AsianNotOriental's Xanga

Illiterate Literary Critics

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 01:17:26 GMT

I checked out Kenzaburo Oë's A Personal Matter from the library today. I have to say that whenever I read any piece of fiction by an Asian (or even Asian-American) author, I have a morbid fascination with the little book review blurbs printed on the cover. Almost without fail, they describe such literature as "lush," "exotic," and other similar adjectives. Whether these adjectives actually apply to the author in question's work is really a matter of opinion, so while I roll my eyes and snicker at the flagrant exoticism in these reviews, I realize that because they are people's opinions, in the end, I truly don't care that much.

However, when such reviewers state things that are just factually wrong, there just is no excuse.

I saw this review on the back of A Personal Matter:

Oë is an astonishing Japanese writer whose books deal with postwar youth with such uncompromising realism that he seems to have wrenched Japanese literature free from its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature.

"Inbred"?

Seriously, "inbred"? There were three million better ways to write that sentence that would make it sound, you know, not nearly as condescending. The reviewer could have written that blurb in such a way that wouldn't betray the clear bias towards Japanese literature - that before Oë, Japanese literature was alien and inaccessible to Western literary circles. Primitive, if you will.

Furthermore, "an astonishing Japanese writer"? He's not simply an "astonishing writer"? What in the hell kind of damning-with-faint-praise, backhanded compliment is that? "Oh, he's pretty good... for a Japanese writer."

But the patronizing, Orientalist tone of this review is actually the least of my objections. What jars me most is the reviewer's obvious ignorance of Japanese contribution to world literature. Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima had been world-renowned writers even before Oë stepped into the literary scene. Kawabata won the damned Nobel Prize, for crying out loud - a clear signifier of someone who has moved into the "mainstream of world literature." Shusako Endo, Oë's contemporary, was a Japanese Catholic, and thus wrote from the perspective of an outsider - hardly representative of a "deeply rooted, inbred tradition."

I read a similarly-worded review about this same work that claimed that Oë was the first Japanese writer to tackle sex so frankly. Once again, haven't these people read Mishima? And he tackled the topic of homosexuality in pretty frank terms in Confessions of a Mask, written two decades before Oë released A Personal Matter. Hell, one can go back pretty far to find instances of Japanese writers dealing frankly with sex: Tale of the Genji, which was written in the eleventh century - don't they do it nonstop in that book?

Good Lord, are these people illiterate?

Argh.

I just... argh.

</rant>

Open Thread

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:44:31 GMT

I rarely do serious posts, but I've been thinking about this for a while.

As the semester progresses and I've been learning more about Con Law, I've been thinking a lot about people's approach to the law. Basically, I want to know - are you legal positivists, or legal naturalists? In other words, do you think rights are something given to you by the state, or something that you have at birth? Do you take, perhaps, a moderate position; say, believe that we have particular rights simply because we are human, but not others? And if that is your position, how did you come to the decision about which rights are ours at birth and which are not?

Discuss. You don't have to answer all the questions I posed, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

My Very Lazy Oscar Predictions

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 14:00:48 GMT

The Oscars kind of snuck up on me this year, so I don't really feel like doing commentary, as is my tradition every year.

However, I will say that this may be the first year where I may get more than one prediction wrong. *sob*

Predictions
Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
Best Director: Ang Lee
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Best Actress: Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney, Syriana
Best Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain
Original Screenplay: Crash
Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain

Reading

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:28:51 GMT

I was going to weigh in on the alleged attempted coup in the Philippines, but I really am not feeling it. Suffice to say I am deeply saddened that my home country, in the grand cyclical tradition of many former colonies, keeps electing power-hungry, avaricious individuals who impede civil liberties. The people then proceed to get angry, attempt to vote out or overthrow those in power, and then proceed to elect more power-hungry, avaricious individuals who impede civil liberties, and then wonder how it happened.

At any rate, in lieu of my deliberately cursory and simplistic analysis of Philippine politics, I am instead going to use the remainder of my break to talk about all the recreational reading I've done. As many of you know, law students don't have much time for recreational reading. (Props to all my law student friends who actually found time last semester to read George R.R. Martin's latest.) Actually, I think that I could make time for reading during law school, but I have this fear, not that I'd never actually finish the book, but that I'd rather be reading for fun than reading case law. In fact, I'm sure of it. Therefore, the only time I can do this is during break.

If you'll look to the right of my blog, you'll see that I've made three additions to my "recently read" list. As you can see, I finally got around to reading Watchmen. I thought it was rich, lush, complex, and thought-provoking. Usually, a book needs a few days to sink in for me, so maybe in a week I'll be raving about it and swearing up and down that reading it was a religious, life-changing experience. For now, however, I'll say it was very well-done. The morally ambiguous ending (indeed, the moral ambiguity of the entire novel) was jarring, as was my incertitude as to what, if anything, the work was attempting to endorse, but what is art's purpose if not to challenge assumptions? And does anyone besides me who's read it think that Willem Dafoe would make an awesome Rorschach?

I read Ha Jin's critically acclaimed novel, Waiting, as well. It was the best book I've read in a while. Jin's prose is very sparse and straightforward, yet strangely poetic. Additionally, despite the simplicity of the plot and language, Jin manages to pose many questions about morality and human nature in general.

And then there was Freakonomics. Truth be told, I was not dazzled by it, despite Malcolm Gladwell's assurance on the book jacket that I would be. It's an easy read, though, and certainly a lot of what Steven Levitt says is plausible. Yet something about it never quite came together for me; never quite convinced me. I don't really know thing one about economics, and have only dabbled in social science, however, so what do I know.

While at the bookstore, I realized that I was pretty close to accomplishing my goal of reading everything Gabriel García Márquez has ever written. However, I don't currently feel motivated to actually meet this goal. I feel that the bulk, if not the entirety, of García Márquez's oeuvre is incredibly well-written, but at the same time, how many times can someone write another Love In The Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude?

By the way, if any of you want to recommend anything for me to read, by all means, please do.

As far as non-literary pursuits, I also got Season 1 of Arrested Development. Jorge and I still had $50 on the gift card we got for Christmas, and we needed to go to Sears to get a rice cooker anyway. So we picked out the DVDs as well. Best damn $34.50 I ever spent.

Next up: Oscar predictions.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:26:23 GMT

I Didn't Even Have to Use My A.K.

Someone actually wrote the article I requested for Wikipedia. Fantastic.

(Yeah, I know, I could have written it myself, but eh.)

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:44:44 GMT

So what is Valentine's Day to me?

Apparently, an excuse to eat spicy food in copious amounts, if today is any indication.

For lunch, Jorge and I met and ate at an Indian buffet.

And for dinner, I made:

Spicy chicken (chicken breast simmered in chili pepper, white wine, garlic, parsley, and capers)
"Fiery" linguine (olive oil, chili pepper, lemon juice, lemon peel, sea salt, parmesan cheese)
Spicy chocolate bars (dessert bars with chocolate chips, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper)

So yeah, all in all, a great Valentine's Day. Hope everyone else's was as happy.

Buncha savages in this town

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:19:26 GMT

Well, I haven't had a Masshole story in several months, so I guess I'm about due for another one.Our car was towed yesterday. The worst part about it is that we knew that the blizzard was coming on Sunday, so Jorge moved it on Saturday. We're not allowed to park in front of our apartment building during a snow emergency, since we live in a major thoroughfare (or as major as thoroughfares get in Everett, Massachusetts get, anyway). So Jorge parked on a little side street. There were no signs. Nothing that said "No parking during snow emergency" or equivalent.

But apparently, during a snowstorm, you can't park on the even-numbered side of the street.

Oh, yeah. Why did that never cross my mind.

I've only ever lived three places my entire life during which I have been cognizant. Obviously, in San Diego, I've never had to worry about a snowstorm, much less which side of the street one needs to park on. In New York, I've certainly been in the middle of a snowstorm, but having never owned a car in New York, that was moot. Jorge, likewise, has only lived in either California (San Diego and San Luis Obispo) or Mexico City (where he neither had to worry about snowstorms, since they never happen there, nor driving, since he was too young when he did live there). Therefore, neither of us has any intuitive sense of which side one should park on during a blizzard. However, I was informed that "everybody" knows this, because we talked to someone a brusque gentleman at the Everett Police Department who informed us so. "If you live in our city, and you have a TV, you know this."

We don't own a TV.

What I hate most about this city is that the way it is run is predicated on the assumption that you've lived here your entire life (or at least a significant portion thereof). Perhaps such an assumption belies an inherent insecurity the city as a whole has: they just presuppose that if you're here, you must have lived here your entire life, since no one in his or her right mind would move here.

Anyway, so Jorge and I find out where our car is being held, get on the bus, and trudge through the snow to the towing place, which is in this industrial area not really fit for walking through. The sidewalks hadn't been cleared, so we had to dance a kind of fine line between the sidewalk and the street, avoiding the line of trucks headed toward us. When we got to the towing place, they knew they had our car in "one of their lots," but they didn't know which one. It wasn't in the lot we were in, so we had to walk through their other one, which meant trudging through more snow.

Eventually, we got our car back, and all was well. During this whole ordeal, however, I almost decided that I'd rather live in L.A. than Boston. You have no idea how much it takes for me to decide that I'd almost rather live in L.A., a city which I alternately have described as, a "hole," "hell on Earth," and "Gomorrah."

I'm sorry to all the Bostonians I've offended by blatantly insulting your fair city, except I'm totally not. Since I've been here, I've heard Bostonians insult both New York and Southern California, which is fine. I can take it. Hell, I continuously insult Southern California. But I figure it's time for me to take a stab at Beantown. It's only just, after all.

Oh, and by the way, Boston: every time you screw a newcomer over, God makes the Red Sox lose.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:59:59 GMT

NWA Court Is In Full Effect, Judge Dre Residing

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this thing.

Anyway, some of the most sublime moments in life are those in which high-level nerdity and pop culture references intersect. This happened a great deal in college (particularly since I was in College Bowl), but it happens quite frequently in law school as well.

Today, for example, I was venting to a research partner my frustration over the utter complexity of the California statute regarding transferring juveniles to adult court. He concurred, and as the discussion progressed, it segued into a discussion about NWA. (Don't ask.)

We laughed, and then I said, "Hey, we should quote them in the paper."

More laughter. I told him that no matter what, he should write something in our paper about how the cops would "rather see juveniles in the pen than me and Lorenzo rolling in a Benzo."

Later, at work, I brought this up to my supervisor. He said, "And when they ask you why you have that sentence in your paper, you just reply, 'I was expressing with my full capabilities. Now I'm living in correctional facilities.'"

Monday, January 16, 2006

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 22:31:32 GMT

Movie Review: Brokeback Mountain

(x-posted to LiveJournal)

Ang Lee sure loves repressed passions. The unifying theme of his movies, as well as the central motivation of his characters, are the struggle between the repression and expression of emotions that are either lost, denied, or forbidden. In Eat Drink Man Woman, he deals with passion lost -- an executive chef's journey to re-obtain his inspiration after the death of his wife. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he deals, albeit in a secondary manner, with passion denied -- where two martial arts masters, played by Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, harbor a long-standing love for each other and never act on it out of a sense of honor. And in The Ice Storm, he deals with forbidden passion, played out in the secret sexual lives of an outwardly respectable, suburbanite Connecticut community. In Brokeback Mountain, he manages, rather impressively, to depict a passion that falls into all three categories. The characters in Brokeback additionally underscore one more unifying truth in most of Ang Lee's movies: that repression is a form of dishonesty. While Lee makes no moral judgment about such dishonesty - these characters are flawed, not evil - he nonetheless demonstrates that like all dishonesty, repressed emotion does slowly chip away at the soul, and ultimately, destroy lives.

I'm sure most of you have beat me to seeing the movie, but I'll recap the plot anyway: one summer, while looking for sheepherding work in Wyoming, the laconic Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, doing his best Eastwood -- and it's very good) meets Jack Twist (the gorgeous-lipped Jake Gyllenhaal). While tending to the sheep, they first form a friendship in which the gregarious bull-rider Jack manages to crack through Ennis' steely exterior. One night, while Ennis is lying outside, shivering, Jack invites him into his tent, and their previously unexpressed desire for each other takes hold.

Nor do they express it after that, or at least they try not to. "You know I ain't queer," Ennis assures Jack, really to convince himself. "Me neither," Jack responds.

They aren't, at least not the way most people conceive of it. They leave each other after that summer, marrying and fathering children with women whom they do actually love and desire. Still, they know instinctively that they are the great love of each others' lives. What follows is a twenty-year relationship in which the two men struggle to keep what is the greatest love of their respective lives secret from the world. Along the way, each man pays the price for those unacknowledged passions -- in interpersonal relationships, in professional success, and indeed, even in psychological and emotional health.

However, the two men are not the only people who suffer as a result of their denial. Ennis's wife Alma (Michelle Williams) suffers, perhaps not so much out of the shame that her husband has been intimate with another man, so much as out of the heartbreak that comes with realizing that the man you love will never love you as much as he loves someone else, regardless of gender. His children are never fully aware of why their parents fight, or of why their mother weeps profusely to herself whenever their father leaves on another "fishing trip." One by one, every year they deny what their feelings for each other, their family relationships and friendships begin to strain along with their mental and emotional control, until by the end of the movie, neither has anything left.

What is heartbreaking about Brokeback is that there is a point in the movie where the viewer realizes that with the way the characters are, there are very few alternatives. The viewer will ponder, "Wouldn't it have been better if they'd just come out to their families and themselves? Everyone would have left them, but at least they would have had each other." And then the viewer sadly realizes that that admitting the truth, while perhaps a more courageous stance, is an equally unfeasable possibility after digging oneself too deep into a hole. There are no easy answers, but the consequences are nonetheless just as real.

The film is, as one would expect from Ang Lee, technically brilliant. The cinematography is excellent and the shots are perfectly crafted for maximum emotional effect. Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla's (21 Grams, The Motorcycle Diaries) Spanish guitar-based score also lends a nice Western ambience to the film. As far as the performances, the best one is Ledger's. While he cannot quite pull off the maturity of a man a decade older, his actions and delivery do convey much about the character that the screenplay alone could not. I truthfully expected more out of Gyllenhaal, as his performances have wowed me in the past, and while his performance here treads on overacting, it's by no means a bad one. And Williams' performance as Ledger's long-suffering wife is sure to earn her an Oscar nod, unless I am gravely mistaken. Not bad for the guys from Ten Things I Hate About You, The Day After Tomorrow, and the girl from Dawson's Creek, to be sure.

Those of you who haven't seen this movie have probably both the multitude of good reviews, and the negative buzz surrounding it. From what I've observed, much of that buzz stems from an artificial, media-constructed culture war, in which it's pitted in the Arena of Morality against the Chronicles of Narnia. Its critics have tried to cast it as a "gay cowboy movie" (cue South Park reference here), while its defenders say it's simply a love story. To call it the former would be an insult to its truthfulness; however, I'm not comfortable with simply grouping it in the latter category. One thing is certain: it functions on a much deeper level. Fundamentally, the movie is about the consequences of emotional dishonesty. To write it off as anything else would be to belittle the universal truth contained in it.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 23:15:03 GMT

Wrongful Seduction And Other Archaically Sexist Legal Concepts

While studying for finals, I learned that there is a cause of action for "wrongful seduction." The cause of action has its basis in common law, when a father could sue the man who "debauched" his daughter and gotten her pregnant; the father was entitled to compensation for "loss of services." Most jurisdictions have abolished it, so that would explain why I didn't learn it in class. I read in a law review article (which I searched for on Google because I was curious) that the reason that most jurisdicitons abolished it is because they didn't want loose women covering up their Jezebel-like activities by suing perfectly upstanding men, rather than because it's a really, really stupid cause of action. Besides the obvious sexism and reduction of female sexuality to a property right, I don't really think it's even cognizable. If you were a virgin previously, you can't sue to get your virginity back. If you're suing because you're pregnant and you need the child support money, well, there are other remedies in the law for that.

There's also a criminal charge for "seduction," defined here as a man convincing a previously chaste woman to go to bed with him with promises of marriage. Subsequent marriage to the woman was an affirmative defense for this charge. I don't know if jurisdictions have done away with this charge, but I'd imagine so, although my study guide tells me that most of the jurisdictions that still have it have also done away with the chastity requirement on the woman's part.

And speaking of outdated and sexist concepts, one of the "libel per se" categories (i.e., libel for which the plaintiff does not have to show that he or she has suffered pecuniary damage in order to bring a case) used to be "imputed unchastity to a woman." They've changed that to "serious sexual misconduct," which makes a lot more sense. Indeed, before I read the old rule, I had no idea that "unchastity" was a real word.

Back to my substantially less interesting study of prescriptive easements.