Obel

That European award committee "that matters" announced Big O is getting the big P about 5 minutes ago. It's safe to say this took people by surprise. It's also hard to see this as anything other than a giant big fuck you to W. I mean Al Gore was clearly well-qualified and he had to share his award. It could also be a prayer or an appeal to keep the drive for multilateralism alive. It's probably both. But still, guys, you couldn't wait a year or two, or 4 or 8 or 12? It's one thing to care and change your posture on all these things when you start, but what about after a while. Will he still want to a chair a committee when he's 64? Did they really just give him an award for being the first sitting president to say we weren't going to go it alone as a policy? Are they just giving the american's an award for not disappointing them again (and because they won't give any Americas else the Obel for Lit anytime soon)?

I tend to think the silliness and randomness of their award-giving (no offense Herta, I love your work) is symptomatic of and furthering the slide toward strangeness and irrelevance. One day someone with balls is going to stand up and just kick those people out or set up a group to replace them. People get old and stodgy, so I'll be the nobel committee will be like this for another 50 years. Then again, we did all of a sudden get a black president, so anything's possible.

美國不是我們的家 - 野火集 龍應台

This more appropriately belongs in Hard Drafts, but whatever yo. Parts 2 and 3 shortly, I'm lazy.

America isn't our home
Wildfire
Long Yingtai

Part 1

I received lots of letters in the mail. An older reader wrote, “Every time I read one of your essays my heart starts racing and it won’t stop. My tears start falling and they won’t let up.” A college student wrote, “Before we all end up apathetic, please tell us what we can do for Taiwan, our so-called ‘motherland’?” An high school student had this to say, “Anything we do won’t make a difference anyway. After I graduate I’m just going to leave for America.”

That young people are angry and pissed and older people are sad and in tears certainly isn’t due to the quality of my essays. For people who care to notice, this outpouring of emotion reveals two things. One, the seriousness of the situation facing us today. The pathetic nature of the environment we live in isn’t something only the servants of the upper class are complaining about, they’ve become a problem for everyone. Two, is the feeling of powerlessness individuals have. If this society had any useful ways of allowing people to express their opinions and see their demands met, things wouldn’t have reached the explosive level they are at now. They wouldn’t be looking to a trivial bunch of essays to express their anger.

The second issue is much more serious than the first. No matter how much the environment deteriorates or how complex are problems become, if people take the appropriate actions and believe they can make a difference, they will continue to forge ahead successfully. If on the other hand, our problems aren’t that serious but people believe they have no ability to change things, their frustration will just build up inside them waiting to explode.

Six months ago a young girl who loved reading went over and killed her neighbor because she was always reading loudly and disturbing her. There’s obviously no excuse for violence, but let’s look at the causes here. If all this girl had to do was call the police and they would come and tell the girl to stop, couldn’t we have prevented this murder? Even if she called over and over begging the police to stop her and they didn’t do anything, and she went and pleaded with the other women to stop reading over and over to no avail, couldn’t she just have moved? But seriously, where in Taipei can you find any guarantee of peace and quiet? With the annoyance day after day and night after night and no reasonable chance to change things, what was she supposed to do?

After Socrates was condemned to death he decided against breaking out of prison. He said, “When I’m faced with a system I’m not happy with I have two choices: I can either leave the country or I can try to improve it by taking the appropriate legal actions. I have no right to destroy the entire system just to fight against it.”

迪斯科

I sometimes imagine that people will ask me why Avril Lavigne is marketable worldwide (China) and a group like Panic at the Disco is not. Of course no one ever asks me this type of question, but I digress. I mean, what's the real difference here? They're both pale enough to be part of the Twilight cast. They're both young and interested in making lots of cash by being tools of corporate machines. Is it really just because Avril is a girl and is (sometimes) blonde?

Let's take an Avril song. Girlfriend:

Hey, hey,
You, you,
I don't like your girlfriend,
No way, no way,
Think you need a new one,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I could be your girlfriend,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I know that you like me,
No way, no way,
No its not a secret,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I want to be your girlfriend.

Ok, maybe that's not fair. Let's look at a verse.


I can see the way,
I see the way you look at me,
And even when you look away,
I know you think of me,
I know you talk about me all the time,
Again and again,
So come over here,
And tell me what I wanna hear,
Better yet, make your girlfriend dissappear,
I don't wanna hear you say her name ever again (again and again and again).

I tried.

Now, let's take something like London beckoned songs about money written by machines by Panic at the Disco

Chorus:

Well we're just a wet dream for the webzine
Make us it
Make us hip
Make us scene
Or shrug us off your shoulders
Don't approve a single word that we wrote

and a verse:

I'm burning and I'm blacking my lungs
Boy, you know it feels good with fire back on your tongue
If you talk, you better walk
You better back your shit up
With more than good hooks
While you're all under the gun
Start talking "a sensationalist"
Oh, he's slightly clever to just a certain extent.
Oh, keep quiet! Let us sing like the doves
Then decide if it's done with purpose or lack thereof

I like to think of this as Hemmingway syndrome: pieces of culture A that are the easiest to assimilate and comprehend form an disproportionate share of country B's cultural consumption and understanding of A. To combat this kind of situation there are two strategies. One, decent language education. If your goals in teaching language are mere small your results will be small (Hemmingway readers, at best). Communication and reading at the level of air-traffic controllers will be possible. A boring world. If you want to pique interest you have to engage a culture and that's done by giving students the opportunity to deal with a culture and language as they are. Don't hold your breath. Two, translation. Translation can translate meaning and it can translate style. In the chinese translation world it seems that the translation of meaning placed in a chinese framework was and is dominant. This does not have to be the case. You're not going to get hip-hop into chinese by making it read like Mandopop. You have to bring it into chinese as chinese hip-hop and this will inevtiably involve dirty words like 'slang' and 'dialect.' The gap that needs to be bridged is one of register, appropriateness and form. It's the reason Shakespeare suffers a fate far worse than Homer in my opinion. Fortunately Homer was lucky enough to be written in Greek, meaning we feel free to update him. We can bring it into proper modern registers both high and low. Shakespeare on the other hand is condemned to remain a museum piece, our new latin. Shakespeare doesn't have to be updated to be Save the Last Dance 2 (I'm looking at you Julia Stiles), and it doesn't have to be silly and deep for sake's sake (I'm looking at you Ethan Hawke, and Baz Luhrman). It just needs to be touched up so it can be absorbed in a real way and not as an assignment.

Basically I'm blaming the internationalization of English for a lot, but the problems start at home. Silliness and old conventions have to be debated and challenged. If your enemies are old, you might just have to wait a few years and let them die (no offense to the recent passing of William Safire). The older generations who grew up mid 20th century don't share our convictions on a lot of things. They were schooled with the previous generations knowledge, not the things being discovered and debated from the 50s to 90s. America went pretty fast from a Reagan /Bush country to an Obama country with gay marriage and the people in power positions aren't necessarily your natural allies.

Dealing with reality is good. The closer you get to dealing with the heart of things the better.

Old does not equal high register. It just equals old. Fart jokes from Aristophanes better not come into English as a bunch of logos (unless you're British and your jokes still tend to resemble Victorian English from time to time, I guess that's what happens when you lack black culture or a real counterculture). And not all Western literature should read like Fu Lei. The only reason we even have that kind of translation is because of 方言 suppression, but that's a whole other post.

alemán

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090928/od_nm/us_westerwelle_english_odd

Guido, I haven't been this excited about German language policy since the orthographic reform of 1996. Danke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_spelling_reform_of_1996

陰影 新井一二三 心井 新井

陰影
新井一二三
心井 新井

Shadows
Xinjing Yiersan (Arai Hifumi)
Xinjing Xinjing (My heart)

Shadows

In the film "Pretty Woman", Richard Gere says to Julia Roberts, "I paid my therapist a million dollars to be able to tell my father 'I hate you." I didn't spend that much money, (maybe about half that), so maybe that's why to this day I still can't say that same line to my mother.

Obviously, movies are different from real life and America is different from Japan. If I really did tell my mother I hated her I don't think it would solve anything; it would probably just cause more problems. So, I just can't say it.

When I first went and saw my jewish therapist it was to deal with my problem dealing with people. But, it wasn't long before the problem became about my mother. From that point on, once or twice a week for a year, I would tell him my memories of my mother from my youth.

Whether all that energy, time and money spent really did anything is hard to say. Also, my parting with that therapist in the end turned out to be less than amicable. But, some of the things he said really did help me understand myself better.

For example, he once said, "People who like writing or drawing from a very young age often have a very difficult reality around them to deal with. So, they often escape to another world where no one can interefere with anything."

I've liked writing ever since I was little. Thinking about my own situation when I was younger, what he says is about right. After I grew up, I kept on writing. These past few years I've written mostly using foreign languages.

A few years ago in Hong Kong one of my books was published and I was invited onto a talk show. The host asked me, "Why don't you write in Japanese instead of writing in Chinese?"

I immediately thought of what that jewish therapist said and replied, "Because my mother can't read it." The host thought I didn't want to my mother to see the details of personal life, but in reality, I wasn't concerned with her reading any specific part. I just wanted a free space to be able breathe, to be able think.

To be honest, my trips around the world to different countries, all these years living abroad, was really just to escape my mother. It was about finding my own free space. It's just that my mother is much tougher than me. One time, when I was living in Canada, I got into some serious trouble. When my spirits were at their low point she called and told me, "Don't come home." After that, my self-imposed exile became banishment.

Around that time I was at a bar, and an older philosophy professor asked me, "How long are you planning on staying here?" I was little tipsy, and because he was a little old, I strangely decided to be honest, "Until my mother is dead." The professor smiled and said, "You're still young, so maybe you don't know, but, your kind of situation is quite common."

It was probably about that time that I started writing about my mother. First I used English, then I switched to using Chinese. I never used Japanese to write about her though. It's not just I'm scared she'll see it, it's also that I just can't do it.

Last year I gave up my wandering existence of ten-plus years and headed home. I used my husband as an excuse for finally coming back. If God hadn't let me meet him in Hong Kong I'd probably still be wandering around the world.

I've granted myself a pardon to return home, but my mother hasn't said anything. She has, however, done something. When she does something she takes her time and oftentimes she gets you when you're not looking. Luckily, I'm quite used to this. My husband, on the other hand, was quite shocked at first. Later he started to say, "Your mother really is something. You should write a book about her."

I have thought about that before, but to describe a person, a person that close to you, there's not enough words. If I write a book and make it fictional, I suppose I'd be able to make her a very fleshed-out character and finally explore a woman who's had a huge influence over my life. Now isn't the time though; better to wait until she's passed away.

Nowadays I have my own home. In addition to my husband and my son, I also have a door to keep my mother from interefering with my life, or banishing me from Japan. Among her five children, I'm the only one to lead an completely independent life. My four brother and sister all live in houses she helped with, they all use money she gives to them.

Sometimes I have to see my mother. A few days ago I started to worry about how she would hurt me when I saw her. It was a vague, but certain feeling of dread. I remembered the feeling when I was younger where I always felt that shadow cast over me.

One day, to get out from under that shadow, I'm going to write about that shadow herself.

論習語

Have the cows come home yet?
牛回家了嗎

到牛回家的時候
Till the cows come home.

Why we don't expressions into different languages. They don't feel right and hence lose their power. Important things are always lost. Trying to save them is often the source of the problem of dealing with letting them go.

孤獨與瘋狂 郝譽翔

孤獨與瘋狂
郝譽翔


Loneliness and Madness
Hǎo​ Yù​xiáng​

http://news.chinatimes.com/Chinatimes/Philology/Philology-Coffee/0,3406,112009082000381+11051301+20090820+news,00.html


I really like Takeshi Kitano. A few days ago I went and saw "Achilles and the Tortoise. Only seven other people showed up to the matinee showing I attended. There in the darkness I cried my eyes out. I know this movie, and most of the other recent movies by Kitano, provoked a very mixed response, but I what can I say, I really like this film. I even loved its flaws. Even something's flaws can be part of it's appeal, like how his face won't stop twitching after he's been hurt.

Incredibly, there's a creator who can make me yearn for tolerance. This is probably the joy of being a reader. But, that's just my personal feeling. When I was in the theater, and the lights hadn't come up yet, I heard a guy get up and say to his friend in front of him, "I'm definitely going to fall asleep." They both nodded and yawned. Later, I heard couple of girls who were complaining as they walked out, "It's like a crazy person made this movie."

Sitting there with a face still wet with tears was more than a bit awkward. You would think that audeince at the Changchun theatre would be full of people who really liked movies, but their reaction was incredibly different than mine. Everybody piles into a little dark droom and for two hours develops a unique impression no one can guess at. The illusion that the projector brings about is like the director leading each person with a flashlight according to the darkness at the pit of their soul. Sometimes it really makes me think that watching a film is more solitary than reading, and maybe more sad.

I just remembered, I actually became acquainted with Kitano's work when I was a kid.

When I was in my first year of middle school my father took me to see Nagisa Oshima's "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence". That was the last time we went went to see a movie together. Even after I was older we still never went again. His take on "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" is something I'll never forget, with genuine shock he said, "This movie didn't even have a single woman in it!"

I still remember my father buying scalped tickets for the movie. Thinking back it's hard to imagine, but Oshima's film was full of violence. There wasn't a single open seat at two-story theater at Ximending. I had no idea it was an art film, and had no idea who the director was. Although I just stumbled into that film, when it was over it was like I was a new person. On the way home I just stared out window and didn't say a word. I was only thirteen then and I didn't know much about anything, but that movie set off something inside me. To this day I still don't know what it is about that movie that so moved me. I was so crazy for the movie that I went and saw it eleven times. I kept the story it was based on in the pocket of my school uniform for three years. I'd put my hand over it and get a strange feeling of relief. I memorized the details of that source material backwards and fowards: the culture clash of East and West, the symbolic meaning of rituals. Imagining I understood it all, I took it all in. It didn't hurt my impression of the film or lead actor Ryuichi Sakamoto's intensity.

That intensity makes me nostalgic. Kitano is also one of the leads in the film and his perfomance is no less impressive than Sakamoto's. Back then probably nobody knew, and I definitely didn't know, that that bald commander in film would one day become a famous director.

But, who cares if I didn't know? I'm nostalgic for that time when I didn't have any intellectual background or any reasons. I miss when I just had pure enjoyment. I didn't care about art or theory, I just wanted to sit in that dark room and watch people who lived in a world totally different from ours. If these days I still have some kind of romantic yearning for the past, it's probably just to sit in a packed theater. In that sealed off era, movies were the one light for our hearts.