Grimace

I've been fixing my jaw in a frown for so long that my teeth themselves have developed a dull ache and my jowls have grown minute creases. I've witnessed the cycle of birth and death over the course of these months, the ending of a great many things, and the transformations of aging; my face has grown ever so slightly more similar to my father's. I've become ever so slightly more familiar with the ineffable operations of the cosmos. . . which to Sisyphus might be conceived as nothing more than a singular enduring grimace. Yet:
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
I am one step closer to the finish line, and yes, jaw set, I am happy.


I'm still attempting to mentally unpack some movies I've seen recently:The Rules of Attraction, Volver and Babel. It's hard to discern any thematic commonalities between them, yet, in separate modalities, each of them has been on my mind.

In Dark Trees

In Dark Trees
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

I spent the weekend under a canopy of shadows, grilling meat over a fire and avoiding showers. I came back, and my iBook underwent a logic board failure. This seems to be endemic with this particular model (and the one before it, and the one after), and now it only functions with a C-clamp pressing it into my desk.

Tick-tock

I thought seriously about discontinuing the blog. There's so much more important writing to be done, and very little time. I'm not sure how much more I'll be updating it. But nevertheless. . .

My mortality clock slides forward, ka-chunk as it reaches the next notch. Book 395 was Vox by Nicholson Baker. And again, ka-chunk. Novel 394 was Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Why did I wait until I was finished with 394 to mention 395? It's long been a policy of mine not to mention sex on this blog, and Vox concerns nothing that is not infused with sex. So, you'll find no comment here about it.

But I don't intend to comment seriously on Cryptonomicon either. My response to the book over the past several weeks have already been sufficiently interwoven into my thoughts that it seems simply tedious to isolate out commentary. But one thing that I noticed was that this work, along with Empire of the Sun both employ Chinese and Japanese characters, but only imbue the Japanese characters with any interior dialogue or subjectivity. There seems to be a Western proclivity to read Japanese modernity back into time, perhaps allowing convivial feelings toward a fellow post-industrial society and coldwar ally to color historical memory. It really does seem that although the 1940s American media tended to demonize the 'Japs' as brainwashed, bloodthirsty and 'unfunny' (<-actual terms used by Life Magazine), contemporary Anglo-American writers find the Japanese mind a relatively comfortable place to situate their imaginations.

Two questions:
1. How 'accurate' can these imaginings be? (Are we just inventing and projecting?)
2. What would it take for us to be able to extend this appreciation of human subjectivity to all humans?

Tick-tock. OK. Time for bed.

Ignoring the elephant in the living room

There's something for selective amnesia or strategic episodes of blindness. Life, and modern society could not, would not function without the ability to ignore the basest, most hideous implications of our lifestyle and social system.
Perhaps this is what Gus Van Sant had visualized when he made Elephant?

The ivory tower

jiyugaoka-watchtower
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

The world is constituted by text and numbers. By text, I mean interpretations and representations; numbers on the other hand signify standards and measurements. I've spent the last 10 years focused almost exclusively on the former, but I think it's about time I turned my attention toward the latter.

Another thought: misunderstandings principally occur not because our answers contradict, but rather because we are intent on confronting different questions. I can't help thinking this is somehow fundamental to the problems between China and Japan; one side may ask how horrible Japan's war conduct was, while the other may be concerned with the question of whether Japan was worse than the imperialist powers, or even the Chinese Communist Party. Of course that's all unspoken, but it operates as a subtext to all the meandering discussions over numbers killed, numbers raped, numbers subjected to experimentation. It's funny how those arguments also reduce to an objectivity-subjectivity dilemma; more irreconcilable text and numbers.
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A metaphor for the banality of nationalism that just hit me: This is my flag. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Private battles, private triumphs

I considered long and hard whether or not to post up a presentation I recently gave at a family reunion, because it's intensely personal, and at times neither logical or methodologically rigorous. It's a product of my private mental battle with the field of Japanese history, and my own family. But personal as it is, this is where I stand on Japan, China and History.

I've been running. Recently, I shelled out for a pair of new running shoes, not the 'heavy man's running shoes' that have been weighing my feet down like squishy anchors. These are the new Asics DS-XI which seem to approximate a beloved pair of trainers I had in Japan, but which seem to have been discontinued.
I'm a shadow that haunts these idyllic streets. When I run, I trace the same paths as every other suburb-dweller, but only when they're asleep or away at work. Nobody sees me, and I see nobody. Today, I clocked a mile at 5:31, my fastest time in 14 years. And nobody saw :P

Burgeoning on the bough

Backyard pear tree
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Summer deepens in NJ; cucumbers are ready, and seem to grow an inch a day. Meanwhile, pears are languidly plumping themselves up on the bough. I can scarcely wait until September.

Novel 396 was intended to be Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, but I was forced to abort after only the first, "The Good Anna." I was much more interested in Truman Capote's dazzlingly wicked Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. There's a half century between these two female character studies, and also a certain gender and orientation gap between Capote and Stein. Not surprisingly, there's not much to see in common between the two. In one sense, the stern, German scolding Anna, would be quite the match for the bewitching, impetuous, and ultimately damaged Holiday Golightly. Why do I feel like I've met various versions of Holly somewhere? And why does it seem like Murakami Haruki's various female characters tend to bear much in common with her? There's a silky dose of Sputnik Sweetheart in there. And perhaps Wild Sheep Chase as well. What is it with male authors and their fixation with call-girls? (I'm not fishing for a response actually, I know the answer instinctively.)

Stein on the other hand, is a bully with prose. The originator of the slightly deranged "a rose is a rose is a rose," she makes it her mission to bring the world back into our language, which has become so comfortably empty that we no longer see or smell the "rose" anymore. Her three lives thus are filled with the air of everyday real life, with all its cumbersome verisimillitude.

One more comparison before I sleep. Park Chan-wook's Old Boy is a pale shadow next to Lady Vengeance. Same auteur, same obsession with revenge, same arty cinematography. Yet, "The Monster" and Geumja are such completely different creatures. I won't reiterate my feelings about Lady Vengeance except to say that it has heart, humor and pathos despite its viciousness. I couldn't help thinking of Old Boy as lying within the precincts of the Hollywood "thriller" genre where an elaborate 'game' mysteriously unfolds between two competing males intent on bettering each other. As a 'game', it seemed emotionally thin despite its bewildering complexity, including wave upon wave of deception, (overly)dramatic revelation and the plot's strange reliance on hypnotism and suggestion. Silly and nightmarish at the same time.