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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
---
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.
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~
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"
I'm not well-read, and I have plebeian taste, so this is not meant to be a meaningful excursion into literature. I really enjoy books: the heft of leather-bound books, the crisp smell of new books, the swish of flipped pages, the neatness of thread-bound signatures and whatnot. In fact, my part time job is in the Preservation Department of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard; I fix broken books.
I digress. What we love most about books is reading them, that act of discovery. And some books never really leave us but, instead, become embedded in our memories and our concept of self. So I'm sharing some books that mean a great deal to me:
The Water Margins: one of the lesser known four great novels in the Chinese literary tradition. Unlike The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is an intellectually challenging discussion of war and strategy or Dream of the Red Chamber, a psychologically complicated work on fate, love, and 18th century Qing social life, The Water Margins lacks depth. It's basically about lawless ruffians that band as brothers, get drunk, and smash a lot of corrupt officials in the face. I love it.
The Redwall Series: A lot of mice and woodland animals live together in an abbey. It's one of the first books I remember reading in English; it introduced me to fantasy (and I mean that here as a state of mind, not a genre of fiction) and made me realize how easily imagination traverses the limits of reality.
The Joy Luck Club: For me, Amy Tan seems to be the singular figure narrating the Chinese diasporic experience. It's not great literature, and it's not even descriptive of my experience in America. It's the weird distant uncle: I can barely comprehend him, but I recognize him as kin.
Pride and Prejudice: Every girl's fantasy involves a Mr. Darcy.
Random Family (tracing a family in the Bronx over the course of two years)& The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (the struggles of a Hmong family in California with the healthcare system over their epileptic child): For a few years, I read solely nonfiction narratives (other fantastic examples of this genre include Reefer Madness, Savage Inequalities, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families). These books cultivate social consciousness: they made me, living in an upper-middle-class suburb, feel obligated to the poor, the socially underprivileged, the geographically marginalized of the world.
The Picture of Dorian Gray: The character I find compelling in Oscar Wilde's book is not Dorian Gray, the corrupted Adonis, but Lord Henry. He champions moral ambiguity so persuasively that, to this day, I remain highly skeptical of anyone who actually has a functioning moral compass.
The Shadow of the Wind, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Prep, History of Love: Contemporary literature, it's like candy.
I realize these kinds of lists are self-absorbed to the point of solipsism, so I'll finish here. Won't you share your books too?
Today I happened upon an example of inexcusably and hilariously poor translation. I recognize that translating poetry is very difficult, and this is an admirable effort presumably by a very accomplished and scholarly gentleman, but still--no excuses. Take a gander at this excerpt:
Our high-pooped barge glides by the marge Of tributary flume: Breasting the maze of floods we raise A crest of creamy spume. --from "Lines on the Autumn Wind," Liu Che, translator (fortunately) unknown to me
Even ignoring its awkward archaicism and near-incomprehensibility, this is a prime example of tone-deaf English. "high-pooped"?? "creamy spume"?!?! For shame, translator, for shame.
The psychologist Gordon Allport suggested, in 1954, that equal status contact would improve intergroup relations, the premise of many government sponsored (or not) cultural exchange missions.
It turns out, however, that increased contact will improve intergroup relations only under very specific conditions. For instance, contact must be meaningful, voluntary, extended in duration, varied across contexts, generalized beyond the immediate situation, and take place among individuals who are similar in all but cultural background.
Pretty demanding, I would say. So, how many of these conditions does JASC fulfill?
Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954.
Prentice, Deborah A., and Dale T. Miller. "The Psychology of Cultural Contact." In Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict, edited by Deborah A. Prentice and Dale T. Miller. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.
The 39th Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, began the Favorite Poem Project in 1997. He asked Americans to submit their favorite poems and, in the course of one year, received over 18,000 submissions.
I find this concept delightful and charming, like sending messages with pigeons or planting a sapling on a birthday. Still, I don't often read poems; they seem melodramatic and self-important. And too many bad poets try to do with poetry what prose can accomplish with greater economy. I do have some favorites -- Alexander Pushkin's I Loved You Once, ee cumings' i carry your heart, Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred -- but I like them because of what they say, not how they choose to say it (though I must concede that, due of the very nature of poetry, it's never entirely possible to divorce the content of a poem from its form).
But here's a poem -- a saccharine and painfully earnest poem -- that I love for its grandeur, for how beautifully it reads:
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impair'd the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or so softly lightens o'er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!
-- Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty
For more on the Favorite Poem Project, click here.
The sky is blanketed by clouds. There is no wind, and, in the stillness, the trees look as if they are waiting. The middle-aged woman pushing a stroller is hiding behind her scarf. And my fingertips are cold.
It's only October, but I think I can smell winter.
One of the things I have been neglecting in the Rachel Opera Project is comparing different performances of the same work. Generally I just pick up whichever recording happens to be on the library shelves. This is, of course, lazy, because I think you can hardly say you know a work until you've listened to all the definitive recordings and formed an opinion on which tempi you like best, whose voice you think works for the role, etc. Because opera is a sung dramatic form, it has even more room for interpretation than orchestral music.
Here is an example of an aria that has had a particularly interesting performance history: "Seerauber Jenny," or "Pirate Jenny," from Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. The work is a 1928 socialist opera (!), and the aria is about--well, you'll see.
Here is what you could call the definitive early version, sung by Kurt Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, in the original 1931 film. It's sung in German, but it has (clunky, literal) English subtitles. Take a look:
What do you think? I'm still a little unsure of the director's decision to shoot the entire song with her standing still, devoid of facial expression. And when I first listened to it, I was underwhelmed by the song as a soprano aria; her voice seems tinny and shaky, and not only because of poor sound quality. That said, the more I listen, the more I like it. Her totally straight-faced, low-key delivery makes it somehow more serious and terrifying. When she says "alle" at the end, I am totally convinced. And scared.
Now here's a live performance by Hildegard Knef. She recorded versions of both this and "Mack the Knife," the other most famous song from the Threepenny Opera, but I chose the live version instead because--well, take a look:
This is a very different song all of a sudden! Her performance in the live is infinitely rawer and wilder than in the recorded version. I love the spoken sections, I love the freedom she takes with the tempi, I love love love love the way she makes the chorus stand out--when she starts in with "Und ein Schiff!", it's amazing, every time! Also, frankly, I think the aria works better for a lower voice.
It's possible to go too far to this extreme, I think; several other recordings (including amateur ones!) that I've heard have consisted mostly of fortissimo belting and shouting, of which I disapprove on principle. But I think the Knef performance is spot-on perfect and probably my favorite recording of all the ones I've heard.
But "Pirate Jenny" has another incarnation in Nina Simone. She was a jazz musician and civil rights activist. Listen to what she does with it:
Pretty awesome, right? (Also, isn't that an incredible translation? So good!) This performance should be credited for what it did to transform the song's social setting in the US. I admit that there are a lot of things I'm not crazy about in this recording: I don't think the song needs her vocal embellishments, I don't actually like her voice, and I think something feels weird about her pacing/pronunciation/something. But to me, all of that is totally erased when we get to the end and she's rasping, "And as they pile up the bodies, I say... that'll learn ya." Ah! Amazing!
Which Pirate Jenny is your favorite? Do you think any of these recordings are taking too much freedom with what's on the page? Or does what's on the page not matter?
“If you are a dreamer,come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!” -- Shel Silverstein
