Proto-Romantic philosophers and so-bad-it's-a-masterpiece yuri. You cannot get any more 'Me' than this.

A scene from Philosophy Club a couple of weeks ago:

Girl (name withheld since we're not on especially good terms and I don't want to be a total jerk to her over the Internet): *says something about Kannazuki no Miko*

Me: Oh, hey, I just finished rewatching that show! It's not really very good, but I have a bit of affection for it for reasons unrelated to its objective quality.

Girl: Such as?

Me: I'm not always entirely sure why, but in some ways I like the characters a lot, even Chikane given the extreme situations in which she has to make decisions. Of course, they're not perfect by any means.

Girl: Well...I mean, what Chikane did was certainly, on some levels, wrong.

Me: Oh, definitely. That's part of why she did it.

Girl: Yeah. I mean, just think of it in Kantian terms: What if everybody raped their girlfriend in an attempt to incite her to violence so that she'd destroy and recreate the world?

Me: I...I think that the categorical imperative, here, has to be parsed to the level on which not everybody is in a position where that would have the intended effect even if it was done 'correctly'. If it's possible to commit sex crimes correctly, which it isn't, by definition.

Girl: Are you a Kantian?

Me: Kantianism plus some virtue/duty ethics, yes.

Girl: Well, okay, how about...

Me: How about if everybody was the Lunar Priestess and acted as Chikane did? I feel like that's the correct categorical imperative analysis to use here.

Girl: Then it wouldn't be Kannazuki no Miko, dipshit.

Me: It wouldn't be the categorical imperative either.

Best philosophy club or greatest philosophy club?

The Law takes cyborg bear heroes very seriously.

This is a disclaimer to BEARsen, a kids' cartoon about a Swedish cyborg bear superhero that my friend Vita and I have long been trying to make happen.

BEARsen is a work of fiction. Some characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is not only not coincidental, but probably intended to be insulting as well. The creators of BEARsen abide by two natural laws—the law of awesome and the law of comedy. Any use of other scientific laws, including but not limited to the mass-energy relation, dominated convergence theorem, Euler-Maclaurin formula, Knuth up-arrow notation, Hempel’s raven, Drake equation, Maxwell diagrams, rank-nullity theorem, central dogma, Westermarck effect, maternal effect dominant embryonic arrest, modern evolutionary synthesis, Curry’s paradox, the Witch of Agnesi, the golden ratio, the law of equivalent exchange, Boyle’s law, Hoyle’s rules, Robert’s rules, house rules, rule of law, and punctuated equilibrium, serves only to enhance the awesomeness or funniness of the events in BEARsen and should not be construed as an endorsement of scientific education as a path to Epic Win. BEARsen is not affiliated with any church, synagogue, mosque, temple, shrine, shul, cathedral, basilica, monastery, abbey, nunnery, gurdwara, madrassa, stupa, hermitage, priory, friary, pagoda, convent, meetinghouse, jinja, or longhouse, except for the First Church of the Blessed St Bob of Hackensack in Mombassa, Kenya. Side effects of watching too much BEARsen may include headache, nausea, vomiting, death, dizziness, stomach pain, acid reflux, cardiac arrhythmia, mild heart explosions, headache, varicose veins, darkened stool, darkened soul, lycanthropy, trucanthropy, arteriosclerosis, haemorrhoids, spontaneous loss of virginity, mild discomfort, vampirism, susto, gender impermanence, sugar high, more vomiting, 401 errors, fallen armpits, Zod’s Disease, spontaneous combustion, flaming ninjas, fair use doctrine, Dogma 95, inverted cranium, electric guitars, por speling, colon cancer, apocalyptic prophecies, apoplectic prophecies, Tony Danza, speaking in a badly done German accent, a desire to dance the Virginia Reel, explosive diarrhoea, implosive diarrhoea, a desire to add increasingly more ridiculous symptoms to a list, St Robert Bellarmine, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, headache, warts, flatulence, demonic possession, wandering skin, cranial inversion, fin rot, Dakka, seasonal allergies, null pointer exceptions, sleep crime, listening to non-stop Japanese electronica, need to shout the word ‘BEAR’ when it comes up in conversation, thinking that you’re good at Guitar Hero to impress others, More Dakka, headache, stomach-ache, nosebleed, horniness, hysteria siberiana, desire to have sex with Ingmar Bergman, exploding uvula syndrome, a desire to take over the world using eight reprogrammed robot masters, spontaneous regaining of virginity, the ‘dancing sushi’, flying ball rot, scarlet devil compaction, abscessed animus, atheism, theism, headache, erectile dysfunction, projectile dysfunction, volatile malted milk impoundments, infections of the crescent of Gianuzzi, isles of Langerhans, crypts of Lieberkühn, canal of Gugier, circle of Willis, area of Cohnheim, pyramids of Malpighi, antrum of Highmore, spaces of Fontana, cistern of Pecquet, angle of Ludwig, Scarpa’s triangle, Gower’s tract, Goll’s column, pouch of Douglas, convolutions of Broca, and jelly of Wharton, sudden infertility, sudden fecundity, Tanizaki Yukari-sensei, need to shout the word ‘BEAR’ when it doesn’t come up in conversation, headache, convulsions, flying ball rot, artificial insemination, temporary insanity, permanent insanity, hilariously ill-plotted shōjo, bone-crunching zombie carnage, Godless liberals, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, and mild rash. The creators are not responsible for any loss of life, limb, face, friends, enemies, infrastructure, faith in the human race, ammunition, political goodwill, or the God of Diodorus Siculus that watching BEARsen may cause you to incur.

 

So yeah.

Book Review: Escape to Hell and Other Stories

There comes a time in every great dictator's life when he puts pen to paper and writes a series of quasi-philosophical, Gonzo short stories that address themes of urban alienation, the pharmacisation of emotional problems, family dilemmas, and the flatness of a globalised world, which then get published as a proper, bound, English-language book, with a foreword by former White House Press Secretary and United States Senator Pierre Salinger.

Well, actually, no, that is not true. That only applies to Muammar al-Qaddafi, the David Bowie of modern tyrants, who wrote Escape to Hell and Other Stories in the early 1990s, one of the better (or less horrifically godawful) periods of his rule over the Great Socialist Libyan Arab People's State of the Masses. Qaddafi apparently was trying, at the time, to reinvent himself as a serious, if deliberately unpalatable to Western post-Enlightenment sensibilities, political 'wise man' along the lines of Sayyid Qutb or Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Escape to Hell was his Eoineen of the Birds, an intended sally of the political into realms of serious cultural production, and what a quixotic sally it is.

Pierre Salinger, who wrote the foreword for Qaddafi's short-story collection, is of course the famed reporter-turned-Kennedy Administration official-turned-appointed Senator from California-turned-reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist worryingly reminiscent of Maniwa from Paranoia Agent. With his gushing attitude towards the work, Salinger betrays either an excessively loose adherence to his own culture's political mores (such as representative democracy, an independent judiciary, minority rights, or the rule of law), poor literary taste unfortunate given his apparent distant relation to the author of Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, or both. I'm going to go with both, for now, and get on to the bulk of the Colonel's work.

Escape to Hell's title story is one of the few with anything like a recognisable plot, although it is really more like a broad-strokes historical fable describing the urbanisation of Arab/North African culture in the modern age, a process of which the author disapproves. Thematically it is similar in this respect to a certain subset of classic Westerns, though I do not doubt that the author and, for instance, John Wayne would fall in hate at first sight. It is by no means badly-written--it is spare and has a certain grim elegance similar to that of the desert that Qaddafi calls home--and its themes, unlike the themes of pretty much everything else in the Qaddafi ouevre, can be reasonably defended as serious literary explorations of alienation and the demysitification of the world.

After this, the only part of the book that can really be classified as a story, Qaddafi abandons plot, characters, dialogue, and the other markers of narrative writing in favour of a more stream-of-conscious, almost Gonzo style, with which he tells the stories of, among other things, his own childhood, a shady pharmacist in Benghazi who moonlights as a drug dealer (it is clear that Qaddafi was under the influence of this gentleman's wares when he wrote about him), Operation El Dorado Canyon (though only in passing), and a family of Touaregs that he claims to know but which may well be yet another surprising use of actual fiction in this ostensible short-story collection.

Escape into Hell is not a good book in the conventional sense, but it is an interesting book and at least not as horribly written and utterly unengrossing as many other tyrants' screeds, such as Qaddafi's own non-fictional (in the same way that Escape into Hell is fictional, which is to say not very) Green Book. The foreword reveals worrying things about Pierre Salinger, the title story reminds one somewhat of a desert Charles Portis albeit one who is phoning it in, and the rest of the book is useful for its glimpse into the mind and self-justifications and rationalisations of the man whose name is so commonly followed by '--must go now' in the news these days.

Also, 'Pierre Salinger, who wrote the foreword for Qaddafi's short-story collection' is the second most surprising-even-to-me phrase I have written to-day, after 'Unleash nerd rage: Target: Neil Gaiman'.

A poem for Lent: Parts XXXIV-L of I-known-not-what

XXXIV.

Diesel’s scent, warm, billowing

wrapped up in its own thing like an identity

wafts over a tangled country

like a chessboard

The water, the swamp, the trees

the housing blocks, the baseball

diamonds, the post-industrial lots

and haze, crash together

mingled crazily and without form, without

            lot or consequence

Something unearthly, something

            less than everyday yet

            in this world, totally so

            totally there.

Electrical supercharged on

towards Connecticut, the train

charges along the twisted scope

of the sound-shore.

The sky is blue, too blue

            as if smiling

it looks to scorn the shade and cool

of the sombre trails of illusory

half-substantial draperies

—As the damasked robes

            of a wandering ghost.

XXXV.

Returning to the town

of the green-on-the-whitesward

            O bells clanging

            for compline!

The sun crashes down

            whitely, whitely

—Over an edge

            serrated, separated

A human work of

common spaces and block-jagged

                        lines.

A poem for Lent: Parts XVII-XXXIII of NANI DESU KA?!

XVII.

Now it’s sunset

it’s springtime

almost, and in sunset-beams

the cat’s curled up

on the mattress asleep.

From the cold

insulated

without penitence

or need to repent

his pre-Adamite depth.

Still chilly but

with snow now gone

paving crazy in

thawing streets

the wind is a blessing.

In the wind’s

benediction

the record of the spring

wind is the record

of the autumn wind.

Spring and autumn

the seasons for norms

the months with neither

beach-holidays nor

ski-resort-holidays.

Winter and summer

the seasons for Norns

one gone one not

realised but wanting

to be frozen.

Stamp up and down

now it’s cold rock-hard

now it’s soft soil

waiting for the

gardener’s hand.

XVIII.

There is an unveiling of svelte loveliness throughout the town.

Without asking, simply look and watch as the spring air lights up.

There are no fireflies yet, not for several months in these parts.

But even so the sudden lightness into the evening bravely blazes.

A poem for Lent: Parts I through XVI of I-know-not-how-many.

Yes, this is indeed what I am doing for Lent. I'm going to add to it every day between now and Easter. This is what I have so far.

Lencten Tide

By Nathan Turowsky

I.

Reluctant eyes watched

            Through the skies’ frames and the snowmelt

                        on the Holyoke Range

            come

            Parnassus.

Turbulence of reality unveils its greyness

Under putative silence of spanning stone.

Eye of God to eye of man

Off the waves two worlds connect.

Something’s secret behind the nerves

There—Deep, deeply.

The ground is yet white

It is an underskirt layer

That is green.

Red banded wings

            set out over still water

Not the deep river and not

            the cold Quabbin

Under a quivering cast of stratus

As they would in the golden world.

In Kendrick Park

The nudity of the trees stands suddenly

Over earth’s similar nudity

In front of the pitched roofed Capes.

From remaining ecstasy of snow

Brush buds carmine-purple

Standing along the highway

                                    tin soldiers.

Light come down

            as love is

            wont

So that on

            the high-flung

            mont

With the joy

            of dancing

            colts

We may catch

            its florid

            bolts.

II.

Once my heart made a sound

Like a little starling nested

            in the wall, not reaching

            down into the hollow…

Not here not there here everywhere

Kindness, space of the eye.

Dear God, I haven't posted anything to this blog in three weeks.

Oh, well. Have some SHEENmazu YoSHEENo to make up for it.

 

 

So, let’s talk about Edo women writers.

In my class on Japanese women writers, we are now into the Edo period. The Edo period, which lasted from 1600 to 1868, was the worst time to be a woman in Japan maybe ever. First of all, education was completely segregated. This is not uniquely bad by itself, but in this case the main textbook for women, Onna Daigaku, contained such gems as ‘to you your husband should be as Heaven itself; you must love and serve him with fear and trembling, lest you call down upon yourself celestial castigation’. The dominant political ideology was a bizarre form of Confucianism in which women were literally perceived as walking wombs, and one of the government’s slogans (the ‘yes we can!’ of its day, almost) was ‘danson johi’, which means ‘revere men; despise women’.

However, in this horrible, horrible environment, there were a few really awesome ladies who survived and even thrived to produce really amazing literature. I’m thinking here particularly of three women (those who we’ve covered extensively in my class), all of whom I really admire the Hell out of for putting up with this bullshit, both in their lifetimes and after their deaths (no women ever appear in anthologies of Edo literature, despite the output of these three and others).

• Arii Shokyuu (1714-1781). Satirical poet and sometime travel writer. She was a third- or fourth-generation member of Basho’s poetry school and is known mainly for inflicting some of the worst (by which I mean BEST) puns on the Japanese language in the history of its literary tradition. May or may not have been an actual nun; certainly lived like one in a lot of ways. Only female Edo writer to attain some measure of popular acclaim and ‘respectability’ (as a writer, at least). Author of Record of the Autumn Wind. Compare: Mark Twain, Bill Bryson, Jan Morris.
• Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825). Political philosopher, in her own cultural context considered extremely traditionalist and conservative, but in a broader context also advocated such things as imprisoning large-scale merchants for being parasitic middlemen who oppressed the workers. Religiously traditionalist and nationalistic; positioned herself as opposed to politically conventional and economic rationalism (as it was perceived at the time). Had a friendship with Takizawa Bakin that went bad when he refused to apologise for being a ‘simple fool’. Author of Solitary Thoughts. Compare: Dorothy Day, Christopher Lasch, Franziska von Karma.
• Ema Saiko (1787-1861). Refined and highly educated and formalist poet, with command of Japanese, Chinese, and possibly Dutch. A dyed-in-the-wool hikkikomori and total daddy’s girl; her father, by all accounts, was awesome enough to completely deserve it. She is now mainly known (unfairly so) for getting NTR’ed by Rai San’yo. Really liked The Tale of Genji kind of a lot. Wrote poems about having to refuse her little sister alcohol. Author of Breeze through Bamboo. Compare: Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rossetti.

I really like and admire all three of these ladies but Arii Shokyuu is probably my favourite. Here are two of her groaningly awful (by which I mean AWESOME) pun-couplets:

Why is my hat frazzled now…?

—The autumn wind. (TL: this is a pun in Japanese)

So I turn back to look once more,

For I am a woman, at Mt Kagami. (TL: kagami means mirror)

And here is a slightly longer poem by either her or one of her compadres, it’s not quite clear:

A robe of mist

Soaked at the hem

Princess Saho

With the coming of spring

Stands pissing.

So, pretty much, when I grow up, I want to be a coolface-tier haikai writer and travelogue author just like her.

Chizu revisited

So, a few hours ago, I had a discussion with Maya about Aoi Hana. In this discussion, one interesting thing that we had decided to do was to reopen the topic of Chizu, the character who many of you will remember from my disgusted rant about her and how despicable she is a while back. In this discussion, we discounted a lot of our previous assumptions about the character in favour of a new set of theories that I now feel not only explain her better but also serve to place her as a character type in the history of both Japanese and world literature.

Our conclusion was that Chizu, when you strip her of the cultural and genre trappings, is in fact a remarkably similar character to Dom Claude Frollo, the antagonist from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Discount for a second the Disney adaptation of Hugo’s story: the Frollo in the book is a less horrible but also even more absurdly pathetic figure. There are three main bases for our comparison here:

1. Lust (maybe actual love, to be fair to Frollo and Chizu, but given the circumstances this seems a little less likely, especially in Frollo’s case) for a young girl as an initial motivating factor for both characters, though la Esmeralda and Fumi, as people, have very little in common.
2. A profound lack of understanding of cause and effect, and the fact that actions tend to have specific consequences, which leads the characters to act on their rather questionable motivation in ways that have a profoundly negative impact on the stories’ protagonists. In Frollo’s case, what he fails to understand is the sheer political and spiritual inappropriateness of his attachment; in Chizu’s case, it is the legal and social inappropriateness, in addition to the effect that it is having on Fumi, who is prone to attachment and separation issues.
3. A form of cowardice that causes both characters to, when confronted with the consequences of their behaviour, spin excuses that, while not false, are presented in a context either indicating outright (in Frollo’s case) or heavily implying (in Chizu’s) that their main desire is to make the problem go away without having to actually address it.

Item 2 in this list is interesting in Chizu’s case because Aoi Hana is a Japanese text and ‘not understanding cause and effect’ is an extremely, extremely common hamartia or heroic flaw in the storytelling tradition of Japanese Buddhism. So this doesn’t really make Chizu any inherently worse than, for example, the mad abbot from Aozukin by Akinari Ueda, though, like Mitsuko from Tanizaki’s Manji, she is presented a little more negatively, since Aozukin is a Buddhist parable outright whereas Manji and Aoi Hana are not. In the context of the story it’s perfectly appropriate and correct to see that Chizu is a rather awful person who could probably benefit greatly from having her head examined. But my initial opinion about her—that she is a manipulative sociopath—gives her too little credit morally and too much credit intellectually. She’s a rather dull person in some ways, needlessly brutish in other ways, and, I now think, a far cry from the sort of wicked mastermind that I initially perceived her as.

Happy St Valentine's Day

So, St Valentine's Day has come round again, and in the spirit of Christian martyrdom I'd like to take a moment to reflect on all of the people who were persecuted and killed who do NOT have the good honour to be remembered with saccharine candy hearts and cards featuring Renaissance-era putti misindentified as cherubim, Cupid, or both. People like St Elmo, who had his guts torn out on a windlass; St Eulalia, who was deliberately frozen to death in the snow; St Eustachius, who was baked to death; St Lawrence, who was grilled to death (not the same as baking); St Agatha, who...no, you don't want to know what happened to St Agatha.

This isn't to say that taking any of these people and turning their feast day into a day of love is at all inappropriate; in fact, given the context of what allegedly happened to Bishop Valentine this actually makes a lot of sense. But it is to say that there are many things at play here that he would not have appreciated: The implication that if you're not in a physical relationship there is something inherently wrong with you; the pressure to buy specific types of gifts for people who may want something more lasting or more useful or both; the bizarre misappropriation of both Christian and pagan imagery in ways that are almost as bad as Neon Genesis Evangelion just less obvious because more familiar. While obviously the nature of the Christian saint from whom the day takes its name is not precisely relevant or applicable any more, it should be remembered that the man did more than just perform weddings in catacombs; he was somebody whose legend is of one who supported love and mutual social support between spouses, families, friends, and colleagues, all over the known world.

This St Valentine's Day, if you have a husband, wife, partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, beau, or consort, treat them as specifically and individually specially as they deserve. Also tell your friends you care about them, call your parents if you don't live with them [and are still on speaking terms], and if you run across anybody in need and there's anything you can do to help them, do. (Also, eat chocolate.)

This is a day about love.