Discovering that your finances are crumbling, even though you've gone halfway around the world to earn better money, is the sort of thing that fucks up your day. In fact, several days have been dampened by this revelation. I'm still going to Thailand, and I'm still paying the bills, but some of the bills back home will be relegated to "Later". Namely, my credit cards. Had I known the state of my financial disequilibrium I wouldn't have bought that "Introduction to Philosophy" on the internet a week ago, spending $80 in credit card magic money in the process.
Crumbling is perhaps too strong a word. I can get by, so don't worry all you worrisome folks. It looks like I won't be buying lunches at the combini anymore (except on special occasions, like when I'm too lazy or don't have the time to go home and prepare lunch). Today all my classes were cancelled because the students had exams, so I went home on the pretext of going to the post office and prepared myself a nice lunch. There's a neat trick that can be done with the rice cooker. I set it to turn on at 12:00, put in rice, water and chopped carrot, and then when I arrive for lunch it's all ready. The carrot was a tad soft though because it sat in the rice cooker after it had finished cooking, and the remaining heat mushed it. Must get green vegetables. I can see in the dark just fine (which is what carrots do for ya - but that may just be a myth propogated by the allies to trick the German pilots into eating too many carrots and pumpkins). Come to think of it, I've been eating carrots and pumpkins myself. Pumpkin is a very popular vegetable in Japan and is often served as a small side dish to a bento. Please note the absence of "box" after bento, as bento means box. So maybe I'm a German pilot or just in danger of getting jaundice.
With the rest of my day I read a few entries on BigDaikon.com, a JET website. One true story described a foreign teacher's experience with the police after a racist Japanese man jumped him. The cops were just as bad and wanted him to bow down to the man, who claimed that he was the victim. The teacher didn't submit though, and after hours of interrogation he was released from the police station when the punk-ass dropped the charges. Forgive my use of punk-ass, I just couldn't think of anything better. Maybe that's because the other rest of my day was spent trying to follow the extremely long strings of logic/illogic constructed by Foucault. That man makes a lot of references to French authors. It makes me think that my exposure is severely limited by reading in English. And I used to think that all the ideas were available in English through translation and synthesis.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
A leafy paradise
Yesterday we went to Ishiyamadera. Ishi means pebble, yama means mountain, dera means temple - so we visited the Temple of Pebble Mountain.
It's the season of leaf watching. This is an actual thing that Japanese people have a name for. The leaf-watching event - I don't know the name. Don't assume it's dull till you've seen the leaves in Japan. They're smaller and the colours are more intense than the leaves back home. It was really quite splendid as the Buddhist monks have devoted their lives to creating the proper setting for leaf-watching, which is essentially what they're doing by creating an architecture that's in proper harmony with nature. The paths among the trees are mossy, and old carved stones festoon the hillsides. Round the rugged rocks no ragged rascals ran, but lichens, mosses and rich, dark soil made a carpet or a living tapestry out of the ground. I've posted one picture of one small part of this temple complex, which runs up a mountainside and includes several structures, whose use and history I do not know and can only assume.
The ritual cleansing of the hands at the temple. (notice the fish in the pond!)
click on the pictures to enlarge them
I will post another picture when I get the opportunity, because these images are amazing.
It's the season of leaf watching. This is an actual thing that Japanese people have a name for. The leaf-watching event - I don't know the name. Don't assume it's dull till you've seen the leaves in Japan. They're smaller and the colours are more intense than the leaves back home. It was really quite splendid as the Buddhist monks have devoted their lives to creating the proper setting for leaf-watching, which is essentially what they're doing by creating an architecture that's in proper harmony with nature. The paths among the trees are mossy, and old carved stones festoon the hillsides. Round the rugged rocks no ragged rascals ran, but lichens, mosses and rich, dark soil made a carpet or a living tapestry out of the ground. I've posted one picture of one small part of this temple complex, which runs up a mountainside and includes several structures, whose use and history I do not know and can only assume.
The ritual cleansing of the hands at the temple. (notice the fish in the pond!)
click on the pictures to enlarge them
I will post another picture when I get the opportunity, because these images are amazing.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The Archaeology of Knowledge
In "The Archaeology of Knowledge", Foucault says that history has moved from the use of the documents as a means to the ends of a timeline, to the focus on the document as object and constitutive element of history itself. Documents are arranged into a monument which is the focus of history - the seriation, stratification and interfunctionality of the monument. Now this is a bold claim and one which threatens to pull history away from non-academics. Is a child in school practicing history when she tries to learn the chronology of 20th century European battles? Is a history textbook even a summary of history by this definiton? It would be not a tome containing history, but an element of history itself, it's content relegated to infantile significance through it's staid insistence on treating events as though they actually occurred. I realize that the view that there are actual concrete events which took place that can be storied and delineated is hopelessly old-fashioned and modernist, as opposed to post-modernist. I still appreciate that historical documents leave more gaps than they fill in, and I think Foucault's point that the gaps can be used as a tool of analysis (for example a lack of publishing following a document that warns of an oncoming disruption in economies, paper supplies, etc can be taken as evidence supporting the event) is quite brilliant. However I feel that he is flying at such lofty heights of abstraction that the phenomena of original interest are too far below him to be seen. They are obscured by the clouds. And his thesis brings up the question of who history belongs to? Is it solely in the domain of the academics? I could almost believe this, if there are fractious definitions of "history". Academic history being the high culture history, and common understand of history being the low-culture history. But what purpose would this serve except to establish a field which can only exist in academia? Perhaps there is a purpose. I shall read on.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
goodnight
as fitful night creeps darkly forward i drift toward my couchbed, my shamble-room strewn with the collected mess of a spent time. green tiles, curtains, cardboard Kleenex box and ironpill bottle enshrine me in verdure. i miss the grass. once i kissed the good grass goodnight, yet now my lips are lipless met, and kisses miss.
Friday, November 19, 2004
The Reading Dream-state
I’m riding on the train. In Spain. Or I wish I were riding on the train in Spain. Instead it’s rainy old Japan. Which is funny because there’s that rain train Spain rhyme. Maybe you think I hate Japan, now that I’m writing doggeral about it in my posts. But in fact, I like Japan. It’s just hard to reconcile my worklife with the experience I know is possible here. Possible, but just out of reach, at least during the weekdays. On weekends such as this I find myself rediscovering the pleasure I get from exploring a land that’s fresh and new to my senses. The whole land lies in possibility before me, only restricted to the Kansai region on weekends. I could travel to the Sea of Japan or to the Pacific on any given weekend, though I haven’t done this yet. My neighbour Colin visited Kobe on the Pacific coast just last weekend, and he went up a tower and looked out over the bay. That sounds like good fun to me.
Nishi Chu (my school) is my recurring nightmare, or perhaps it’s merely a dreamless immobility that brings no rest. This is how I feel some mornings when I wake up to go to Nishi Chu. My eyes and body are still tired, but it’s not sleep that will cure me. It’s the tantalus hope of not going to work. I haven’t yet had that cruel experience of waking up and thinking it’s the weekend, only to find it’s a workday. Come to think of it, when I was a boy it always happened the other way: I’d wake up on Saturday and think it was mid-week or think it Monday on a Sunday morning. Then the realization hits and it’s even better than knowing it’s the weekend. Now my bewildering sleeps come at odd times in the afternoon, when the office has cleared out and I’m sitting at my desk with nothing to do but read. My head is over the book, and the words of McLuhan begin to cluster like an impenetrable forest. I venture in, and passing each word, a silent tree that refuses to speak its meaning, I’m too entranced to realize I’m no longer awake. By then I’m in the midst of a forest of McLuhan’s mind and my own - my unconscious, unfettered mind - and I begin to see the meanings in such a strange and wonderful way. The insight that accompanies those problems I fall asleep to is complex beyond normal conscious imagining, and only a glimpse remains when I wake to the sound of a phone, ringing.
Cursed lucidity! Why won’t you retain the cipher of my recombinant dream-mind? Instead, seive-like only the granules of ideas remain. Spending my free moments - make that free hours – at school reading re-organizes my consciousness away from the everyday stream of consciousness and into a forced awareness. My mind keeps wanting to drift, unused as it now is to extended concentration, and as I force myself to continue reading I’m also forced to explore different ways of connecting to the material. Usually it’s depth connection – the engagement that McLuhan says is fostered by a youth of television. Then as my ability to maintain that understanding slackens it becomes a race. My eyes running over the page just faster than my ability to second-guess and misunderstand. It’s a forced understanding that must be McLuhan’s lineal textual engagement. A means of engagement suggested by the medium itself, by it’s unimodal sensory demands and tersely coded meaning. Heidegger, who struggled to contain the multiplicity of meanings in the written word would have a bone to pick with McLuhan. Like any great thinker McLuhan can sweep aside these inconsistencies as unknown, irrelevent, or merely obstacles in the way of his strident exposition.
I try to imitate this to gain confidence in my writing, however weak and random my expression. I have so much work to do. Please forgive this self-indulgent entry.
Nishi Chu (my school) is my recurring nightmare, or perhaps it’s merely a dreamless immobility that brings no rest. This is how I feel some mornings when I wake up to go to Nishi Chu. My eyes and body are still tired, but it’s not sleep that will cure me. It’s the tantalus hope of not going to work. I haven’t yet had that cruel experience of waking up and thinking it’s the weekend, only to find it’s a workday. Come to think of it, when I was a boy it always happened the other way: I’d wake up on Saturday and think it was mid-week or think it Monday on a Sunday morning. Then the realization hits and it’s even better than knowing it’s the weekend. Now my bewildering sleeps come at odd times in the afternoon, when the office has cleared out and I’m sitting at my desk with nothing to do but read. My head is over the book, and the words of McLuhan begin to cluster like an impenetrable forest. I venture in, and passing each word, a silent tree that refuses to speak its meaning, I’m too entranced to realize I’m no longer awake. By then I’m in the midst of a forest of McLuhan’s mind and my own - my unconscious, unfettered mind - and I begin to see the meanings in such a strange and wonderful way. The insight that accompanies those problems I fall asleep to is complex beyond normal conscious imagining, and only a glimpse remains when I wake to the sound of a phone, ringing.
Cursed lucidity! Why won’t you retain the cipher of my recombinant dream-mind? Instead, seive-like only the granules of ideas remain. Spending my free moments - make that free hours – at school reading re-organizes my consciousness away from the everyday stream of consciousness and into a forced awareness. My mind keeps wanting to drift, unused as it now is to extended concentration, and as I force myself to continue reading I’m also forced to explore different ways of connecting to the material. Usually it’s depth connection – the engagement that McLuhan says is fostered by a youth of television. Then as my ability to maintain that understanding slackens it becomes a race. My eyes running over the page just faster than my ability to second-guess and misunderstand. It’s a forced understanding that must be McLuhan’s lineal textual engagement. A means of engagement suggested by the medium itself, by it’s unimodal sensory demands and tersely coded meaning. Heidegger, who struggled to contain the multiplicity of meanings in the written word would have a bone to pick with McLuhan. Like any great thinker McLuhan can sweep aside these inconsistencies as unknown, irrelevent, or merely obstacles in the way of his strident exposition.
I try to imitate this to gain confidence in my writing, however weak and random my expression. I have so much work to do. Please forgive this self-indulgent entry.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Why I'm Not Studying Japanese
Britney Spears is actually not bad on the track "Dance Mix". She's the consumate pop star. I also like that song she does with Madonna. This is what happens when I play my music on random - I get the one Britney track I have. And suddenly it's the melancholy harmonica of Mazzy Star, light-years from Britney's galaxy.
I'm burning through McLuhan now, after letting it lie for days while reading histories and "The Rule Of Four", an exciting piece of bibliophile Princeton fiction. A novel about a book. It was actually this novel that inspired me to re-invigorate my studies and now I'm reading 60 pages a day in a race to get through McLuhan. I don't think I'm learning any less than when I read it slowly - I still garble the theoretical points in my mind while the anecdotes stand out in high relief. Such as: Germany is a tribal society; that tribalism was encouraged by Hitler and the technology of radio. I think it's through anecdote that I'll understand McLuhan, as it was through metaphor that I understood Baudrillard. Anyone who wants to see the bizarre extremes of linguistic manipulation should read Baudrillard (not in the original French for me, alas).
I hope to be able to read authors in their original German and French someday soon. Time must be spent in France and Germany. I'm going to Kyoto this weekend to buy another book - an introduction to ancient Greek if I can find it. What can I say? I don't enjoy studying Japanese.
Leaving to the sounds of John Lee Hooker... no wait... a harpsichord... The Magnetic Fields.
I'm burning through McLuhan now, after letting it lie for days while reading histories and "The Rule Of Four", an exciting piece of bibliophile Princeton fiction. A novel about a book. It was actually this novel that inspired me to re-invigorate my studies and now I'm reading 60 pages a day in a race to get through McLuhan. I don't think I'm learning any less than when I read it slowly - I still garble the theoretical points in my mind while the anecdotes stand out in high relief. Such as: Germany is a tribal society; that tribalism was encouraged by Hitler and the technology of radio. I think it's through anecdote that I'll understand McLuhan, as it was through metaphor that I understood Baudrillard. Anyone who wants to see the bizarre extremes of linguistic manipulation should read Baudrillard (not in the original French for me, alas).
I hope to be able to read authors in their original German and French someday soon. Time must be spent in France and Germany. I'm going to Kyoto this weekend to buy another book - an introduction to ancient Greek if I can find it. What can I say? I don't enjoy studying Japanese.
Leaving to the sounds of John Lee Hooker... no wait... a harpsichord... The Magnetic Fields.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Grimness begone!
As the cold and dark nights creep up on us, making the afternoons cold and dark, I find myself cycling home along the red patched sidewalk in darkness instead of afternoon sunshine. It's amazing how a place can be transformed by the absence of light, and that's all darkness is. Darkness is actually the norm - it's light that's the periodic visitor. Da Vinci suggested that a painter begin the canvas with a wash of black, because only the illuminated portions should be anything but black.
Grimness begone!
I am trying to get back on the path of righteousnous, if righteousness can be described as attention to learning, physical exercise and creative activity. A very humanistic description to be sure, and really the term righteousness is far to laden with book-burning tradition to serve my purposes here. Has anyone heard of the bonfire of the vanities? Savonarola, an upstart preacher in renaissance Florence started the tradition of a giant bonfire, burning all the "vanities" that he felt were condemning his city to moral turpitude. These included the writing of ancient philosophers, poets, playwrites as well as paintings and sculptures by great masters. It seems astounding to me, and an example of the brand of righteousness that seems to be afflicting politics in the United States right now.
Grimness begone!
Tonight, I'm looking forward to an easy evening of watching exciting tv episodes of "Alias" and possibly "Lost". This is what we do at the Highlife Morii, an apartment complex inhabited by an inordinate number of foreign English teachers.
And thus, I have updated my much-neglected blog.
Grimness begone!
I am trying to get back on the path of righteousnous, if righteousness can be described as attention to learning, physical exercise and creative activity. A very humanistic description to be sure, and really the term righteousness is far to laden with book-burning tradition to serve my purposes here. Has anyone heard of the bonfire of the vanities? Savonarola, an upstart preacher in renaissance Florence started the tradition of a giant bonfire, burning all the "vanities" that he felt were condemning his city to moral turpitude. These included the writing of ancient philosophers, poets, playwrites as well as paintings and sculptures by great masters. It seems astounding to me, and an example of the brand of righteousness that seems to be afflicting politics in the United States right now.
Grimness begone!
Tonight, I'm looking forward to an easy evening of watching exciting tv episodes of "Alias" and possibly "Lost". This is what we do at the Highlife Morii, an apartment complex inhabited by an inordinate number of foreign English teachers.
And thus, I have updated my much-neglected blog.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
What you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting for?
What is the point in writing anything unless it's a comment, a broadcast of the current, disguised or undisguised in theme? So I thought as I sat at my desk with nothing to do in the waning hours of the afternoon. I thought about the story I was writing, which is themed on optics, and it seemed to me to be so divorced from anything real or now. Reading about the revolutions that wracked South and Central America I remembered stories by Jorge Luis Borges that entranced me with their intricate paranoid conspiracies, and I realized it was all based on reality for him. Burroughs took it to the next level for fantasy by inducing realities that could be written with authenticity. That's why Naked Lunch is possibly the best book ever written. It's a true fantasy.
IN the words of Gwen Stefani:
What you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting for?
Take a chance cause you might grow
.....
look at your watch now
you're still a super hot female
which seems applicable to me, except for the last part. This is the problem with a super hot male listening to female singers - the inspiration is usually just slightly off. I've just listened to her song nine times in a row now. It's good.
The Japanese I learned today: migi ni magaru = turn right.
IN the words of Gwen Stefani:
What you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting for?
Take a chance cause you might grow
.....
look at your watch now
you're still a super hot female
which seems applicable to me, except for the last part. This is the problem with a super hot male listening to female singers - the inspiration is usually just slightly off. I've just listened to her song nine times in a row now. It's good.
The Japanese I learned today: migi ni magaru = turn right.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
ZeZe
magic bunny
What's in the fridge?
We went to ZeZe this weekend. There was a shopping mall, a red fridge and a bunny at the foot of the stairs. We bought mushrooms and molasses cookies at Waco. What's in the Redfridgerator?
I've updated this post with another picture of Veronica because really the atrium picture doesn't do her justice. This new picture is from our Mountain hike in the summer. It's also a nice reminder of warmer days and jungly foliage.
Mount Ibuki in my backyard
The Oncoming Cold
I just got home from Ishiyama. Took the train part way with Veronica, who was heading out to a lunch with her Vice Principal, still full after our bolted breakfast of french toast and bacon. The sky is grey today, but we agreed that it is a nice day, a good day for being outside, as it is so warm.
We both dread the cold. I refuse to be "shut in" by the cold. I put "shut in" in quotation marks, because it's something that happens to Japanese people, not so much from cold as from shyness. Some people never leave their houses except to go to the combini for a snack or to the video store for a movie. Well I come from Canada, dammit, and even if my apartment is not heated, I refuse to be shut in by this oncoming cold. In fact, since my apartment is not heated it gives me even more reason to go out, because it's like I'm outside already. Only my massive goose down duvet will protect me. That thing is so warm! I had it on one morning, and I got out of bed and puttered around the kitchen for about forty minutes, then I crawled back into bed and it was still warm! So my duvet will be my heat saviour. Either that or I'll have to pitch a tent with Veronica and we can camp in her bedroom, conserving valuable heat. This is life in Japan!
We both dread the cold. I refuse to be "shut in" by the cold. I put "shut in" in quotation marks, because it's something that happens to Japanese people, not so much from cold as from shyness. Some people never leave their houses except to go to the combini for a snack or to the video store for a movie. Well I come from Canada, dammit, and even if my apartment is not heated, I refuse to be shut in by this oncoming cold. In fact, since my apartment is not heated it gives me even more reason to go out, because it's like I'm outside already. Only my massive goose down duvet will protect me. That thing is so warm! I had it on one morning, and I got out of bed and puttered around the kitchen for about forty minutes, then I crawled back into bed and it was still warm! So my duvet will be my heat saviour. Either that or I'll have to pitch a tent with Veronica and we can camp in her bedroom, conserving valuable heat. This is life in Japan!
Friday, November 05, 2004
Sunny Day corn flakes
A few bright beams are sneaking through my morning curtains, promising a sunny day for Kansai. On a sunny day, usually anything is possible, and mediocre things are great. The proper sort of music must be played for a sunny day, and now it's relaxed guitar songs. Of course I couldn't have a playlist going without a few electronic elements, supplied this morning by Royksopp. That's such a cool name. I love Nordic names and Nordic stories. Bjorn Ulvaeus, Ragnarok, Knut Hamsun, Valkyrie, Strom Thurmond. Heh heh I have no idea if Strom Thurmond was Nordic, I just read his name in the US history text I was reading yesterday. I read for about four full hours yesterday - no joke! To me, this is a productive day. I hope more of my classes are cancelled today so I can do more reading. I'm a great teacher, aren't I?
Hello to all my friends who have been reading this and sorry about the infrequent contact. I'll send out a mass email soon. I wish I knew who was reading this!
Hello to all my friends who have been reading this and sorry about the infrequent contact. I'll send out a mass email soon. I wish I knew who was reading this!
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