This is just a post to say that I am utterly shocked by the double standards between history and literature students in my field/department/university. I knew they existed based on a colleague’s experiences, and my own limited experiences with a history student last year, but I cannot fathom how a third year history phD can survive if they can’t read the fucking language. Clearly, I chose wrong going the literature route, if this level of understanding, i.e. a complete lack of it, is all that’s expected of English-speaking students studying Japan. JFC.
Going Paperless. February 2, 2011
After the usual blunderful Christmas money exchange with my family this year, I decided I deserved a real present and took the plunge, buying an iPad. Why an iPad, of all the ebook readers out there, when the iPad is so well known for being difficult to read on over long periods of time? Because, after many years, I am finally ready to commit to going paperless.
Here’s the thing, I love books. I really do, I love them as much as anyone. I love the smell when I walk into libraries. I love the feel of the book that my head inevitably uses a pillow when I fall asleep reading in bed. I love owning this physical object that makes me feel connected to something deeper.
But here’s the other thing. I get twenty free pages to print a week and, after that, I have to pay thirty cents a page. For black and white. And there are weeks I have to print out whole novels.
I hear a lot of paper/booklovers out there whine about how paperless just doesn’t have the same feel. And you know what, you’re completely right. But this is definitely one of those situations for me, that if you just decide to commit to it, you will find that life without paper is really not that different than life with it.
On iPad, there are several apps that allow you, not only simulate the feel of writing on paper (my personal favorite is Note Taker HD), but also allows you to upload the ever popular in academia PDF and even highlight and write all over it, just like a real piece of paper. Yes, I spend a half a second zooming in sometimes, to be able to focus on the parts of the paper I want to use, and yes, it takes a bit of getting used to. I don’t deny this. But I feel that many of the objections I see to going paperless, by my peers and professors, are simply based on a misunderstanding of where our current technology is.
I spent three hours walking in the freezing rain to school today, because transportation is a mess, and I brought a fair portion of my papered research with me. Guess what? All that paper is now completely soaked and half of the papers are now ripped from moving around inside folder I’m using while I walked. My iPad, from which I’m writing this, suffered from being cold and from its protective cover being slightly damp.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. A lot of academic books aren’t available in ebook format, a lot of the programs available for our use can still be improved, but I do strongly feel that, as with any life change, you have to make a commitment. You don’t complain that it’s too hard because it’s different from what you’re used to – you try to adjust. As scholars who study foreign cultures, surely such an attitude should be familiar to us.
Translating’s hard, guys! >:( December 13, 2010
One of the reasons I will never be a great on the fly translator, a skill so often and consistently required here to merely survive seminar, is that I don’t process Japanese into English well. I easily grasp the meaning and can explain around the plot, but the literal translation always eludes me, leading to terrible classes where I sound like an idiot. For example, just this morning, we were reading a text where one word in the Chinese meant 台所, but all that came to mind in the English was “probably rectangular room with cooking” which, in my talking out loud to the class somehow came out as “hallway” and lead to the professor saying for about the millionth time that seminar, “No, it’s not a hallway. It’s a…?” which, naturally, makes me panic for the millionth time and I just sit there thinking to myself, “FOOD FOOD FOOD?” until C. is like, “Uh, kitchen?”
I’m embarrassed for myself that I can’t speak English, but I don’t really understand why I can’t seem to grasp the transition between languages. I know that it’s really not a good idea to think in one language when speaking another, and so I’ve always tried to avoid it, but in a program so heavily geared toward off the cuff translation, it’s ended up working against me. I’m not saying it’s impossible. People are obviously good at simultaneous language translation! But translation has never really been my talent, a secondary interest at most that’s only flagged as I continue to suck at it every week for the last year and a half.
Nothing really to comment about, but I wish I could just get better at it. I’ve gotten better at reading, better at understanding, but translation just continues to lag on behind. End of the semester blahs!
Texts. December 5, 2010
One of the things that I kind of already knew, but didn’t really focus on until this semester, is the reason that electronic sources are simply not good enough. Perhaps in English sources it’s difference, but the way uploading information a la pre-modern Japanese has gone can be seen pretty much in the UVA e-text initiative, or the online list of Noh plays you get if you’re ever doing Noh research and type “noh translation” into google. What you get on the former is something that, while it continues to be updated, is already out of date, code-wise, and a bombardment of sources, of which it’s unclear how, exactly, they went from paper to electronic form. What you get on the latter is a mess of links to other databases that stopped updating in 2001 or 2002. Putting aside the question of what software or by-hand typing might have been used to get a book source inputted online without formal permission from the current publishers on texts out of copyright, and what errors might have been committed there making the texts mostly unusable without side by side comparison with the original sources, what is mostly common to both of these is the assumption that once a text has been put up into electronic format, one if enough.
All this is to say that I get into a lot of angry face discussions with my boyfriend (who is a die hard digital is the best, I want to live in virtual reality and never speak to any of you again mwahahaha fanatic) about the nature of text and why I like paper better than electronic. I’m not some kind of anti-electronics crazed person. I don’t think technology is where I want it to be right now – if I was going to use a Kindle or iPad full time for my reading, I would need it to be able to take notes on the pages I’m reading, be able to highlight, and what not – adding bookmarks to come back to later just aren’t good enough either. It gets complicated fast when dealing with the amount of information I do. I like to mark up what I’m reading, and I don’t feel comfortable when I can’t.
But it goes deeper than that – I look at the e-text initiative of my alma mater, and what I see is a database that has taken a bunch of “authoritative” collections online and said, “This is great, now everyone can read these! Yay!” when the real problem is that we’re dealing with manuscripts that changed over time. Without the bibliography, the footnotes, the introductions, of the original text, I can’t tell where this manuscript came from, who compiled it, what makes their version accurate. Even in modern Japanese literature, it’s a well known fact that most authors syndicated their writings in newspapers, which, if they hit it off, were later collected, but even those collections are sometimes wildly inaccurate in their assumptions because their own texts are full of transcription errors. What if someone picks this version and puts it up online and it’s the only one to survive???
One version is just not good enough, and right now, it feels like that’s all the e-text community really has on its mind. It’s understandable – there’s a lot of shit out there that needs to be digitized, but I get very prickly when I’m told that digital is best!!!1 because at this point in time, it simply isn’t true. Digital formatting makes a lot of assumptions that I’m simply, as a scholar, not comfortable with – it assumes it’s the truth, when in fact, it’s just a pale shade of reality that, when compared to the real thing, is just sad.
Really? December 4, 2010
It’s that time of year – the end of the semester. I get it. We’re all busy and we have too much to do, and reading 浅草紅団 is hard even for native speakers who find the style, slang, shifting character names, etc, irritating and difficult to keep up with. Heck, the book is so hard that most readers misread one of the characters as being two separate people! So. I’m saying that I understand. We all fall apart.
That said, I can’t believe that someone in my department would try to pass off something I wrote as their own opinion during discussion. We do weekly blackboard-esque postings to get a feel for our opinions on the piece before class. We all read each other’s postings so we can know what’s going on in class, and because, you know, we’re graduate students, it’s rare that one of us just doesn’t do the work.
When I’ve been unable to complete my own work, I typically just shut down entirely and hide in bed for the week until all the scary things have gone away. Which is never. However, this has got to be better than getting called on during discussion on a book you haven’t read and then suddenly stating my opinion in the place of the one you haven’t been able to formulate because you haven’t done the work.
But how do you know they just decided to steal your work, N? How do you KNOW?
First, I sat next to this person during the seminar this week, where on his laptop, he surfed the internets and read our postings during the seminar, and spent a good part of it looking up terms from our various postings, including my own.
Second, my posting was rather unique this week, in that I had no f-ing idea what to say about the work because it was so damn hard to read, so a lot of the things I said in the posting were completely out there. In particular, I linked 浅草紅団 to 黄表紙, which is ridiculous! Ridiculous! I’m not saying off the wall insane, but at the same time, not something you could ever write a paper about, really. My point is that on his laptop, during class, he researched the terms I used in talking about 黄表紙 including looking up the particular one I was talking about.
All I’m saying is that the dots seem pretty clearly connected here. I’m not … overworked or going to call the intellectual theft police. It’s that time of year and it can’t be easy for a student still taking language classes to read the book in question, but dang, it’s really something I hadn’t expected here. I just don’t get it. It was just painfully obvious that we all knew it was something I’d said, not him, and it was just a shocking moment for me. Even the professor grilled him on exactly where he would have read the 黄表紙 I was talking about. It was incredibly awkward. I can’t believe someone in such a good program, no matter how panicked the moment in question, would try to jack my own absolutely ridiculous opinions as his own, as if what I was saying made any sense at all. Gah.
Back to the grind. September 8, 2010
As probably could be expected, drama has so far not presented itself and was all created in my head. At least I have the sense to realize how little most drama matters anyway. Someday, I’ll figure out exactly what happened, but that day is not today.
Unrelatedly, there must be something in the water with this year’s student influx into Japanese lit, because they’re all interested in early early EARLY Japanese texts and histories, like the Kojiki.
I had an hour long meeting with my advisor yesterday in which many lies were told, promises I absolutely cannot keep made, and many ego-crushing life paths presented. Okay, not ego-crushing, just sobering. I was always under the impression that it’s best to specify your interests as a prospective phD, but in doing so, I’ve actually limited myself too much and now I’m going to have to work toward actually broadening my horizons to make me more marketable as a prospective student. As such, I’m becoming Folklore Girl ™, instead of Setsuwa Girl ™. The prospect is daunting, mostly because for all that this is the perfect direction for me, I really don’t know the first thing about where to take this new direction with my M.A. thesis. While it’s clear the topics are intrinsically related, I’m really… really… terrible at theory and using other peoples’ frameworks to encompass my own. The problem is that you have to engage other scholarly works or you can’t hope to consider yourself relevant, and so I foresee a long jaunt into the history of the study of folklore. Which will undoubtedly lead me to Russia. Because that’s where all the folklore is.
Anyway, seeing my options laid out before me was truly humbling and I’m beginning to grasp how difficult a semester this is going to be for me. Hopefully, I’ll survive and be better for it!
Oops. August 29, 2010
One of the things about academia is that it can be extremely troublesome socially. I’m a pretty passive-aggressive person when it comes down to it, and I left my program last spring with a lot of unresolved issues socially. I probably could have done a lot more to fix the situation, but in the end, I run from problems and try to put them in my rearview mirror as unfortunate 20 car pileups instead of getting out of the car and trading insurance numbers with everyone. In short, I’m nervous to return to the program this fall because I honestly don’t know what happened in May or afterwards. I’m also a little bit unclear (oh, problems of communication) what even happened in April about everything.
I’m posting about it because I’m currently working up the courage to respond to an e-mail from my advisor, which just deepens the reality that I’m going back to drama that I am responsible for, feel badly about, and really, have no control of anymore.
Part of me wants to say, “Fuck the drama, my scholarship is what’s important!” but the truth of it is that there are good people in the program, and there’s really no one I dislike. I know that classes will help me just bite the bullet, but right now, going back is a horrifying chasm of terrible. :(
One more week!
来つ、寝。 August 23, 2010
On Taking a Fox as a Wife and Having a Child (1:2)
In the past, during the reign of Emperor Kinmei, a man from Oono in the province of Mino left by horseback, intent on finding a good woman to take as his wife. By chance, he happened upon an open field and met an exceedingly beautiful woman. Winking and acting overfamiliar, he asked her where she was going. “I went out to look for a good husband,” she replied.
Hearing this, he told her, “Why don’t you become my wife?” and when she agreed, he took her into his home and they were immediately married. After a short while together, the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy. Around the same time, the household’s dog gave birth to a pup on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month. Each time that newborn pup saw the mistress of the house, he barked ferociously and chased after her. Terrified, she asked her husband to kill the dog, however thinking this a lamentable thing, he could not do it.
Around the second or third month, when the yearly portion of rice was harvested, the wife went to the building where the rice was pounded and gave the women there some refreshments. The mother dog came after her, barking and biting. She was so startled and afraid that she turned into a fox! The master of the house saw this and said, “Since we have had a child together, there is no way I can forget you. Please always come back here and sleep together with me.” For this reason, the fox did as her husband asked and came nightly to sleep with him. This is the reason she is known as “kitsune,”* a fox.
Whenever she left, her scarlet skirt would rustle in the wind. Her husband, sick with love and seeing her face as she left, composed the following poem:
koi wa mina
wa ga ue ni ochinu tama kagiru
harakani miete
inishi
No one loves more deeply than I
After such a brief meeting
She has gone.
This is why their child was named Kitsune, and that Kitsune-no-atae became his surname. The child possessed incredible strength and ran as quickly as a bird might fly. He is the beginnings of the Kitsune-no-atae family in Mino Province.
* The pun here is illustrated in the title of this entry, “Come and sleep” in some form of pre-modern Japanese sounds exactly like the word for “fox” – kitsune. It’s possible the author of the Nihon Ryoiki wants to provide an etymology lesson, however, the idea that this is the true basis for the word is best treated with a grain of salt and left to the more whimsical.
Many of our stories of the fox in Japan are taken from various setsuwa collections, in particular, the Kon’jaku Monogatari. The above story is the first extant fox wife tale in Japan, although the roots of the story must certainly extend further back in order to justify its recording in this particular collection. This setsuwa is found in the Nihon Ryoiki and the enigmatic (1:2) by the title indicates that it is located in the upper volume and the second story in volume itself. My translation is taken from the Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshuu.
I’m embarrassed to say that I was re-typing this from a paper and the original translation I submitted was filled with typos! Terrible!
Language Log – 08/13/2010 August 13, 2010
Anki:
JLPT Vocabulary Deck: 1050 cards learned, reps completed.
Heisig Deck: 1300 cards learned, reps completed.
Smart.fm:
Intermediate Japanese Step 1: Review complete. Return 08/14/2010.
Intermediate Japanese Step 2: Learned 50 new cards. Return 08/14/2010.
Language Log – 08/12/2010 August 13, 2010
Anki:
JLPT Vocabulary Deck: 1000 cards learned, reps completed.
Heisig Deck: 1250 cards learned, reps completed.
Smart.fm:
Japanese Core 2000 Step 7: Review complete. Return 08/27/2010.
Japanese Core 2000 Step 8: Review complete. Return 08/27/2010.
Japanese Core 2000 Step 9: Review complete. Return 08/17/2010.
Intermediate Japanese Step 1: Review complete, learned 28 new cards. New cards complete. Return 08/12/2010.
