Thanksgiving and Other Thoughts

Rachel has been prodding me to post on our blog for roughly a month now. And I have always steadfastly ignored her, in part because I have been busy, but also because that is the underlying dynamics of our relationship. However, I am no longer busy, and it seems irresponsible to lapse into silence on this blog, which is structured around the dysfunctions of both Rachel and myself.





For my first make-up post, I'd like to return to Thanksgiving. This was the first year I had the chance to actually go home to spend the November holiday with my parents, so I was thrilled weeks ahead (to be honest, I was thrilled with any break from classwork). There was a lot of eating, which seems to be an obligatory component of every family gathering. My cousin, who is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at UTAustin, also came up for the weekend. The last time we spoke was the greater part of a decade ago, and the experience was tinged with much teenage awkwardness. But now, I find in him a wonderful conversationalist, a keen humorist, and a kindred (which is to say, very nerdy) spirit. And the fact that he is a relative -- well, that's like icing on the cake. To really evoke the spirit of Thanksgiving, I have included a painting by Norman Rockwell, the master of classic Americana.

Finally, a list of things for which I am thankful (brought to you by the letter "F"!):

• A family that I know -- even if I know nothing else -- will always be there
• Friendships that continue and friendships that begin
• The financial freedom to indulge in my liberal arts education (though that sense of freedom is set to expire very soon)
• Fortune, for having smiled on me for so long. Despite all my angst, at the end of the day, I know that I am in a privileged position, which is a product of extraordinary luck and my parents' love.

And I hope your holiday was full of warmth and love as well. Cheers!

I'm stupid.

My stupidity and general mental ineptitude are too vast and all-encompassing to write a brief blog post about. I am incapable of not only abstract thought but also the basic requirements of life. I consider myself lucky that my brain hasn't yet forgotten how to operate my vital functions.

In short, Harvard may have finally destroyed my mind and turned me into this:

Knitting project: teddy bear!

For Chanukah this year, in the spirit of frugality and global economic collapse, my sister and I are celebrating Homemade Holidays--trying to give as many homemade presents as possible.

For my mother, who loves teddy bears, I made the "bear necessity" pattern from the Family Circle Easy Toys book. The end result is not at all perfect--I'm still a beginner at seaming and stuffing. (Although my seaming has improved a ton, and my new enormous bag of polyfill fibers makes stuffing much easier!) So the bear is a little... misshapen and stupid-looking. But at the very least, he's a big improvement over my previous attempts.

(I'm still debating whether or not to make him the tiny sweater included in the pattern in the book. What do you think? Does this little guy need a sweater?)

And a bonus--I'm a Secret Santa for someone in my orchestra, and one of my gifts is going to be this slightly freaky little frog. He's meant to sit on your bookshelf with his little legs dangling off!

BurritoQuest 2008

At midnight, some night last week (they all start to blur together in a haze of sleepless misery), I decided that what I needed was a burrito. So I went out to our beloved neighborhood taqueria, the favorite of college students here because it serves delicious Mexican food until 2 A.M. And I documented the process.

Here is my world, on a December midnight:

I live in the Tower. I love looking up and seeing lights on and imagining what sort of people are inside.

Someone decorated a tree in our courtyard with Christmas lights.


Dunster.
The view across the Charles.


An advertising display for Starbucks.
The Garage, home of the cheapest food around.


My favorite! This tree is decorated with lights year round.


Returning home, the halfway-decorated tree in our dining hall.

I'm going to miss this place a lot when I have to leave.

Illness

I am sitting in the dining hall squeezing lemon into hot water like a grandma. I am sick, which I finally realized after I was still burning hot in my room with the windows open. In Boston. In December.

In some ways I become even more unpleasant when I'm sick (hard to believe it's possible, but it's true, I assure you)--I avoid all human contact, sleep at funny hours, totally abandon any pretense at cleaning my room, and generally become an antisocial hermit. More than usual, that is.

But in a weird way, I kind of enjoy being sick, intensely sleep deprived, or both. It gives my humdrum existence a sort of magical, hallucinatory quality that spices up the dullness of the everyday routine. I have long conversations with myself and entertain myself quite nicely.

The novelty is going to wear off awfully soon, though--hence the hot water and lemon juice.

Happy holidays

I've been home for Thanksgiving, which has been utter bliss. The food is delicious, the house is so nice, and my family is wonderful! The only noteworthy occurrence has been:

The setting: Thanksgiving evening, the extended family sitting around and pretending to watch some football game on Fox. Fox apparently has this new CGI robot representing the NFL. It looks like this:



My mother: Do you think that's animated, or a real person in a suit?
Rachel: It's animated.
My grandfather: Oh, it's a real person in there.
Rachel: It's definitely animated.
My grandfather: He's a negro.
[silence]
My mother: How can you tell?
My grandfather: The way he moves! [sagely]
[general pandemonium]

The look on my sister's face at this moment can best be described with an emoticon:

Welcome to the holidays at my house!

"Music is, fundamentally, the art of feeling."

Yesterday, I had one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that happen surprisingly, delightfully often here.

My beloved orchestra, the Bach Society Orchestra (a.k.a. BACHSOC), played John Adams's "The Wound-Dresser," a setting of a Walt Whitman poem for baritone and orchestra. Then, Professor Helen Vendler, a scholar of poetry, President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian (and president of our glorious university, and object of my undying love), and John Adams himself oh my god had a casual panel discussion about the piece.

John Adams is possibly the most significant living American composer. His music is just transcendent--if you've heard it, you'll know when I mean when I say it can be like drinking light. It is amazing. I'd actually never listened to Adams before this year (ah, that's an embarrassing revelation), but I've been on something of a binge lately, and he has definitely rocketed up to my twentieth century top ten list.

On a more personal note, he conducted BachSoc back in the day when my father played clarinet in it, and apparently they knew each other and played chamber music together. Incredible!

John Adams impressed me a great deal. His commentary on the piece when he coached us during the dress rehearsal cut right to the heart of the musicality, his speech was peppered with metaphors--I love finding out the images composers use to visualize their music. He spoke just brilliantly on a dozen different things--choosing which verses of a poem to set, the meaning of the vernacular in literature and music, technology in music, etc etc etc...

One of the coolest things I learned is that when he sets a text, he will record himself speaking the line and then consider the rhythm and intonation in natural spoken American English when he puts it to music.

The title of this post is his--and I think it is quite admirable for a man who is obviously so deeply intellectual about music to say that it is "the art of feeling."

I think this reflects his commitment to musically coherent music. I'm not at all one of those bitter classicists who whines about this newfangled modern music what with its minimalism and its atonality and why don't any of these whippersnappers write tunes anymore (and it's not like John Adams is known for his hummable melodies, anyway). So I don't at all believe that music has to be tonal and melodic and pretty to be good. But I do think, as I am led to believe John Adams probably does, that the purpose of music is to stimulate the emotions.

It's notable, I think, that music is unique among art forms for actually being incapable of communicating ideas. (I assume this is somehow a controversial statement, and it is definitely not my own thought--I don't remember where I read it, though...) While adding words or accompanying information certainly allows music to communicate ideas (see: opera), music itself says nothing. You can't teach facts or tell a story through music. Music isn't even really about anything.

If we believe that, then I think we have no choice but to declare music "the art of feeling." Because even without words or historical context, the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th Symphony and and the "Dies Irae" from Mozart's Requiem (please excuse the cliché examples) still somehow communicate things that are very different to us. I wish I could speak with some real understanding about this, but I am fundamentally ignorant about music--I can just say that to me, music that succeeds in causing its audience (even an audience as ignorant as I am) to feel is good music.

P.S.: All countless millions of you who asked me, "John Adams, the president?" are philistines and uncultured rubes, so there! (I am mostly kidding. Mostly.)

The Inner Life of the Cell

A series of exams + proposals + thesis deadlines (none of which I have fulfilled in a satisfactory manner) has left me with very little time on my hands. So here is a cop-out post: a short video on the inner life of the cell, from the Department of Mollecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard.

I won't write anything here about the miracle that is life, but I doubt I need to. Watching the clip gives me a little perspective: alright, so I have a thesis deadline that's overdue, but at least my RNA and, consequently, all the proteins in my body, self-assemble. What a relief I don't have to do both.

In English

"In English, we have this expression: 'It's all Greek to me.' Do you know what that means? It means I don't understand what I'm looking at."


I was talking to my supervisor at the library this past Thursday, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with spine labels for a series of Chinese books. She wanted me to translate a few titles from their English transliteration back to the original Chinese, no big deal. In the process, she made a joke about the total incomprehensibility of Chinese characters to her, resulting in the above quote. So I find myself in the bizarre situation of sitting there, nodding my head and trying to contort my face into a look of dawning comprehension, as my supervisor slowly explains (the way one might explain something to the very young) a basic idiom in a language I have long considered my native tongue.

Thank you, very much, for teaching me the mysterious ways of your language. Bilingualism is a rare thing indeed if you cannot grasp the concept that there may not be an exclusive one-to-one correspondence between my ethnic appearance and the languages I speak.

Texas

America is a pretty big place, and every corner of this big place has staked out its identity. Sometimes, being from Texas on the East Coast feels like a burden. There is a hint of the self-righteous in New England liberalism: at the same time it condemns death penalties, it also, by implication, condemns the people of a state that makes use of the death penalty seemingly without care. A classmate once told me that Texas is an awful place, and he doesn't need to visit it to know this certainty.

A whole place (and all its people) written off because of ideology that isn't even shared by all? Laaaaaaame. It disappoints me that my peer would say such a thing; it seems so contrary to the spirit of inquiry that brought us here in the first place.

The longer I am away from home, the more I miss it. Texas is a contrast to New England in many ways. The weather is certainly less moody; the people are incredibly friendly and warm. Doors are consistently held open for me; men address me as "ma'am" (which makes me giggle a little), and women call me "hun." Here, I sometimes get doors that shut in my face, and pedestrians passing each other avoid making eye contact.

I realize that I am making sweeping generalizations, but I would like to say that there is much about my home that is valuable. To this end, I am appending a post I wrote for the 60th JASC AEC blog earlier in the year:

+ + + +


I feel that Texas has an undeservedly bad rap. I'm not saying that Texas is a money-bush or something equally awesome. It's just that people think it's really, really awful. To wit: I was at my professor's, feeling full of nerves and trying to impress Her Highness. Her guests ask me where I'm from, and when I reply "Texas", they start laughing! When I failed to join in their laughter ("Yeah, you're right, it IS funny that I'm from the ass-end of America!"), they reluctantly stopped.

I'm very fond of Texas, though. I like the overabundance of Ford F-150s on the road. I like the generous cordiality that is so very much a part of the place. And I like that the "In Texas, we like it BIG" joke refers to everything from steaks to anatomical parts. The list goes on. More specifically, however, the Texas landscape can be breathtaking.

Over winter break, we packed ourselves up into an SUV and went down to Big Bend National Park, perched on Texas' southwestern border with Mexico. And this is what we saw:


I felt oddly inspired. It's difficult to feel unhappy or deeply burdened in a place that exited long before me and will continue to be here, unchanged, long after. Encounters with nature on a grand scale always leave me with a diminished sense of self-importance.


On this glorious camping trip, I also:

1) slept in a tent in below-freezing weather. My god I haven't gone to sleep whimpering and full of tears since I was sixteen, when my life was powered by teenage angst.

2) called 911 because we were followed by an aggressive man, who kept up an utterly unnecessary commentary on his ability to "kick ass" as he tailed us in his truck. A breathtakingly frightful span of time later, we lost him. I was gratified to note that he had a California license plate. Not Texan, then.

3) drove for hours and hours on a road that doesn't end. Kerouac, you crazy drug fiend, I get you.

My intellectual life

In the course of my rigorous thesis research, I came upon a rare film that, I think, perfectly expresses my current intellectual state:



MY BRAIN HURTS
NO NO NO MY BRAIN IN MY HEAD
GET BETTER BRAIN

DC!

I am currently in our nation's capital, meeting with President-elect Barack Obama...


...and eating tacos with him. Mmm, delicious tacos.

No, I kid, although President-elect Obama is never far from my mind, because I'm a "cock-eyed optimist," in the immortal words of Rogers and Hammerstein, and I go all weak in the knees over the prospect of a president whose policies aren't a slap in the face to all I hold dear. Hurray!

Actually, I'm in DC for the JASC fall meeting awesome amazing great so cool!

Because of various transportation difficulties (from hell's heart I stab at thee, Delta Airlines!!!), I arrived a full sixteen hours later than I should have. While this was enormously terrible in every way and a huge waste of time for me and others, it had the advantage of allowing my favorite pastime--clueless Rachel wandering!

But Rachel, most of your time is spent in clueless wandering! How is this any different?

I will tell you!

I am sessile. I am a deeply rooted plant. I walk the same paths every day; I stay in my room, my building, and my city. This is partly by choice and partly by habit, but either way, I end up spending most of my time in one place. This feeds my (usually unfulfilled) wanderlust.

So when I arrived in DC, without a map, without even the vaguest knowledge of the layout of the city or its subway, I was filled with totally childish glee. I loved figuring out how the ticket machines in the metro worked--and the metro stations in DC are so gorgeous and modernist and freaky--wandering around and figuring out the layout of the streets--tracking down some wifi to make this post--awesome, all of it.

Here's to a weekend of adventure!

The City

"Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide -- extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, new York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of praoxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding."

-- Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City", The Practice of Everyday Life



I know people who profess a love for New York as if the city were an intimate friend. And in many ways, the city has become The City, both animated and personified. I hesitate to cite Sex and the City -- because, seriously, how obvious and tired an example is that -- but the show has made New York into a glamorous persona of its own. Who is Carrie Bradshaw, or indeed any of the ladies, without the beautiful, intimidating, and Sphinx-like background of The City?


What I do think is amazing is the ways we have come to conceptualize urban space. City brings to my mind grand skylines, and some cities have come to be defined by the peculiar features of their horizon: Seattle's Space Needle, Dallas' Reunion Tower, New York's World Trade Center (which is as evocative in its absence as it was in its presence). This view of the city (what Michel de Certeau would term "god's gaze") is so alluring that painters in the Middle Ages began depicting their urban spaces from this perspective even though the means of realizing the vantage-from-on-high -- namely, skyscrapers -- did not then exist. A specific subgenre of impressionist paintings, which sought to depict the realities of urban life, often adopted a bird's eye perspective so that it could reveal, in one sweep, all the motion and anonymity of city life (shown Claude Monet's Boulevard des Capucines, 1873). But this is not how we actually experience the city: in our daily lives, we more often walk the alleys of the city than see its peaks. I'd like to think that the expansive horizon of the city is so attractive not because we are voyeurs looking for an image of other people's lives, but because we are looking for a reflection of our own, and perhaps a confirmation that we are, happily and inescapably, a part of The City.

Optimism, a rhapsody

A Newsweek article, "This is Your Brain on Optimism," from almost exactly a year ago links optimism to better physical health. A UPenn research interviewed by Newsweek offers two possibilities: 1) optimists take better care of their health since they believe in the potential positive outcome, or 2) optimists are more likable and build better social networks, which has been linked to longevity. The article concludes that optimism is a fundamental brain pattern and possibly an evolutionary survival strategy.


I wonder to what extent optimism is a biologically determined trait, and to what extent it is shaped by our experiences. Is trauma more likely to create or destroy optimism? Or perhaps the answer depends on the circumstances surrounding the trauma? If life does tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (on both ends, for the pessimistic as well as the optimistic), then research on how to facilitate optimism -- how to cultivate hope -- may have profound socio-economic impacts.

It would also make me more likable (one of my long-standing dreams is to have infinite charisma), more able to build social networks, and live longer. Benefits all around!

Atrophy

Upon entering college, I was fairly convinced I wanted to study economics, and not just the fuzzy track of basic theory, but the kind that at least tried to be mathematically rigorous. So, in my freshman year, I took Math 21a. Multivariable Calculus.

Here are four True/False questions (out of a total of 20) on my first hourly exam, in October 2006:

A line intersects a hyperbolic paraboloid always in 2 distinct points.

1. There is a quadric surface, each of whose intersections with the coordinate planes is either an ellipse or a parabola.
2. The level curves f(x, y) = 1 and f(x, y) = 2 of a smooth function f never intersect.
3. The equation x^2 + y^2 − z^2 = −1 defines a one-sheeted hyperboloid.

Then a series of short answer questions, such as:

Imagine the planet Earth as the unit sphere in 3D space centered at the origin. An asteroid is approaching from the point P = (0, 4, 3) along the path ~r(t) = ((4 − t) sin(t), (4 − t) cos(t), 3 − t).

a) When and where will it first hit the Earth?
b) What velocity will it have at the impact?


I went to office hours all the time and developed nervous habits; after each exam, I exited the auditorium with both a diminished sense of self and ragged nails. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that I could answer at least half the T/F questions on sight back then. When I look at the questions now, my mind can't even glean meaning from the scattered symbols. One-sheeted hyperboloid? Quadric surface? Re-enacting Armageddon?

This was three years ago. I don't think I will ever need this knowledge again, though my ego would love it if I could still juggle x, y, and z axes and recognize an elliptic paraboloid just from its function. What bugs me is that I so easily lost not just a formula but an entire body of knowledge. And I notice that after each summer, I read less quickly, communicate less smoothly, process ideas with less acuity. Every skill atrophies with disuse, but I am unaccustomed to thinking of thinking as a skill. So much of who we are seems to reside in our consciousness, which includes our ability to comprehend calculus but also encompasses the whole range of beliefs, responses, and impulses that accompany us through the day and makes us us (to invoke Descartes in a totally irresponsible way).

It's midterm season, so I see copies of old Math 21a hourlies -- now posted as practice exams -- floating around the computer lab. And I am reminded that what I take for granted is not a constant. After all, I've read Flowers for Algernon.

And this too shall pass

Smadar Lavie wrote an ethnography of Bedouins set in southern Sinai. In this particular episode, he is with the Bedouins in their tents, telling stories, joking, making fun of tourists, complaining about military rule, and also listening to the Arabic version of BBC World Service.


The Ghalid continues, "The Greed were here nd left behind the Monastery, the Turks were here and left behind the Castle, and the British drew maps, and the Egyptians brought the Russian army (and a few oil wells), and the Israelis brought the Americans who made the mountains into movies, and tourists from France and Japan, and scuba divers from Sweden and Australia, and, trust Allah to save you from the devil, we Mzeina are nothing but pawns in the hands of them all. We are like pebbles [...]"

-- Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation


The geopolitics of change, which even nomadic peoples do not escape. In the end, we outlast; time is the survival strategy of even the passive.

Boston JASC Reunion, Part 1

What's this I see?


Five JASCers in one room! Yoshi with his Pooh-san towel, Aya in her pajamas, Sunyoung smiling like a goddess, Nancy as our gracious host, and me as the photographer.


After moving in and making a big mess out of Nancy's room...


... we had a late dinner of Japanese food (because Yoshi reaaally wanted rice!).


It's been so wonderful to see everyone--Yoshi's crazy stories about JASC behind the scenes, talking with Aya, Sunyoung's laughter. It's like JASC again, running around getting lost and being inefficient and talking about love and staying up late and getting up early.


More updates on Boston JASC reunion soon!

state of life

It's an indication of how much of a child I still am that I find the unhappy clutter of life to be exhaustively all-consuming. Or you may choose to call it by its other names: self-absorption, intense narcissism, myopia.

In any case, there is no perspective when my sun refuses to shine and my world refuses to turn. And I will be obstinately petulant until this unhappy clutter goes away.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

This is my redux of Rachel's post. Here follows a partial list of things that bring joy to my life:

• blank notebooks
• graffiti
• a well-fitted coat
  
• mass transit in unfamiliar cities
• skipping class on Fridays
  
• the produce aisle
• people with obscure interests
  
• lists
• Sherlock Homes
• accordion music
• Monopoly game pieces
• folding shirts still warm from the dryer
  

Potential

It's such an ugly word. To use the word "potential" is to indicate a gap between that and reality. It's moralizing, condescending, and totally oppressive. The next time sometime tells me I'm underachieving my "potential", I am going to tell them that I could "potentially" be a crack-whore on the street, dragging my five-year old malnourished child behind me.

Unless it's my thesis advisor. In which case I say, "Yes Ma'am."

Brrrr cold!

Monday was sunny; Tuesday was cloudy. Then Wednesday and Thursday inexplicably descended into wintry despair. It's better today, the expected high is in the low 50s (degrees Fahrenheit).

I am devoting a post to the banalities of weather in part because I came across this picture of a snow monkey (also known as a Japanese macaque, though I tend to think of them as spa monkeys). I also happen to believe that weather is far from banal. It determines what I do and colors how I feel; to say that it's mere backdrop to my life is to ignore just how often it intrudes into the foreground. I didn't realize this until I came to college, when the vagaries of New England weather made a wreck of my winters. I thought about investing in a sun lamp.

When it's cold -- not so much that I can't think of anything but the ache in my ears but enough that I instinctively hunch inwards -- I am reminded of home, the familiarity of a brick house and the warmth of the kitchen. I think of Thanksgiving, Cowboys game on the TV, and my parents' cooking. I'm idealizing, of course: my parents routinely turn the thermostat down to save money and energy, so our house is often punishingly cold, the Cowboys haven't been worth watching since their glory days in the early 1990s, and I have spent every Thanksgiving in the last three years away from home (each time building on this nostalgic longing).

This year, though, I'm going home on November 26th. So, each day I walk through the Yard, shivering and kicking fallen leaves, is one day closer to home.

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

I am occasionally (often) seized with the desire to abandon intellectual pretensions and be utterly frivolous. So here is a non-exhaustive list of things that make me happy for no particular reason:

--moving walkways in airports

--the way valve oil smells and the squeaky sound it makes when it gets on my fingers
--the cheerful sounds google and skype make when someone chats me
--sunshine in my room in the afternoon
--lady police officers
--doing everyday things with my eyes closed
--licking old-fashioned stamps
--watching other people play video games
--grapefruit
--writing with colorful pens
--being barefoot in inappropriate places
--street and subway musicians

Shame!

I was assigned to read Persepolis, 1 and 2, for class tomorrow. Only the first half is on reserve, and all available copies in the library system are out. Class is tomorrow, two hours of discussion with the professor.

Compelled by the exigency of my situation, I found a copy of Persepolis at the Harvard Bookstore, parked myself in a corner couch, and read the second half of the book while legitimate patrons and store staff drifted around me. Petty, gracelessly cheap, and, worst of all, I felt as if I had violated the sacredness of text and authorship.

On the other hand, the paperback costs $25, so my conscience isn't terribly tortured.

Thanks to the economy, I have no future

My last post was a bit abstract, so here is a very real speculation on the state of my life after graduation.


After four years of learning, privilege, toil (however you choose to describe my college education), I am finally ready to enter society as a theoretically functional individual. In June 2009, I graduate. In my Panglossian fantasy, my parents and I celebrate, I receive a fellowship to study in China for a year, and then I move onto law school.


Given near-paralysis of the credit market, however, many of my fellow graduating students that would have entered the investment banking industry are now considering other options, like graduate school or fellowships. All of a sudden, my idyllic little pasture is overcrowded with starving sheep, as it were. Competition drives evolution; it drives the market. What emerges is a more efficient equilibrium. Competition is, essentially, a "good" thing.


But competition also causes profound instability and dislocation. And my lizard brain is intensely insecure about my survival. What is the back-up to my flimsy plans? The prospect of going home to live with my parents is frightening: disappointment and shame within an enclosed space would invariably lead to madness. I could find odd jobs here and there (assuming that Barnes and Noble would even hire a simultaneously overqualified and inexperienced college graduate), apply to law school, and wait out the year. I could pack up, move to Shanghai, and eke out a living tutoring English in China's new Gotham. Or simply live overseas as one of those disaffected young expatriates that populate Hemingway's novels.


Clearly, my speculation has reached the realm of fantasy. It got so bad that, while trying to have the same conversation with Rachel a few days ago, we ended up talking about launching crime syndicates -- planting poppies in the power-vacuum of post-war Afghanistan and the kind -- in lieu of legitimate post-graduation plans. We kid, of course, but it's a rather dark sort of humor.


And alright, I acknowledge that ultimately I am speaking from a privileged position, and that this rant veers on the melodramatic. My problem is not at all unique; it's one that all college graduates face. After investing so much (of my parents' money) into my (questionably productive) education, what do I do with my life that will validate my parents' sacrifice and my self-worth?

Traveling

Speaking of modernity (see Rachel's last post), I came across a very evocative quote in the opening pages of Joseph Conrad's Victory, written in 1915:

"The age in which we are encamped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel"

-- Joseph Conrad

The obvious point is how fitting this quote seems within its historical context: the beginning of the 20th century, after the West's imperial project but before two convulsive world wars, a time of political crises not yet redeemed by the marvel of consumer technology or the optimism of a return to democratic ideals.


The second point I want to make concerns the trope of traveling. I found Conrad's quote in an essay by James Clifford (originally given as remarks at a conference on cultural studies in 1990). Clifford is an anthropologist, and in this essay, he criticizes the dominant strain of anthropological study in the mid-twentieth century, a mode that focuses on participant-observation in the "field." This method basically means the anthropologist finds a village of "natives" in, say, Melanesia, pitches a tent, lives with the subject of his study for two years, and records his observations.


I have placed the words natives and field in quotation marks not to be obnoxious, but rather to show that Clifford finds these concepts problematic. A field is restrictive: to define a field, you must draw boundaries, outside of which is not the field, not a part of the anthropological study. Culture thus becomes circumscribed within the field. The "native" is assumed to be a dweller, not a traveler; he lives within an enclosed space out of contact with the larger world. Does this kind of hermetic native even exist? The village-mode of anthropology marginalizes a long list of actors: missionaries, converts, people of mixed blood, merchants, tourists, pilgrims, servants, entertainers, migrant laborers, translators, and so forth. Culture does not stay still, it does not live and die in a bounded village. Clifford's essay is tellingly titled "Traveling Cultures."


Why have I spent so long talking about Clifford's critique? Anthropology has long moved beyond a Jane Goodall-esque study of natives, witness the attention paid to the migrant labor phenomenon in Southeast Asia (Pei-Chia Lan's Global Cinderellas, Rhacel Parrenas' The Force of Domesticity, Servants of Globalization). In the process of reading Clifford, two thoughts occurred to me.


First, I like the conjunction between academia and traveling. Imagine anthropological studies of liminal spaces: hotel lobbies, airplane terminals, hospitals, urban cafes, buses, and trains. But travel here can also be a metaphor. How do we as students "travel" between discourses, disciplines, and paradigms? (Edward Said published a paper specifically on this topic: "Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler.") And on a shamelessly personal level, I think of myself as a traveler, an individual defined by my schismatic crossing of the Pacific. How does this shape my awareness and thought?


Second, the layering of traveling and culture pulls me inevitably towards JASC. I can't help it; I've been reading essays on culture, cultural identities, and cultural confrontations, and I always end up trying to map these theories onto my understanding of JASC. If, as Clifford suggests, the act of traveling is culturally meaningful, then JASC can be imagined not just as the meeting of two hegemonic cultures. Rather, the process of JASC -- the four weeks of traveling -- is itself a site of cultural production and hybridity. Does this obviate the need for an overarching mission? Is the fact that JASC happens at all sufficient?

"Talent"; or, "Why Japan?"

Extra points for anyone who can recognize any of the authors in the photographs in this post! As a hint, I have named each file after a work of theirs... in Japanese, for extra challenge.

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Seamus Heaney recently visited our school, and our campus weekly magazine interviewed him. A question and answer that I found particularly interesting:

FM: With [the Nobel Prize in Literature], you join the ranks of fellow Irishmen William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. What do you think is behind Ireland's rich literary tradition?

SH: I don't know the answer to that, really. I don't believe that sociological conditions produce the oddity of talent. Talent is unpredictable. But it does seem to flourish when societies are in search of definition.

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It's a bit frightening to think of it this way, but I've been studying Japanese literature (with varying degrees of interest and competence) for nearly eight years now, all of high school and all of college. The process has been at times bumpy but always fascinating and always rewarding, and I like to think that I've come out on the other end of this journey a better person in some ways.

While I hate to admit it, from a normal person's point of view, Japanese literature is a somewhat obscure topic. And the natural question that people ask when it is revealed that I spend so much time studying something so weird and useless is:

"Why Japan?"

I don't have a good scholarly answer for this, but I have a sincere answer. (Sincerity is a rather rare commodity around here, so please appreciate this.)

Japan had an experience of modernity so unusual as to deserve to be called unique. Far more than Western nations, Japan had a visceral sense of modernity and modern society coming from outside, being something alien to itself. The process of modernizing was so drastically accelerated that it produced vast, weird fractures in people's understanding of the world around them. This is why so much early Japanese literature is obsessively concerned with tradition and modernity.

The Japanese experience of the social forces that affected the rest of the developed world during the 20th century was also wildly exaggerated--socialist labor movements--an incredibly brilliant flowering of popular rights, democracy, and liberalism--militarism and fascism--being both perpetrator and victim of some of the most horrific military actions of the modern world--the experience of being an occupied nation--the most sudden and dramatic economic growth imaginable--the unbelievable pace of technological development--extreme urban spaces--and now a crippling demographic transition (少子高齢化).

This is so simplistic and reductive that I'm almost embarrassed to admit to it, but this really is what I think--that the experiences of modernity and postmodernity have been somehow traumatic for people in developed nations. Our perception of our current experience as somehow severed from our past and the sinister ways we view modern life (pervasive fear and demonization of urban space and technology) suggest, simply put, that we are not comfortable in the world we live in.

To me, that is the power of Japanese literature. The Japanese historical experience of all of these changes and dislocations and traumas has been almost uniformly extreme, and so Japanese literature bears the scars of modernity very clearly. More than most other "national literatures" (I recognize that the term is deeply problematic, forgive me), Japanese literature touches directly on the issues that are the most painful and intimate for, I think, everyone living in a developed nation today. We are all in, as Heaney said, "societies in search of definition."

I have always wondered if I would be just as fulfilled studying, say, Irish literature, or African literature, or even Chinese literature. Does it matter that it's Japan?--yes, yes, it decisively does. Choosing Japanese literature was not arbitrary for me. I won't say it answers my questions, but it asks the same questions as I do.

JASC 59

I talk about the 60th JASC and I talk about the theoretical premises of JASC, but here is a nostalgic look at my JASC: the 59th Conference! En route to Kagoshima, Josh was lucky enough to be part of a JASC reunion. Incidentally, I received this picture not from him but from Hiromichi (he wears a white shirt, in the second row), my round table leader.

Having led my own round table this past summer, I appreciate the dedication and intellectual commitment of my round table leaders all the more! JASC as an institution remains year after year, but the delegates and the EC's come and go. I feel a special affection for the EC's that led my conference, my mentors and -- in many ways -- the reason why I became an EC.


Best wishes to Ryota, Yuko, Hiromichi, Nao, Daichi, Josh, and Eri~

The Five Stages of Grieving

8:35 am: I wake up
8:37 am: I lean over and turn on my laptop
8:38 am: Laptop freezes after the start-up screen
8:38 - 40 am: I wait for it to stop thinking so hard

Stage One: Denial
"My laptop's fine..."

8:41 am: I am exasperated and turn the laptop off. Then on again
8:43 am: Laptop remains frozen

Stage Two: Anger
"God hates me! To return the favor, I shall gleefully hate the world"

8:44 am: I reboot the laptop again

Stage Three: Bargaining
"If you restart this time, I will limit my usage of you to only 90 minutes a day"

8:50 am: In despair, I pack up my laptop and resume my day

Stage Four: Depression
"This totally sucks. I mourn the death of my laptop and my academic career"

9:20 - 10:40 am: Drawn out breakfast with Rachel. We discuss education policy and are baffled
11:00 am - 12:00 pm: Professor Lajer-Bucharth lectures on Impressionism and Modern Life
2:00 pm: I take my laptop to the Computer Clinic in search of more technologically-oriented minds than mine. They tell me my hard drive may be failing and help me to back up my academic files

Stage Five: Acceptance
"I can pick up my repaired laptop in three to five business days. All is right with my world again"

2:45 pm: I exhale