tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22636855908669480082024-03-13T12:03:10.746-04:00String between PearlsA wide-eyed student of history writing on research, travel, and this miscellaneous world.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-65838901571945507282012-01-14T23:46:00.002-05:002012-01-14T23:51:52.274-05:00There was no Crab Rangoon...<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <style>
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</style> </div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">... that concoction is pure Orientalist-Imperialist-Colonialist bunk! (Though undeniably tasty.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">A Happy New Year to my dear hypothetical readers! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the month of December I hurtled through a trip that gave me quite a few passport stamps and a bout of digestive distress (finally) worthy of the illustrious title of “food poisoning”. [1] Many memorable moments were had, but the most outstanding were the six days I spent in Myanmar. The Nation-state Formerly Known As Burma has been headlining frequently of late with Secretary Clinton’s visit and Aun Sang Suu Kyi’s decision to run for office; all the media attention's probably been causing thousands of geographically challenged heads to be scratched vigorously from sea to shining sea at every mention. Not that I should pretend to be so superior; here's an index of what I knew about the country before visiting it:</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">(1)<span style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Jad<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=2263685590866948008&postID=6583890157194550728" name="_GoBack"></a>e, loads of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">(2)<span style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Freely elected government, absence of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">(3)<span style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Petite, steely-eyed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, name of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">(4)<span style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Villainous foe of King Mongkut’s Thailand in The King & I, appearance as</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Thus I arrived in Yangon on a hot midmorning in December, formidably naïve. Despite my ignorance, I have had the dubious privilege of having lived in societies so publicly riddled with corruption that their people seem almost proud of the fact, as though nepotism and flagrant abuse of the law were unique facets of the national character. So I imagined all sorts of terrors in wait for me even as I biked, six weeks earlier, to the Myanmar embassy in Beijing to get my visa. The building was square-cornered and about as cozy as the backside of a bathroom tile. A lavishly carved sideboard in the lobby, looming as one entered, is all I really remember of the place--that, and the subtly terrifying waiting room with over-high ceilings and bad lighting. The transactions with a kindly, roundish gentleman behind the window were pleasant enough (I spoke English, my go-to for when I am actually begging someone to "please be nice to me"), but for a small obstacle. I was supposed to turn in a copy of an invitation letter, even though I was merely asking for a tourist visa! After some parleying, I was given a sheet of white paper and a juicy black pen to write my own invitation letter, stating name, age, occupation, and intentions. My handwriting is evidently much better than I usually think it to be. One week later, I had my visa.</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cutting back to my arrival in Yangon: all around the airport there were fields. Inside it were the efforts of very diligent floor-waxers on display, and little else; the official money-changers--distinguished from the nice lady who eventually made the trade for me by sitting beneath a sign with a logo on it--refused to do anything with my Chinese bills. The airport and our hotel were so far apart that, by my eventual arrival in the lobby, I had taken a taxi-tour of the city. The town was bustling enough to have a few traffic jams, but the billboards plastered with very cheerful people endorsing suspiciously named vitamin pills (along the lines of Lucy's Vegetameatavitamin), 3-in-1 coffee mixes, and the odd piece of industrial hardware gave away the poverty, or rather the gaping canyon that split poor from rich. It was especially a shock to notice that the men and women selling fritters, clinging to the backs of tiny pickup trucks-turned-buses, or otherwise going about their business were uniformly <i>thinner </i>than their fairy-tale counterparts in the ads. Much thinner, maybe in proportion to the relative size of <i>haute couture</i> models to the average North American. A very shallow bit of first-world irony, perhaps, but a bit that, thanks to the ubiquity of those ads, never quite left me.</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The remains of my first morning in Myanmar was spent at Shwe Dagon, an enormous complex of pagodas, shrines, and images that dazzled every sense and packed us off with raging thirsts and slight headaches from the merciless sun. </span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-av_8JvXbM08/TxJYv33ZPyI/AAAAAAAAATU/hK3Zayj4oHI/s1600/DSCF8733.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-av_8JvXbM08/TxJYv33ZPyI/AAAAAAAAATU/hK3Zayj4oHI/s320/DSCF8733.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Very, very shiny.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The apparent piety suggested in all the well-tended buildings and the wafts of fragrance from the flowers and fruits on altars was, I would later learn, rather more complicated: local spirits, sages, and ghosts had been thoroughly merged with imported Buddhism, though it's a wonder that some of them, transplanted into the Buddhist body of belief, weren't summarily rejected. According to an otherwise stodgily P.C. book on Myanmar culture I later borrowed from a hotel, sages who attained great wisdom would, as they meditated on remote peaks, seek out a kind of plant shaped like a woman's torso, animate a few with their wisdom-magic, and… well, have a bit of fun. Not what Lord Buddha was doing on <i>his</i> mountain retreats, if my feeble grasp of his biography serves. </span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ym1V2QSpunM/TxJY-rguQhI/AAAAAAAAATc/hfMmTYcgsPQ/s1600/DSCF8887.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ym1V2QSpunM/TxJY-rguQhI/AAAAAAAAATc/hfMmTYcgsPQ/s320/DSCF8887.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A game in which kiddies threw coins at a creakily rotating bowl for luck.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Anyway, insight into the sages' frolicking came later; initially Shwe Dagon simply overwhelmed with its sheer size and density of decoration, an effect amplified by the contrast with the shanties and mostly-pothole lanes in the neighborhood. Then, it felt odd. Odd in in the way that you might feel odd if you caught sight of an enormous, gilt, many-tiered cake daintily sitting atop an overflowing bin of (unsorted) trash, or a gold lamé party dress sized to fit a giantess on top of a hamper of dirty socks.</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But then I realized that much of the country was like this, innumerable pagodas shining over landscapes of toil. On the first of two 17-hour train rides--the worse one, because it took up an entire day after rising at 5 o'clock--I could only think, repeatedly, of how medieval this was. Maybe it reflects on my shabby understanding of the European condition before 1250, but wasn't the ideal, at least, a landscape of agricultural productivity as far as the eye could see dotted with beacons of spirituality/sinkholes of resources in the form of churches? That was the Myanmar countryside, anyhow, and the view was especially striking at night, when many of the palm-thatched huts in villages past which we bounced were bathed in darkness while a nearby pagoda beamed, tawny under a few weak incandescent bulbs.</span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cxjVSQNkZE8/TxJWn9fy2RI/AAAAAAAAATE/I0r-NifwKAU/s1600/DSCF8986.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cxjVSQNkZE8/TxJWn9fy2RI/AAAAAAAAATE/I0r-NifwKAU/s320/DSCF8986.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunset in Mandalay. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Our train took us to the capital of British Burma, Mandalay. The city was big, but the electricity was unreliable; the streets stank of the gas-powered generators that shopkeepers posted before their establishments in case the lights went. (I gave one family a little entertainment when I showed up with my headlamp to buy crackers.) After passing out, my head still woozy with a phantom sensation of swaying, we woke to gawk at a colorful market and to rent bicycles to take around town. Having been in 2011 to a good number of picturesque places with ridiculously abundant produce, the stalls at the Zegyo Market were less notable to me for their unique wares than for the aesthetic of poverty, what Zoolander would call "derelicte" gorgeousness. Baskets balanced improbably on the heads of slight women, doorways jammed with coconuts, the smoke-belching mopeds that hauled away sacks of rice--all looked antique because <i>they were</i>. During our entire stay, one of perhaps ten cars had a third brake light. Apparently, back in the Days of Yore (i.e., before the mid-eighties), there had been no requirement for a third light-- a dire condition that I was too little to remember. (This is the kind of enlightenment you get in on when traveling with your father.) I've been suspicious before of my own lust for all things old or even merely old-looking, and in Myanmar this suspicion rose once and again. What brand of perversity could make me think the creativity born of desperate poverty beautiful? The answer, of course, is the perversity of privilege. And that, reader, is why everyone who can afford it should go to places like Myanmar--to realize the depth of that privilege. It doesn't really lighten any spiritual burden, make me feel special or lucky; instead it supplies everyday life with a ballast by reminding us, "Behold, the bottom, where it has always been!"</span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DGG3bKxyits/TxJVzMh2vnI/AAAAAAAAASs/AIqcG3sDLb4/s1600/DSCF9295.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DGG3bKxyits/TxJVzMh2vnI/AAAAAAAAASs/AIqcG3sDLb4/s320/DSCF9295.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picking up a few things at the market?</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Before tapering off this far too lengthy post, I have two further reasons for visiting, both rather more positive. The first is the glorious ancient capital of Bagan, on the banks of the wide slow Irrawaddy--for consistency's sake I should call it the Ayeyarwady, to go along with "Yangon" and "Myanmar." Dotted with somewhere between two and four thousand stupas, pagodas, and shrines, the place is a marvel, especially for those who just can't get tired of temples. Far and away the highlight: remnants of beautiful frescoes from the twelfth century adorning some of the sites. These, along with the stucco columns and lacy embellishments on the outside faces of the buildings, had a distinctively Indo-Greek feel. </span></div><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gNAbmbxs_ys/TxJWQnTEMRI/AAAAAAAAAS0/rNGwUAhd_iw/s1600/DSCF9272.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gNAbmbxs_ys/TxJWQnTEMRI/AAAAAAAAAS0/rNGwUAhd_iw/s320/DSCF9272.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bagan, Land of Indeterminate Thousands of Pagodas.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But it wasn't all medieval treasures and glory. We saw that some of the frescoed interiors had been brutally whitewashed--though often only up to a height of seven or eight feet, above which the old, colorful patterns clung on. It seemed like an attempt to restore the paintings had suddenly lost the half-a-heart that it had begun with, probably to a new golf course. [2] And we had the answer to the question of why UNESCO hadn't made the city into a Heritage Site, namely the clumsiness with which the Orwellian government had rebuilt some of the buildings and maintained the city has kept it from the fame (and lucre) that status entails. </span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vVHHbUJEYrg/TxJZIq0CwAI/AAAAAAAAATk/MaozKRRXQKI/s1600/DSCF9232.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vVHHbUJEYrg/TxJZIq0CwAI/AAAAAAAAATk/MaozKRRXQKI/s320/DSCF9232.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alas.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">I'm not at all sure of the justice in this sort of exclusion, but the trade embargo on Myanmar is at the root of the second reason for visiting: the virtual absence of American stuff. No McDonald's, no Starbucks, and hardly even any Coca-Cola--what few cans there were cost a couple times the average daily wage of a local adult and had been shipped from Thailand. When I tried to pay my credit cards online, I got the rare privilege of seeing a special error message about my account being inaccessible from a location under sanction. Inconvenient? Of course. But an utterly unique experience, to have no Wal-Mart squatting in the shadows of Mandalay Hill or among the Bagan pagodas. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It seems the changes ongoing in Myanmar will mean the reversal, soon, of the cultural and economic sanctions. On the one hand, maybe that would mean fewer villagers having to ride to town in ox-drawn carts virtually identical to those their great-great-grandparents used or work the fields with water buffalo and wooden plows; maybe that would mean more consistent electricity, education, better health, and all sorts of wonderful things that everyone deserves, as our domestic politicians always remind us. Maybe it would also mean that glass-and-steel bastions of the wealthy would come to tower above a country of smoke-darkened thatch along with the grand, golden monuments to Buddha. </span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In George Orwell's documentary novel, <i>Burmese Days</i>, the villain U Po Kyin dismisses his own conscience with "a careless wave of his hand that meant 'pagodas'." And while I agree, as I struggle through Orwell's brilliant but emotionally tortuous story, that there's something terrifying about a country being known as "the Land of a Thousand Pagodas" when each is a gilt-and-plastered black hole for wealth that very few have, <i>at least the people hold something sacred.</i> Neither U Po Kyin nor the military junta could tear down the pagodas; though watered down, some vague flavor of righteousness versus evil lingers on. What will happen when the powerful, ardently embracing Globalmegacorp., decide that they can ignore their consciences, or at least trade out the <i>dharma</i> for Diet Coke and iPads? </span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Aun Sang Suu Kyi is revered like a saint, with her face in sticker form on the dilapidated dashboards of countless cabbies (including those driving not early-80s jalopies but horse-carriages). She might be on her way to Power at last. But the One Ring, as Bilbo Baggins taught us so well, corrupts absolutely; can she avoid its perils?</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Go now to see this country, now, before the sharks of change circling it finally close in.</span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tGDUomsrSJ4/TxJVfw8fctI/AAAAAAAAASk/4n43czaocqs/s1600/DSCF9047.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tGDUomsrSJ4/TxJVfw8fctI/AAAAAAAAASk/4n43czaocqs/s320/DSCF9047.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunrise on the Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwady.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-av_8JvXbM08/TxJYv33ZPyI/AAAAAAAAATU/hK3Zayj4oHI/s1600/DSCF8733.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1) It is most shocking that I had never had anything more the matter with my innards than this, considering the sorts of things in poorly considered combinations that I routinely stuff down the hatch.</span></div><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: x-small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(2) The view from Mandalay Hill included one of these; though I never saw the Bagan counterpart documented by Mr. W. Pedia's site on Bagan, turfing that parched soil, which was beyond sandy, being actually sand--couldn't have been a very ecologically sound plan.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-18803249007593552492011-11-19T23:23:00.001-05:002011-11-19T23:29:48.466-05:00Rambling Notes from A Would-be Researcher, or, Two Months and What I Haven't Got to Show<span style="font-size: x-small;">Caveat lector: raw, uncensored straight-from-the-field action below! </span><br />
<br />
Yesterday evening I made my second "month in review" list, and, as when I did so the first time, found that despite some misgivings, quite a bit was getting done. Numerically, certainly, I've reviewed a lot of dockets at the archives and gone through much digitized content, downloaded a lot of papers and PDF files, and made huge lists of books and call numbers. <br />
<br />
I can say without too much embarrassment that I have been putting time to good use, especially this month. My roommate and I dutifully left the house at 8:30 or earlier to arrive between 9:05 and 9:15 at the archives; once or twice, I left before 4:45 pm, but most days I stayed right up until 5:00 (though the advertised hours are until 5:15, by quarter to five the place is very much in the "shut down" phase, the equivalent of the fifteen seconds or so when one's computer desktop turns black-and-white and the mouse stops responding). Then, after commuting home and visiting the gym like the exercise addict I know I am (admitting it--the first step toward recovery?), and often picking up some provisions for dinner or for the next day, I typically arrived at home around 8:30. <br />
<br />
Even the days I did something different--visiting the National Library, talking with a contact's student about her application to American grad programs--I'd be out of the house for 8 or 12 hours at a stretch. Compared to the first month, which I mostly spent at home, this has been a very intense way of life. If I was getting weary and guilty of working at home after month 1, I think perhaps now I have reached a second "plateau." There have been a few "breakthrough" moments this month, especially regarding a couple of exciting possibilities about source materials. In one case, a body of rarely-used files that I thought would be totally inaccessible to me here in Ol' Peking and thus reluctantly left out of my project turns out to be available (though in what reduced form, who knows?) as a reprinted set of books in Taiwan. In another instance, a whole genre of folk performance art turns out to have had virtually no attention paid to it in Anglophone scholarship; what there is in Chinese and English is also mostly literary analysis and musicological studies. <br />
<br />
The "plateau" isn't really about what I've been finding, though, of course! It's a conceptual one, a matter of my limited mental capacity for variegated facts and figures and whose rickshaw ran into whose chickens. It simply feels like there is too much sloshing around in my head. My research topic is a huge, amorphously defined one to begin with--I was told that it might not be a bad thing to have it stay that way as I plunged into fieldwork--and now, it may be time to take some of the equally hither-and-thither bits I've collected magpie-like and look for something to bind them together. Unfortunately, not being an actual magpie, spit probably won't cut it. No, maybe it's time to open a .doc file an save it as "draft1.doc"! <br />
<br />
Just a couple of more long-winded notes to myself about two narrower aspects of the sloshy-head problem: first, it's clear that I need to grab onto cases or events as exemplary instances to prove my point--or to put it more pragmatically, future chapters. Right now, though, aside from the obvious events from the turbulent political history, there aren't a whole lot of novel "events" to choose from. In a previous paper I had talked about some case studies-- cf my post on "Dr. Sex"-- but these feel so hackneyed and "done." The folk performance art certainly could be a source of case studies: they're a fixed, large body of material, and I could take a few very specific examples from the corpus to discuss in detail. But, how to bridge the gulf between illiterate singers and French-educated Ph.D.s? I have only the vaguest of inklings as of right now, but (overly optimistically) I feel like that bridge would practically build itself if I started actually trying to cross the river and put down something in "draft1.doc". But actually that bridge is the terrifyingly tenuous, controversy-ridden key to all historiography: the diffident bond between trend and exception, between environment and individual, between longue dureé and the cheese and the worms! It is a monkey bridge I am very frightened to even look upon, much less try to cross... <br />
<br />
Another part of the sloshy-head problem is the constant anxiety that I'm "doing something I shouldn't," that is, bothering to read and take notes on materials that will prove ultimately useless. That's the huge pitfall of fieldwork, I guess-- on one hand, one is so very free to do anything and everything. On the other, one's only in the field for a purpose, and time, money, and The Future are all separate Swords of Damocles dangling over one's bared neck. I guess that, if trying to tell a big story with little stories is the One Ring to Bind Them All of historical writing, then the psychological and material struggles of the historical writer between her own "big story"--degree-getting, job-finding, becoming a Real Adult--and the "little stories"--the pure pleasure of finding the un-looked-for, the delight of acquiring knowledge--is the One Ring that rules historians' lives. <br />
<br />
And we can't just lob these guys into a giant (vulva-like) volcano and "un-birth" them, either. (That'd be nice.)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vUKtqLxnB8Q/TsiAYttcF2I/AAAAAAAAASY/ulBRaH377lA/s1600/250px-Mount_Doom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vUKtqLxnB8Q/TsiAYttcF2I/AAAAAAAAASY/ulBRaH377lA/s1600/250px-Mount_Doom.jpg" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-49830372569853352072011-10-07T21:40:00.000-04:002011-10-07T21:40:07.010-04:00Qionghua and the Technicolor DreamshowLast night a friend and I watched, for the first time, the National Ballet of China's production of <em>The Red Detachment of Women</em>. It's apparently what they showed Nixon when he came to hang out in '72. From the start, of course, we expected the experience to be deeply ironic: after all, ballet doesn't exactly stick out as the most proletarian of art forms. Though, in a pretty ridiculous tract published during the early 70s in MIT's <em>The Drama Review</em> under the heading "Documents from China," some defender of the production claimed that <em>Detachment</em> was deliberately designed to overcome the counterrevolutionary evils of classical ballet.Regardless of whether the ballet form is capable of transcending its roots in the muck of bourgeois decadence, the leading sponsors for the National Ballet were Mercedes-Benz, a luxury airline, and the Bank of China. Hmm.<br />
<br />
As for the show itself, I am totally an outsider when it comes to dance and performance art generally. But here's what I did notice.<br />
(1) The colors made me feel like I was watching a bunch of Legos onstage. Fierce, unyielding primaries for the leads and villainously pastel for the main landlord, "Southern Tyrant." Subtlety is not the name of the game for the "Model Operas" of the Maoist years. Red blazoned on arms and waved in the form of a huge snapping flag. Deliriously bright backgrounds ostensibly depicting idyllic Hainan Island ("the Hawaii of China").<br />
(2) Speaking of the lack of any pretension to subtlety*: there are lots of revolutionary poses struck, firm, determined revolutionary nods made, and (on the other side) lots of sleazy bowing and old-fashioned handclasping. The music is (unsurprisingly) militant-folksy-cheery and major-key when the Good Guys are on and cool-cat jazzy when the Bad appear (the latter also get much dimmer lighting for an extra bit of "Bad Old Society" smarm). <br />
(3) One innovation I found actually appealing was the fight scenes that drew heavily upon the physical vocabulary of martial operas. (Of course, it was also pretty...unique to include masses of company dancers wielding their bayonets <em>en pointe, </em>but that element of Red kitsch is given away right in the posters for the ballet--it's downright iconic.) If there had been a gong, clapper, and eight-cornered drum instead of a full symphony for some of the battle scenes, it would have felt a lot more like some clip from <em>Romance of the Three Kingdoms</em> than a struggle of the oppressed proletariat against landlord depredations.<br />
(4) The interesting lack of a prima ballerina, and the similarly interesting sexual dynamics among the principals. While Wu Qionghua is certainly the protagonist, there's also Hong the party advisor to the Detachment and the commander of the Detachment. With the latter, Qionghua dances half-a-dozen <em>pas de deux</em> and exchanges several dramatic embraces; with the former, zero on both counts. It was all very Anchee-Min-Red-Hot-Lesbian-Tension** or Sexy Iron Girl (-on-girl), and it made me wish I were doing work on gender and sexuality of the Maoist years.<br />
<br />
Anyway, it was a technically superb production and so worth the $30 to go see it at the bombastic National Opera House. If any of my gentle readers are intrigued, I believe there are various clips scattered about the usual places on the Internet for a glimpse of the action.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Subtlety, as we all know well, is the first sign of counterrevolutionary corruption.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Not intended to disparage Min's book or lesbians, of course!</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-79452706581555538882011-10-06T10:30:00.001-04:002011-10-06T10:33:15.891-04:00A Month in Old Peking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j32Jsl6T5os/To22fPGO5cI/AAAAAAAAARs/KML79wTSB0A/s1600/DSC00256.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j32Jsl6T5os/To22fPGO5cI/AAAAAAAAARs/KML79wTSB0A/s320/DSC00256.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
It's frightening to realize that I've now been here an entire month. I spoke with an acquaintance at some length earlier this week, and made the customary protests of "oh, no, I've gotten so little done in all this time," but in actuality I think it's been a month fairly well-stuffed with activity! Here are a few of the things, recorded in anticipation of dark moments of self-loathing in my future, that I've managed somehow to pull off, research-related and not:<br />
<br />
-Locate, rent, move into, and make "home base" an apartment that, for its flaws, is a quiet, comfortable, convenient one at a very reasonable cost<br />
- Keep healthy enough to enjoy the briefly delightful burst of autumnal Peking weather with some long runs (a luxury I will never forget to take for granted again)<br />
-Organize and begin follow-up work on nearly all the material I had already gathered and begin work on a digitized archive of all sorts of sociological, legal, and memoir-y goodness<br />
-Get back in touch with all my closest contacts from previous expeditions and obtain letters of entry to archives<br />
-Had my first bicycle stolen (every denizen of Old Peking has to have this happen to them--surely it is a rite of passage when estimates of bicycles pilfered run to over 9 million a year?)<br />
-Apply to go to Taipei in the winter<br />
-Visit a new city (Tianjin--more on my fleeting impression of that town in future)<br />
-Pay filial visits with regularity to grandparents<br />
-Meet up with colleagues and friends, some of whom I had not realized were living in town<br />
-Meet up with--heavens forbid!--entirely new people, some of whom I hope might become friends<br />
<br />
Maybe the most important conclusion--certainly the most heartening one aside from the larger realization that this month has been anything but idle--is that I like the city I have chosen. On bad days, its murky, acrid air and endlessly oppressive piles of dull-faced people blur into a bleary Monet fogscape. On a beautiful day, or even at quieter parts of the bad days, I think I love this town.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1eDJdaC0178/To22WKeHZAI/AAAAAAAAARo/_iIlsrWxOr0/s1600/DSC00254.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1eDJdaC0178/To22WKeHZAI/AAAAAAAAARo/_iIlsrWxOr0/s320/DSC00254.JPG" width="320" /></a></div> Yes, it's the city into which I was born, but I have spent perhaps a total of a year and a half in it--I come to Peking quite unpickled in her brine. On top of that, I have spent most of my life in various spacious, unbelievably safe, and brightly-lit suburbs. It's somehow intrinsically romantic to return to my birth-city for my longest stint urban dwelling, ever, and for my longest research stint, ever. It's like going to live in the house of the birth mother you, the adopted child, only just relocated and about whom you are also planning to write a biography! <br />
<br />
Will I leave an old soggy salted Napa cabbage-stalk? Will I leave with another case of imminent pneumonia lurking like a spot of quicksand in my lungs? For now, I relish the transient glory of the Pekingnese autumn as I run around manmade lakes in which emperors once punted. I stare at the tawny streetlights over my head during quiet nighttime bicycle rides home along the twelve-foot moat. I inhale deeply the delightful smell of roasting chestnuts, corn, and sweet potato from vendors' tricycles and carts clogging the mouths of subway stations.<br />
<br />
On a night lit by a tallow-colored moon and the haze of fluorescent lights scattered in the dirty taupe sky, if I squint in the direction of the old Inner City as I ride along the moat, I can pretend that the ugly concrete pillars of the elevated Second Ring Road are the dark red City Walls, their gates shut after the evening drums began the night watch. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j32Jsl6T5os/To22fPGO5cI/AAAAAAAAARs/KML79wTSB0A/s1600/DSC00256.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2B5gFL1SGVQ/To26n30ZEEI/AAAAAAAAAR0/KbOBbYhPwFY/s1600/2116327460_1bc2c455b2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2B5gFL1SGVQ/To26n30ZEEI/AAAAAAAAAR0/KbOBbYhPwFY/s320/2116327460_1bc2c455b2.jpg" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Deshengmen, or Virtue and Victory Gate, c. 1880s. One of the few survivors among the city's many gates. I enjoy cycling or running--hobbling more like--past it and imagining it in its imperial glory, but the stink of the public toilet that's been built near it and the burden of avoiding the cabbies pulling out from their break hour--they have claimed the underpass near the Gate as their own--makes it tough to keep up the illusion.)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-73347022868079151222011-09-23T12:19:00.004-04:002011-09-23T12:33:29.498-04:00Southeast Asia Whirlwind: Part I--Blitzkrieg Overview<div style="font-family: inherit;"><style>
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</style> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">From mid-August to early September 2011, my friend A and I ventured fearlessly forth into the balmy climes of Southeast Asia for a three-week tour. Our breakneck itinerary: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">two days/three nights in Bangkok, one night in Ayutthaya, two days/three nights in Siem Reap (the town nearest Angkor Wat), two days/two nights in Phnom Penh, one night in Chau Doc, one night in Can Tho, two days/two nights in Saigon, two days/three nights in Hoi An, one night in Hue, one night on Cat Ba Island, and two days/three nights in Hanoi. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I shall let the reader briefly catch his breath here.</span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1A7kuUN6z9A/Tnytp8GeupI/AAAAAAAAARk/Vj7R8DktiHc/s1600/DSCF7233.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1A7kuUN6z9A/Tnytp8GeupI/AAAAAAAAARk/Vj7R8DktiHc/s320/DSCF7233.JPG" width="240" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is how we felt a lot of the time. Hnnngh!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">These nights do not add up to the proper number because we, the intrepid duo, spent 2 nights on Vietnamese trains. These were, as far as we could tell, relics only a couple of years younger than us and likely purchased on the cheap from mainland China. (They were given away by telltale Chinese labels on a few bathroom doors and hot-water machines.)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Speaking of trains: to make our way between this formidable array of places (and hostelries, quality assorted), we placed ourselves in the hands (paws? maws?) of the perhaps even more formidable following array of vehicles. </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">In rough order, and omitting some of the less interesting repeat entries: </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">airplane</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">taxi, legal</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">tuk-tuk</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">mini-bus (secondhand smoke + exhaust) </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">bicycles (no brakes but nice baskets)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">crummy local train </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">coach bus (free flimsy plastic bottles of drinking water)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">shifty Poipet tuk-tuk (somehow patched together out of wires and thin steel rods stuck on top of a motortrike)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">more coach bus (with loud pop music and flashy party lights!)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">more bicycles (brakes, 3 gears! what more to ask for?)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">yet another coach bus (bus itself = not bad, road = so pocked with potholes that it was 1/4 the necessary size) </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">speedboat (well, sort-of speedboat…speedish-boat)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">even more bicycles (I think one was a very nice shade of yellow)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">back of scooter, more back-of-scooter (terrifying) </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">hand-rowed ferry (shortest ride ever: creek was about 10 feet across)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> outrigger-propellered Mekong riverboat (as romantic as it sounds)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">a second and equally brief sway in the ferry</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">taxi (illicit, 25 x the proper fare)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Reunification Express train (leg 1) soft sleeper (hellooooo China in the 1980s)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">our OWN scooter</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> Reunification Express (leg 2, central highlands) soft seat (still locked in the 80s somewhere in China)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">still more bicycles (we rode these poor things to death; one tried to kill me in retribution by bouncing me right off it in front of an oncoming mini-truck) </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Reunification Express (final leg) soft sleeper (I thank thee, melatonin pills)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">local hard-seat train to Haiphong (they are not joking about the hardness of the seats)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> rip-off ferryboat that was supposed to be a speedboat </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> rip-off tour boats (cheating honest people of a lunch they paid for? a crime that warrants the lowest pits of hell)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">taxi (private, minivan, silver-gray) </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">...and finally, an airplane again.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"><br />
</span> </div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">In later installments I will write more about the many places we visited/dashed past like madmen. But the particle count today in the pearly haze above Old Peking warrants a reasonable bedtime, so here I bid the reader good night!</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-73566997694460358202011-08-11T11:58:00.002-04:002011-08-11T12:14:52.457-04:00The Bright Lights of Midnight<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fbtUVdnLCqQ/TkP_yKe2mSI/AAAAAAAAARY/nVQL5mXJN6Q/s1600/pokelostgeneration.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>Yesterday I went with a pal from high school days to see Woody Allen's not-so-new release, <i>Midnight in Paris</i>, about which I had heard only hints and rustlings of praise, my devotion to the wonderful weekly "Filmspotting" podcast being a very novel development. The movie isn't exactly the most profound piece of cinema I've ever seen; next to the other film that I recently found to be touching and uplifting, <i>Tree of Life</i>, <i>Midnight</i> is certainly of a much more modest scale and scope of ambition.<br />
<br />
I'm anything but a film scholar. Nor am I even a very consistent watcher of movies (frequently I skip forward to juicier bits; often I am glazed with sweat and exertion while viewing from the stationary bike or, even worse, the bobble-head torment of the "dreadmill"). There are torrents of reviews gushing (and a few not so gush-y) about <i>Midnight</i>, and I have zero pretension of adding to that deluge. It's personal: lately I've been very sad at the state of the world, both in the earthly sense (solar explosions, terrifying climatic changes) and in the more abstract and man-made ones (poisonous interracial and interfaith hatred, murder, the continuing, incomprehensible absurdities of global finance). All my doom-and-gloom made watching this movie a genuinely memorable experience, my thoughts on which I'd just like to record for my future self.<br />
<br />
I've always found Woody Allen movies kind of...creepy. No doubt part of that is an (unfair?) overlap between his screen explorations of his psychic issues, especially regarding women and sex, and how he's chosen to live those issues out. Sure, I enjoyed <i>Hannah and Her Sisters</i> and <i>Love and Death</i>, but <i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i>, for instance, just made me so uncomfortable that I'd had to stop a quarter-hour into things. <br />
<br />
<i>Midnight</i> has a lot of the familiar Woody Allen elements. It's a movie that, in the space of less than ten minutes, unleashes doppelgangers of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Cole Porter on the audience in a frantic onslaught that, for some reason, makes me think of dueling Pokemon.*<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fbtUVdnLCqQ/TkP_yKe2mSI/AAAAAAAAARY/nVQL5mXJN6Q/s1600/pokelostgeneration.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fbtUVdnLCqQ/TkP_yKe2mSI/AAAAAAAAARY/nVQL5mXJN6Q/s1600/pokelostgeneration.jpg" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Don't pretend you didn't see it coming.</span></div><br />
In other words, folks, the forecast is for a veritable hailstorm of name-dropping. Moreover, there's a good dose of the same <i>je ne sais quoi</i> neurosis that has so irked me. Actually, no, I <i>do</i> know what that neurosis is--a panting, sweaty-palmed lust for beautiful, mysteriously charismatic women who for some reason or other always seem to fall for the typical Allen protagonist: brilliant, hopelessly romantic doofuses. I mean, I'm all for panting lust and beautiful women and all, but what starts getting weird about the Allen brand of this lies in, I think , two factors:<br />
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(1) Woody Allen playing "Mary Sue"** and using his film as art-therapy for his Issues...as himself<br />
(2) Disguising the deeply earthy core of those sexually charged Issues with a heavy varnish of romanticism and jokey self-deprecation, a vast Freudian bonbon<br />
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And <i>Midnight</i> was so much more appealing than Allen's preceding variations on this theme precisely for its revision of these elements. For one, Owen Wilson does a great job replacing the Allen Marty Stu, especially with the way he produces his lines, speaking as if with marbles in his cheeks, lumpily and artlessly. Seeing Allen hit the replay button for his own benefit again and again, living out his erotic fantasies, an eternal (though not ever-youthful) interloper--why buy a movie ticket (or more likely, waste bandwidth streaming a movie) when one can get more than enough of that kind of psychological masturbation in the Fanfic-verse?<br />
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Second, <i>Midnight</i> turns the chocolate bonbon inside-out: it's all about, ultimately, the need to recognize and deal first with the thick, difficult, and disturbing outer shell of earthy, physical desire before hitting the core of idealism, higher purpose, and spiritual love that is--and should, and must be-- at the center of everything.<br />
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**Spoilers!**<br />
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In breaking off his relationship with his fianceé, in his "minor revelation" that there is always a more halcyon past to imagine returning to (then bidding the woman of his love/lust farewell), and in choosing at last to reside in and make do with the present world <i>first</i>, instead of giving priority to fantasy, this is a perfect movie for dark days.<br />
**/Spoilers!** <br />
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In a world of fleshly desires doomed to remain forever unsatisfied, of pain, of fear and regret and guilt, <i>Midnight</i> tells us that more fulfilling choice is to refuse to give these things up for a fantasy of perfection. We have to put the world, if only slightly, ahead of our dreams--because without the world, what can dreams really mean? It would be a self-satisfied illusion, a perennial quest for a golden age that never was. There's nothing really <i>wrong</i> with that quest, because that is what being human is about, but we can't afford to forget<i> </i>that we have edged the past in gilt and glamor ourselves.<br />
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And that's where the historians come in. (cue heavy metal anthem)<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*"I choose you, T.S. Eliot! Use your Mystical Oriental Allusions Attack!" Oh what I would not give to see such a thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Or rather, a Marty Stu (as the diabolically delightful<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu"> TV Tropes sinkhole-of-productivity </a>explains, there's considerable controversy about the term, but poor Mary/Marty is basically an authorial avatar injected for purposes of wish fulfillment, most frequently in the black, bleak depths of the Fan-verse).</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-67553618307700182782011-07-25T16:21:00.001-04:002011-07-25T16:32:20.622-04:00Gallivanting about Gotham<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4CPtFz_wspk/Ti3Pon40lmI/AAAAAAAAAQ0/VAt-aOeIHmc/s1600/DSCF7086.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4CPtFz_wspk/Ti3Pon40lmI/AAAAAAAAAQ0/VAt-aOeIHmc/s320/DSCF7086.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>I've been to New York City many times, but during my recent visit--after an absence of about three years--I was able to make pilgrimages to places previously unexplored (the lovely Cloisters, for one). Thanks to an energy level that has been compared favorably to that of a certain pink bass-drum-beating bunny, I mostly made it from point to point on my own feet (now nicely criss-crossed with the unmistakable badge of Chaco tan-lines). Certainly traipsing about in the kind of ridiculous "heat bubble" that has entrapped the City in the last few days is not for everyone, but I must advocate an ambulatory (or perhaps bicycle- or scooter-based) mode of exploring New York as by far the most rewarding.<br />
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(1) Hoofing it assuages the "I'm-not-a-tourist-I-swear-but-I still-want-to-take-a-picture-of-the-sun-glimmering-on-that-lovely-Beaux-Arts-facade" guilt for those of us--who really must be most of the people walking about Manhattan at any moment--who are familiar enough with the place to qualify as a cut above those nice folks packed onto the double-decker Gray Line buses, but are nothing approaching "locals." Especially as the qualifications for being a New Yorker are higher than a busker on Venice Beach.<br />
Walking (particularly in frigid winters or insufferable summers) seems partly to soften for me the conundrum between pulling out the cam and stashing the damned giveaway a little deeper in one's pack, walking just a bit faster and looking a bit more bored. Then again, perhaps living more "in the moment" would be not such a bad lesson for the good folk of the East Coast to learn...<br />
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(2) Funny that this post is making me seem such a New Age-y Leftcoaster, but, building on the last bit, walking allows one to fully engage all of one's senses. I love running as a mode of exploring new places as much as any nutty Runner's World subscriber, but walking, fast or slow, is vastly easier to maintain while remaining immersed in the smells and sights all around. Something tells me that's how our long-ago ancestral hominids managed to make it through savannahs and glacial mountainsides. Attentions otherwise demanded by the exigencies of survival can be turned easily to sucking down the greasy fumes of mystery-meat hot dogs, as there's probably nothing stalking you for supper in NYC, but I guess that is no certain matter.... <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XU4ayuZhn7M/Ti3Ol6l4W7I/AAAAAAAAAQw/Io61ePXNcCY/s1600/DSCF7040.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XU4ayuZhn7M/Ti3Ol6l4W7I/AAAAAAAAAQw/Io61ePXNcCY/s320/DSCF7040.JPG" width="240" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here's someone getting her supper by hunting (your recyclables, anyway).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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(3) While staring at things with unusual intensity thanks to the mental alertness granted by walking steadily, one comes to notice the kinds of things that help one achieve that all-important sense of a place, the essential bouillon that can be subsequently dissolved to excellent effect in the simmering water of any conversation.<br />
This time, as in the past, I of course saw the diversity in which New Yorkers rightfully take such pride, but came further to realize that it isn't merely all the different varieties of humanity that happen to be represented in Manhattan that makes up this diversity, but how closely said varieties live, walk, eat, sleep, work. Now, for me, it is the sheer density of humanity and its encrustations upon an environment that, though nearly hidden by the anthills built by people, still pokes through in awesome ways that makes Manhattan so devastatingly alluring.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wA4Iz9fvoHA/Ti3OUFSoM4I/AAAAAAAAAQs/KawKHVGbqBY/s1600/DSCF6981.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wA4Iz9fvoHA/Ti3OUFSoM4I/AAAAAAAAAQs/KawKHVGbqBY/s320/DSCF6981.JPG" width="320" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Flowers in Highline Park. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>And writ large, I find myself agreeing with a hypothesis I first heard on a podcast a few days ago about the gravitational field of big cities: imagine, as in Stephen Hawkings's tableau of the universe, a soft stretchy sheet upon which marbles were put. The heavier the marble, the more deeply it sinks into the sheet, pulling other marbles inexorably toward it. Manhattan is a quasar. The only reason I have for not immediately trying to move there as that pinnacle of Romantic Delusion, a Would-Be Writer, though, was made as clear to me in the few days I was just there as was the City's attraction: my oh-so-svelte graduate-student wallet. I'm doomed. I could never become naturalized as a citizen of the City. On top of my skinny funds, there's my lust for seasonal produce and organic teas over 99-cent pizza slices and Oriental-flavored Maruchan and my preference for a dwelling-place not larded with vermin, traffic noises, or raucous roommates. Not infrequently I long to breathe something other than the indolent perfumes of the nut roasters' carts.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gx0K3EaSuWU/Ti3QHhxaZ_I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/e5DXEfC3eQA/s1600/DSCF6966.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gx0K3EaSuWU/Ti3QHhxaZ_I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/e5DXEfC3eQA/s320/DSCF6966.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">No way I could afford THIS on a regular basis if I lived nearby. </span></div><br />
I wonder how I will feel after a couple of weeks in, first, farmburbia, then what must be one of the most perfect strip-mall-McMansion paradises of a suburb in the nation. Probably considering whether it would not be wiser after all to mutter "fuckitall," pack a bag, and start scanning Craigslist New York for a day job...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-26647465570730150032009-12-30T19:03:00.013-05:002009-12-31T00:57:49.855-05:00Some Tips from Dr. Sex<span style="font-family:georgia;">Hail, my gentle hypothetical reader. It's been a very long while indeed since the last entry, but I sincerely hope the contents of this post will ameliorate somewhat my lamentable laziness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Allow me now to introduce the subject of this post:</span><br /><a style="font-family: georgia;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SzwQhCmNl2I/AAAAAAAAAOg/Z9_FHCpnMXc/s1600-h/160px-Zhang_Jing-Sheng.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 160px; height: 204px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SzwQhCmNl2I/AAAAAAAAAOg/Z9_FHCpnMXc/s320/160px-Zhang_Jing-Sheng.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421226211266107234" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">It's one of those portraits where a snide comment is superfluous.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br /></span></div><span style="font-family:georgia;">Dr. Sex, also known as Dr. Zhang Jingsheng (张竞生), was born in 1888 in Guangdong province.* He studied at Peking University, participated in underground revolutionary activities, and was in the first batch of study-abroad students funded by the fledgling Chinese Republic in 1912. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Lyon in 1919, writing his dissertation on Rousseau.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">As we all know, what happens in France...doesn't stay in France. Dr. Z had himself some bontemps and returned to take up a post as Professor of Philosophy at his alma mater, but then was ejected summarily after publishing </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >Sex Histories</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> (性史), at first called </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >Sex Histories Part I</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">, in 1926. Over the winter holidays (Coincidence...? Nay, gorging on food and being huddled inside makes everybody think about perversity, a universal condition across the distances of time and space.) Zhang sent out surveys to university students in the city, then edited together some of the responses into a book. Infamously, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >Sex Histories </span><span style="font-family:georgia;">flew off the shelves and caused all manner of ruckus, including massive traffic jams. Its twelve accounts range from one by his then-wife, entitled "My Sexual Experiences," to "Looking Back On Gaining Knowledge in Childhood," by one "Jing </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >zai</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">" (roughly, "Respectful Dude").</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">As Haiyan Lee has described, Dr. Z's aesthetics mixed utilitarianism, German Romanticism, iconoclasm, social-Darwinian eugenics, and radical social utopianism into a hearty stew in which "beauty" became something each citizen of the "Republic of Beauty" had to diligently create and scrupulously uphold</span>. This fantastic land, while full of apparent forward-thinking--viz. Dr. Z's resolute advocacy of nude, mixed-sex outdoor exercise--was decidedly not liberal or even individualistic: Beauty came in the singular, and one either met its criteria through the proper cultivation of one's erotic and aesthetic body, or one failed and became a threat to the overall beauty of society. "Nymphomaniacs," same-sex sexual liasions, and even women who wore trousers were all regarded Un-Beautiful, and warranted "correction"-- in the former case by labial surgery. Ideal men were tall, had deep orbits, high-bridged noses, and broad shoulders--that is, not Chinese. In short, Dr. Z's ideology presents another troubling example of how ideas that seem like they should be worthy of celebration and colorful parades also come with a mandatory set of less palatable accompaniments: in this case, personal liberation simultaneously endorsed with fascist domination through "biopower" remind us again of the extent to which authoritarian ideals were inextricable from the global development of modern state and society.<br /><br />With that schpiel out of the way, I should note that Dr. Z's fate was an unhappy one: after the sensational publication of <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex Histories, Part I</span>, he prepared a manuscript for a sequel (in which he planned to write about his own experiences) and was on the cusp of submitting it for publication when the backlash hit. Media appended him with snide nicknames, including "Dr. Sex," "Dr. Prostitution," and "Great Licentious Worm."** He held onto the manuscript, but the eagerly awaited <span style="font-style: italic;">Part II</span> appeared anyway--and, according to some sources, the series magically continued until <span style="font-style: italic;">Part X</span>. Zhang put furious ads in the papers declaiming against the people who were stealing his name brand, but to no apparent avail.<br /><br />This brand was evidently still powerful (if rather tinged with salacious implications) well into the later years of the Republic, because I was able to pull a dodgy-looking volume from the nether planes of WorldCat called <span style="font-style: italic;">Strange Stories of Sexual Desire: Interesting Histories of the Art of Sex</span> (性欲奇谈:性艺趣史). Said volume was seemingly put out by Zhang's own publishing house, The Bookstore of Beauty, and has "Edited by Dr. Zhang" prominently displayed on the title page beside the photo of a rather uncomfortable-looking nude (the chaise lounge against which she awkwardly leans look decidedly scratchy). But there is exactly zero mention of the good Doctor in the contents; instead, "Medical Doctor Wei," who narrates these Interesting Histories appears to be a woman; her name is her sole identifying feature. Real editing was ostensibly handled by one Jiang Xiaoping. In other words, by the 1930s Dr. Z was clearly hot-stuff enough that his name could help hawk anything sexy.***<br /><br />Anyhow, back to the reason you, my dear hypothetical reader, have bothered to scroll down this far: Dr. Zhang will now be answering your questions, educating YOU in order that you may become a better citizen of the Republic of Beauty!<br /><br />(1)On "harmonizing before having sexual intercourse":<br />"...first it is necessary that man and woman enter the realm of beauty at the same time. ...If either one has not yet entered the realm of beauty, that one suffers qualms throughout the night. ...In this instance I think it's best for the one who can't sleep to go to another room, read books related to all kinds of sexual learning, and supplement knowledge for the next occasion."****<br /><br />(2)On female ejaculation:*****<br />"Women possess many types of nether fluids: one type is fragrant water and emerges from within the clitoris. The second type is vaginal fluid, and is discovered when the penis is in contact. The third is "Bartholin fluid," which is a type of fluid from the glands at the vaginal opening and is expelled only when the woman fully comprehends the joys of sex and is fully satisfied. When expelled, it shoots far [lit. "hits far away"] like a man's ejaculate. ... When this "third type of water" is expelled, the woman is as if drunken or dazed...then she becomes tired afterward, much like the state before and after male ejaculation. ...From this "example from nature," [during female ejaculation, paralleling the male's delivery of sperm,] the ovaries must be working intensely to send the ovum [lit. "egg beads"] down to the uterus to fuse with the sperm [lit. "seminal bugs"]."<br /><br />(3)On changing oneself into a "beloved" husband:<br />"...when he awakes in the morning he should comb his hair prettily. If his wife dislikes the beard, then everyday he must not forget to shave assiduously like the overseas Chinese students in America. He should always be dressed in up-to-date fashion. ..."The greatest taboo is to come into touch with [your wife] when she is in a bad humor." ..."It is best if you and your wife live in separate houses, but if you can't you mustn't forget to partition the room or at the very least to sleep in separate beds."<br /><br />(4)On "strengthening weaknesses of the sexual organs":<br />"the man should frequently wash his privates in cold water...avoid having intercourse excessively and must not use aphrodisiacs. He should also be diligent in washing his body."<br /><br />"...woman's laxness is an extremely common defect in our country...they have never even once made an injection into the private parts and they are particularly indifferent to washing. Therefore their flesh is unhealthy and it prevents the development of sexual desires...when menstruation has finished one should inject water once into the vagina and usually do this several times monthly. Again one must bathe continuously....after washing, rub with a soft cloth until the flesh gets warm and desist when you feel like you're generating electricity. ...At the time of intercourse you must come to it with enthusiasm and conduct yourself with courage."<br /><br />"...the sexual organs are overly concealed [in children]." [Zhang next describes a type of open-crotch pants for small children.] "...this is good, for in this way the sexual organs are continuously exposed to the outside air and the feelings of sensation are fostered. Secondly ...daily if possible, wash the child's sex organs and after washing rub them until they are warm. Thirdly, think of ways to prohibit masturbation and other similar kinds of dissipation..."<br /><br />(5)On the proper conduct of intercourse:<br />"First, the number of times that the male ejaculates...should not be excessive and the sperm must not be ejaculated too quickly....Once or twice a week is sufficient for those in the prime of life....However the time for one occasion must be lengthened, at least more than twenty minutes and better if extended to from forty minutes to an hour."<br /><br />"The tempo can be helped by filling or emptying the urinary bladder...before intercourse it is good for the male to fully urinate and for the woman to store up her urine. ...[This] slows ejaculation while...accelerating...the "third fluid. ...The most important thing is that the woman take initiative. It is forbidden for her to...become like a wooden doll...never etiquette and formality or a training course in Confucian ethics."<br />***<br /><br />What a delightful pudding of hyper-sensitivity to "hygiene" with a touch of an abiding fear of male enervation through excessive ejaculation ("spermatorrhea"), all infused generously with clear, "scientific," and fascistically arbitrary delineations of acceptable sexuality and deviance! Delicious. The good Doctor will be in all week to help with egg beads, third fluids, and generating electricity from your privates.<br /><br />Good night, and don't let the seminal bugs bite!<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*A.K.A. Revolutionville.<br />** Oh journalists!<br />***He's actually made quite a comeback in the Reform years, as a simple Google (or better yet, Baidu) sesh will indicate.<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">****He so smooth. Look at that shameless product placement! Oh Doc, I wanna be just like you one day EMAIL THIS ENTRY TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.<br />*****All passages except this one are taken from Howard Levy's 1967 translation.<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-12791107473532770772009-08-23T16:28:00.031-04:002009-09-19T03:31:34.779-04:00Musings on belief and ritual<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI6jto-hcI/AAAAAAAAAN0/gEIKm9ERkOo/s1600-h/DSCF1340.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI6jto-hcI/AAAAAAAAAN0/gEIKm9ERkOo/s320/DSCF1340.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373421690627720642" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Fushimi-Inari Daisha, Kyoto)</span><br /></div>Dear hypothetical readers, I really have no excuses. I have been recovering from my months abroad (i.e., slacking off) at home for nearly ten days now; it's high time to do a little more reflection.<br /><br />First, a brief disclaimer: I have been raised as, and remain, a nonbeliever. I am convinced that organized religion, particularly those that usurp social and cultural power to the extent that they attempt to exclude alternatives, can be extremely pernicious. At the same time, I have great admiration for what has already been created under such would-be spiritual monopolies, viz. music involving pipe organs, enormous marble statues and mosaics, oil paintings with perhaps unnecessarily sumptuous draperies, etc. Also, it is more than obvious that materialist histories that place intangibles like belief aside are simply lacking--they just do not touch upon the psycho-emotional world that human life cannot be without. For all that, though, attempts to read any doctrine inflicts upon me a throbbing headache, followed by the urge to nap for a couple of hours. [Read: the following may be incredibly shallow and/or somewhat offensive, despite my intention otherwise. Then again, what else is new?]<br /><br />With that out of the way, onto the post!<br /><br />Traveling in Japan during the summer meant encountering massive clumps of tourists, of course. I mostly paid visits to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, but these too were crowded with people, from the pimped-out glitter of Ieyasu's shrine/tomb to the relatively subdued Touji temple. Observing the people and the surroundings, the following points were immediately obvious:<br /><br />1. Ritual observed at temples and shrines were distinctly similar, featuring the same hand- and mouth-washing, coin-tossing, bowing, and clapping. For tourists, of course, there was also frantic photo-taking (or complaining about not being able to take photos in areas that forbade it). And, aside from the peer pressure of hundreds of other tourists in close quarters, authorities put up signs with multilingual "NO PHOTOS" signs at every point that a photo-crazed person might get the urge.<br /><br />2. Ritual materials also overlapped considerably. <span style="font-style: italic;">Ema</span> (wooden placards with pictures on one side and blank spaces for wishes to be written on the other) and <span style="font-style: italic;">o-mamori</span> (protective charms, usually wooden or paper, the latter folded and inserted in a cloth pouch) I had thought the special province of shrines, but were also offered for sale (and offering) at temples:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI2oyj6l7I/AAAAAAAAANQ/21YH5O6Rh6s/s1600-h/DSCF1277.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI2oyj6l7I/AAAAAAAAANQ/21YH5O6Rh6s/s320/DSCF1277.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373417379801503666" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Ema praying for romance.)<br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI4nPNp3OI/AAAAAAAAANo/tfIIQ6kndoE/s1600-h/DSCF0506.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI4nPNp3OI/AAAAAAAAANo/tfIIQ6kndoE/s320/DSCF0506.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373419552156277986" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Ema of various designs, Hakodate Kokoku Jinja)</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI64s_A4yI/AAAAAAAAAN8/Y1JHuQzvkM8/s1600-h/DSCF1339.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI64s_A4yI/AAAAAAAAAN8/Y1JHuQzvkM8/s320/DSCF1339.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373422051228967714" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Fox-faced ema, Fushimi-Inari Daisha, a kitsune, or fox-spirit, shrine)</span><br /></div><br />3. Which leads me to the next characteristic: money was evident everywhere. Money tossed at small stone Buddhas for luck; money stuck into the trunks of ancient trees planted by long-dead, famous emperors; price labels for every charm, stick of incense, candle, and paper fortune on sale.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpH9aMG-VMI/AAAAAAAAANA/5pOssDWjT0Q/s1600-h/DSCF1308.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpH9aMG-VMI/AAAAAAAAANA/5pOssDWjT0Q/s320/DSCF1308.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373354456798614722" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Piles of dough at Kinkakuji, Kyoto)<br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI7NIbdmfI/AAAAAAAAAOE/rXJaJRGDl_I/s1600-h/DSCF1743.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI7NIbdmfI/AAAAAAAAAOE/rXJaJRGDl_I/s320/DSCF1743.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373422402193431026" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Coins lodged in the trunk of this old tree Go-Shirakawa of <span style="font-style: italic;">Heike Monogatari </span>fame was supposed to have planted)</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div>Of course, this high profile for $$$ is not limited to Japanese places of worship. But a votive candle or the <span style="font-size:100%;">Pietà seem like quite different ways of displaying sociocultural capital while simultaneously expressing belief. For one, the sensation of being in some of the more tourist-laden shrines was more like strolling through an amusement park or even a department store of gifts (お土産) to buy for friends and family back home. Yet these were indubitably "places of worship"-- on the personal level, there were certain quieter spots and moments of sensory in which I felt something spiritual.<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI29ejmMEI/AAAAAAAAANY/zaX2Gzp2xG4/s1600-h/DSCF1309.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI29ejmMEI/AAAAAAAAANY/zaX2Gzp2xG4/s320/DSCF1309.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373417735208710210" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Kinkakuji again. Not so many people snapping shots of this!)<br /><br /></span></div><span style="font-size:100%;">Moreover, there were people partaking in ritual processes and material consumption of a level that probably seems rather more "faithful" than chucking your 5-yen coins at a stone Bodhisattva of Mercy. One particularly impressive scene: a family was seated in the "Shogun's Room" to the right side of main shrine of the Toushouguu 東照宮 at Nikko, accompanied by a Shinto priest who walked them through making offerings and prayers. This extremely formal occasion occurred less than ten feet from the hall where all we tourists shuffled about making noise and wishing we could blast the place, complete with its portraits of the 36 Japanese "Immortals of Poetry," with photos.<br /><br />Anyway, the point is that for wearing consumption so conspicuously on their collective sleeves, the shrines/temples/tourist hotspots could not be derogated as <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> being sacred centers of belief and faith in some way. Which leads me to the principal question that I pondered (half-assedly) as I sweated my way through Kyoto, Nara, and Nikko: to what extent is religion fundamentally about conspicuous consumption and cash changing hands? This is not meant to be disrespectful (though the question is probably not one any devout believer would ask); in what sense are belief, ritual, and commerce one and the same?<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpKsJhSLCUI/AAAAAAAAAOM/-UXmfBlJjsE/s1600-h/DSCF1535.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpKsJhSLCUI/AAAAAAAAAOM/-UXmfBlJjsE/s320/DSCF1535.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373546584959813954" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Nara mascots...)</span><br /><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;">In the broadest view, the three concepts could be understood as one. Commerce and ritual involve a fundamental faith in the continued significance of all social, symbolic, and material elements involved; what good could it do to trade a pear for an apple if one has not some deep belief that there is something meaningful in the trade--that will remain meaningful a hour, a day, or a week after the trade occurs? Similarly, ritual could be called a commerce of a particular stripe, and without sustained belief in the world remaining unchanged enough to give one's ritual act meaning, it could not stand. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Such belief can be called faith, for its contents are not known to be <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori</span> fact. (Unlike some atheists, I hold that trust in the scientific method and other positivisms should properly also be called "faith," of the same species as faith in ritual practice.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">On the other hand, perhaps faith also requires such rites and exchanges to define it. Could any of the usual dogma of a given organized religion be explained without some idea of exchange included? Rather than denying the intangible of belief a place in more concrete and statistically measurable venues, it seems pretty clear to me that such spirituality must of needs rise from physical origins, for instance the acquisition of a new object or the swinging of a censer. Of course, there's a biological explanation for this, as senses tingling and muscle fibers twitching are inseparable from cogitation.<br /><br />That was a long detour to the real point, which is that for all the apparent weirdness of shrines that look more like shopping arcades, such consumption is in fact a crucial element of belief and worship in these specifically Japanese instances and, I believe (punny!), in all organized religion at large. It's easy to condemn the "lack of spirituality" in things like these polylingual, obviously tourist-targeted fortune-selling machines,<br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI1zmK_IHI/AAAAAAAAANI/rTSF6AAYTbA/s1600-h/DSCF1311.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpI1zmK_IHI/AAAAAAAAANI/rTSF6AAYTbA/s320/DSCF1311.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373416465942650994" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">but is it really so bad to acknowledge openly the inseparability of belief and trade? I for one thought it was refreshing to throw my coins into the collection boxes before bowing, clapping and praying to the gods and Buddha. It would help the priests and monks preserve their historical buildings and lovely landscaping, and maybe help get the attention of the divine, too.<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpKtELFeGfI/AAAAAAAAAOU/yoK4ER8PT6Y/s1600-h/DSCF1368.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SpKtELFeGfI/AAAAAAAAAOU/yoK4ER8PT6Y/s320/DSCF1368.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373547592613239282" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(Touji, Kyoto)<br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-40034210501308279982009-07-24T10:27:00.015-04:002009-07-28T19:43:46.450-04:00This is Hakodate...This is Historifandom!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm553AUHnmI/AAAAAAAAAMI/taqetX4BHiQ/s1600-h/DSCF0208small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm553AUHnmI/AAAAAAAAAMI/taqetX4BHiQ/s320/DSCF0208small.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363358192128990818" border="0" /></a>Dear hypothetical readers,<div><div><div><div><div><div><span style="font-size:100%;"></span><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Your hapless author has been occupied with cramming Japanese into a pitiably sieve-like noggin for the last few weeks here where the sun don't shine, i.e. Hokkaido. Updating because my so-called "independent study" project draws to a close (or at least is being forced to come to some kind of closure, as the presentation looms like the Sword of Damocles over next Tuesday) and it attempts to express, very poorly, some observations made in these parts about historifandom as well as Modern East Asia*, which I will relate with greater detail and eloquence below.**</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">These observations concern mostly the life and demise of one Hijikata Toshizo, "The Demon Vice-Leader of the Shinsengumi." If that line made little sense to you, Mr. W. Pedia could probably explain things much better. But, briefly, Hijikata was the close friend and right-hand-man of the leader of a semi-official police force fighting for the dying Shogunate in the 1860s. As Imperial supporters increasingly gained in power and finally erected the new Meiji government, the remnant Shogunate loyalists broke away and tried to form their own country in Hokkaido, the Ezo Republic, with its capital located in the little town where I am currently making my abode. In perhaps one of the more pathetic civil wars in East Asian history, Hijikata and fellows staged a desperate last stand in Hakodate, centering their energies on holding a new-style pentagonal fort, Goryoukaku, only to be totally wiped out by summer 1869. Hijikata, who had become Vice-Minister of the Army for the Republic, was supposedly killed in a spot about 10 minutes by foot from where I type this post.</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Anyway, what's more exciting than modified copy-paste from Mr. Pedia is that Hijikata fandom is extremely active. Photos from the big souvenir shop near the Goryoukaku Park:</span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm56SZT07sI/AAAAAAAAAMY/ErtQ49DSEhA/s1600-h/DSCF0717.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm56SZT07sI/AAAAAAAAAMY/ErtQ49DSEhA/s320/DSCF0717.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363358662695120578" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Exhibit A, Hello Kitty cosplaying as Hijikata. (Expresses one of the central tenets of fandom, namely "sacrilege is an measure of total worship"...) 315 Yen.</span><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-LNRi85rI/AAAAAAAAAMo/9WDhh5ErL9Q/s1600-h/DSCF0712.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-LNRi85rI/AAAAAAAAAMo/9WDhh5ErL9Q/s320/DSCF0712.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363658741386110642" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Exhibit B, Hijikata piggy bank. 682 Yen.</span></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm56J-mJJBI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/fnO5ioEf9FE/s1600-h/DSCF0707.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm56J-mJJBI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/fnO5ioEf9FE/s320/DSCF0707.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363358518085231634" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Exhibit C, Hijikata T-Shirt. About 3000 Yen.<br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I could go on with the random Hijikata memorabilia, but that could be a very long post indeed. Instead let me cut to the chase: I find these tokens curious because of their mingling of the life of a historical figure (and from not even that long ago) with fan-mythos, tourism, and consumption. More than simply creating a legend and maintaining/expanding it through free-for-all fan channels like scanlation groups or fanfiction writers, these items create an (capitalist) economy of historifandom. It is nothing as simple as "well, I like him because he was a cool dude" or "he was the last real samurai." If such were the case, how could one bear to buy a (probably made in China) cell phone strap of the last samurai </span></span><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Thus Hijikata has been remodeled into a mascot of sorts, a stand-in for Hakodate or for whatever bushido is supposed to mean, more than for himself.*** It would be interesting to interview tourists and find out how much they know of Hijikata's background and of the period in general, and how much of that knowledge might be derived from what might be considered "illegitimate" sources, like NHK Taiga Drama, manga, or novelizations. If I were really good at this accursedly difficult language **** or about 50 times more diligent a student I would have probably done so. But for the purposes of the manga, I felt it sufficient to document atrocities/awesomeness like the "Hijikata Hotate [Scallop] Burger" buyable at the local burger joint, Lucky Pierrot.***** Witness the mayonnaisey horror:</span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-M0fQfQPI/AAAAAAAAAM4/_UA-TLDyptQ/s1600-h/P1030725.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-M0fQfQPI/AAAAAAAAAM4/_UA-TLDyptQ/s320/P1030725.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363660514593292530" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">And the "Shinsengumi" coin laundry (a pun on the word "sen", 撰/洗, the first of which means "organized," as in "Newly Organized Group," the latter of which means "washing,", as in laundry...):</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-MX17kQFI/AAAAAAAAAMw/DZ_wrbjhIfk/s1600-h/DSCF0216small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 294px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sm-MX17kQFI/AAAAAAAAAMw/DZ_wrbjhIfk/s320/DSCF0216small.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363660022463348818" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Abominations or amazing testaments to a view of history that celebrates losers sometimes more than it celebrates winners? As to that, I wonder how much of the so-called "<span style="font-style: italic;">mono no aware</span>" sentiment suposedly so native to Japan has been retroactively emphasized after 1945.<br /><br />This monument located in a quiet corner in the moutain, for instance, is dedicated to the fallen Shogunate warriors, but its delayed installation (and rather out-of-the-way placement) could imply that there was considerable resistance to recognizing the losers of the Bakumatsu in the early Meiji. I would not be surprised if militarization also led to a certain interpretation of Hijikata and his colleagues. Sure, they were romantic and dashing and doomed, etc., but surely not much room for that by the 1930s? Ditto for the <em>Chunshingura</em>. I am sure that someone could answer this question, especially as I recall hearing from somewhere this spring that there's a collection or monograph on the transmutation of the text and its various adaptations (aka fanfic spinoffs!11!!!). Where does heroism end and plain old failure begin?<br /></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Before signing off, the Mona Lisa-like photo of unknown date (probably in 1868) that is plastered over every imaginable household item and surface in the souvenir stores:</span></div><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnRxF2DUXI/AAAAAAAAALo/wBigDjJP47g/s1600-h/hijikata_toshizo_2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362047472673968498" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 198px; height: 320px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnRxF2DUXI/AAAAAAAAALo/wBigDjJP47g/s320/hijikata_toshizo_2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:100%;">A statue version of him from Shinsengumi days:</span></div><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSDY4kL0I/AAAAAAAAALw/_kYuUoDlRTg/s1600-h/Hijikata_Toshizo_in_Takahata_Fdo.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362047787022430018" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 200px; height: 320px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSDY4kL0I/AAAAAAAAALw/_kYuUoDlRTg/s320/Hijikata_Toshizo_in_Takahata_Fdo.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Some recent anime versions:</span><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSKHBt30I/AAAAAAAAAL4/4Ba_lVsTJYI/s1600-h/toshi.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362047902488059714" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 200px; height: 243px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSKHBt30I/AAAAAAAAAL4/4Ba_lVsTJYI/s320/toshi.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">From <span style="font-style: italic;">Gintama</span>, I believe</span>.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnRdudo_bI/AAAAAAAAALY/pbXeK6I5PWc/s1600-h/92d88b17588dcfb91d1611480ed9a5a61227966959_full.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362047139980049842" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnRdudo_bI/AAAAAAAAALY/pbXeK6I5PWc/s320/92d88b17588dcfb91d1611480ed9a5a61227966959_full.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">From<span style="font-style: italic;"> Peace Maker Kurogane</span>.<br /><br /></span></div><span style="font-size:100%;">And, I always thought that <em>Anachronism</em> looked like a great game, but this trading card takes the cake:</span><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSSgl43yI/AAAAAAAAAMA/0iYCnug03qY/s1600-h/toshizo.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362048046789615394" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 142px; height: 200px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SmnSSgl43yI/AAAAAAAAAMA/0iYCnug03qY/s320/toshizo.gif" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">And with that, to all a good night.</span><div><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">*Phrase used with a mild twitch of the eyebrow.</span></div><span style="font-size:85%;">**Not saying much.<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">***Other Hakodate mascots include squids, squids, and also squids. These folk really appreciate their 名物, so much that there's a whole dance routine reciting some popular squid dishes, like squid somen and squid shiokara...</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">****Gratifyingly or maybe terrifyingly, our most recent reading selection, by Dr. Donald Keene, has him writing that Japanese is "uncountably many more times more difficult than Chinese." If even Dr. Keene thinks so, then...well...</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />*****Apparently, founded by a Chinese man...<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-11791238246343139512009-06-06T13:11:00.013-04:002009-06-07T01:47:06.256-04:00Comic Books, Old School Chinese StyleThe term's finally coming to an end, and so I guiltily update a horrifying two months since my last entry. To make up a little for this transgression, I've got some juicy stuff to share.<br /><br />While doing some poking around in old books earlier this year, I ran across illustrations in some late Ming (early 17th century) <span style="font-style: italic;">gongan xiaoshuo</span>, or "court-case tales." (NB: <span style="font-style: italic;">xiaoshuo</span> is the Modern Chinese word for "fiction," but the fictiveness of the genre in late imperial times was not nearly as clear-cut as that label might imply. Thus I use a zillion synonyms, but never "fiction.")<br /><br />Anyway, these pictures take up about a third of the page;<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SisPzBeX9bI/AAAAAAAAAIk/e7_JvOk4DCI/s1600-h/mingjinggongan002.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 232px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SisPzBeX9bI/AAAAAAAAAIk/e7_JvOk4DCI/s320/mingjinggongan002.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344382752048805298" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">(This and all following images from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Mingjng gongan</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Bright Mirror Cases</span>. )<br /><br /></span></div>block-printed like the text, they are not exactly the pinnacles of late imperial Chinese artistic genius--in fact, they are frequently quite stereotypical in their graphic vocabulary, with all the women looking like one another, all the magistrates much apparently cloned from one man, etc. Not unlike Lego characters in the recent series of popular films adapted into Lego-based action games, even when these figures' heads are lopped off they retain more or less the same expression--one of slight bemusement:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SisrTWsslbI/AAAAAAAAAIs/AYy-D9JJ-BE/s1600-h/mingjinggongan002crop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 369px; height: 230px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SisrTWsslbI/AAAAAAAAAIs/AYy-D9JJ-BE/s320/mingjinggongan002crop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344412994315785650" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;">(Oh dear, it looks like this evil monk, being unable to seduce me, has lopped my head off in his fury. Teehee?)<br /><br /></span></div>Nonetheless, the presence of these illustrations suggests something of how the vast majority of Chinese people might have accessed stories that literate folk could read at length in the body of these <span style="font-style: italic;">xiaoshuo</span>. The stereotyped images also have the flavor of the courtroom drama, put on and accessible to even the most "rootless" of illiterate rural people. As one would expect from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Cops</span> of 17th-18th century China, most of the stories are pretty sensational, with lots of blood, sex, and plot twists. Notably, I've found two stories in this collection alone with women who have sex and <span style="font-style: italic;">impregnate each other</span>.<br /><br />But just about all <span style="font-style: italic;">gonagan xiaoshuo </span>end with the successful, clever resolution of the case by a righteous judge, and, often, most unpleasant punishments for the guilty parties. More than occasionally, these sentences far exceeded the statutory regulations.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Siss-R0peVI/AAAAAAAAAI0/FqUiC9kehyQ/s1600-h/mingjinggongan002crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 203px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Siss-R0peVI/AAAAAAAAAI0/FqUiC9kehyQ/s320/mingjinggongan002crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344414831252961618" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">(If "a wicked monk buries the woman [he murdered, see above] and plants a tree atop her grave" isn't pretty sensational, then you, dear Reader, have probably watched a little too much true crime TV, especially since the monk is apparently a late Ming version of the Hulk or something, able to uproot entire full-grown trees.)<br /></span></div><br />Here I want to post a complete graphic account of a case so you can pretend to be an illiterate person--little kid, young wife, old codger, bandit--of your choice and follow along, just like an episode of CSI as a comic, except Old and Chinese, which can only make the experience better...right? Thus I present "Lord Governor Chen Solves the Case of a Rape and Murder."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sis-tLP6zuI/AAAAAAAAAJM/BEigWc9c7ow/s1600-h/mingjinggongan003_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 207px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/Sis-tLP6zuI/AAAAAAAAAJM/BEigWc9c7ow/s320/mingjinggongan003_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344434328639819490" border="0" /></a><br />A local gentleman, Deng Kui, treats the scholar son of an acquaintance, Zhang Wenli, to a meal.<br /><br />(Thebpody text notifies us that Deng Kui's young wife, Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>,* is "flowerlike in complexion and moonlike in radiance, more beautiful than Xishi and Imperial oncubine Pan of old, with hands delicate as new-sprung lily-buds and brows as fine as willow-leaves just appearing on the branch." During the Pure Brightness festival, Deng and his old mother go out to pay the customary tributes to his father's grave, leaving Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span> home alone. BAD IDEA.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitCO_sEvhI/AAAAAAAAAJU/QQu21GgFy40/s1600-h/mingjinggongan003_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 344px; height: 236px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitCO_sEvhI/AAAAAAAAAJU/QQu21GgFy40/s320/mingjinggongan003_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344438208187121170" border="0" /></a><br />Zhang Ba [Zhang the Eighth] tries to rape Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span> and, failing to overcome her, murders her.<br /><br />(The body text describes the young idler Zhang the Eighth, who had long lusted after Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>, and, when he saw the young woman's husband and mother-in-law both heading toward the graves on Pure Brightness, decided to make his move. Unfortunately for him, Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span> shouted invectives at him and tried to flee. Suddenly realizing his difficult situation, and espying some fancy jewelry and cltohs, Zhang the Eighth grabs a kitchen knife, kills the poor Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>, and seizes some of the cloths and jewels before running and hiding in the hills behind the house.<br /><br />Coincidentally, the young scholar Zhang Wenli passes by the Deng household and heads inside to say hello--with the ulterior motive of maybe catching another glimpse of the beautiful Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>. He ends up discovering her "corpse, saturated with fresh blood and lying on the floor," which scares the soul from his body. In terror, he leaps on his horse and dashes away. Zhang the Eighth, still crouched in the hill, sees all of this clearly. You may see where this is going.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitEMFA3SyI/AAAAAAAAAJc/2I0TqfW1Y_8/s1600-h/mingjinggongan004_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 363px; height: 216px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitEMFA3SyI/AAAAAAAAAJc/2I0TqfW1Y_8/s320/mingjinggongan004_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344440357100145442" border="0" /></a>Kui returns home, sees his wife's murdered corpse, and begins to weep uncontrollably.<br /><br />(The mother-in-law and Deng Kui report matters to the local headmen immediately. Zhang the Eighth makes a timely appearance, saying that he had been chopping wood in the hills and had seen Wenli ride in, then leave a short while later in a panic. "His family is rich and just has the one son," Zhang suggests to Deng. "You should take this body and carry it to their door, otherwise they'll probably try to bribe the officials with all they've got."** But Deng is reluctant--the Zhangs might send people out to grab Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>'s corpse and thus eliminate the evidence, so he takes matters to court.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitF04fYmuI/AAAAAAAAAJk/FkCpFjXnQLk/s1600-h/mingjinggongan004_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 217px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitF04fYmuI/AAAAAAAAAJk/FkCpFjXnQLk/s320/mingjinggongan004_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344442157624761058" border="0" /></a>Deng Kui turns in a petition to the county magistrate accusing Wenli.<br /><br />(The text reproduces Deng's accusation as a standard "petition" form--perhaps as a way to satisfy armchair detectives who should have been studying up on the <span style="font-style: italic;">Book of Odes </span>or the <span style="font-style: italic;">Spring and Autumn Annals</span> instead, so they could become a magistrate and read real, but probably much more boring, petitions.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitG07jcGxI/AAAAAAAAAJs/J3twROc78Z0/s1600-h/mingjinggongan005_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 353px; height: 205px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitG07jcGxI/AAAAAAAAAJs/J3twROc78Z0/s320/mingjinggongan005_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344443257958701842" border="0" /></a><br />The magistrate sends out constables to arrest Wenli.<br /><br />(The magistrate, Shen, is "an impatient and harsh man" equipped with "a steely sense of justice." He's furious after reading the plaint, and straightaway sends off constables. I do like this dude's pose with those manacles--can you hear the <span style="font-style: italic;">Cops</span> theme music in the background here?)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitHvhpBryI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/o_8bT6AmoIE/s1600-h/mingjinggongan005_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 192px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitHvhpBryI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/o_8bT6AmoIE/s320/mingjinggongan005_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344444264615096098" border="0" /></a>Zhang Shimao, Wenli's dad, sets out some wine and goodies for the two constables.<br /><br />(The next morning, having deflected the police for the evening, Shimao has Wenli file his own petition, accusing Deng Kui of making false accusations: "last year Deng lent my father some silver as startup capital, which we have not yet repaid. Thus he is plotting to cheat us of money.")<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJMFGEClI/AAAAAAAAAKM/mwMhrw6TuFc/s1600-h/mingjinggongan006_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 185px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJMFGEClI/AAAAAAAAAKM/mwMhrw6TuFc/s320/mingjinggongan006_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344445854680091218" border="0" /></a>Magistrate Shen conducts the inquest of Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>'s corpse.<br /><br />(The corpse has a wound on the side and another on the neck[--this does seem obvious, considering the picture shows her decapitated...]. Magistrate Shen calls in the local headmen and Zhang #8 for interrogations. I wonder what that weasel's going to say?)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJGWlCzAI/AAAAAAAAAKE/FX83wSx7zC8/s1600-h/mingjinggongan006_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 186px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJGWlCzAI/AAAAAAAAAKE/FX83wSx7zC8/s320/mingjinggongan006_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344445756294220802" border="0" /></a><br />Zhang the Eighth stubbornly testifies against Wenli, who is injustly condemned.<br /><br />(At first resistant to confessing, even after forty strokes of the bamboo rod and collapsing in a faint, Wenli eventually confesses after being trussed up in the leg-press and having his head knocked with sticks. Even though he still denies any knowledge of the clothes and jewels, Magistrate Shen ignores him and writes up a case summary.)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJZVPGZfI/AAAAAAAAAKU/NtAU_ImjioE/s1600-h/mingjinggongan007_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 194px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJZVPGZfI/AAAAAAAAAKU/NtAU_ImjioE/s320/mingjinggongan007_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446082351261170" border="0" /></a>Shimao appeals the case to the Provincial Judicial Commissioner's office.<br /><br />(There's another "plaint" here recording what Shimao filed on the provincial level, going over the prefect's head.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJj8b64GI/AAAAAAAAAKc/cijKSteJvSs/s1600-h/mingjinggongan007_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 212px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJj8b64GI/AAAAAAAAAKc/cijKSteJvSs/s320/mingjinggongan007_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446264672706658" border="0" /></a>Luckily for the hapless Wenli, the Nanjing-based Governor Chen is on a tour of inspection and arrives in Huizhou prefecture at just the right moment.<br /><br />("A youthful holder of the <span style="font-style: italic;">jinshi </span>degree [the third and most advanced in the bureaucratic tests]," Chen is "bright as a mirror, able to see as clearly as a vase of ice, and careful in the details, down to matters as fine as the new-grown autumn down of birds and beasts.")<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJrTbr5II/AAAAAAAAAKk/B2c_0V5zfjQ/s1600-h/mingjinggongan008_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 196px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJrTbr5II/AAAAAAAAAKk/B2c_0V5zfjQ/s320/mingjinggongan008_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446391104824450" border="0" /></a>The Governor interrogates the murder in detail.<br /><br />("Lift high the bright mirror, Sir," pleads Wenli, "and shine through my injust condemnation." Zhang #8, though, maintains that he had seen the entire rape-attempt-<span style="font-style: italic;">cum</span>-murder from the hill where he was chopping wood. The Governor asks if he, being at such close range, had heard the woman screaming, which she must've done as her murderer attacked. "This humble person did hear," says Zhang #8. "Well, if you heard her cries, why did you not report the matter, instead waiting for Deng Kui to do so? Your words seem unreliable." Zhang #8 has nothing to say.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJ3glMteI/AAAAAAAAAKs/pmuEHStsh5Q/s1600-h/mingjinggongan008_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 367px; height: 244px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJ3glMteI/AAAAAAAAAKs/pmuEHStsh5Q/s320/mingjinggongan008_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446600792815074" border="0" /></a>A crow flies in and pecks the head of Zhang the Eighth.<br /><br />(Just as the Governor is hesitating over Zhang #8's inconsistent testimony, a crow flies right in, pecks Zhang #8 on the head once, then flies off again. Everyone's shocked, until Governor Chen sternly shouts that it was Zhang #8 who had done the deed. The fellow refuses to confess until he's gotten two rounds of the leg-press and a hundred knocks from the sticks. When he finally does admit to his crime, he adds that "Heaven couldn't allow my stubborn accusation and injustice toward Wenli, and now you, Sir, are as just as the blue sky. I am resigned to paying with my life.")<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJ_DWZOsI/AAAAAAAAAK0/TdkikGpsAso/s1600-h/mingjinggongan009_crop1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 197px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitJ_DWZOsI/AAAAAAAAAK0/TdkikGpsAso/s320/mingjinggongan009_crop1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446730385046210" border="0" /></a>The great Governor sentences Zhang the Eighth to the death penalty.<br /><br />(The Governator also declares that, because Yu <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span> had resisted rape to the death, she would be commemorated as a chastity martyr, which probably means some silver distributed to her husband's family to erect a <span style="font-style: italic;">paifang</span>, or arch, and a likely biography in the local gazetteer--though such institutions are much better documented as well as a lot more extensively maintained in the Qing than the late Ming.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitKIsEbqnI/AAAAAAAAAK8/uAuc6Xv0fIg/s1600-h/mingjinggongan009_crop2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 357px; height: 227px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitKIsEbqnI/AAAAAAAAAK8/uAuc6Xv0fIg/s320/mingjinggongan009_crop2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446895934384754" border="0" /></a>Wenli is cleared of the crime and sent home a free man.<br /><br />(I dig his jolly look here. The blob in the sky could be anything--a comet? A dying bird? A melting sun? A cloud? But those little dark marks near the horizon are definitely supposed to be bamboo. Bamboo shoots, probably. Yum. What a lush landscape they have in Huizhou.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitKMNtr_uI/AAAAAAAAALE/hyIAco5w0CM/s1600-h/mingjinggongan010_crop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 206px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitKMNtr_uI/AAAAAAAAALE/hyIAco5w0CM/s320/mingjinggongan010_crop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344446956505399010" border="0" /></a>The gentry and the common people alike praise the righteous, moral governance of Lord Chen.<br /><br />(More blobbity things in sky, and either a really "mad cursive" inscription*** or a surprisingly postmodern representation of Lord Chen's justice. This last page of the story is taken up by an eighteen-line poem. I quote, "Emperor and lords rule with righteousness and the four seas are clear/the star of virtue hangs high and the eye of Heaven is open." Aha! Those blobs must be THE EYES OF HEAVEN. Do these lines sound a bit apocalyptic to you too, dear Reader?)<br /><br />Golly, that was an epic post. No commentary--just the observation that these could be awesome if some competent people decided to make 'em into a TV series.<br /><br />Next time, on THE STAR OF VIRTUE, join us for mutually impregnating lesbians and patron deities of literature--all in the name of JUSTICE, of course!<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*<span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span> has sometimes been translated as "woman," [for instance Spence's <span style="font-style: italic;">Death of Woman Wang</span>] but it literally means "of the clan of". If only one surname is mentioned before <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>, it is the woman's father's name; if there are two given, for instance Zhang Wei <span style="font-style: italic;">shi</span>, the first is her husband's and the second her father's. Oh, the delights of Cofnucian patriarchy.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">** Lest Zhang #8 seems maniacal here, this tactic was actually practiced often enough that it entered a substatue in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Great Qing Code</span>.<br />***Behold: </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitTmYhyyVI/AAAAAAAAALM/m96YwUQriBU/s1600-h/051121141018_0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 151px; height: 211px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SitTmYhyyVI/AAAAAAAAALM/m96YwUQriBU/s320/051121141018_0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344457301689551186" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-10217242767147712902009-04-04T13:13:00.003-04:002009-04-04T13:35:50.185-04:00Of dyed bears and WAHAHAI have to confess, I've always perversely enjoyed reading about the newest line of fake shit being sold somewhere in the Motherland. I'm just a schadenfreude type. The melamine-tainted milk, however, was flat out evil enough that I haven't been so har har about fake stuff since (especially because I and people I was responsible for consumed plenty of dairy products in summer '08--fortunately all of us were big and strong enough to not get sick from it).<br /><br />But <a href="http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2009/04/01/2003439917">this post</a> from the Taipei Times made me gasp. What? The "diplomatic gift" pandas from the Mainland to Taiwan in late 2008 turned out to be random forest bears painted with the right colors?! Surely not? Not the bears whose names, when joined together, actually means "reunion"?<br /><br />Then I followed the post to Paul Midler's <a href="http://www.paulmidler.com/china-delivered-fake-pandas-to-taiwan/">site</a>, and whew, it was all an April Fool's hoax. As he rightly points out, though, the fact that the TP Times put up this story signifies a vast gulf between the Mainland (who is probably pulling an Unhappy China about this, if anyone even got wind of it over the Great Firewall) and Taiwan. It's called being able to laugh at oneself. Sure, in this case it's more like Taiwanese reporters laughing at the people across the strait, but what it really takes is the capacity to look at oneself and burst out laughing. I mean, if the bears had <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> turned out to be fake, it's not like anyone reading on Taiwan would likely forget that the Mainland really could get away with such jabs--<span style="font-style: italic;">because they can, </span>because the island is not unlike Seoul, balanced not so many miles away from a host of frightening possibilities. So even while the article's making fun of Chinese fakes, it's also a kind of cheerfully cynical snicker at Taiwan's own position in the world.<br /><br />But now for a real fakes story: the WAHAHA. This was a fate luckily dodged in '08, but according to my bosses, in summer '07, during the scheduled excursion to a "wild" (unrestored) section of the Great Wall four hours north of Beijing, everyone bought extra bottles of Wahaha [literally, "Kids' Ha-ha"] drinking water. They drank the suckers, because the hike is long and very hot, and then everyone puked for the next week. From then on, the brand became an evil totem, its name read as an evil laugh. Wa. Ha. Ha.<br /><br />In summer '06, I actually partook (fortunately without incident) of some sketchy Wahaha. The little store in the "downtown" bit of the village we were living in carried 24-packs of water, and, too spoiled to drink the excessively mineral-rich hand-pump water boiled in an ancient, disgustingly crusted kettle, we opted to buy these. Anyway, the one time we sprang for a good deal on some Wahaha it turned out to be a suspicious imitator--same red and white label, but all the graphics seemed a little...pixellated. And the name was very similar-looking, but not quite there. We tried it anyway. It tasted like old flour. We trashed them. I still kind of wonder what the hell was in that stuff--surely not <span style="font-style: italic;">real </span>flour? How is that a better profit margin than just selling boiled tap water, anyway?...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-34578070521045194422009-03-26T12:35:00.010-04:002009-03-26T14:18:19.131-04:00Yuan Mei my homeboy strikes again......with a short story encapsulating so neatly the class- and language-barrier crossing legal culture of eighteenth-century China that I can barely move.<br /><br />"The Real Longtu Turns Out To Be A False Longtu"*<br /><br />A man of Jiaxing county [in modern Zhejiang province] named Song became county magistrate in Xuanyou [in modern Fujian province, which is frigging far away from Zhejiang**]. He was a stern, fastidious official, and thought of himself as a second Lord Bao. In one of the villages under his jurisdiction, there was a State Student named Wang. Wang started an affair with his tenant's wife, and the two got along well. It put Wang off that the husband was at home, so Wang bribed a fortune-teller to confide to the husband that it was not an auspicious year to remain at home, and that he should instead travel far away to avoid disaster. The husband believed all this and told Student Wang, who lent him capital and ordered him to go do trade in Sichuan. The man did not return for three years; all the villagers gossiped that this tenant had been done in by Wang.<br /><br />Magistrate Song had also heard of this matter and wanted to right the injustice done to the tenant. One day, as he passed the village where Wang lived, a whirlwind began to blow in front of his sedan chair. He followed it and saw that the wind was coming from a well; he ordered his staff to dredge the well, and found a decayed male corpse inside. Believing it truly to be the disappeared tenant, he arrested Student Wang and the tenant's wife, interrogating them using harsh torture, under which both confessed to murdering the husband. They were sentenced according to the full extent of the law.*** Local people began to call the magistrate "Song Longtu," and there was even an opera scripted from the story that was sung in all the neighboring villages.<br /><br />The next year, the husband returned from Sichuan. When he entered the city, he saw that onstage they were putting on a performance of Student Wang's story. As he watched, he realized that his wife had been executed unjustly and immediately began to wail in sorrow. He petitioned the provincial seat for redress. The judicial commissioner took the case for him, and Magistrate Song was sentenced according to "deliberately punishing an uninvolved person to death." The people of Xuanyou made a ditty about this:<br /><br />Blindly sentencing the adulterers as murderers,<br />a real "Longtu" turned out to be a fake.<br />A warning to the people who rule us commoners,<br />even if not corrupt, you pay for a mistake.<br /><br />***<br /><br />This story wouldn't have much sting if legal cases didn't have a popular circulation, through venues ranging from the terse classical tales penned by literati authors to media much more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate. The fact that Yuan Mei had served as a magistrate for several years in three different places himself only adds to the ironic impact of the "false Longtu": sure, it's a funny story of a snobby overreacher, but the pressures on local officials to solve cases, particularly those with a corpse involved, was pretty damn heavy. Even if Yuan could look back in his leisurely retired life to criticize Magistrate Song, he must have once faced much of those pressures himself.<br /><br />In fact, we <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> Yuan Mei used supernatural associations with the law in resolving cases: he told one story about his days as a borough magistrate within the city of Nanjing in which a young wife had disappeared, only to show up in a village far outside the city. The father-in-law wanted a divorce, saying that she had obviously been going to meet a paramour, but the woman stubbornly said that she had been carried to the village involuntarily by a giant whirlwind. Yuan sided with her and used a story from the collected works of a thirteenth-century Confucian as proof. In that story, a girl was blown away by a giant whirlwind and ended up wedded to a Prime Minister; "I only wish I could promise you that your son will get as far as that," Yuan told the father-in-law, which was apparently effective in shutting the old man up.<br /><br />Given his profound skepticism toward most religious practices around him, I doubt that Yuan Mei believed that the young woman had been blown by a wind to where she was found. It's possible that he even created this story because it, like the tale of the false Longtu, is funny. But from both the story he included in his collection of "weird tales" and the one he claimed to be autobiographically true, we can see that popular expectations about the magistrate's justice, which blurred the boundaries between what we'd call fiction and fact, could not be simply put aside by even the most cynical official.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Longtu is the courtesy name of the famous Song judge, Lord Bao, who was basically a medieval Chinese supernaturally assisted version of Sherlock Holmes. </span><br />**<span style="font-size:85%;">Not unusual, since by the "rule of avoidance" magistrates weren't supposed to serve in their home districts.</span><br />***<span style="font-size:85%;">Both would have been up for death penalties--the adulterer by beheading after the assizes, and his partner in crime by the harshest sentence on the books, <span style="font-style: italic;">lingchi</span>, a.k.a. "death by slow slicing." [Won't go into gory details here.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-12345590785744757162009-03-20T15:56:00.007-04:002009-03-22T03:03:23.722-04:00Some more pictures<div style="text-align: left;">By all rights I have no excuse whatsoever to not post something more substantial, but... well, these images kind of speak for themselves. I'm scanning a batch for a More Serious Project, and though these don't apply to that, I figure no one could possibly think<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>SNAKE DEMON ATTACKS <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">(oh shi--!)</span></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 308px; height: 426px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/ScP3FOzyiuI/AAAAAAAAAIM/TrvlInLOJE0/s320/jingshitongyan002.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315363654474042082" border="0" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>or </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>EPIC BATTLES BETWEEN DAOISTS AND DEMONS <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">(calling it for the Daoists.)</span></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/ScP3rrcdnZI/AAAAAAAAAIc/G3x5KJSzm-Q/s1600-h/jingshitongyan003.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/ScP3rrcdnZI/AAAAAAAAAIc/G3x5KJSzm-Q/s320/jingshitongyan003.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5315364314995858834" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 332px; height: 484px;" border="0" /></a><div>unawesome. Both are from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Jingshi Tongyan, a</span> 1624 collection of tales edited by Feng Menglong. The first is an illustration of the famous Miss White Snake, who marries a mortal man for TWOO WUV but is forced apart from him at the end of the tale and imprisoned under a pagoda.* The second picture depicts a Daoist master named Xu and his students fighting the armies of an evil dragon (dragons in Chinese lore are associated with water). It's a bit hard to tell, but they consist of turtles, crabs, and a shrimp or two, all armed with swords and spears.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">*Intense folks who want to read the original from 1624 in Chinese, see </span><a href="http://www.guoxue.com/minqingstory/jsty/JSTY_028.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">. Those who rather prefer Wikipedia, sidle on over </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_White_Snake"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">** Original </span><a href="http://www.guoxue.com/minqingstory/jsty/JSTY_040.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">. It's pretty rousing stuff.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-46823014818223388782009-03-06T10:43:00.008-05:002009-03-06T11:20:16.103-05:00Lazy PostHell of busy-ness this month, but I'd feel sad leaving my oh-so-devoted readers with nothing for so long. No Bear Wives--that may have to wait until after end of term, at least--but have some pictures from Athanasius Kircher's truly epic <span style="font-style: italic;">China Monumentatis</span> from 1667.*<br /><br />Fig. 1: The Kangxi Emperor-<span class="caption">Monarchæ Sinico-Tartarici</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFIwH114bI/AAAAAAAAAHk/FytTbOdJ8MA/s1600-h/14.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 325px; height: 451px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFIwH114bI/AAAAAAAAAHk/FytTbOdJ8MA/s320/14.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310105427222323634" border="0" /></a><br />One word: PIMP. Note the weird little dog (not sure if he was a doggy type in life). The really cool thing about this picture (and the others in the book) is that we can "read" them to be depictions of China in the 17th century, but they actually have a lot of improbable distortions based on how European observers saw, for instance, Kangxi's throne troom as a copy of the French king's. We can't make judgment calls about European travelers simply being <span style="font-style: italic;">unable</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">to see</span> the "real" things around them--only that they saw, but what they saw was processed between observation and representation. Here's a contemporary photo of the Taihedian throne room for comparison.**<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFMHcMM67I/AAAAAAAAAIE/WmH9bCOL4Co/s1600-h/1596615-Throne-Room-Forbidden-City-Beijing-0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 225px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFMHcMM67I/AAAAAAAAAIE/WmH9bCOL4Co/s320/1596615-Throne-Room-Forbidden-City-Beijing-0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310109126356691890" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Fig. 2: Father Adam Schall-<span class="caption">P. Adami Schall Germanus I. Ordinis Mandarinus</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFJYZ-TTVI/AAAAAAAAAHs/9UcJWrb2fH8/s1600-h/13.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 313px; height: 484px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFJYZ-TTVI/AAAAAAAAAHs/9UcJWrb2fH8/s320/13.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310106119284411730" border="0" /></a><br />I will pwn you with geometry. (Kangxi was actually quite into geometry. Unfortunately, the mass conversion Schall was supposed to be working toward didn't exactly occur by dint of his success in sharing the delights of triangles with the Emperor. Instead, they studied math, which is probably the opposite of mass conversion.)<br /><br />Fig. 3: Green-haired turtles-No Latin caption. [Let them speak for themselves.]<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFJ1BF3AdI/AAAAAAAAAH0/GPdB5TT7iPU/s1600-h/28.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 438px; height: 350px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFJ1BF3AdI/AAAAAAAAAH0/GPdB5TT7iPU/s320/28.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310106610821431762" border="0" /></a><br />Included because <span style="font-style: italic;">they can fly</span>. [Hums "Flight of the Valkyries," followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.]<br />Oh yeah, I know. I haven't ever seen them because they're from the palm-tree areas of South China. Gosh, they have some strange shit down there.***<br /><br />Fig. 4: Mandarin with sidekick-<span class="caption">Modus scribendi</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFKrSncA5I/AAAAAAAAAH8/Vvb5InlMAzA/s1600-h/32.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 443px; height: 344px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SbFKrSncA5I/AAAAAAAAAH8/Vvb5InlMAzA/s320/32.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310107543238607762" border="0" /></a>This reminds me so strongly of <a href="http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/">Carl Pyrdum</a>'s medieval marginalia monkeys. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't from the same visual tradition? (Especially as this is the modus <span style="font-style: italic;">scribendi</span>?)<br /><br />I could post a lot more, but these are probably my top 4 . Maybe later I'll try to find the page of "regional costumes" from various Chinese cities, or the pictures of Chinese beauties posed in "native" styles and costumes.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Randomly: judging from how dark these images are, I'd guess it's the English edition we're looking at. Oh well, the Latin captions are still sweet.<br />**NB, the Taihedian, or "Hall of Great Harmony," was the pimpest of the throne halls, and was reserved for fairly special occasions--celebrating the New Year, for instance, or the accession of a new ruler.<br />***Other strange shit those Southerners have: people who use tree bark to make fake injuries so to better accuse others of assault or even murder; sodomites (often rendered "rabbits" in slang); pirates; weird islands where people have holes in the middle of their chests; informal wars between gangs hired by different powerful lineages.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-43292561912710684112009-02-06T14:38:00.005-05:002009-02-06T15:06:47.523-05:00I think someone might be turning in their graveWhat with lousy weather and a case of pests in our apartment, this past week has been pretty terrible and totally un-conducive to work either serious or bloggish. Today, though, things seem to be looking up, so I thought I'd just talk about this ridiculous bit of historifandom (sort of?) that I have just witnessed.<br /><br />Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Ben cao gang mu</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects</span>, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.<br /><br />Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzUHPHJwZaE">A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE. </a><br /><br />Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging <span style="font-style: italic;">early modern medical encyclopedia</span> is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You can't cut the deer horn too thin,<br />you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.<br />Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder<br />and dried caterpillars,<br />your own music, your own medicine,<br />the amounts are just right.<br /><br />Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,<br />copying out formulas is even bitterer,<br />you better open up that </span>Ben cao gang mu<span style="font-style: italic;"> and read you some fair-copy editions</span><span style="font-style: italic;">.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the </span></span>jianghu*,<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.<br /><br /></span>I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, <span style="font-style: italic;">FAIR-COPY EDITIONS</span>? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SYyYLcJrVtI/AAAAAAAAAHc/LqrJpS2r5Is/s1600-h/jay-bencaogangmu.wmv.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SYyYLcJrVtI/AAAAAAAAAHc/LqrJpS2r5Is/s320/jay-bencaogangmu.wmv.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299778183810995922" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*</span><span style="font-size:85%;">Jianghu</span></span><span style="font-size:85%;">-</span><span style="font-size:85%;">a term in martial knight-errant (<span style="font-style: italic;">wuxia</span>) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">**</span>Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-82331366920849976202009-01-16T19:20:00.007-05:002009-01-16T20:22:51.663-05:00"Person-demons," part 2Remember <a href="http://stringbetweenpearls.blogspot.com/2008/11/its-been-too-long.html">this post</a> wherein I translated a couple of tales about gender-transformed men, or "person-demons," and promised I'd get to talking about their bizarre circumstances? Well, it's taken me about 2 months, but here I am, getting to it! (Mostly because I have just discovered another version of the infamous "Bear Wife" story and want to talk about it badly, but would feel overburdened with guilt if did not present some thoughts about person-demons first.) Spoiler hint--if you haven't read that previous post, might want to jump there for a quick peek. I promise it's exciting--mushroomy penises, long silky hair and all.<br /><br />First, these two tales are very interesting because they break down, component by component, the assemblage known as "gender." Now, I can't claim to be a strict constructionist in the old "social construction or biological inheritance" squabble, but I do think that packaging is at least as important or "meaningful" as what's on the ingredients list, if you will. (And if you've ever eaten something sketchy but colorfully wrapped from a Chinese convenience store, you definitely will.) So, in "False Woman" and "The Legal Case of the Person-Demon," we witness some decidedly acquired characteristics that were, within the universe of the stories, apparently very good at making everyone around the impersonators think they were <span style="font-style: italic;">bona fide</span> women. A recap [of course, both wore women's clothes]:<br /><br />in the red corner, Hong the Heroic (from <span style="font-style: italic;">Zi bu yu</span>):<br />-delicate, soft voice<br />-hair down to the floor<br />-15" waist<br />-jadelike skin [NB: I think in reference to the white, not green, variety]<br />-Adam's apple-less throat<br />-bound feet<br />-sewing and embroidery<br /><br />aaaaand the challenger, in the blue corner, Sang the Salacious (from <span style="font-style: italic;">Geng si bian</span>):<br />-groomed brows and face<br />-tri-parted hair w/ hairpiece<br />-cooking, embroidery, and sewing<br /><br />All very well and good. With an understanding of modern human physiology, one might dispute that an Adam's apple-less throat could be a sign of "real" intersexuality, viz. hormonal or genetic variation from the norm. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that the men deliberately imposed these abilities and characteristics upon their own bodies; in Hong's case, he actually confesses to growing out his hair and binding his feet as a young boy. Sang Chong's meager arsenal, even more so than Hong's, seems to point to a certain ease in becoming a woman: just get the right amount of hair in the right place and learn to sew.<br /><br />But even with Hong's commendable self-modification, masculinity turns out to be not so easily erased. For both "person-demons," it is sex--more directly, their possession of a penis--that confounds their carefully cultivated feminine identities. Both have had sex with women but end up being "outed" by men; their judgment in the court of law is entirely concerned with the former, but not with the latter. Thus, the phallus is the hinge upon which both stories turn.* But Sang is an evil monster while Hong is a chivalrous hero, though both went around sleeping with women illegally. Why the distinction?<br /><br />For one, Hong's seductions were consensual, "affairs," not black-magic-induced rapes. Where Sang's story linked its protagonist to a lineage of dangerously heterodox and socially destructive rapists, Hong is portrayed as an isolated case, inspired by an amorous widow/foster-mother.<br /><br />For another, the authors' backgrounds seem to have been at odds: Yuan, though fairly successful in the imperial exams, retired in his 30s to become an aesthete and poet who dallied with young men and women "students." Lu, on the other hand, served many terms as a county magistrate and was famed for his commentaries on the <span style="font-style: italic;">Spring and Autumn Annals</span> and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Zuo Commentaries</span>.** Their moral outlooks, judging by these pieces, were quite different: where Lu was concerned about the transvestite's power to disrupt the normative relations of the family and (with the secret-cult component) maybe even the state, Yuan's focus was on celebrating the ultimate supernaturally-aided triumph of "free love" over prejudice and ignorance. Hence all the time devoted to relating all the grisly details of just how Sang made his numbing powders, and, on the other hand, to giving us the incident of Hong's remarkably "enlightened" male lover.<br /><br />But there's a lot of entangling ambiguity here, too. You could almost read Lu's account of how Sang assembled his repulsive roofies as a "recipe" for the audience--"pretty young widow of your friend catch your eye? Fret no more!" And, lest we all start imaging Yuan Mei to be some kind of Love-n-Peace hippie king from 1760,*** Hong, in relation to the other young men penetrated by other men in Yuan's stories, seems vindicated and heroic <span style="font-style: italic;">only because he "proves" his manhood by penetrating women</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">cf</span> the village boy who, having some decent looks, never repelled a would-be suitor and ended up being humped at by a mallard in the pond, which he was obliged to beat to death lest it fulfill its lustful purposes.****<span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">In short, there's much to be gleaned from reading these apparently crazy stories. They remind us that, despite the passage of time, some of our ideas about sex and gender and other human beings have been </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. For the historian, they can be invaluable in tracing the contours of a mental landscape of "uncanny valleys" and freaky bear-women in caves and murderous nannies--as parts of everyday life, not so dissimilar to using tabloids or blockbuster films to chart the anxieties and desires of people in more contemporary contexts. Plus, they're creepily intriguing. Also, make for great if somewhat nerdy party chitchat (might be better than talking about the time the elven ranger in your D&D party screwed up big-time and aggroed a DR13 rok that ate the cleric and the dwarf).</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><br /><br />*Let's not dwell too long on that image.<br />**Some of the other parts of that terrifying beast they call the "Confucian canon." Yes, there were things in there apart from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Analects</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Way of the Mean</span>.<br />***Admittedly that would be awesome.<br />****To make matters even more traumatizing, the villagers gathered 'round and laughed instead of helping out. For the rest of his life he was called "the duck's lover."</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-64660958031576326542009-01-14T14:20:00.004-05:002009-01-14T14:47:27.060-05:00A truckful of quizzesFor self-knowledge is the first step to self-improvement! (Or more probably in my case, complacency.)<br /><br />1)<a href="http://www.okcupid.com/tests/13372526327873131397/Sublime-Philosophical-Crap">The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test </a><br /><p class="result_intro">Your result for The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test ...</p> <h2 class="result">N-S-R</h2> <p class="raw_score">You scored 100% Non-Reductionism, 33% Epistemological Absolutism, and 33% Moral Objectivism!</p><p class="raw_score">More specifically, I'm an Epistemological Idealist and Moral Subjectivist. Hooray!</p><br />2)<a href="http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/the-greek-mythology-personality-test">The Greek Mythology Personality Test</a><br /><p class="result_intro">Your result for The Greek Mythology Personality Test ...</p> <h2 class="result">Dionysus</h2> <p class="raw_score">33% Extroversion, 33% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 86% Perceptiveness</p><p class="raw_score">"Although deeply emotional, you are extremely lacking in self-knowledge. You are somewhat needy, and when bored, may become very hedonistic. Your life is a quest for meaning, above all else. ... You are, at heart, a good person. You are very affectionate, and you are very loyal to your friends and family. ... Famous People Like You: John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner."<br /></p><p class="raw_score">I mean, flattering that I'm the eternally youthful, ravishingly attractive god of wine, but...what? Britney Spears?! Michael Jackson?!</p>Also, it told me that "You are very reluctant to burden others with your own problems, to the point that this in itself can become a problem for the people who care about you." This is a complete lie. *Suspicion*<br /><br />3)<a href="http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/new/jparise/which-roman-emperor-are-you/">Which Roman Emperor Are You?</a><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="400"><tbody><tr><td> <br /> <span><img style="margin-left: 5px;" src="http://quizfarm.com/quiz_images/results/31864_13403.JPG" /></span><br /> <br /> </td></tr><tr><td><a href="http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/new/jparise/which-roman-emperor-are-you"></a><br /></td></tr><tr><td><br /> <br /><br /> <table class="tblBorderAll" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><td><span id="text_block">You Scored as <b>Augustus</b></span><p>You are Augustus! First emperor of the Romans and one of the greatest statesmen in the ancient world. You brilliantly eased the old Republic into the Principate and set the path for an empire that would last for centuries and form the underpinnings for all western civilization. Hail Caesar!<br /><br /></p><br /> <span id="graph_block"><br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Augustus</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="75%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">75%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Hadrian</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="71%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">71%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Marcus Aurelius</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="64%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">64%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Antoninus Pius</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="61%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">61%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Domitian</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="61%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">61%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Claudius</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="54%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">54%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Nerva</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="54%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">54%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Trajan</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="54%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">54%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Vespasian</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="50%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">50%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Tiberius</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="50%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">50%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Vitellius</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="46%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">46%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Nero</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="29%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">29%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Commodus</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="14%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">14%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><br /> <tbody><tr><br /> <td width="150"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:78%;" >Caligula</span></td><br /> <td width="130"><br /> <table bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="4%"><tbody><tr><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </td><td align="center" width="40">4%</td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> <br /> </span><br /> </td><br /> </tr><br /> </tbody></table> <br /> </td></tr></tbody></table><img style="visibility: hidden; width: 0px; height: 0px;" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyMzE5NjE5NTMwODAmcHQ9MTIzMTk2MTk4MDcxMCZwPTY5MDgxJmQ9Jmc9MSZ*PSZvPTcyZGJhZjlkOWY5MzQ3ZmI4NDFkN2Q5MjFlZjU2MzJl.gif" border="0" height="0" width="0" />Fairly awesome. I note that my second possibility was Hadrian. :)<br /><br />4) <a href="http://www.gotoquiz.com/what_kind_of_reader_are_you">The What Kind of Reader Are You Quiz</a><br />To no one's surprise:<br /><table style="border: 1px solid gray; width: 320px; font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; background-color: white;"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2" style="padding: 5px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; color: black;"><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 20px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px;">What Kind of Reader Are You?</b> <div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 4px;">Your Result: <b>Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm</b></div><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 200px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 94%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><p style="border: medium none ; margin: 10px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; color: black;">You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.</p></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; color: black; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Dedicated Reader</td><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 100px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; margin-top: 4px;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 78%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; color: black; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Book Snob</td><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 100px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; margin-top: 4px;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 71%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; color: black; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Literate Good Citizen</td><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 100px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; margin-top: 4px;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 58%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; color: black; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Non-Reader</td><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 100px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; margin-top: 4px;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; color: black; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">Fad Reader</td><td style="padding: 3px; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"><div style="border: 1px solid black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 100px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; margin-top: 4px;"><div style="background: red none repeat scroll 0% 50%; width: 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-size: 8px; line-height: 8px;"> </div></div><br /></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" style="padding: 8px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.gotoquiz.com/what_kind_of_reader_are_you"><b>What Kind of Reader Are You?</b></a><br /><a href="http://www.gotoquiz.com/">Quiz Created on GoToQuiz</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br />"Last stages of a Ph.D" eh? Hmm.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-7326281255905276692009-01-07T17:30:00.004-05:002009-01-07T21:10:34.359-05:00Hmm...Bit of news from <a href="http://granitestudio.org/2009/01/08/china-unearths-ponytailed-corpses-dating-back-almost-400-years-to-the-qing-dynasty-mail-online/">Jeremiah</a>: apparently bodies of six people with long queues have been found in Xinjiang. He's got a pic from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Daily Mail</span> linked, and I was going to paste it here but it is a bit icky if you're not into preserved corpses.<br /><br />My first reaction was "what if they're faked?", which is really sad. Then again, considering the recently leaked photos of what at least seems to be a shopping center with all-fake stores (see <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/01/05/fake-brands-shopping-centre-set-to-open-in-china-pictures-115875-21018152/">here</a>), maybe that initial cynicism is well-warranted.<br /><br />If the bodies are authentic, however, I'm excited! They could be an excellent chance to do some historical forensics and object-driven history in the late imperial period, the novelty of which continues to surprise me.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-89438717720775284452009-01-01T01:26:00.021-05:002009-01-01T02:48:25.418-05:00A call for equal-opportunity ogling<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVxlg4_9KtI/AAAAAAAAAG8/3cZSXFESZNs/s1600-h/200px-Painted_Fire_movie_poster.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 286px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVxlg4_9KtI/AAAAAAAAAG8/3cZSXFESZNs/s320/200px-Painted_Fire_movie_poster.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286211678356974290" border="0" /></a><br />Happy New Year!<br />Just a quick pop-media post (I swear I'll get back to more, um, "weighty" things some day): tonight I watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Chihwaseon</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Painted Fire, </span>a 2002 South Korean film about the 19th-century painter Jang Seung-up, also known as Ohwon.* The film's title is literally "drunken painting immortal," which gives you some idea of its protagonist's major activities [being an immortal painter version of King Arthur. Another, which is my primary concern here, is his third hobby--having sex with, or at least ogling, just about every female character who appears in the film.<br /><br />Now, I have no problem with looking at beautiful ladies acting in fairly frank sex scenes. It is quite hot. (The only detraction was that I was watching the movie with my parents--even someone who wants to spend time being paid to spout off about penetrative hierarchies has problems watching sexy movies with the folks, which probably indicates something.)<br /><br />The problem arises when the female parties all look like the same lissome twentysomething with pearly teeth, fine brows, dewy complexion, and liquid eyes, while their male counterpart, particularly in closeups, resembles a leathery potato incised with human facial features. I mean, it is a rugged, interesting face, to be sure, and its owner does some fine acting. But the contrast was terribly obvious. Such sex-based double standards of attractiveness and talent aren't a revolutionary revelation, but in this case they must've particularly gotten to me because lately I've been thinking over certain examples this trend in reverse, by which I mean attractive, <span style="font-style: italic;">youthful</span>-appearing men to match the by-default superficials of their leading ladies in heavily-funded projects. The popularity of Johnny Depp in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Pirates</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">of the Carribean</span> franchise, for one. As much as I shudder to mention its name on this blog for my utter hate of just about all it stands for, <span style="font-style: italic;">Twilight</span> for another. More excitingly still, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Picture of Dorian Gray</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Vintner's Luck</span>--in production, and hopefully will join the small selection of highbrow movies with LGBT themes--both feature impressively good-looking actors.*<br /><br />I am following this trend with enormous excitement, not just for the increase in the raw amount of beautiful men I get to see, but also because it may be a marker of a deep shift in Euro-American society: now viewers can actually have the chance to ogle equitably. That there is an association between equal-opportunity ogling and LGBT topics makes a lot of sense, when one considers how central the "desiring" role is to our (and many other patriarchal societies') definition of masculinity. In other words, the only desiring position is a masculine one. Thus, if anyone who did not consider hirself a man desired a man, the nearest approxmimation would be the male "homosexual."* So, there's an overlap between movies with gay themes, movies with beautiful men, and movies that have broad appeal to people who love men, because of the way desire itself is defined (or, dare I say it, <span style="font-style: italic;">constructed</span>).<br /><br />Anyhow, male objectification seems to be on the rise. Along with the nubile boys come more objectionable things. Young men are reporting body-image issues in increasing numbers; "men's magazines" are plastered with stupid diet tips and weight-loss-quick schemes just like those marketed to women. Clearly not good. Of course our goal should be to promulgate health and self-confidence for every individual, regardless of sex or gender. Yet I can't help feeling that the aestheticization, on parallel terms, of the male body is a necessary first step toward such utopian possibilities, given our race's much-less-than-ideal previous trajectory. People desire, whatever gonads they have, and sexy <span style="font-style: italic;">beautiful</span> men in the movies can help move us toward a broader recognition and acceptance of that fact.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*By the way, it's a pretty interesting movie, if a bit stiff and dry-feeling. The 1890s' tumultuous history of the simultaneous presence of Qing and Japanese troops, the Donghak Revolution, and the fall of the royal house and the <span style="font-style: italic;">yangban</span> are all there, and not just serving as a quiet backdrop, either.<br />**But don't take my word for it:***</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVxzsgE5X8I/AAAAAAAAAHE/eqVpVh5bjb8/s1600-h/2866486377_8d43a3f2c4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 271px; height: 473px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVxzsgE5X8I/AAAAAAAAAHE/eqVpVh5bjb8/s320/2866486377_8d43a3f2c4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286227270988029890" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVx0QQ5GkKI/AAAAAAAAAHM/ztbOQ6LkBUI/s1600-h/d6ebb8f3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 236px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVx0QQ5GkKI/AAAAAAAAAHM/ztbOQ6LkBUI/s320/d6ebb8f3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286227885387321506" border="0" /></a><br />***<span style="font-size:85%;">(Imagine #2 with some wings and other suitably divine haberdashery, svp.) If the powers that be, aka the studios, decide to tickle my horrifying period costume/angel fancy any harder, I may combust.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-22459964051639340692008-12-23T20:06:00.031-05:002008-12-24T03:26:26.302-05:00Shoutoku: The Man, The Myth, The...Angst?<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGNLIMsCyI/AAAAAAAAAGM/SNuT40rCmXU/s1600-h/cherries3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 452px; height: 272px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGNLIMsCyI/AAAAAAAAAGM/SNuT40rCmXU/s320/cherries3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283159060201081634" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Who doesn't like some <em>déshabillé</em></span> <span style="font-size:78%;">period costume </span><span style="font-size:78%;">?</span><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Just finished reading Yamagishi Ryouko's epic <span style="font-style: italic;">Hi no izuru tokoro no tenshi </span>[『日の出ずる処の天子』Ruler of the Land of the Rising Sun], which ran from 1980 to 1984. In a sentence, the 10-volume (in Chinese translation; I believe the <span style="font-style: italic;">bunko</span> version in Japanese is 7-8 volumes total) was<br /></div></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">REVISIONIST JAPANESE HISTORY, JERRY SPRINGER STYLE.<br /><br /></span>Maybe that makes the book sound unpalatable to some readers, but believe me when I say that this is not "so horrible it's good." It's so good it's horrifying. At least, enough people thought so that the work won a Kondansha Manga Award in 1983.<br /><br />First, the art: Yamagishi Ryouko is famed as one of the pioneering female <span style="font-style: italic;">mangaka </span>who jump-started the <span style="font-style: italic;">shoujo</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">manga</span> or "girls' comics" movement--the so-called "Year-24 Group" (<span>二十四年組</span>), or "Forty-niners," who were born in 1949 and were among the first women to enter the Japanese comics-making world. Most of this group's work would thus be considered rather old-school by the aesthetic terms of modern <span style="font-style: italic;">manga</span>. Take this page from <span style="font-style: italic;">Kaze to ki no uta</span>, by Yamagishi's fellow Year-24er Takemiya Keiko:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGQs54NfqI/AAAAAAAAAGc/HM5LUKOYDU0/s1600-h/takemia_keiko_poem2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGQs54NfqI/AAAAAAAAAGc/HM5LUKOYDU0/s320/takemia_keiko_poem2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283162939007532706" border="0" /></a>Major characteristics of classic <span style="font-style: italic;">shoujo</span> from authors in this generation include stylized, glamorous-looking protagonists, cartoony cariactures in the supporting cast, an unironic abundance of flowers, pointillist bubbles, and sparklies, and an earnest deployment of coventions such as vertical lines on the face, which denote shock and/or fear. No CG technology here, folks--all the toner and ink carefully hand-applied. Most of the lines are highly organic and finished, in contrast to some of today's authors, who may strive for a "rougher" or "simpler" look. On top of all this, Yamagishi demonstrated a decided fondness for period costume and, to a lesser extent, other material bits of history (her interiors never as dense as Takemiya's, nor her page layouts as complex and thickly packed). To wit, a page from <span style="font-style: italic;">Hi no izuru:</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHZZQDj8-I/AAAAAAAAAGk/0Bg_PmBr2i0/s1600-h/006.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 230px; height: 343px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHZZQDj8-I/AAAAAAAAAGk/0Bg_PmBr2i0/s320/006.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283242865712165858" border="0" /></a>Now that the aesthetic context is gotten out of the way, onto the juicy part. The story concerns the exploits of young Prince Shoutoku [CE 574-622], known also as Prince Umayado [厩戸]. As most know him, Shoutoku was a promulgator of Chinese culture--Buddhism and Confucian values*--as exemplified in his patronage of temples: Shitennoji, and the magnificent Houryuuji. The "Seventeen-Article Constitution" that Wikipedia so helpfully calls "one of the earliest moral dictatorial documents in history" is generally attributed to him, as well. In case you, hypothetical reader, cares, the moral injunctions were mostly pretty "duh": obeying imperial commands, not rushing to decisions by one's lonesome, etc. Awesomely, until the 1890 Meiji constitution came into effect, this document was completely valid. Even today, the Japanese constitution does not technically override it.*<br /><br />Anyway, Shou-chan is a very respected figure, indeed almost a saintly one, though apparently some have disputed his existence (not to mention the attributions of various things to him). Even so, he was on Japanese currency until 1984:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGQom97TbI/AAAAAAAAAGU/spH-ZnhrAYs/s1600-h/shotoku.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 207px; height: 250px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVGQom97TbI/AAAAAAAAAGU/spH-ZnhrAYs/s320/shotoku.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283162865211755954" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Don't make me get all moralistic on your a$$, yo.</span><br /><br /></div>Now, go and look at that pretty picture at the beginning again. Yep. Yamagishi intended it to be the same man. The flowers+hair loops visualization has apparently stuck; here's a cover from Ikeda Ryoko's <span style="font-style: italic;">Prince Shoutoku</span> manga, which was published about a decade later [you betcha there have been some debates about Ikeda plagiarizing from Yamagishi]:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHfnCqVGaI/AAAAAAAAAGs/gEBu6jET19Y/s1600-h/shotoku4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHfnCqVGaI/AAAAAAAAAGs/gEBu6jET19Y/s320/shotoku4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283249699704609186" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Mmm, beefy.<br /></span></div>Anyway, here we've got a most <strike>efflorescent</strike> <strike>coiffureal</strike> delicious case of historifandom--if the pictures don't do enough to convince you, then the DRAMA better. Not to spoil anybody [warning, spoilers imminent], but if the following plot elements don't reek of TEH DRAMUS characteristic of (histori)fandom, I'm not sure what will:<br /><br />-Countless plots to horribly murder various important people, quite a few of which succeed<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">-Quasi-incestuous marriages between step-parents and -children<br />-Actual incest [which, by the way, the reader sees from a mile away but is like unto a runaway locomotive in its relentless momentum], consummated via deceitful trickery<br />-Illegitimate children who represent about 80% of the births in the book, the most plot-central of which result from suspiciously endogamous sex<br />-Nonconsensual sexual acts<br />-Dream [GHEI] sex<br />-General homoerotics, riddled with more angst and Unresolved Sexual Tension than a gay Harry Potter "deathfic" and all kinds of gender issues<br />-Issues of which are mostly manifest in Shoutoku's repeated and highly successful cross-dressing<br />-Suicidal thoughts and attempts so far up the frigging wazoo that it's probably come out on the other end<br />-Trippy-as-hell and very distressing dreams, visions, out-of-body experiences, ESP, telekinesis, telepathy...Shoutoku will kill you <span style="font-style: italic;">with his mind</span><br /><br />In this delightful melting-pot of freakishness, Yamagishi mixed a beautiful, cold, traumatized Prince Umayado, his [very obvious] love interest Soga no Emishi, various historically recorded folks from the Soga clan, the imperial line, and what feels like everywhere else. The thing is over two thousand pages long, so here I'll just discuss why I think this particular bit of revision is so engrossing quickly.<br /><br />1. Yamagishi plotted her political and romantic intrigues with great mastery: gripping, intense, but not quite so over the top that one lost a deep engagement with the story. Mostly, she achieved this by plumbing the vast casts' psychologies with consistent dexterity. Emishi isn't just a stupid 6th-century frat boy, though that could have been his lot. His ultimate rejection of Umayado is so devastating because the reader believes that, for one, it might not have been that way "if only...", and for another, Yamagishi gives us so much insight into the human torments of the characters that we feel all the proper <span style="font-style: italic;">mono-no-aware</span> catharsis.<br /><br />2. The <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>art feels sometimes archaic and a little stiff, but there's something about classic manga's willingness to conventialize and stylize that reveals the medium's parity to other highly formulaic yet nonetheless engaging visual genera, i.e. <span style="font-style: italic;">noh</span> or Peking opera. It's a little silly when Umayado can't seem to put his hand on anything without making it look as delicate as possible, but then again, arguably that's part of <span style="font-style: italic;">manga</span>'s heritage from more traditional Japanese art. Where she needs it, Yamagishi makes use of the image's power to "tell all."<br /><br />In short, the images and words together convey an immense, realistically textured emotional universe for not just the protagonists, but all the major characters. There are not too many absolutes in Yamagishi's world. Just about everyone is capable of making the reader groan in frustration, recoil in horror, or smile.<br /><br />3. Also importantly, the manga isn't shy about its facts. The machinations of Soga no Umako, Emishi's doggedly conventional father, and virtually all of the characters, are situated with what was a surely considerable amount of research. The politics of 6th-century Japan are not just about sleeping with sisters and cross-dressing to impress, but related to international history: the Paekche-Koguryo-Silla standoff on the Korean peninsula, for instance, is of great import to the cast--and even if the reader didn't have any clue about the situation, its immediacy in the story. On the mainland, the Sui dynasty exterminates the Chen and unites a huge swathe of formerly divided territory. And, of course, the title takes its title from the famous missive Shoutoku wrote to the Sui emperor in 607: "From the ruler of the land of the rising sun, to the ruler of the land of the setting sun, greetings...."<br /><br />To draw hundred of pages in quest of the legendary creature who wrote those haughty words and coined the phrase "Nihon" is impressive enough, but to give these long-dead folks, often without much more than a name, the dimensionality of people trying to cope with their situations, their emotions, their pasts, is truly the most admirable point of good history as well as good historical fiction. Sometimes the boundary isn't so clear, and verification almost seems unimportant. Yamagishi's Shoutoku, with his angelically beautiful androgyny, a boy by turns cruel, vulnerable, brilliant, loveable, domineering, and passionate, is nothing like the moralizing gentleman with a respectable beard whose portrait is printed in history books. But his divergence from that man fails to signify after we pass through the landscape that Yamagishi drew for him. That's the sign of the best kind of historifandom: with enough power that it can stand alongside what is conventionally accepted as "reality," in a strange and attractive symbiosis.<br /><br />Basically, if you have time to spare and would like to spend it marathoning through an epic of some kind, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hi no izuru<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span>is an excellent choice. Have another nice thing to look at, to whet your appetite:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHvv6BcuiI/AAAAAAAAAG0/82u94O3fJVU/s1600-h/quartet.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 247px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SVHvv6BcuiI/AAAAAAAAAG0/82u94O3fJVU/s320/quartet.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283267444190525986" border="0" /></a><br /></div><span style="font-size:78%;">From left to right: Prince Umayado, Futsuhime, Emishi, and his sister Tojikome. Aka Emishi and his harem. Damn frat boys with Mickey Mouse hair always get the fun.</span><br /><br /></div><span style="font-size:85%;">*Yeah, they didn't really have Buddhism in Japan back then. Crazy, huh? They even had a war over it. They didn't even have horses in Yamato until the late 4th century CE. And there was even a time...(hushed voice) <span style="font-style: italic;">when Japan didn't have domesticated rice</span>. That's right. NO SUSHI. It must have been terrible.<br />**Oh Wikipedia, educational as always.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-64345154738544536062008-11-25T12:20:00.010-05:002008-11-25T14:53:36.751-05:00It's been too long......since I've written about sexy things!<br /><br />One particular component of late imperial notions of gender and sexuality that fascinates me is that of gender transformation: in other words, how and why people (and sometimes nonhumans) move from one apparent gender to another, and what happens to them afterward. Today, I'll present a couple of translations of "weird tales" relating to this subject; afterward, I'll offer some thoughts.<br /><br />As an undergrad, I wrote on the <span style="font-style: italic;">Zi bu yu</span> [<span style="font-style: italic;">What Confucius did not Speak Of</span>*], a collection of tales by the gentleman-poet Yuan Mei that first circulated in the 1780s. My favorite of the tales was "False Woman," alternately translatable as "Woman-Pretender."** A translation:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">False Woman</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A beautiful man by the surname of Hong, from Guiyan County</span> [NB: In modern Hunan province]<span style="font-style: italic;">, pretended to be a seamstress and traveled in the provinces of Hubei and Guizhou as a itinerant embroidery teacher for women. A licentiate scholar in Changsha named Li invited Hong to embroider, and then tried to seduce him. Hong told him the truth </span>[about his sex].<span style="font-style: italic;"> Li laughed, saying, "If you really are a man, even better! I've always thought it stupid that one of the emperors of the Northen Wei </span>[4th-6th century CE], <span style="font-style: italic;">when he called two beautiful nuns who served at his mother's side for his pleasures, found out that they were men and executed them. What an idiot that Wei lord was! Why didn't he just make them his male favorites, to have them at his pleasure while not hurting his mother's feelings?" Hong eagerly consented after this speech, and Li loved him well.<br /><br />Some years later, Hong was in the Jiangxia region</span> [in SE modern Hubei] <span style="font-style: italic;">when a man named Du also tried to seduce him. Hong tried to do with Du as he'd done with Li, but alas, the man was not one who knew the way of things, and took Hong to court. Deported back home to Guiyang, Hong was examined by the Provincial Judge: his voice was delicate and soft, his throat lacked an Adam's apple, his hair was so long that it touched the floor, his skin was like jade, and his waist was just one foot and three inches around. Yet his privates were as thick and heavy as a large, fresh mushroom. He said that he'd been an orphan since childhood and had been taken in by a widowed neighbor, with whom he later carried on a liaison. He grew out his hair and bound his feet, calling himself a woman. When his adopted mother died, he became an embroidery teacher; he left his adopted household at seventeen and was now twenty-seven, having encountered innumerable women in a decade. The Judge asked for the women's names, but Hong replied, "Isn't it enough that I'll be punished? Why must you injure those ladies?" Torture was applied, and he could not help but give up a few names. The Governor wanted to sentence him to distant exile </span>[a codified punishment for fairly serious crimes, at distances of, say, 2000 or 3000 <span style="font-style: italic;">li, </span>or about 660 to 1000 miles], <span style="font-style: italic;">but the Provincial Judge, calling Hong a "demon-person," insisted that he be beheaded.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">The sentence was approved.<br /><br />The day before his death, Hong said to one of his guards, "I die without regrets, having enjoyed so much of the forbidden pleasures of this world! And that Judge will not be spared, either. I only had consensual affairs; keeping my hair long and seducing people are offenses that don't warrant execution under the law. Those affairs I had with women were all secret things that could be covered up--why did he force me to confess and embarrass them? They had to be called in and beaten; the snowy, jadelike skin of the daughters of rich men in tens of town and counties had to suffer the red sticks, for what?" The next day, he was executed in the market square. Before he died, Hong pointed at the spot where he knelt and said, "Three years hence, the man who tried me will be here, too." Indeed, three years later the Judge was executed for corruption, and all were astounded.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></span></span></span>In a sort of postscript, Yuan Mei wonders that this story is similar to that of Sang Chong, a "demon-person" from the Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty. Judith Zeitlin's <span style="font-style: italic;">Historian of the Strange</span> discusses the Sang Chong figure, tracing him to another collection of "strange tales," the <span style="font-style: italic;">Geng Si Bian</span> [庚巳編] by Lu Can,*** published in the late 16th century. This "demon-person" story is a lot nastier than the exploits of our brave pretty-man hero Hong, though--get ready to cringe much harder:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Legal Case of the Person-Demon<br />The Central Censorate views reports of men masquerading as women to commit evil deeds as abnormal events. A report from Jinzhou county in Zhending prefecture in Zhili province </span>[modern Hebei] <span style="font-style: italic;">runs: criminal Sang Chong confessed that he is the nephew of Li Dagang, part of a military-affiliated household in Shanxi province, Taiyuan prefecture. As a child, Sang was sold to a man named Sang Mao of the neighboring county as an adopted son. During the first year of the Chenghua reign </span>[1465], <span style="font-style: italic;">he heard that a man named Gu Cai, from Shanyin county in Datong prefecture, had masqueraded as a woman and taught handicrafts to women while secretly sleeping with them for eighteen years without being caught. Sang Chong decided he wanted to emulate Gu, and traveled to take Gu as his master. He trimmed his brows and face, arranged his hair into three parts and put on a hairpiece to pass himself as a woman. He learned, too, how to cut and trace patterns, sew and embroider shoe uppers, cooking and other such occupations. Afterward, Sang gratefully left for home.<br /><br />Thereafter, men from nearby counties </span>[omitting some details of proper names for sake of brevity] <span style="font-style: italic;">came to visit Sang and ask him to teach them, as well. Sang told them all, "When you go to people's homes, enter and leave carefully. If something happens, don't say a thing about me." So they each went their ways.<br /><br />In the third month of the third year of the Chenghua reign, Sang had been away from home for ten years, doing nothing but corrupting people. He'd been through forty-five prefectures and counties, and seventy-eight towns and villages. Everywhere he went, he carefully sought word of pretty girls of good family, and then called himself a runaway beggar-wife, first moving into a poor household nearby to help with chores. In a few days, Sang would then make up pretenses to enter the girl's chambers to teach her womanly crafts. At night, he would retire with her, cajoling and joking with her while having his stealthy way. If she were upright and resisted, he would wait until very late and use a little trick. He carried with him an egg, the white of which he removed; also seven peaches, and seven sticks of willow, all of which he burned to ashes. He smashed a new needle with an iron hammer, and adding a mouthful of liquor to all this, concocted a drug, which he then sprayed onto the girl while silently chanting a sleeping-spell. The girl would then be paralyzed and unable to speak. After having his evil way with her, Sang would incant the release spell. Upon waking, if the girl stridently rebuffed him, Sang would plead and wheedle until the girl suffered in silence.<br /><br />After three or five days of living in one spot, he feared discovery, and would move to a new place. He did this for about ten years, seducing one hundred and eighty-two women of good households, without discovery. In the thirteenth year of Chenghua, at about five in the afternoon on the thirteenth of the seventh month, he came to the house of a licentiate scholar, Gao Xuan, in Nie village, Jinzhou county, Zhending prefecture. Sang called himself the concubine of one Zhang Lin, of Zhaozhou prefecture, and said that he had run away because of his husband's abuse, and begged for shelter. He was settled in the southern rooms. That night, the son-in-law of Gao Xuan, Zhao Wenju, crept into Sang's rooms and tried to seduce him. Sang pushed and hit Zhao, but Zhao pushed him onto the </span>kang [a heated bed platform, typical in North China]<span style="font-style: italic;"> and groped at his chest; feeling no breasts, Zhao moved downward and found that Sang had testicles. Thus he brought Sang to court in Jinzhou.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>The rest of the account recounts how the case unfolded: Sang's confession was corroborated, and a list of the girls he'd violated was compiled. His "master" and "students" were all brought to court and tried together "to warn those who follow." But the women were spared any punishment, for they had all been coerced with Sang's "trickery"; plus, there were too many of them. In the eleventh month of Chenghua, the emperor himself wrote an edict: "Yes, this fellow has committed a vicious and ugly crime that damages custom. Punish him with <span style="font-style: italic;">lingchi</span> [the infamous "thousand cuts" form of execution, reserved for the worst capital crimes]. No need to submit a reply. As for the other seven, prosecute them strictly and bring them to justice."<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />Translating these have already taken up a huge chunk of space (not to mention time I was going to spend working), so I'll reserve some observations for next time. Brief note before I go to do "useful" things, though: if you search any of Sang Chong's case on the Chinese Internet (tm), you'll turn up bunches of Reader's Digest-type sensational stories about this <a href="http://qi.desktx.com/lishi/20080710/1736.html">"Strongest Pervert in History."</a><br /><br />*<span style="font-size:85%;">One of those Classical allusions so well-loved by people of letters even today. The reference is to a passage from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Analects</span>: "Confucius did not speak of oddities, feats of power, disorders of nature, or spirits." [子不语怪力乱神] Thus, Yuan let people know that his book was in fact about all of these things.<br /><br />** Readers who are just dying to see the text in its original can look <a href="http://www.my285.com/gdwx/xs/bj/zby/23.htm">here</a>; the story's a little less than 1/4 of the way down the page. Kam Louie and Louise Edwards have done the fullest English translation of the collection, as <span style="font-style: italic;">Censored by Confucius: Ghost Stories by Yuan Mei</span>, and you can read this tale, which they translate as "The Female Impersonator," therein.<br /><br />*** Enterprising (or masochistic readers not caring about their vision) can see the original <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27172/27172-0.txt">here</a><br />as part of the Gutenberg Project. The tale is about 2/3 of the way down the page.<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-30675450819785258062008-11-11T12:01:00.005-05:002008-11-11T12:34:08.194-05:00On the tragedy of coercionCan I just tell you how good Watase Yuu's <i>Sakura Gari</i> is? (Yes, the <i>Fushigi Yuugi</i> woman. No, it's not as hackneyed, obviously.*) Warning, may spoil you, though this "sneak preview" color page from 2007 could give some things away as it is.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SRm64ZZE1MI/AAAAAAAAAEg/rC3huhV0PSU/s1600-h/sakuragari.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 362px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SRm64ZZE1MI/AAAAAAAAAEg/rC3huhV0PSU/s320/sakuragari.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5267446717238006978" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(On the right, our hardworking protagonist Masataka. On the left, our charming failed hero Souma.)<br /></span></div><br />It combines the best dramatic trademarks of Yuki Kaori's work--gothic houses, hopelessly beautiful psychotic aristocrats, fancy clothes (in this case Taishou-era period wear, which is thumbs-up for sure), violence, and sex. The last is perhaps where some readers would have issues with the manga, because though this is an exceedingly sexy work, not very much of it is warm or fuzzy.<br /><br />I've been thinking about why I can stomach some types of coercive sex--what I could probably call "non-sex-positive" sex--and not others (for instance, what apparently occurs in the <i>Twilight</i> series). The reason here may be that Watase manages to tread the delicate line between inspiring disgust at sexual violation and cathartic, tragic sympathy for the inability of the characters to escape their pasts. In this sense, the visuality of manga gives it a distinct advantage: it can convey horror and despair even as unspeakably violent, destructive acts are being perpetrated. It can accomplish a degree of psychological revelation that is almost certainly harder for the novelist. And it is that insight into the souls of Watase's <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">dramatis personae </span>that makes this less a suspect piece of rape apologetics than an excruciatingly well-executed piece of tragic drama that is almost Greek in its amounts of helpless self-destructiveness. The best Yuki Kaori manga have also this sense of epic personal failure. Thus we the readers can sympathize.<br /><br />Another possibility might be that the players of this sad game are male. Some time ago, I read one person's account of how, as a gay man, he felt violated and horribly objectified at Yaoi-Con, "A Celebration of Male Love and Beauty" that happens not too far away from here annually. What if the target of the sexual violence here were a young woman? I suppose that would generate more distaste, at least personally, if only because (a) young women are still by far the target of most reported sexual violence and (b) the biological capacity for childbearing adds another, highly unpleasant layer onto the already problematical physical and psychological domination. In this case, then, I am siding with the explanation for "why is yaoi so popular (especially among female fans)" that attributes it to a leveling of the sexual playing field between partners. The baseline power differential is smaller than if Masataka were Masako. Furthermore, there is certainly physical force in this coercion, but much of it is in manipulative mind-games--just as abusive, but with less potential to viscerally revolt the reader than the kind of purely physical power that is all too often the basis of "normal" (that is, not same-sex) erotic manga.<br /><br />Of course all this could perhaps be seen as my self-justification, but I truly feel that this work is not a massive attempt to allow prurient readers to revel in sexual exploitation. But maybe I'm the only one who sees the echoes of Classical tragedy--everyone else's just enjoying the power play and admittedly technically polished sex scenes...<br /><br />*<span style="font-size:85%;">Actually, several of her lesser-known works (<span style="font-style: italic;">Ayashi no Ceres, Imadoki</span>) are supposed to be quite good in contrast to the very, very mainstream and much less challenging <span style="font-style: italic;">FY</span>. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-31407840183590285302008-11-06T21:14:00.002-05:002008-11-06T21:17:15.924-05:00Briefly...It may be a little less thrilling than sex or monkeys (or sexy monkeys for that matter), but this confirmation of the <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081106-monsoons-china.html?source=rss">connection between climate patterns and political situations</a> as derived from Chinese stalagmites (or is it the other? I can never get them quite right) is pretty impressive. That link continues to this day, I would say, but certainly in a less obvious manner.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2263685590866948008.post-68309881884857350392008-10-27T01:53:00.048-04:002008-10-30T03:42:11.740-04:00For the love of monkeysWhen Carl "My Inspiration, Basically" Pyrdum at <a href="http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/">Got Medieval </a>started posting about images of monkeys, I was inspired. Also, I laughed, cried, and gave it many thumbs up. And people should give him a super-duper Medieval Lit job.<br /><br />But returning to my inspiration: I knew that someone had to do something about Chinese monkeys, and where better to start than with <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> Chinese monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven齐天大圣, the mighty Sun Wukong 孙悟空, the Beautiful Monkey King 美猴王,the immortal Simian 猢狲himself!*<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQVZHPOnd_I/AAAAAAAAADA/p1vAhDb3z2Q/s1600-h/250px-Sun_Wukong_on_TV.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 246px; height: 203px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQVZHPOnd_I/AAAAAAAAADA/p1vAhDb3z2Q/s320/250px-Sun_Wukong_on_TV.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5261709720534087666" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Behold! My fuzzy cheeks, my rosy glow, my large magical stick. Sorry, I'm a celibate Buddhist, and besides, the dude who created me invested in me the vices of Pride and Anger, not Lust or Gluttony.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span>(Image from the nostalgia-riffic mid-1980s CCTV show, with the opera star Liuxiao Lingtong as Mr. Sun)<br /><br /></span></div>The goal of this post is to take an initial look at some representations of the Awesome Ape** over time and in various media, and to muse about why a monkey, of all creatures, became the uncontested hero of this extremely influential story.*** In general, the trend seemed to be one of "domestication," especially considering that this block-print, dated by the authoritative Wikipedia to the 16th century, depicts a rather more bestial incarnation:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQVjijUTZXI/AAAAAAAAADI/5CdnjOSgBFY/s1600-h/416px-Xiyou.PNG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 222px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQVjijUTZXI/AAAAAAAAADI/5CdnjOSgBFY/s320/416px-Xiyou.PNG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5261721184899392882" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">("Pilgrim Sun." Frontispiece from the oldest surviving copy of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey to the West</span>, c. 1590.)<br /><br /></span></div>I am pretty sure that this isn't His Apeness way back before he learns human ways, because he's wearing clothes and has got his magical staff from the Sea Palace. In fact, this is probably supposed to beSun the Pilgrim (the label in the left margin says as much). So even in his role as protector and disciple of the sutra-seeking monk Tripitaka, Wukong looked a bit more <span style="font-style: italic;">au naturel</span>. He's also blending in nicely with that peach tree behind him. Maybe the hairiness is a side-effect more of printing technology than of any initial visual type, but that would require looking at more illustrations from later copies, which maybe one day I can convince someone to pay me to do.<br /><br />On the stage, Lord Monkey acquired a more standardized look. Here he is as the Great Sage, with the long partridge feathers of a warrior and the yellow robes of a ruler:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliNfHdH3I/AAAAAAAAAD4/yRMyIpEnwHo/s1600-h/File748488733515346.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 283px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliNfHdH3I/AAAAAAAAAD4/yRMyIpEnwHo/s320/File748488733515346.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262845623389724530" border="0" /></a><br />And here he is as a more modest Pilgrim en route to India with his master.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliQ_K8ofI/AAAAAAAAAEA/VuAQEnPlWm8/s1600-h/450px-Sun_Wukong_at_Beijing_opera_-_Journey_to_the_West.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 282px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliQ_K8ofI/AAAAAAAAAEA/VuAQEnPlWm8/s320/450px-Sun_Wukong_at_Beijing_opera_-_Journey_to_the_West.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262845683533914610" border="0" /></a><br />Dramatic****, coded facial makeup is emblematic of Peking opera in general, but note the decidedly nonhuman features highlighted by the contrasting red and white, and the orange fabric balls for extra-large monkey ears. But of course, these bold, recognizable colors and patterns are also a way to "tame" the hairy, bulgy-eyed Ape of earlier times into brightly-colored familiarity for theatergoers.<br /><br />More recent iterations began to get creative. Witness Sakai Masaaki-san as the Sage in the 1978 <span style="font-style: italic;">Monkey </span>[also <span style="font-style: italic;">Monkey Magic!</span>] (or as I like to call it, "the more politically incorrect <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey to the West </span>TV series"). Compare his relatively more "normal" skin and hair color to the CCTV Wukong, as well as the abstracted monkey-ness of the opera makeup. <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlkVFq_6mI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/HbkXxm-9qeU/s1600-h/masaaki_imadewaep.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 315px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlkVFq_6mI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/HbkXxm-9qeU/s320/masaaki_imadewaep.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262847953021692514" border="0" /></a><br />Next comes the many faces of Goku from that venerable, ridiculous, and horrifically unattractive anime known as Dragonball***** that I nonetheless watched for lack of anything else (oh, bygone days when no American kid watched <span style="font-style: italic;">weird Japanese shows</span> instead of hearty, patriotic, made-in-the-USA cartoons). The link (as far as I know) between this Goku (the Japanese pronunciation for "Wukong") and our favorite simian are tenuous. Apparently sometimes this one has a tail, and he can fly around on a cloud. Also, he is powerful. More interesting is that his hair <span style="font-style: italic;">grows really long</span> when he enters "Super Saiyan mode"--a kind of lycanthropic (simithropic?) transformation, a bestial reversion maybe.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhiHdTRYI/AAAAAAAAADo/hbRw2MsEjmU/s1600-h/Old_goku_pack_by_gokussj5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhiHdTRYI/AAAAAAAAADo/hbRw2MsEjmU/s320/Old_goku_pack_by_gokussj5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262844878304527746" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">(AM I PORCUPINE OR MONKEY OR MAYBE A BUNCH OF POLYGONS??)<br /><br /></span></div>The tension between Wukong's conformation to Buddhist (or in some cases Daoist) tenets such as mercy and patience and his "wild," impulsive streak forms some of the central conflicts in <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey to the West</span>, the primary one being between Monkey and his master Tripitaka. But how ironic that it seems to be this very "human" weakness of impatience and pride that is contrasted to the virtues of an <span style="font-style: italic;">actual</span> human (Tripitaka)! Plus, as I'll discuss in more detail below, Tripitaka is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> the hero of <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey</span>--so it's really these "untamed" qualities of the Monkey King that attract our human admiration, even as his image was domesticated.<br /><br />But of course then postmodernity and that dang globalized media thing has to go and screw the trend of domestication up (in that annoying half-assed postmodern way). So we got the anomaly of a pretty much human looking beefy hero named Goku who "reverted" by growing long bushy blond hair. Japan of the late 1990s brought us another charming version of Goku:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliIsSGcMI/AAAAAAAAADw/62Fsc-JE6jo/s1600-h/goku-1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 158px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQliIsSGcMI/AAAAAAAAADw/62Fsc-JE6jo/s320/goku-1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262845541024690370" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;">(Son Goku from the manga <span style="font-style: italic;">Saiyuki</span> by </span><span style="font-size:78%;">Minekura </span><span style="font-size:78%;">Kazuya which, though not overtly ghei, is ghei by (many) implications.)<br /><br /></span></div>Bushy hair, check. Stick, check. Traveling-clothes, check. You don't know this, but occasional outbursts of violence in a weremonkeyish manner, also check. The weird thing is this Goku's childlike image; indeed, instead of being basically the only competent member of Tripitaka's little party, this Goku is kind of airheaded. It's Sanzou (Japanese rendition of Sanzang, in turn the Chinese rendition of Tripitaka) who's the cool operator. Then again, Sanzou uses a revolver to blast demons away while Hakkai (Bajie/Pigsy) is an emo one-eyed user of "<span style="font-style: italic;">ki</span> blasts." So. Some revisionism here. What meaning does this have, aside from indicating the popularity of dark-drama manga that transcends traditional genre barriers? Unclear. But I should point out that Goku retains something apart from the obvious from the original novel--his asexuality. This is something that'll be important when I take a look at the history of monkeys in older folklore.<br /><br />Here we have a Jet Li-Monkey from the recent <span style="font-style: italic;">Forbidden Kingdom</span>, which I haven't seen but in which I am mildly and guiltily interested. The armor's been updated--no more tacky yellows and reds! It also has a bit of a Japanese look to it, but maybe it's supposed to be Tang-style. But importantly--nothing really very apelike about this Sage except for the <span style="font-style: italic;">hair</span>. The more "natural" blond hair (as opposed to the heavy-duty goldenrod of the CCTV version), tied in a not-very-Chinesey tall ponytail. This man looks more like what a Chinese person who'd never seen a blond Caucasian might imagine one to be like (hairy, very hairy, with slightly sketchy grin) than an animal.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlip7i0UBI/AAAAAAAAAEI/5Bp5ESNpGm0/s1600-h/monkey-king-5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 219px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlip7i0UBI/AAAAAAAAAEI/5Bp5ESNpGm0/s320/monkey-king-5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262846112057020434" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">(Damn, that looks soooo itchy.)<br /></span></div><br />And finally, Sun Wukong (as far as I am aware, he is known by this name and not Son Goku) from the very recently released <span style="font-style: italic;">Musou Orochi 2: Maou Sairin</span> video game by the Japanese company Koei. His attitude resembles that of a surfer more than that of a Buddhist pilgrim, and he allies himself with the (eeeevil) monk Taira no Kiyomori, who takes Tripitaka's place in freeing the Monkey.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhVneHGnI/AAAAAAAAADg/nfQKXAnaS1E/s1600-h/400px-Sun_Wukong_wo2.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 288px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhVneHGnI/AAAAAAAAADg/nfQKXAnaS1E/s320/400px-Sun_Wukong_wo2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262844663559559794" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;">(Thanks to http://koeiwarriors.co.uk/ for the image.)<br /><br /></span></div>As far as I can tell, the Sage looks like (again) a "foreigner" with weird hair more than he does a monkey, tail aside (even the tail looks like an accessory and not a hint of a deep bestial nature). Perhaps coinciding with a man-objectifying trend I identified in <a href="http://stringbetweenpearls.blogspot.com/2008/04/historifandom-musou-part-2.html">a post some time ago</a>, he's got a really impressive midsection.<br /><br />To sum it up, from the initial publication of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey to the West</span> to the twentieth century, it seemed like the general trend in image/imaginings of the Monkey King was one of codification and concomitant domestication. He was powerful, but not an object of terror. The narrative of the novel also concerns the Monkey's taming, of course. As some people who know vastly more than I will ever know about this have written, the Monkey's journey is one of being appropriated by the strictures of religion and made not only human but holy, rather like a Chinese St. Christopher.****** The Monkey of <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey</span> is, however, the inheritor of two traditions, neither of which is quite as friendly. The first is that of the White Ape, whose legends mostly concern the kidnapping and raping of human women (some of whom apparently could be bestialized by the experience and "forget" their humanity). This obviously threatening figure is a target of men's attacks, and ultimately dies at their hands--a dangerous, racially distinct Other intent on "stealing" womenand subverting human society tameable only by violence. The ethnic quality of the White Ape's otherness seems especially striking when recalling the blondness of several of the images of the Monkey above, and particularly of the recent versions. Monkey-as-foreigner is thus one mode.<br /><br />The other is that of the rebellious ape, a Titan-like creature born naturally of the earth and locked in battle with a god in the form of a young man. This monkey is not nearly as obviously evil or dangerous as the White Ape, and it's pretty clear that its attempts to usurp a "higher" authority are echoed in the Monkey's pre-pilgrimage exploits. Basically, then, the monkey was a symbol of conflict between chaotic earthly forces and lawful human ones--the pivot being a threatening sexuality, which, as I pointed out, Sun Wukong does not have. That, I think, is an important factor that puts him, and not the actually more human-looking Sandy (Shasen) or the actually human Tripitaka, in the role of the hero.<br /><br />Sandy's in fact not a very central character in the party, so let me look more closely at Sun Wukong, Tripitaka, and Pigsy (Bajie/Hakkai) instead, because they represent three ways for the reader to identify with the action.<br /><br />Tripitaka's the only human being--so there's a superficial level of self-recognition for the reader. Furthermore, he's the most spiritually accomplished in the human world-order of Buddhism. Of course, he's a sexual teetotaler, being a holy monk and all, but there's a crucial difference from Monkey's abstinence: he lacks sexual agency. It's not only his being a monk that emasculates him, but his personality (vacillating, credulous) and his looks (effete, and outright "tasty" to the various demons that try to eat and/or have sex with him). Not something a virile young reader would want to fully sympathize with.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhK88EkQI/AAAAAAAAADY/lsEjg0CJYHQ/s1600-h/tripitaka_onset.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 168px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlhK88EkQI/AAAAAAAAADY/lsEjg0CJYHQ/s320/tripitaka_onset.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262844480343806210" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">(In some cases, Tripitaka has been actually played by an actress, as here in <span style="font-style: italic;">Monkey. </span><span>Cute, though <3</span>.)</span><br /></div><br />Pigsy, on the other hand, is bestial, even monstrously so, and voracious in both sexual and literal appetite. He's the sins of greed and lust made obvious in a porcine package. His failings also include, however, incompetence at defeating demons/protecting Tripitaka (all of his abilities are explicitly described as inferior to Wukong's), and dishonesty. He's an aspect of human weakness, but the most repulsive one of these three main characters.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlg_sq3ooI/AAAAAAAAADQ/dybFJi73TO4/s1600-h/bab6f84f.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 259px; height: 242px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yMp-E81Laas/SQlg_sq3ooI/AAAAAAAAADQ/dybFJi73TO4/s320/bab6f84f.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5262844286998127234" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-size:78%;">(I do recognize that pigs are in fact intelligent, cool animals. But most 16th-century Chinese probably didn't.)<br /><br /></span></div>Thus Monkey is the only one left to make our hero, and the fact that the first major section of the novel is actually all about Monkey's exploits only reinforces that link. For a contemporary reader Wukong didn't have the sexual "gross-out" factor of either looking too girlishly feeble or too disgustingly greedy. The motifs of sexual/racial threat are still in the imagination of His Monkeyness, but apparently neutralized into abstract representations of his identity as <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> Monkey.<br /><br />It was the Royal Ape's very human self-discipline, capability, intelligence, along with his irrepressible impulsiveness and irreverence that made a perfect hero. Novels and print culture are associated with an early modern consciousness in Europe--though the appellation has only been controversially applied to China, maybe the Great Sage's intense individualism in the face of Confucian authority, along with his presence in a widely printed novel, could be an argument for a similar spirit in the Ming and Qing.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*He is a man(?) of many faces, of many passions, of many Risible and Old-Fashioned Literal Translations... [BTW, I am delighted to note that my Chinese input system </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >automatically supplied</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> these proper nouns. Even the computer is a fan.]<br />**Not an actual epithet, but one I am sure His Awesomeness would appreciate.<br />***If you need a refresher, or maybe just a fresher, on what the hell is going on here with the monkeys and pilgrimages and Buddhist satire, here's a <a href="http://www.vbtutor.net/Xiyouji/journeytothewest.htm">rundown</a>.<br />**** Badummmmp!<br />*****For sake of simplicity, have omitted other suffix letters (Z, S, etc.)<br />******See Whalen Lai's article, "From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint." 1994.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1