hallelujah not here to bore you

A bad thing about the internet

Yeah you can find anything, but it's really hard to find older stuff. So it's like a bigger, better library where the filing system is bust and you ask the librarian, who is good, but has a pretty short-term memory (hello, Google). I mean how often does a search yield a site more than a couple of years old? And how often, if it does, do you discard it?

Also, things are not automatically catalogued. Things are more sporadic. A brilliant article on a specific subject could be on a total random website.

So we obsessively check blogs and websites for every update, because if we miss it when it's posted we will probably miss it forever.

It would be  so much nicer to have a theme and then dig up everything about it you can on the internet, and read about it leisurely, digging deep and with continuity. But this is just as hard as a library ever was. Harder even. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff when there is SO MUCH chaff?

This could well be a theme for future historians: fatal flaws of early internet.

Oh well. These are pioneering times, there will be casualties.

Just know you read it here first. Possibly. How would I know if some other random blogster thought of this?

American v British English - endlessly funny

Worst. Name. For. A. Cooking. Show. Ever.

how we write

Sorry not to write in a while. I actually had a social life last weekend and wasn't at home, except to crash into a shochu (Sat) / sunstroke (Sun) / speaking-Japanese-all-day (Mon) induced slumber.

And I watched Atonement and I liked it. So there. But then I am a sucker for one-takes.

I am planning to be much less social this weekend, so hopefully more will follow. But I just wanted to share part of a recent email from the lovely Jeff. It is eloquent enough to reprint as it is, a one-take, if you will, in written form:

following our well tread method of stream of consciousness conversation... isnt it funny how weve adopted as a culture all these wonderful ways to make written english informal? just the general lackadaisacal thing towards proper punctuation and especially capitalization... its really lovely i think. course people complain about it as a degradation of the language, but its really just a reflection of the way people talk to each other. the people who cant write a business style or formal emaila re the same ones who would have had a hard time with it to begin with. no love lost! spelling too, its really nice how if i misspell something, i generally dont care that much unless its a big word that makes me look like a PLEEEEEB for not knowinng ;)

Language keeps changing to accommodate meaning. Smileys are now a part of writing and knowing how to decode them is crucial to understanding e-communication. And intellectuals everywhere write theyre and youre and pretend they don't care - but they make damn sure they don't write their and your. There is a Lolspeak-English Dictionary.

The interwebs: I can has love u??!!1!

The Road to Defeat of One lacking in Political Sense - Yukio Mishima I: Introduction

I snapped the title for this from a wonderful article in this wonderful book by Nagisa Oshima, grand old leftie film director and someone who did not appreciate Mishima's posturing (although posturing might be the wrong word for it, by all indication he truly felt what he preached).

In short: Nagisa Oshima made films like the explicit and sexy The Realm Of The Senses, one with David Bowie and Beat Takeshi, and, most recently, the, well, explicit and sexy (and explicitly and sexily gay) Gohatto.

Yukio Mishima, while surprisingly candid about feminine aspects of samurai culture in this youtube clip, (lol at the statue in the background at 4:06) was also troubled by his own homosexuality / homosexual tendencies (depending what source you read) and wimpy writery disposition to the extent that he became a body-building fanatic and ended his days in 1970, at the head quarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, after having forced his way in with his self-assembled small junta, given a speech about how Japan needed to return to its old values, and committed seppuku (hara-kiri). Nice.

The two did not see eye to eye:

Oshima on bodybuilding: Mine is still not a shape that is pleasant to look at.

Oshima on Mishima's spartan lifestyle: I am the sort of person who, once he starts drinking, continues until he passes out, so I'm no good at sipping cocktails and I would have liked to make this person, who said he didn't know what a hangover was, drink like crazy and then show him how delicious beer can be when you are hung over.

Oshima on politics: For the most part, politics is asserting yourself to old women. (It should be added that Oshima too is and was quite passionate about politics at the other end of the spectrum. This, like so many of his other quotes, should probably be taken more as provocations, not as statements of fact.)

Oshima on beauty: Mishima asked me why I don't use beautiful men and women in my films. This is the limitation of Mishima's aesthetic sense. In other words, Mishima's aesthetic sense was extremely conventional.

That's it for now. Soon I will chronicle the wonder that is this book:

By this thoughtful jester:

What John Nathan lacks in Oshimaian wit, he makes up for in patience, insight, and a deep, deep fascination with everything dark and fucked up in Mishima (and there is plenty).

We're in good hands.

Ayn Rand

...is very scary, especially when she tries to smile.

She is NOT, however, a philosopher. You know who isn't either? The dumbass people who read her and are of second-class minds. These people come across not only as stupid, but also as major evil bitches.

This podcast is a case in point. I especially recommend this howler on universal health care (show 42) although now I am listening to the one on organ trade, which promises to be just as amusing. And these are the only one's I've listened to so far.

I hope I will be able to comment in depth on this later, but I do love how the host keeps banging on about the devilry of "mob rule" until his caller calmly reminds him that what he calls "mob rule" is what most people call "modern democracy." But hey, it's not like great philosophers haven't had the same idea. He would get on well with both Plato "gold people" and JS "two votes if you have a degree" Mill.

For now, let me leave you with some more scariness.

Somehow, that seems to explain everything about Angelina Jolie, ever.

Hey there, Christian likes your hair. And I like really badly put-together myspacehit-referencing youtube shit!

Psyeah!

Japanese words

I found some quotes I had written down from my prodigious reading of Japanese fiction last year. I think most of these are science fiction, and they are of course translated and I did not note the translator's name, which is a travesty on my part. Nonetheless, some are easily and devastatingly human. I love it because I've felt it:

Yasutaka Tsutsui: "Standing Woman"

(Click to enlarge for this and all the rest)

"Embracing a heart that seemed ready to split apart, I walked."

"The bitternes of sugarless, creamless coffee pierced my body, and I savored it masochistically. From now on I'll always drink it black. That was what I resolved."

Some are trembling with passion:

Enchi Fumiko: "A Bond for Two Lifetimes - Gleanings"

"When I realized that for the unprincipled Professor Nunokawa, who had in the past paid court to me tenaciously, life meant the putting of all his energies into producing a paltry quality of urine in the next room, my whole being shook and I was brought very close to tears."

And some are universal in  their  sentiment, although I know a few Japanologists (Hello, Ruth Benedict: Download thisaintrocknroll.doc) who would take this as symptomatic of the Japanese "obsession" with suicide. Incidentally, this obsession is only surpassed by the Danes (and Pre-Nazi Germans)(type "suicide Denmark"). I guess that is why I find this moving:

Okamoto Kanoko: "A Mother's Love"

"They do not really understand, those who say that despair makes death the only choice. To die of despair requires the enormous energy of stirring, moving, deciding. But real despair only piles on burdens of weakness, leaving the victim helpless, stripped of thought, reflex, and recourse."

And finally this account of being a woman in 20s (or 30s, I am not sure) Japan from Uno Chiyo's: "The Story of A Single Woman"

"She carried her bedding over and a little desk, her kimonos (just enough for a change of clothes), her handmirror and her make-up. With that her move was complete. And here she had begun her new life, bringing with her only the minimum of possessions. Much later, how often would Kazue repeat this pattern in her life? At the time, though, she hadn't the foggiest idea that with this move she had begun a life of wandering."

I like that quote because I can relate, I like the next because my grandmother, too, bobbed her hair in the thirties and  was chastised for it:

"Hardly any woman at that time had bobbed hair. Chopping off her hair was the most radical pose a woman could affect. Kazue looked so different with short hair that she was almost another person. She was already twenty-seven, but now she looked hardly twenty, and this is what so appalled her mother- and sister-in-law."