my brain, it is both full and blown away.

[kaigou]

In the past week or so, I feel like I've had the entire progress of CP's master's shoved into my brain.

1. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture
   author: Lisa Rofel
   
   Intriguing but extremely dense and definitely to the trade. Or to the academic, as the case may be. Rofel could probably benefit from a bit more of the warmth present in anthropology works like Rosemary Mahoney's.
   
   However, I should note that one detail of interest to me was Rofel's mention of a post-socialist healing mechanism (or maybe more precisely post-cultural-revolution healing, erk, I can't recall the precise detail this moment, for reasons that'll become clear as you work your way down the list). The literal translation of the concept is 'speaking bitterness,' in which one basically airs the grief and hurt and lingering anger from experiencing a past situation. Exorcising the pain, as it were.
   
   That struck me, that this kind of potentially strongly cathartic experience is one for which (that I know of) we don't actually have a formal sense, in the West, and certainly not a formalized framework like what China introduced for its citizens to air their grievances as part of healing.
   
   I'm thinking here of the way we (the Western 'we') come at this speaking-bitterness sideways, especially in the wake of the California anti-marriage law: that many queer folk have stood up and essentially been speaking the bitterness of life under such an oppressive discriminatory law and society. In doing so, it's a way to expose others to the consequences of their actions, and it might have the benefit of moving things forward -- but from what I read of Rofel's understanding of it, the point isn't necessarily mainly to fix the situation, or to force redress, or even to guilt an apology out of the wrongful party. The main goal, with all else being side-benefits, is for the wronged party to be able to speak clearly -- and not to just be heard, but listened to -- about the bitterness of one's experience.
   
   In a sense, the weight lies on the shoulders of the person speaking that bitterness, and the counter-weight from other parties is to be silent and listen, to grant the speaker that space to recognize and exorcise that bitterness.
   
   I'm familiar with some groups (of different types and purposes) that have a pseudo-Native-American behavior of using a 'speaking stick', where the person doing the holding is thereby the person doing the talking, and others must be silent. That has limited application when it comes to speaking bitterness, though, because it only defines who's talking and doesn't automatically grant a validity to the words, only a right to a turn at speaking. However, the speaking stick will then move to the next person, who -- as granted by now having their 'turn' at speaking -- will understandably (as is often the intention for such speaking-stick concepts or props) feel it acceptable to then speak/respond to the previous person's statement.
   
   But speaking bitterness doesn't require (and from what I gather, may in fact be injured/undermined by) a reply -- because again, the weight is not on the listener to do anything but take in the bitterness and understand that it exists. Unlike the proverbial speaking-stick, replies and discussion are not the goal. (At least in this specific act of speaking the bitterness. Maybe later, once the bitterness has been spoken and accepted, but in that moment, no, I don't get the impression that the audience is to do anything but listen and be aware and in their silence grant the speaker legitimacy and validity.)
   
   Perhaps incorporation of the concept/term of 'speaking bitterness' in our online discussions may help to distinguish when someone needs to speak as a way to speak their piece (and peace) without response, critique, or any reaction except silent but attentive listening.


2. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
   author: Ivan Morris
   
   This wasn't from CP's study-book collection, but was one he'd gotten from his father's library, and I happened to mention pondering putting it on my Amazon wishlist. (Handy, to already have it.) Not my time period of interest (let alone of country) but fascinating critical study of Murasaki's Tale of Genji all the same.


3. Behind the Mask: on sexual demons, sacred mothers, transvestites, gangsters, and other Japanese cultural heroes
   author: Ian Buruma
   
   I tore through this, then went back and reread significant chunks. Most cultural anthropologists will gleefully pound all decent information into the most boring dust (see also Rofel, Napier), but Buruma actually makes it interesting and intelligent. Really, really, really insightful. Nothing like reading and having that ah-HAH moment about many things, from the mythic sources for the bizarre quasi-homo-erotic tension between Sasuke and Naruto and the reason Trowa spends fifteen freaking minutes in a last-breath-before-dying soliloquy. The mystery, solved!


4. Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation
   author: Antonia Levi
   
   I could be wrong, but from what I saw on the page, it certainly looks like someone told Levi that you win the writing game if you can shove more animanga-title references onto one page than any other anime-documenter. However, stringing together endless references to a variety of anime -- half of which, or more, I've never even heard of it and it's not like I fell off the manga truck yesterday -- just does not make for exciting reading. Did not finish, but then, it probably didn't help I was still in the throes of post-Buruma awe.


5. Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle, Updated Edition: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation
   author: Susan Napier
   
   I tried to give this one my best shot, but... honestly. Example: Napier wants to discuss the development of nihilism (a topic Buruma also addresses, so I figure the intention is valid). However, she uses three anime as comparison points, the final of which is Wolf's Rain. An anime, she notes, which was not only considerably less popular than the other two major anime she's using for comparison, but also an anime that was roundly criticized by critics and fans for its "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending.
   
   Let me get this straight: you're going to try and convince me of a major nihilistic tendency on the part of a culture based on an anime the fans hated and the critics dissed? Where, exactly, is the indication that it resonated with pop culture at all?
   
   I mean, sure, Titanic has a rocks fall (or boats fall) and everyone dies, but it resonated, and its distributors have the bajillions in revenue to prove its pop culture appeal. If no one watches a damn show, and the few who do then proceed to do their best to forget they ever wasted that much time (or to rewrite it with far more skill than the original screenwriters and fix the storytelling muckups), wouldn't this be telling you something? Like, maybe it's not such a good example of nihilism and more an example of really freaking sucky writing?
   
   I could only take so much of being able to destroy her arguments that easily, especially since Napier is an academic lamp-shader. She raises the points that undermine her argument, as though raising them is the same as countering them, and carries on. I suppose she figures enough hand-waving (to mix tropes) and maybe no one will notice the undermining points have effectively demolished her argument.
   
   Reading her made me feel like I'd become the only one with a working brain in the author-reader dialogue.


6. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation
   author: Patrick Drazen
   
   First of all, ignore the idiotic title. Second, ignore the absolutely horrendous cover design (though granted, not nearly as bad as the cover for Samurai from Outer Space. (Yes, I know, small press, but still, people.) If you can get past those, this is actually a very insightful and interesting read. Lots of details, tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, highlights of symbolism and intra- and extra-story references. Very light on the philosophy, but that's not the book's purpose (only that I was looking for it and found only scraps). It's somewhere between an introduction, an overview, and a revue of themes, without also being a ridiculously top-heavy "top 100 anime of all time!" kind of nonsense.
   
   Best part is that Drazen really knows his Tezuka, and pulls in historical elements regularly, to give a sense of the continuity in the development of manga and anime, and where newer animangaka are riffing off of, or paying homage to, older series.


7. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai
   author: Michael Dylan Foster
   
   Definitely not for the casual reader, but not requiring you have a master's in anthropology, either. I read then skimmed then read then skimmed much of the book, since again, Japanese history isn't a time period that really twigs for me. It's when Foster gets into discussing Gojira that I slowed down on purpose -- but there was plenty earlier in the book that had me slowing down, just because Foster's a decent writer who clearly enjoys the topic.


8. Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment
   editors: Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels
   
   On CP's suggestion, I only read the intro (the rest of the book deals predominantly with African, and some Near-eastern, cultural practices, and right now that's not really my focus. Thing is, even just the introduction is heavy on the anthro-lingo along with name-dropping like crazy (although in its defense, it's a lot of history summing up the Occidental interpretations of, and translations of, non-western modes of belief). Slow going. Interesting, but slow going, and that makes for slow processing.


9. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan
   author: Gerald Figal
   
   Same vein as Foster's work, but for some reason not capturing me like Foster. Will return to it, though, because I noticed a few parts that might fit into some of the thoughts tossing about in my head after reading the final book on this list.


10. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
    author: Hiroki Azuma
    
    This guy is my newest GOD. I swear. First of all, he doesn't play the neo-liberalism or Marxist game (something I could really only stomach in Rofel's work since she is, after all, discussing a somewhat post-Marxist, or at least semi-post-socialist, cultural regime). He does reference Hegelian and Heideggerian thought, and wraps it up in technological understandings like databases and the structure of the world wide web. And best of all, he doesn't privilege the original over the derivative works, but grants validity to the otaku preference for seeing the two (original and copy/fanwork) as being of equal importance and value for consumption.
    
    What's particularly fascinating is his deconstruction of the development of Japanese culture and the way he carefully steps through and builds into a very convincing argument of otaku as not just the avant-garde, but also the arrière-garde, if avant-garde has a formal opposite. Some of his criticisms aren't just surprising from a non-Japanese perspective (in the sense of, hey, I hadn't thought of that/realized that) but they're also surprising if you're at all familiar with the emphasis the Japanese culture often puts on harmonious presentation. To have someone so bluntly (and in a text that's also a best-seller!) calling Japan on the contradictions and failures in its self-created post-war identity is, well... unexpected.
    
    CP said he'd skimmed but never got 'caught' by the book, but I started with the first chapter (since the intro goes on an on, and then the translator's notes go on and on even more, and I felt like I was reading without context for whatever they were each discussing). Almost immediately I was snagged. Okay, yes, when reading intense non-fiction like these books, I tend to read slower, and in chunks rather than straight through, but it still only took me about a day or so to read Azuma. (Doesn't hurt that the book itself is a rather slim volume compared to the rest.)
    
    Actually, of all the books I've read, Buruma was the most insightful about long-term storytelling patterns and archetypes... but Azuma's the one that blew off the top of my head. I fully expect I'll spend the rest of the day wandering about in a delighted philosophical daze.
    
    And in case you're wondering, for me, that's a good thing.

My icon is strangely appropriate.

Comments

[starlady]

Yay for Buruma, qualified yay for Morris (did you notice he's really big on the fundamental passivity of the Heian aristocracy? yeah, that actually isn't terribly well-supported in the evidence). As for Napier and Levi: Preach it!

And hooray for Azuma! If you liked his book you should absolutely read Tom Lamarre's The Anime Machine.

I have the Dylan Foster book; he's written some excellent essays in Mechademia, actually. Ditto for Drazen (with whom I sometimes have bones to pick, honestly) and Lamarre.

[hokuton_punch]

*takes notes!* I THINK I HAVE SOME SUMMER READING. :D

[reileen]

I've had Napier's book on my shelf for ages, and only got around to reading it now because I'm doing a paper on an anime character (Kagura from Gintama) and I was looking for other things talking about the shoujo character or the quality of being shoujo. In that aspect I was underwhelmed by the book, myself, although she might have something I can use in her one essay about the Miyazaki heroines. I looked up one of her other essays, about four different depictions of the shoujo in four different series (which I think were Vampire Princess Miyu, Mai the Psychic Girl, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and Sailor Moon), and was surprised that she ended up spending less time on Sailor Moon than she did on the other series - it was at the very end of the essay.

I'll be checking out some of the other books from this list of yours, though. :)

[annotated_em]

Oooooooh. I don't really need any more books oon the TBR pile, and yet...

[branchandroot]

*bookmarks* Lovely; one literature search already done. *grins*

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

While we're at it:

Anne Allison, Millennium Monsters – not impressed.

[morkeleb]

Nothing like reading and having that ah-HAH moment about many things, from the mythic sources for the bizarre quasi-homo-erotic tension between Sasuke and Naruto and the reason Trowa spends fifteen freaking minutes in a last-breath-before-dying soliloquy. The mystery, solved!

Okay, you need to explain that. I am crazy with curiosity, and utterly unable to buy books online. It is hell. Don't make me spam you with D: smilies.

[(Anonymous)]

This is obviously late and fairly beyond the point, but when reading Levi, Drazen and Napier, realizing what the books actually *are* goes a long way to understanding them. Samurai From Outer Space was essentially *the* first book-length discussion of Japanese animation published in English. Of course it was going to be fairly basic, and simply did not have a lot in the way of previous research to fall back on or push off from. Drazen's book is similar; good for an introduction, but a mass-market, unannotated book about a popular culture topic that was published in 2003 cannot be taken too seriously in 2010. Well, and Napier simply was the first one with solid academic credentials to write about anime, and to show you you *can* write about anime. As you say, yeah, she is a bit of a "lamp-shader" (though much less so in her articles), but at that point, she was exactly what the field needed. Taking her to task for focusing on a particular show that you and fic-writers didn't really care for, is neither here or anywhere, really. She is not in the business of being a movie critic, so either media-critical or fan-critical responses to what she sees in a particular text are, for her purposes, irrelevant.

- Mikhail Koulikov (LJ: corneredangel)

[kaigou]

I have no problem realizing what the books "are", nor do I discount Drazen's text simply because it's been seven years since he wrote it. I think a lot of what he has to say remains applicable and valuable. My complaint was that what I wanted, I realized I wouldn't get from his text. This is not a complaint about his text, per se, so much as recognition that he's not a valuable resource for my specific need at this time.

As for Napier, no, she doesn't get that kind of pass, and she may have been the first in English to be writing of anime, but hardly the first overall (and I make that note because I don't like treading even accidentally into privileging english-language as the only valid standard). In fact, one could say that given Buruma also discusses anime, along with manga, in his treatises, that Napier isn't even the first. Beyond that, however, neither Napier or Buruma are the first to discuss popular culture, in either a literary/filmic sense or in a sociological sense. By those standards, Napier falls flat, and I think to some degree this is because she's hiding under the cloak of "this is completely different!" or some such, and using that as means to bypass the expectations and standards of previous writings/debates on popular culture in film, literature, or society.

After all, one does not have to be a movie critic, or a literary analyst, to realize that if one is positing that a specific filmic or literary text indicates a significant pop culture position, that one should also demonstrate to some degree the depth/breadth of this text's implications, either in terms of the single text's impact on pop culture, or in repetition of its themes in other aspects of pop culture. Certainly, if she's simply discussing a single text independent of pop culture, then it doesn't matter if a text has any resonance within pop culture -- but as she frames so much of her work within the context of pop culture then it makes no sense, and undermines her conclusions, to abruptly disregard pop culture when it suits her purposes.

Even those really sidelined sociological discussions of pop culture -- like mod-kids in Britain in the 60s, or the influence of the Beatles on American rock, or whatever other pop culture element you choose -- must first recognize that to be pop culture, it needs to be popular. A single song that, say, encourages and fetishizes bowling is not indicative of a major pop culture theme if only three people heard the song, and two of them didn't even like it. Find another song that enshrines bowling that is a major pop-culture phenomenon and then make the argument; otherwise, the arguments are irrelevant because they're not reflecting a popular element of the culture. Two kids walking in and singing a verse may be an intriguing incident, but it takes a whole lotta people walking in and singing a verse before it becomes a (popular) movement.

No, I don't give Napier any credit at all, seeing how often she pulls that stunt. Just because the topic has changed doesn't mean you can gleefully toss out the academic and intellectual rigors of the previous fifty-plus years of sociological and literary analysis styles on pop culture artifacts.