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September 30, 2005Lafcadio Hearn had the yellow fever bad...
I've been reading Lafcadio Hearn's "Japan: An Interpretation," and while it's been an entertaining enough read, at page 470 of a total 500, I'm feeling a little "Herniated".
It's an odd book. In some respects, Hearn is able to make very keen, critical observations of the turn-of-the-century Japan in which he lived. But for every keen, critical observation he makes, Hearn trots out a pile of blandishments that usually negate it.
Consider the following:
"For it has well been said that the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal or lacquer--but its women."
"Only a society under extraordinary regulation and regimentation,--a society in which all self-assertion was repressed, and self-sacrifice made a universal obligation,--a society in which personality was clipped like a hedge, permitted to bud and bloom from within, never form without,--in short, only a society founded upon ancestor-worship, could have produced [the Japanese woman]."
"[The Japanese woman is] a being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others,--a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right,--and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice everything at the call of duty; such was the character of the Japanese woman."
Hearn praises Japanese women by claiming they lack any of the baser qualities of human nature. However, by holding them up as more than human, he dehumanizes them. His compliments are probably sincere, but that doesn't make them any less racist than somebody who praises all African-Americans for being good at sports, or all Asian-Americans for being studious, or all Caucasians for being...um...well, for having some skill which some of us (but by no means all of us) possess.
That said, I'm willing to cut the man some slack, given that he wrote the book just over one hundred years ago. I'd like to think that, when measured against its faults, "Japan: An Interpretation" is still more praiseworthy of a read than not.
* * * * *
I got my car washed this morning--which would have made tons more sense if the Ventura County fire not still dumping tiny bits of ash into the air. Oh well, it was due for a wash either way.
Posted by patrick at 01:43 PM | Comments (1)
September 26, 2005
Oh, it's late and here I am...
Really, I'd rather be just about anywhere else but downtown Los Angeles at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning--but for my apartment complex's code violations hearing, I'll make an exception. I've got a feeling--based on the fact that the city's official notice was posted above the mailboxes and gone a few hours later--that the landlord would rather not have us know about the complex's structural peccadilloes.
Oh well.
In other news, I downloaded what seemed like an excessive amount of drivers and codecs and new programs in order to watch fansubs on my computer. For some reason, the default setting on one such program is to have the image and the subtitles upside down. But now I have superfluous programs working at odds with one another--the image is right-side up, one set of subtitles is presented correctly below it, and a second set of subs (in another font and size, natch) is strung up upside down above it all. A little distracting, sure, but now that I have it all working, I'm loath to mess with it.
[guitar solo, during which I worked on something else and killed time on the internet]
And now it's 1:37 a.m. I'm not making it to that code violation hearing. Maybe I'll call back in a few days and see if they have any info in their files about it. Ack. My eyes are too tired to continue working, but my brain has the wanderlust. This would be a good time A) to know Braille, and B) have books written in it.
An amazing language, that Braille. I was thinking about it the other day. It's less than 200 years old. I wonder if it will evolve slowly into its next form, or if somebody will build the proverbial better mousetrap all at once and leave Braille antiquated over the course of a generation or two?
Posted by patrick at 11:02 PM | Comments (3)
September 20, 2005
Whaddya mean it has no intrinsic value?
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
As I was driving home from work today, I realized that the much-vaunted "new car smell" isn't really anything to write home about, objectively speaking. Truth be told, it smells a little off. If I were to be hit with it during the middle of a walk, I'd probably wrinkle my nose and speed up. And if I were to encounter it while driving the Ontario leg of the 60 freeway, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
We only love it because it's exclusive to the experience of having (or driving in) a new car. In other words, if the only place in the world where one could find haggis was within the glove compartments of brand-new cars, we'd be haggis-lovers, all.
Posted by patrick at 01:50 AM | Comments (2)
September 12, 2005
Dead cars, bad taste, power outages...business as usual
I only worked half a day today, courtesy of L.A.'s citywide blackout, so I ended up knocking out a lot of chores of the life-maintenance variety this afternoon. By the time I would have otherwise been leaving the recording studio, I had already paid a variety of bills, returned some e-mails, made some phone calls, and finished off John Barth's "The End of the Road". He's one bleak bastard, that Barth. I'm still not sure how I feel about having read that book and "The Floating Opera" back-to-back; the latter reads like a superior draft of the former, and since I read "The Floating Opera" first, I didn't feel like there was much new ground to cover in "The End of the Road".
There's probably a wonderful segue from Barth over in to the buying of a new car, but I'll be damned if I feel like expending the energy to think of it. I hope I go out of this world with more grace than my 1993 Saturn did right before I left for Japan. Suffice it to say that I was subjected to a grand guignol of shaking, overheating, and foul odors before the car shook off its mortal coil (or, rather, a rod). Luckily, I was in the position to purchase my mother's car from her. Out with the '93 Saturn, in with the '97. With 100,000 miles on it, I figured I was set for years to come.
As nature abhors a vacuum, so do the car gods abhor assumptions.
They fear me.
After all, it's not every mortal who can kill two cars in 90 days flat.
The '97 Saturn perished of a cracked cylinder and subsequently corrupted engine last Thursday. I'd had it all of three months, and had unwittingly spent an amount on its upkeep equal to what I'd eventually get for its trade-in value.
So now I have a 2006 Saturn. It's a beautiful, brilliant blue, it works perfectly, and it's totally dashed any hope I had of moving to a less ghetto-riffic apartment building when my lease is up. I haven't named the car yet, but I think I will. I'm open to suggestions, all.
I'm in the process of getting more recent photographs put onto the site. The current batch are a little outdated, as was hammered home when I put up a casual picture of myself from the Japan trip and some folks out there in internet-land had their minds thoroughly blown that I could have...ahem...expanded my borders so suddenly, not realizing it was no lipid blitzkrieg that had taken place, but rather a sparsely-chronicled, slow conquest. Also, I no longer look all of 16 when I'm clean-shaven. Now I look 23...
I'm still losing weight, though, so hey--no harm, no foul. Except for my ego, which felt like President Taft must have felt when he special-ordered a bathtub for his huge Commander-in-Chief butt.
One of the pictures below is a recent photo of me. One is a Mexican dwarf matador. The third is an old Asian man in New Orleans warding off his rescuers, courtesy of my questionable sense of humor, fond memories of "Street Fighter," and MS Paint.
Posted by patrick at 09:35 PM | Comments (3)