and the third best book shop.

4) On Tuesday I went to have lunch with a friend. We decided to try a new restaurant called メヒコ, "Mexico," because we rather felt like Mexican food. As it turns out, it was a high class seafood restaurant with no explicit Mexican food at all. You might think, "Jason, it may not've been high class. Maybe it was just pretentious but average like every other seafood restaurant out there, and Outback." Well. Tell that to the 30-odd flamingos strutting around the glassed-off atrium in the midst of the big oak dinner tables.

This was in Moriya. In Ibaraki. Fer gosh sake.

I'm turning Japanese, exhibit C:

2008-07-31T00:54:00.001+09:00

On the phone with my brother just now, who works in a parking garage. I heard a customer come up and ask him about a car problem he was having.
Brother says, "It's probably your battery, I can come up and jump it when I have time."
Woman says, "Can you do it now?"
Brother says, "Nah, maybe in an hour or two. I'm on the phone with my brother right now."

It's cool for two reasons. One, because I forgot just how relaxed customer service situations can be in foreign countries, and Two, because my brother loves me. Aw.

--- -- --

I also watched 90 minutes of Spider-Man 3 the other day. It really is true that the more money you throw into a story, the worse it is. I mean, I'm half inclined to believe they spent the majority of the budget on ensuring each line of dialogue was as technically terrible as it could be before filming. I mean, got dahm.

Keith Barry

2008-07-23T09:57:00.002+09:00

I love magic.

Koriyama

2008-07-22T00:21:00.004+09:00

I went to Koriyama with my friends. We had fun. Here are some videos that I didn't know had sound, and here are the photos. Captions aren't working right now for some reason; I'll try to have them updated by week's end. At any rate, it's the colorfullest place on earth.

Service culture

2008-07-18T23:24:00.001+09:00

So last week my white friend and I were walking into Starbucks in Akihabara, when an old man stumbled by us, veered strangely off course, and fell face-first into the rather stone corner of the nearest building. Dan and I naturally rushed over to help, at the time or shortly after I said Oh shit!. We and another passerby, this one Japanese, helped the guy up, who explained that he'd been drinking too much. I tried to get the guy to take a seat and figure out where he lived.

This is the interesting part: the man was Japanese. The third party who stopped to help out was Japanese. The woman who stopped to help about now was also Japanese. But as I was asking the old man where he lived, and as he looked at me, not understanding, the other two Japanese asked him where he lived in English. Several times. Until Dan asked him in Japanese, at which point the old man answered.

This is the cool part: he was from Moriya. And so was the helper-woman. And me too, if I haven't mentioned it in awhile. Moriya's a random town two prefectures away with a population of 57,000, give or take. Akihabara's in the middle of Tokyo.

Small world. And a strange one that'd accommodate two healthy young foreigners before an old citizen with blood welling from his noggin.

Watchmen trailer

2008-07-18T11:24:00.001+09:00

http://www.joblo.com/video/joblo/player.php?video=watchmentrlr

I don't have time to write this. But it's such an I-told-you-so moment that sacrifices must be made.

So for the years preceding a definite in-production Watchmen movie, I was on Moore's side that the comic was unfilmable, insofar that the most one can do in adapting a limited series is to present the story exactly as-is, adding one's own stylistic choices with regards to the storytelling in the shift from paper to film. Ususally directors mess up in one way or another. V for Vendetta, for example, could've been a better thinly-veiled political allegory if the Wachowskis adjusted the plot and characters a little more, and had their own original story only inspired by Moore's as a result. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could've made a better film if the directors and movie studio had ever read the comic at all and tried to apply the actual plot to the characters, or even the characters to the characters. (Both examples are Moore books, but damn do his works get filmed badly.)

So Zach Snyder's falling in line here. If you've watched the trailer and read the comic, you'll have noticed two things: that the movie is exactly the same as the comic, word for word, shot for shot. But now it's moving, which I suppose justifies the umpteen million dollars it took to make the drawings move about in high definition. Which brings us to the second point, which is that somebody, maybe Snyder, maybe the movie studio backing him, maybe Gibbons himself, didn't get an important part of Watchmen, which was the art style. Certainly the movie retains the art design--down to the least fractal on Manhattan's crystal Martian palace from what I can see--but none of the style. Watchmen was the lovechild of the 1980s and you can see it in everything from the plot to the dialogue to the themes to the way the pencils and colors were applied to the page. But this trailer was crisp and clean as 300. Which should've been brilliant and clear. But Watchmen shouldn't, for the same reason watching Nosferatu in color or DBZ in live-action would unsettle me.

Gilliam made the right choice when he abandoned trying to adapt the film a few years ago.

And Rorschach's voice sucks.

John Updike

2008-07-13T13:27:00.001+09:00

I read a random quote by him today,

The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has
such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that
interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long
pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible
pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle
haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars
sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the
quasar—these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation
with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with
lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female
body curves around centers of repose.
“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

that makes me want to read more of him, because damn that's some fine sentencing and poetry, regardless of truth.

The worst comic strip ever.

2008-07-11T01:16:00.003+09:00

I disagree, because even though these are the punniest of the pun, the jokes resonate with a kind of annoying sense that you're reluctant to acknowledge. If you took the same unfunny jokes but messed them up, then it'd be the worst strip ever. In hindsight, I dare say I wrote and drew some of the worst strips ever. Funny how all your best ideas come after you don't gotta worry about doing a weekly bloody comic strip anymore. Dangit.

Pittsburgh's air, and the other 10 chokiest cities

2008-06-26T16:20:00.005+09:00

I thought Pittsburgh was pretty much fully recovered from its stint at the top of the pollution chain, but this article--which seems to be concerned less with statistics than with selecting a wide variety of cities--puts me hometown on a short list of the world's most polluted cities. Even if in actuality it's not in the top 10, it makes sense to me that Pittsburgh'd be at least woth an honorable mention. It has a rapidly expanding suburban sprawl filled with folks who love SUVs and Hummers, and, aside from its coaly steely history, it catches a lot of the industrial farts from Ohio. Still, despite the city being recently labeled America's most polluted city, I don't think the number of respritory problems compare to some of the other places on the list, like in Russia or China or Peru.

Marina

2008-06-25T23:34:00.001+09:00

Marina is cool not because it's cute (which it is), but because it was a 24-hour comic.

Akiba stabbings

2008-06-10T23:43:00.002+09:00

Mostly for my family, here's the news about the stabbing spree that went on in Akihabara on Sunday. I wasn't there, but I was an hour beforehand and, small world, so were two of my students, one a few minutes after I had left, the other at the time of the murders, though she was in the train station at the time.

Murder's a strange thing, psychologically and sociologically and almost all the other -logies, too. This is the third killpeople spree that I've heard about since I came ashore and it's disturbing in a way rampant gunmurder in Detroit isn't.

Nuclear War a go-go

2008-06-06T22:59:00.003+09:00

Israel says if Iran doesn't stop building nukes it'll get it's ass attacked because Israel's the only country in the Arab world white enough to own nukes by divine right. Ahmadinejad, who maintains Iran isn't building nukes, said earlier this week that Israel is "about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene." Note the quotes.

I suppose it makes sense. We started the millennium off kinda slowly, but now that the West has got a full-scale offensive going on in the area that Obama's set to cut short, somebody's got to step up to the plate. And who better than America 2--Israel.

Wow that's bitter. Still, while Israel can, sociologically, hardly be blamed for acting like its colonial British mother and its shoot-first-ask-questions-never American dad, it is unfortunate that the people and history caught in the middle will be ground to dust. Or evaporated: Israel being probably the only country (excepting, perhaps, North Korea) batshit insane enough to use nukes in this day and age.

Anyways. Nukes suck, war sucks, cold wars suck, fearmongering sucks.

The most important thing you'll read this week

2008-06-06T09:42:00.003+09:00

Coco Wang, a Chinese cartoonist, couldn't directly help with the rescue efforts after the quake on May 12, so he made comics depicting a few of the really heartbreaking stories he heard that Westerners wouldn't necessarily have access to. Took me the better part of half a minute to start crying. Here they are.

World's changed.

2008-05-22T23:41:00.003+09:00

I remember a time when America could go to Arabia and tell them what to do and how to do it, and by gum somebody'd do it. Or at least they'd give it a good show before the politics and violence of the region-in-question tore everything to pieces. But now, as this article reveals, America's gotten too weak for that. As much as I revel in the failure of anything Bush attempts, this gave me some pause.

America is, of course, going downhill economically and influentially in the world. It's that time again, where the dominant empire changes hands. A few centuries ago it was France, then England, then Russia and the US, then the US all by its lonesome. Now it'll be someone else--maybe the first world en masse, given the nature of economics and communications and technology today (...or maybe it'll be China, but I'm still not willing to concede that). At any rate, barring magic of a Camelot fashion from future president-elect Barack Obama, the US has seen its golden days and it'll be in the shadow of itself for the foreseeable future. The problem I see with this (and it's not really a problem for anyone but America himself) is that the US isn't generally capable as viewing itself as anything but the best.

Examples: In a bunch of American movies you'll see foreigners talking about my country-this or my country-that. "In [whomever's homeland], the beer drinks you," or some quaint, often comical quip like that. It might be because I don't watch an abundance of foreign films, but hearing an American talk about their country in such a homely and removed way, so as to suggest that anybody on Earth might not know exactly how it goes down in the US of A, sounds at best from an era when The Wizard of Oz was on the New Releases shelf at ye olde bookstore, and at worst a silly parody. The idea being that America's not a country, it's the country. It's like asking who Michael Jackson is, or Steven Spielberg. (They're Americans.)

Anyways, when I was reading the article about Bush wagging his finger at the poor, miseducated Arabs, I kept asking myself Who the hell does this guy think he is? And not in that way where I think of clever ways to argue against politicians I don't like; this was more of a natural, gut reaction, the kind you might get if Pascal Couchepin gave a speech in Washington explaining to Americans that they've got to stop being silly about this whole not-being-socialist thing and get on the bandwagon.

In the end, if this economic and superpower shift does occur, I'm just worried America will appear on the world scale like that really fantastic football player you knew in high school but who at the 10-year reunion has a beer belly and can't manage a sentence without swearing or saying "man" and is tragically unaware of the fool he looks, because he's convinced the old crowd is still the old crowd and he yet at the height of stardom.

Top o'th'World

2008-05-21T23:13:00.005+09:00

Ma.
Last Sunday I was invited to climb Mt. Tsukuba, the tallest mountain on the Kanto Plain, by two of my students. We three and one of my student's colleagues hiked from about halfway. Took about 90 minutes to get to the top. The summit was beautiful, not just because it was the top of a freakin' mountain where on a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji, but also because there weren't any fences on the summit. In this age of individually-wrapped toothpicks, it was nice to see a place that left some leeway for the mortal coil to unwind.

Anyways, here's a compilation of four videos my student took. The first one is a nice view of the surrounding countryside, the others are of the hang-gliders that were vulturing the area. You can hear me inarticulately talk about BASE jumping if you wait till the end.

PS - Can anyone else see the video? Because I can't.

To infinity, &c.

2008-05-19T23:33:00.001+09:00

I didn't know they had these, and they still pretty much don't, but holy crap all the same.

Kamakura

2008-05-18T01:01:00.000+09:00

Got them Kamakura pictures up at last. Golden Week to follow on the morrow.

(n)orth(e)ast(w)est(s)outh

2008-05-16T23:15:00.002+09:00

Beth Gibbons is the best female singer out there ten years ago, and Joanna Newsome the best female songwriter out there today. Tom Waits and Nick Cave are still holding it up for what I learned yesterday is sometimes referred to as the sterner sex.
--- -- --
I've only read one so far, but I imagine every story written about the gay marriage ruling in California will read like a fairy tale, with the newly empowered citizenry in the underdog's corner and the conservative Christians in the place of the malevolent doomlord. So be it. According to my mostly philosophical knowledge of the US constitution, marriage is explicitly ensured between a man and a woman, but it doesn't explicitly bar folks of the same gender from marrying. There's also that spirited bit about America being a place for the pursuit of happiness.

The thing that gets me [spittoon], is the whole Christian right thing. Being a Christian, I'm well acquainted with the human tendency of picking and choosing the parts of the Bible you feel you should remember at any given time. But something like this itches me the wrong way. First off, fundamentalist Christians (which most of these advocates decidedly aren't, but at least they're convinced they are) should be concerned with love above everything else, and politics below everything else. But, in a switcheroo that Moore commented on in Lost Girls, stuff like the consistently misinterpreted second amendment became very important, and stopping the happy lives of gay families whose business is decidedly not your own. Secondly, this ruling doesn't change anything for the churches themselves. Gay couples will get married in court, like me old mum and da did, nary more than a week afore I was born. Separation of church and state's a good thing, as the Dark Ages taught us, but I get this impression during times like these that there are folks who want nothing but to go back to the way things were in the old country. So until this blows into a gory mess come autumn, I hope a million billion people's lives are improved via newly legalized matrimony. Sorry it took the Free World so long to pay attention to you.
--- -- --
On Tuesday, I asked somebody if they'd heard about the news from China, about the earthquake and it's crazybig death toll. They said they didn't like the Chinese. At some point before or after we talked with great excitement about the earthquake that happened in Japan last week that didn't harm a soul.
--- -- --
My kids spent 50 minutes not speaking English and instead drew pictures of poop on the board with my face on it. Guess who soon found out he had latent social insecurities left over from his own ninth-circle experience in elementary school?

To those what'd call me:

2008-05-16T01:01:00.002+09:00

Barring any buggery, I've changed my Skype subscription to this cool thing they've got going now so that I can talk to all my America-bound friends for an unlimited amount of time* for one yearly fee o'$55. So Thaine, I'll give you a call as soon as my Internet's working nights, your time. It ain't been lately, which has let me get a good damn deal of writing done...there might even be something to that...

*Not to exceed 10,000 minutes per month, as per Fair Use.

Guernica

2008-05-15T16:19:00.002+09:00

If you've ever looked at Picasso's Guernica before and weren't struck to near-tears by it, here's a 3-D tour that might invoke them at last.

And if you've never heard the story about the painting and the war in Iraq, you dang well should, so here you go.

Earlier this week [Feb. 2003], U.N. officials hung a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso's Guernica at the entrance of the Security Council. The spot is where diplomats and others make statements to the press, and ostensibly officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with the 20th century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop.

Aokigahara: Fuji Jukai

2008-05-12T22:49:00.002+09:00

I uploaded me Jukai pictures, and'll hopefully finish off the Golden Week roll before week's end. There are a bunch of pictures of the forest, and most of them not very special, but the places I went to over Golden Week weren't the kind of places one could easily capture in a 2-D photo, and with a non-professional camera at that. So in lieu of taking my time to show you the atmosphere, or the essence or whatever, I just took a fucking lot of pictures and hope that they'll begin to give you an inkling of what it was like there. Personally, I'm not convinced the atmosphere can truely be conveyed apart from going there yourself, and then only if you're disposed to somewhat of a poetic or superstitious mindset. Jukai was fucking angry, and it weren't from ghosts or demons or whatnot--'twere from the forest itself. And Sane and I were in the tourist part on well-worn paths most of the time. If we went past all that, I imagine some proper Old Forest shit would've gone down.

2008-05-11T01:10:00.002+09:00

Two things made my day today, and the second was when two drunk girls looked at me and squealed something at each other which my friend translated as "good looking," and the first was when the five year-old I teach ran to her mother after class and started manically squeezing her (the mum's) breast while laughing like someone unchained by the niceties of society and perfectly aware of such a freedom.

the race

2008-05-09T12:48:00.003+09:00

I'm not sure what the word's like stateside, but here's the impression I'm getting about the primaries from the various newsfeeds: I've heard McCain is running for president, but what he's up to, who can say. Obama seems to stick to novel ideas for the country's future and occasionally, whenever an important voting day looms, becomes a mudslinger. This is opposed to Clinton's strategy, which seems to be almost entirely mudslinging, when not benig outright manipulative of whatever demographic she's trying to impress at the moment. Case in point:

She added [to a crowd of mostly blue-collar, Hispanic voters], "Some call you swing voters. I call you Americans."

I mean, this isn't isolated. I read about one of these a week, more during a voting week. I don't recall Obama throwing in many of these. I do recall him apologizing publically for getting to entrenched ni name-calling after the PA primary, and I do recall a bunch of comments by him where he singled out his competitors for sidelining the issues in favor of various vote-winning dramas, things which I don't recall Clinton or McCain doing. Maybe I'm bias--I certainly want Obama to win--but maybe there's a reason why the demographics with lower education favor Clinton and those with higher education favor Obama: the latter argues intelligently, the former emotionally and, I'd say, deceptively. Which is what Bush did in 2000 and 2004, right? Does anybody else remember the campaign ad in 2000 that subtly labeled Democrats as "rats" and the 2004 one that suggested "the wolves will get you" if you vote for Kerry? Like...like, those ads worked. The guy that used those things won. And I'm getting a strong sense of thatness from the Clinton campaign.

a reminder:

2008-05-09T11:51:00.002+09:00

Who's On First is not an easily accessible bit of comedy for EFL students, even for the higher levs.

Internet > TV

2008-05-04T12:55:00.005+09:00

For the last few years I've been on a little bit of an anti-TV kick on account of how much time is wasted on shows that for the most part aren't worth anybody's time. That, and I thought Alan Moore made a good point that film is more of a passive medium than print, since the former only requires that you sit back and enjoy the ride, while the latter requires you to actively read in order to glean meaning. I think Moore's too bitter towards TV on account of his experiences (I still enjoy movies and videos, at any rate), but I think he has a point. As for TV itself--it's an industry, and I don't trust the things, as a rule. The Internet's better for proliferation of art, since it's in the hands of the individual, for the most part.

Anyways, here's a video of a really intelligent guy talking about how societies cope with massive structural changes, and why and how TV was our way to cope for the last 50 years, and what'll happen now that we don't need a coping device anymore. Well worth watching if you've got 20 minutes.

Itineraridad

2008-04-28T02:50:00.002+09:00

Here's a loose sketch of what I'm up to over the next week in case two weeks from now I'm nowhere to be found. Starting on Monday, April 28.

1) Go to Kawaguchiko, and immediately to Lake Saiko. Camp out.
2) Spend the next day in Aokigahara Jukai, the forest where people always get lost or kill themselves.
3) (Probably) Leave Wednesday to Matsumoto. Depending on what time it is, I'll either look for a place to stay the night or head off to one of two places, listed next.
4) Magome/Tsumago, the Edo/Meiji Era post towns.
5) Kamikochi, the place where it's pretty and isolated.
6) Then I'll be off to Kamisuwa for the last day--this being probably Monday next week--to hike or bike around the lake, which I pledged to do last summer and then forgot about up till last week.
7) Then I'll take the cheapest (fffive hour) train home. Hopefully with a lot more determination in me stride than when I left. See you then, then. Happy Golden Week.

Congrats

2008-04-27T22:32:00.003+09:00

to all my beloved friends at UPG (and maybe other places) who graduated on Saturday. J, Mike E., Zach, Dan, Mike S., Chad, and anyone else I missed because I couldn't make you out on Sergey's video--you're certifiably and actually more intelligent in your respective fields than 90% of the rest of the humans in the country, and probably the hemisphere. Kick the Commies' asses with your powers of knowability.

Alan Moore said (1)...

2008-04-26T22:16:00.001+09:00

And the writing [of Heroes] shows such contempt for the viewer. The climax, a man who is going to explode is carried off into the air by his brother... did anybody bother to compare the effects of a groundburst with an airburst nuclear explosion? I'll take the former over the latter, thanks. This is supposed to be the sort of thing that superhero stories are good at. I tell you, if we are ever threatened with a scenario like that in real life I hope the superheroes aren't American because we'll be sunk.

I hope I'm not stirring delusions of grandeur to compare my nerdiness to his.

Hey now, crooked jowl

2008-04-23T00:33:00.002+09:00

I had some, and by some I mean a truckload of, ice cream last night. Then I made this video. I don't recommend watching it if you have anything to do at all. We ended up getting the tent up, but I neglected to see how they folded the stuff up initially, and my sugar high prevented the patience necessary to effectively rebag.

odds and ends

2008-04-21T00:41:00.003+09:00

So my parents were driving through the mountains the other day and a tree fell in front of them. Actually, like four feet in front of them. And by them I mean them, not the jeep. It's headlights and front bumper were destroyed.

The moral of this story is Holy Crap.

Amerikaner

2008-04-19T01:21:00.002+09:00

Today I ordered a Mega-Mac value meal on a whim. I thought that was the end of my America-binge for the quarter, but tonight I came home and spilled a bottle of Coke all over my bed and drank the rest while reading about videogames and eating potato chips.

The Guilty Catholic syndrome is setting in but good right now. Sleeping it off.

Free Lunch!

2008-04-17T10:05:00.003+09:00

Two Australians did something that I should've thought of when I was a kid. Instead of making a generator that can only run on fuel, why not have two magnets dancing around each other and get their levels of attraction and repulsion to sync up so that they dance forever? Because. You know. Energy would then be created with no external power source whatsoever. And the world would be saved.

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ffmop8puhr

The Doomwood

2008-04-17T00:04:00.003+09:00

A student today told me about Jukai, a.k.a. Aokigahara, a.k.a. the dense forest at the base of Mt. Fuji, a.k.a. the haunted suicide forest of Japan.

The student was a trained boy scout troop leader. Knows his shite about camping, believe you me. He told me that if I didn't go in the woods with a rope to tie myself to my starting point, I'd get lost and die.

It's also worth mentioning that I got lost today trying to find a big mall complex. The directions were: 1) go straight until the cell phone store; 2) turn right.

Anyways, I think I know how I'm spending at least some of my Golden Week. Maybe, heh heh, the last part.
(Because of the mortal danger.)

The Hunting Ape

2008-04-13T21:15:00.004+09:00

This is long, but interesting. It's a history of the evolution of humans, focusing primarily on our eating habits. It talks about how we changed our behavior when hunting became a biological necessity, and how that mindset is still apparent in modern life. And 2/3 of the way in the guy totally rips on sports hunting, which I think's great.

The coolest bit, anyways, is about halfway in. He's talking about the fossil record gap between 7 and 4 million year ago, and he suggests that ancestral man may've not gone straight from the jungles to the savannah, but rather from the jungles to the water's edge. He lays out a bunch of interesting behavioral and physiological developments in humans that are far removed from chimps and apes and why those developments are easily explained if mankind became aquatic for about three million years. Like our protruding noses, and our superthin body hair and the grain of that hair, and the webbing between our fingers and toes that other apes don't have, and all the intricate things our bodies do when we dive under water that other apes' bodies don't do. And human infants can hold their breath and swim and there seems to be no real reason for that, since it doesn't happen anywhere else in the ape kingdom. Apparently. Maybe the whole video was a satire. But it's cool anyways. Give it a watch.

Did they say this at college, or did I just miss it?

2008-04-12T00:38:00.003+09:00

I just realized, after a good deal of college where everybody assumed I had had good poetry theory teachers in high school, the difference between prose and poetry. It's so simple, and other people in books have told me before, but I didn't have the sense to understand. Check it out:

prose=storytelling. Storytelling is talking about something that happened, in any number of ways.
poetry=language sex. Language sex is when you take a language, say English, and wrap it around yourself like a putty lover and you yourself are made from putty and you two become one and you decide to take a look at the world with your ears made of English and your eyes made of English and your tongue not coated in but actually English, and you create something markedly removed from prose, where the average writer is just talking about how something looks or sounds--you're not describing a damn thing. You're telling us what it is if all its
double-helices were letters and line breaks and grammar.

At least great poets do that, most of the time. I think Murakami said it best when he said...and this isn't a quote because I don't own the book...that poetry needs to create a metaphysical tunnel from itself to the reader's mind. Something for the language to pour through and muck up the rest of your mind with its linguistic beauty. If he succeeds, the poem should lose a good deal in translation. I've always wondered what reading Shakespeare in a non-European language must be like. Probably like reading a good story, but almost certainly not like reading Shakespeare.

Of course we're in the age now where everyone's doing everything, so the definition above is defunct, at least in practice. But I think even up to 50 years ago that's what people were aiming for, and I think they should still be aiming for that, at least in terms of everyday short poems.

Anyways, Beckett and Eliot wrote some cool things about poetry that I've read in the last few days and I think you should read it:

Beckett said, in his essay "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce."

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when most concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Scholastics' axiom: "niente 'e nell'intelletto che prima non sia nel senso" it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philosophy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement was a manifestation of the "forma poetica dello spirito."

The s.o.b. didn't bother to translate the Italian becaus he thought everybody forever should be privy to such education if they were to considered truely worthy of reading his shite, but I remember enough of the language to make due: "nothing is in the intellect which didn't first come from the senses" and "the poetic form of the spirit."

And Eliot, in his essay "Milton I", in comparing Shakespeare and Milton, said

At no point is visual imagination conspicuous in Milton's poetry. It would be as well to have a few illustrations of what I mean by visual imagination. [He does a passage from Macbeth that I don't care to write, and then this one:]
Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.
not only offer[s] something to the eye, but, so to speak, to the common sense. I mean they convey the feelings of a being at a particular place at a particular time. ... With Shakespeare...the combinations of words offer perpetual novelty; they enlarge the meaning of the individual words joined... In comparison, Milton's images do not give this sense of particularity, nor are the separate words developed in significance. His language is, if one may use the term without disparagement, artificial and conventional.
O'er the smooth enamel'd green...
...paths of this drear wood
The nodding horror of whose shady brows
Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.

He goes onto suggest that Milton writes English like a dead language. I'm not sure. Never read the guy. But I'd like to. And Eliot's a fucking smart guy.

tractor trailor

2008-04-08T09:22:00.002+09:00

I bought a long fountain pen yesterday and some essays by TS Eliot on poetry and poets and a panini and today I think the wind's strong enough to turn my umbrella inside out and soak me but good and I'm lately haunted by the words of that girl I worked with in the bakery years ago who authoritatively told me how Japanese was impossible to learn after you reached adulthood and I wish I had a full single day to sit down and write because these wind up/wind down hours squeezed in on the sides of work aren't enough for me to get into whatever zone it is that lets me hammer out mediocre stories and I just realized yesterday that if you think you might be neurotic then you are neurotic and if you think you're left-brained then you probably are and both of those things make writing poetry an exercise in futility and I'm starting to see why I got the impression that some of my writing professors thought that if you didn't have natural talent you'd never make it as a writer and my natural inclination is to say that's crazy, that you can do anything if you work for it, but then that's the American in me and where I ain't at present is there and where I am is a place where the nails that stand out get hammered down--as the elementary school saying goes--and I'm a person who teaches English and I'm a person who must needs do it by the book and I'm a person who has read a thing or two about education and cognition and neurosis and the arrant plague of information that has avalanched the collective unconscious while I was sleeping and now there's thick powdery white noise for miles at every exit and I'm stuck here in my head waiting for that year-long vacation after I retire and before I die to carve a spade from a dream and dig myself out before the apathy and contentedness build up and leaves me convinced that it'd take more energy to break out in the first place than I'd reap at last.

I think I want to take up an art. A physical one. I'm thinking calligraphy, because I figure if I want to be a writer I may as damn well learn how to write.

Kamakura pictures...an intro

2008-04-04T10:45:00.002+09:00

I uploaded a dozen representative pictures from my Kamakura trip on Wednesday. I don't have time to format them all now, but I wanted to put something up. So. Here ya go.

dance: dance revolution

2008-04-03T10:59:00.002+09:00

I want to dance to work like this every day for the rest of my life.

picasa

2008-04-03T10:36:00.002+09:00

I updated my Picasa with a bunch of new stuff, and I updated the riverboat partymath and shin-matsudo miscellany albums, too. I have a fuckload of stuff to add yet, and I'll try to jump on that tomorrow.

Went to Kamakura yesterday, with Sane. I love Japan. We saw a big Buddha, which I found out sounds a lot like pig in Japanese (butta).

Pictures and stories to follow.

yinyang

2008-04-01T09:48:00.002+09:00

I had a very dichotomized weekend. Let's split it up by locale, diets, and activities.

Sunday
I went to Ibaraki Prefecture to stroll about with a very kind family who takes English lessons at my school. We were out to see the cherry blossoms (which are called sakura in Japanese, which is an objectively cooler word which I'll use from here on out), which we did, though they weren't yet in full bloom. I took lots of pictures which, when I find lots of time, I'll thrown up on Picasa. afterwards they treated me to a very traditional soba lunch.
After the stroll, I left them to meet up with my brother-from-another-mother, Sane, and his friends. We had a hanami party under a sakura tree, which was under a blanket of threatening grey clouds which did eventually split and rain. But not before we got righteously drunk and decided to 1) see Sane's new apartment, 2) go for sushi, 3) go for karaoke, 4) go home, 5) nevermind! let's all 6) go for ramen, and 7) go home for real.
It was a wonderful day. All told, I ate soba, sushi, and ramen, and drank Japanese tea and beer.

As opposed to Monday, when I ate pepperoni pizza, hot dogs, and American-style cookies, and drank Coke.
The plan was to go to Tokyo, hit up Icchaichie, the tea cafe, in Ochanomizu, hit up some book stores and spend an uncalled for amount of money there, then go to Dan's in Oimachi to play videogames. What actually happened was this:

CAFE OWNER: Jason! Hey man, how've you been? It's been a while.
JASON: Yeah K____, how've you been?
CAFE OWNER: Great man, great. This is my wife, Sh____. We got married last month. You want to go to CostCo?
JASON: Yeah, sure.
CAFE OWNER: Let's go.

CostCo was in the next prefecture, so I got to see Tokyo via the highway for the first time since coming here, and I saw a brand new city. I even thought of living in the city for a while after that, but that natural high wouldn't last forever, so I doubt it'll happen. Anyways, the owner lived in San Diego for almost 10 years and is a really cool guy. I'd never been to CostCo, but I heard tell of its glory from many a Westerner. And, though I realize I was impulse buying like a relapsed alcoholic drinks, I did find it glorious. Almost $200 later, I had eaten so many cookies I felt sick, and washed it down with orange juice until I felt sicker. But the pizza was real pizza and the hot dog was as plastic as you might ever hope it to be and I heard morbidly obese angels singing to the chorus of the florescent lights and for a minute I sang with them.

--- -- --

In other news. When I was in high school and Jeff would punch me or do something physically or mentally harmful, I'd retaliate by knocking him one on the shoulder. He'd retaliate in turn by giving me three or four of the same, or, often enough, harder. I always thought this was unfair, but I tied it to something distinct in human nature (or maybe the nature of all living things). You don't give as good as you get--you return it with a vengeance so the jerk learns not to keep at it. Well, as I grew older I started to learn about historical incidents where the equation played out in all its potential morbidity. After Carthage attacked Rome for the second time, Rome virtually enslaved the whole city. When it attacked the third time, Rome turned the whole city to dust. Statistically speaking, the same thing's happening on the fronts of the American wars. Except that Carthage really did send Hannibal.

And the Creativity Killer is...

2008-03-25T23:11:00.003+09:00

...school. This is one of the best talks I've ever seen ever. And every talk at Ted is worth giving a listen-to. And now I'm gonna have a sit and rethink my various reasons for existence.

sulking

2008-03-24T13:09:00.003+09:00

Chalk this up to end-of-the-unproductive-weekend depression, but I just wanted to list all the things that don't suddenly jolt you into writing more, and writing better:

-a bag of potato chips
-a shower
-more tea
-a nap
-a box of chocolaty bready bars
-adjusting your beanbag seat
-checking your e-mail
-StumbleUpon Video
-considering the forthcoming work week
-any other form of direct or indirect sulking
-going to Tokyo because you feel obligated to someone you met once

Emily told me once that the more minutely you try to revise a story, the more difficult a task it becomes. I thought that was crazy until sometime last night, when all I'd been trying to do for two months was spit out a complete, crappy little draft of a story that as fully realized inside me head. But I've learned. While writing from scratch can be every and all manner of stupid and suck, revising is magical in how it makes you want to forget how to breathe while you sleep.

HHOagogo

2008-03-23T13:03:00.002+09:00

I know about hydrogen power abstractly. It works in rockets. It goes kablooey easily. But this guy seems to've figured out a way to make that not happen so much.

Unbelievable Patented Technology - video powered by Metacafe
At http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/889506/unbelievable_patented_technology.swf if the video doesn't appear.

Jerusalem, and

2008-03-22T00:09:00.001+09:00

Moore just said Jerusalem would run near 750,000 words. That's 250,000 more than he previously expected.

I.
Am.
Gonna. Muthafuggin.
Hug.
Somebody.

And tomorrow I have eight classes, seven of which are in a pretty little row. If you have excess energy you'd like to give up, channel it my way.