There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Rogers

No particular reason, just felt in a Rand-bashing mood tonight.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Hey, let’s mock objectivism for a bit…

Translators working on closely related language pairs such as French and English (as opposed to more distant ones, like Japanese and English) have a tendency to be writers first, translators second. Their actual mastery of the source language is sometimes surprisingly low, but (for good or bad reasons) editors seem to think that the quality of their written production in the target language can make up for their weakness. This is an especially common occurrence in English to French translations, where French speakers barely English-fluent have been known to translate major English literary works (not a new practice either: Baudelaire‘s famous translation of Edgar Allan Poe, while delightfully written, is so incredibly riddled with errors that it could be a new work in its own right).

The smug pleasure of pointing out errors in the work of so-called professional translators can only be beat by one thing: the even smugger pleasure of pointing out errors in said corrections…

In a recent Guardian article, Germaine Greer plays on a rather trite cultural tropism: “Why do people gush over Proust? I’d rather visit a demented relative“.

Yes, we get it: Proust’s writing is long, convoluted and not exactly packed with action. I am far from his greatest fan and would not even put him in my personal top ten of French authors, but criticising his style on length and paragraph count is about as subtle as calling Picasso’s paintings a bunch of kid scribbles by a guy who couldn’t draw a normal face.

The translation comment, however, is what grabbed my attention. Ms Greer chose to illustrate the poor quality of Proust’s English translations with a sentence drawn from the fifth volume (La Prisonnière, aka The Captive):

Tirant d’un flûtiau, d’une cornemuse, des airs de son pays méridional, dont la lumière s’accordait bien avec les beaux jours, un homme en blouse, tenant à la main un nerf de boeuf, et coiffé d’un béret basque, s’arrêtait devant les maisons.

Then goes to quote the two main translations in turn:

This Scott Moncrieff hilariously renders as: “Drawing from a penny whistle, from a bagpipe, airs of his own southern country whose sunlight harmonised well with these fine days, a man in a blouse, wielding a bull’s pizzle in his hand and wearing a Basque beret on his head, stopped before each house in turn.”

In Carol Clark’s version for Penguin we read: “Drawing from a penny-whistle or bagpipes melodies from his southern homeland, whose light the fine morning recalled, a man in a smock with a bludgeon in his hand, and wearing a beret, stopped in front of the houses.”

Upon reading these, I was confused as to what either translator may have done to deserve Ms. Greer’s hilarity: both translations seem to convey, in a reasonably faithful tone and language, the admittedly obscure meaning of the original.

Her ire stems from one “mistranslated” word in particular:

The translators’ manifest difficulties stem at first from Proust’s own imprecision, and are then compounded by their ignorance. The Pyrenean goatherd carried neither a dried bull’s penis nor a bludgeon – what would he be doing with either? He is going to milk his goats and he needs something with which to restrain them: a hobble made of dried bull sinew.

There are just two small problems with this interesting — and indeed creative — approach to the original meaning:

1. A “nerf-de-boeuf” (literally “bull sinew”) is not actually made of dried bull sinew. It is merely one of these delightful euphemistic idiom people have come to use, in order to avoid having to say “bull penis” in proper company. As such, translating “nerf-de-boeuf” by “bull’s pizzle” is not only correct, but perfectly renders the euphemistic idiom (the old English word “pizzle” is used both for “non-human penis” and a whip made from such).

2. I have very limited first-hand experience as a mountain goat-herder, but I can very easily imagine how a sort of whip or flogging instrument (say… a pizzle) could come handy to herd a pack of goats. While “bludgeon” might stray a bit far from the original (and fail to reflect the actual material used), it still sounds considerably less far-fetched than a hobble. There too, I cannot claim much experience, but a cursory web search showed absolutely no trace of a “nerf-de-boeuf” ever being used as a hobble (which would seem to be made of much softer, more flexible materials).

In the end, it is pretty obvious that, of all three translations, Ms. Greer’s is the least accurate, bordering on a mistranslation, while the professional translators had, for once, done an adequate job.

I could probably go on the importance of double-checking before going about correcting others, but then I am not sure what this would imply on the present entry… So let’s just agree to say that Proust’s work, while certainly daunting from the outlook, is worth a read; and the people taking on the thankless task of translating his humongous body of work should at least get credit and benefit of the doubt for trying.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Mistranslations and Miscorrections…

Einsamkeit ist wie ein Regen.
Sie steigt vom Meer den Abenden entgegen;
von Ebenen, die fern sind und entlegen,
geht sie zum Himmel, der sie immer hat.

Und erst vom Himmel fällt sie auf die Stadt.

Sometimes we all have to go out and willingly stand in the rain for a while, even when it means those we love will get drenched as well..

Taking a break from things, will be back in some…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Einsamkeit

Pros:

1. It worked for Jack Kerouac.
2. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to edit and correct typos.
3. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to spend drunk in some seedy Golden Gai bar.

Cons:

1. Actually, it took him three weeks to write it. I don’t have three weeks.
2. Sleep deprivation-induced typos probably likely to include: entire paragraphs written in Urdu, random obscene expletives, obscure references to isomorphic transformations in alternate planes of reality…
3. Comparability of Beat literature masterpiece with Natural Language Processing project involving Machine Learning parsing of Rhetorical Structure Trees: dubious.

It’s a toss, really…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Let’s proceed scientifically…

I think the book and audio tape were a christmas gift from our aunt some 20 years ago (personal message: Hi Auntie Carol! merry christmas to you and the rest of the family up there in Knaresborough!)… I am pretty sure we ran that tape back into complete white noise over a period of two or three holiday seasons.

(praise be to the internets, and to Yuki for reminding me this even existed)

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Holiday Mushiness Therein…

Well, he died of a stroke mid-sentence yesterday morning. It seems A. J. Cronin has taken over the writing gig for now (Zola will be contributing, on the family scenes).

Can’t say I will miss Franz…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Breather…

The fact that it took me three months to get to it, is a testament to the sad state of affairs of this industry (and my own sorry ass’ inability to get anything done when not threatened at gunpoint). Actually, the decision to start reading mangas is an old one, one that arose around the time I woke up one day and realized I could suddenly understand Japanese (すっげぇ〜！日本語を喋れるよ！さああ、僕は貝が好きなの・・・). Well, alright: understand might be pushing it a bit, but I’ve been known to conduct reasonably flawless weather-related conversations with my neighbours: a major improvement from my arrival on Japanese soil, where my vocabulary was essentially limited to three Japanese words, one of which I cannot repeat on this site unless you can testify you are over 18 and click here.

Thing is: drunken conversation with Samurai friends did and still does wonders to my verbal skills, I can pull off a semi-decent everyday-Japanese provided it stays on the topic of whose turn it is to pay the next round, or monosyllabic expressions of my appreciation for miscellaneous types of music or other artistic works. Anything slightly off the beaten path usually gets me nodding complacently until I somehow manage to catch a few words that could clue me in on whatever it is we are talking about. Similarly, that whole level-of-speech issue has not been getting any better: you know things are bad when your friend – who has just chugged half a gallon of rum directly off the bottle – kindly worries about your use of excessively colloquial expressions.

Horizons have to be widened and grammar needs improving dramatically.

Hence: Mangas

First, because books are convenient: you can study them anytime, anywhere and by yourself; they do not require a language exchange partner who will be either convinced you are hitting on her, or actually hitting on you (and yea, the feminine form here has a purpose: just check the number of candidates for language exchange in English or French out there and their repartition by gender).

Also because, taking my cue on the local upcoming generations, I cannot read kanjis for shit. Which rules out most magazines and daily newspapers. Some magazines are not that hard – possibly even below my level – but there are only so many times you can read about the latest news on panty thieving activities, detailed voyeuristic recounts of schoolgirl groping-related arrests or nampa tips, straight from the pros (the gist of which can usually be found in all its quaint alliteration-riddled English translation glory on the Mainichi’s website).

As for regular books, real literature, eternal classics of the Japanese masters: try opening an original Mishima volume for laughs, just once. I swear, that guy uses kanjis even my dictionary has never heard of.

Mangas, on the other hand, rarely make use of overly elaborate kanjis, yet can cover a wide array of situations and lexical fields, all along offering saucerplate-eyed visual clues of the ongoing story. Additionally, most have furiganas for part or all of the kanjis used (depending on the target age for the series).

Let’s stop here for a slightly tedious digression that you may want to skip if you know anything about the Japanese language and the black magic art known as reading it:

As you may know, Japanese is written using both kanjis (roughly 1000 to 2000 different ones for basic books and newspapers) and two syllabaries known as kanas. A syllabary is similar to an alphabet, in that each character represents a sound, but unlike, say, the latin alphabet, Japanese kanas each match a full sound (“ma”, “mi”, “mu”, “mo”, “ra”, “ri”, “ro” etc). Each syllabary contains 80-some characters and is usually the first thing anybody will learn when studying Japanese.

In theory, every Japanese word could be spelled using only kanas (and thus easily readable by anybody with reading abilities above kindergarten level). This is quite convenient in cases like computer interfaces, where words are typed using kanas, before being turned into kanjis through some menu selection or such. In practice, though, most people (yours truly, included) will find it incredibly tedious to read a text written entirely using phonetic kanas (remember that Japanese doesn’t separate words either). For texts meant to be readable by kids or sufficiently important not to take a chance with the odd illiterate countryman, a compromise is found by writing both the kanji and its kana spelling alongside. These kanas are usually written in a smaller font above (when writing horizontally) or to the right (when writing vertically) of the kanjis they explain. They are called furiganas and will make the most arcane reading accessible to the casual reader.

One important reason to love furiganas, especially for foreigners, is that if you encounter a kanji you are unfamiliar with, you will probably want to look it up in a dictionary… Which is infinitely easier to do if you actually know how to pronounce it.

It is still possible to look up both meaning and reading of an unknown kanji by using a method known as “multiradical lookup”, relying on the number of strokes and a few recognizable components of the whole ideogram. Even if with a bit of habit and the right tools, multiradical searches can be done fairly fast, they are considerably more annoying to conduct than regular phonetic lookups.

End of digression

Finding readable materials…

Wasn’t an easy task…

First, as I’ve said, I know little about mangas, beside the obvious classics (so obvious that I have yet to spot them in a traditional manga store) and the ones I have come to associate with the utter stupidity of the genre, such as featured on TV or in the hands of greasy subway otakus. Neither ones, a welcome option as a motivating studying support. My friends didn’t have much to offer in terms of advice either: Yutaka had kindly suggested タッチ, a series revolving around baseball and the usual preteen subjects, written in Japanese well within my grasp… Unfortunately, my seething hatred for this unfathomably boring sport was just too much to overcome and I all but gave up, halfway through the first volume (I would heartily recommend it to any beginners who really gives a damn about baseball, though).

Then, I followed the common sense-laden advice offered by the very helpful maintainer of 日本語の道 and went for “anything I felt like reading”, without worrying too much about difficulty or level of language. After a bit of shuffling around the manga section of Shibuya’s Book First, I became the proud owner of a volume of Arsène Lupin’s – 3rd of the name – new adventures… Rupan Sansei, as he is known to his copyright-agnostic Japanese fans.

Why? Simply because it was one of the only character that I somehow remembered ever catching on TV as a kid. Probably seen at most once or twice, on vacation at some cousins’ house (TV watching wasn’t exactly a big hobby of mine, as a kid… It could have become one, had my parents ever deemed it necessary to own a TV). Also because the French novel character it is very loosely inspired from, was my absolute favorite, from age 6 to 10 (didn’t have TV, but we sure had books, oh yes we had). Given he had practically guided my first steps through French literacy, it seemed only fitting his distant cousin would do the same for Japanese. So I picked up a re-edition of the first volume, paid for it, went out and eagerly unwrapped it – because these damn things are always sealed in plastic, so as to thwart freeloading attempts of their perennially cheap readership – and discovered that there wasn’t a single furigana in the entire manga. And I do mean, not a single one: hell, even proper nouns were laid out in all their naked unreadable kanji glory. To this day I am still not sure why a comic book featuring the wacky antics of a sex maniac amidst an abundance of scantily clad buxom women, would make itself so difficult to read for its obvious intended readership of horny teenagers in full hormonal breakdown. I suppose it has to do with the fact it was published 30 years ago, when reading standards were substantially higher: they wouldn’t bother going back and add furiganas now.

Anyway, as I said in my aside, while querying unknown kanjis without furiganas is feasible, it is also much more than one wants to deal with when catching a few pages in between two subway rides.

On my next visit, I made sure this time to stick with the most basic of language levels. Initially, I ran a few laps around the store, trying to assess the market segment covered in each aisle, by sampling a few random covers here and there. I stopped after realizing that, for the past 10 minutes I had been leafing through the volumes of the ボーイズラブ section (sure it was written in big bold letters above the trays, but seriously: I suck at katakana engrish, I tend to tune it out much more often than even kanji signs): in fact, the one specific volume I had in my hands was most definitely outright yaoi stuff. I’m not sure what was more embarrassing: realizing I was holding 200 pages of lurid sexual romances between high-school boys with bad hairdo and rosy cheeks… or that beside my pale ass, all three other customers in that area were teenage girls wearing braces.

It was maybe time to query assistance.

I therefore went on to expose to the nearest employee the motives and nature of my sudden interest in mangas, asking for buying advice. The young and bubbly clerk I confided in, turned out to be surprisingly helpful for Japan, where the impeccable politeness and willingness to bend over backward for the customer, still doesn’t brighten the fact that most store employees act as glorified label-readers for the hapless information seeker. To my amazement, not only did she not respond to my query with the helpless look of the a lamb lost at night in the middle of a hyena housing project, traditionally reserved to foreigners foolish enough to inquire in a Japanese store, but she even had, gasp, suggestions as to what could fit both my taste and language requirements.

And this is how I left with volume 1 of Detective Conan: ostensibly kid’s reading, the animated version of which I had already glimpsed at, on occasion, without noticing too much of the formulaic quirks that make most anime damn near unwatchable (but we went through all that already…). We aren’t talking kindergarten coloring book either: quite a bit of blood and seriousness in the plot, and language I could see a pre-to-mid teen reading. But the important part is that it’s got furiganas for every kanji, making for a totally painless reading experience at any level.

It’s now been a few days, and I’m happy with this choice: in fact, I am reaching a point where I am really itching to read through to the end and know what happens, which is what you want when picking language practice material. At this speed, I’ll probably be done by next week-end. I guess then, I will milk the whole series for what it’s worth, but I also welcome any suggestion with details on availability at my favorite local mangaka… Be aware that a recommandation with only the English translated title and no author nor any idea of which category to look into, isn’t likely to materialize into my next bedside book… But if you wanna share your manga-reading/japanese-studying tips: now is the time, here is the place…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Why Manga does not suck completely

Instead, I’m gonna bring a crowd pleaser to the important part of my readership who is currently saving on their weekly imported Poki consumption, to fulfill their teenage wet-dream of a pilgrimage to the fantasy land they have come to associate with Japan in their head. I know they’ve been reading ever since their google search for “japanese upskirt pictures” or “pokemon furry porn” got them here.

Today’s topic is: Manga.

Mangas can be summed up approximately thus: they suck. They suck big hairy giant mutant robots balls.

Now I know I’m causing a lot of grief among the otaku crowd here. At least those who haven’t already gone back to humping their pillows dolls or building that lifesize gundam robot…

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

While allegedly taking from their western cousins, Japanese comic books differentiate themselves in that they are produced in unspeakably high volume and diversity, at a frequency that would make Stakhanov himself blush. Popular manga series in Japan release a new volume every month or so. Compare that to the two to four years it takes some European comics. American comics often sit somewhere in between (and note that, while I’m at it: most US comics, à la Marvel or DC Comics, end up quite crappy for the exact same reasons). In these conditions, there is little surprise in finding out that your average manga board consists of a dozen strokes, twenty still-frame repetitions of the same expression and endless full-page insert with hardly any more work put into them.

Of course, a few mangas have better art and show some attention to detail.

Like countless people, the first Japanese comic I ever read was Otomo Katsuro’s Akira (for those of you who think mangas started with Dragon Ball Z: that was ages before pimply western teenagers in Sailor Moon outfits started becoming a tripping hazard on the streets of Harajuku). Akira simply kicked the hell out of anything else made at that time, and reasonable time was taken between releases… but that didn’t prevent the latter volumes to suffer the fate of every single manga: a progressive straying into the most ridiculously incoherent plot ever made.

And don’t come telling me there is a cultural element in there: why in the world should ten volumes make sense, at one degree or another, to suddenly degrade into accumulations of pseudo-spiritual gibberish and science-fiction clichés?

The answer probably lies at the crossroad between greed and loss of inspiration: to increase manga plot quality tenfold, all one would have to do, is keep a few trained ferrets in publishers’ offices and have them frenetically go for the nuts, the minute an author considers going past the tenth volume. Magically, plots would stop running on endless silly digressions and useless props, loose ends would be tied without the use of painfully artificial deus ex machina and story-telling would be enjoyable from start to finish.

Yet, knowing when to stop is a completely foreign concept to manga editing and, few, if any, manga authors have ever considered stopping before they have milked their character dry to the point of irrelevance.

But the authors/editors are only partially responsible for this sad state of affair, since in the end, they are only caving in to the pressure of the market. Manga readers do not care about the drop in quality, as long as they keep getting their weekly fix of familiar characters and rehashed storylines. That same symbiosis between greedy makers and undiscerning public is what allow George Lucas to churn out monumental cash-hungry horsedungs with no other apparent purpose than the systematic raping and destroying of our childhood memories, and still have fanboys wetting themselves in line to see them. Instant gratification and junk-food mentality are about the two strongest drives in this market. Mangas are the cheetos of comic book art.

And this is only to name the most prominent and universally shared flaw of this industry. I could also point out the shameless pandering that drives most teenage mangas, preying on the insecurities of the average otaku and doing their best to build that fantasy bubble where curvaceous giggling girls in maid outfit, inexplicably fall for socially inept, manga-obsessed shut-ins, apparently oblivious to the lack of personal hygiene and the fact they keep a collection of love-dolls in their living room.

You may tell me that this is no different from Danielle Steel or any other sort of low-quality pulp material in the western world: I realize that suspension of disbelief and building imaginary worlds are precisely the point of most fiction, including quality ones. But there is a fine line here, and self-serving marketing teenage-oriented mangas step over that line with the subtlety of a stampeding godzilla herd.

While insipid romance novels certainly do a lot to keep the average housewife numb in the fuzzy expectation that a charming prince may one day come and ravish her from her suburban home, it is still understood to be somewhat of an improbable option. Compare that to my weekly encounters with dejected gaijin otakus, fresh off the boat and heart-broken at the realization that Tokyo is nothing like the otaku-dreamland they had been led more or less subconsciously to believe: the only girls that will talk to them in Akihabara are paid 3,000 yens an hour to wear stupid cat ears while serving sodas and will charge an extra ten for pictures, while the bubbly Shibuya teenagers in mini-skirts and fluorescent make-up will look right through them, and stick instead to pimp-lookalikes with ridiculous hairdo and the sort of semi-carbonized tan one doesn’t acquire reading mangas… You wouldn’t believe how many of these pour souls I’ve bumped into, in my years here, coming to the sad realization that most Japanese, at best don’t give two craps about manga (particularly the sort that tends to be popular abroad), and in most case, will actually give them the same judgemental looks they get from folks at home.

They are only the western counterpart to the local otaku crowds who have long decided to retire completely in a fantasy-world of their own, where girls come in software box with a bonus inflatable pillow and showers are optional. It is with these people in mind that most of the adult manga industry market their products. Which is pretty sad for them, and anybody else who like the eye-rolling factor in their reading, to remain at a bearable level.

“But”, I can hear you ask, anxiety glowing from the corner of your unrealistically saucerplate-sized twitching eye, “is there really nothing to save from the vast emptiness of the manga world?”

This is a legitimate question. One that we will attempt to answer in Volume Two of this ongoing series (or maybe volume 28, if the series work and we can get a publishing contract).

Note: feel free to attempt and change my poor opinion of the genre by pointing me to recent manga works that shatter my close-minded stereotypical vision of the industry. Be aware, however, that any manga recommendation that starts something like “this is the story of a lonely love-doll collector who, despite all odds, meets and seduce a young, fresh, innocent and smart girl with cat ears inexplicably sprouting out of her hair”, will likely be met with my own reading recommendations.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Manga Sucks

One, and only one thing makes F. Scott Fitzgerald the coolest writer there ever was:

He married a girl named Zelda.

If anybody reading this was legally given the name Zelda at birth, please contact me: I think I may have to marry you right now.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Random Thought in Passing

However, Bunny asked. Soon to be joined in the peer-pressure effort by our favorite bible-reading cosplay freak. And I can’t decently turn a cold shoulder on them without justifiably being labeled a stuck-up killjoy. Plus I do need a diversion from coding and who can resist a bit of self-serving writing every once in a while (all right: not like this whole blog is anything else in the first place).

So here goes… Expect a rather freestyle approach to the whole meme-answering thing, though.

Since this one was asked in French and it’s been a while: I doubled the effort and made a bilingual post.

How many books a year do you read?

A shitload.

I guess it won’t really come as a surprise to anybody that I have always been the bookworm type (I got rid of the coke-bottle glasses ever since, thank you very much). Learnt to read around 5, and immediately proceeded to methodically go through my dad’s library in its entirety. How was I to know that this kind of vanity library, where the opus of every single noticeable classic author spreads over shelves of finely binded gold-engraved volumes, is only meant as a way to decorate your study, not as a reading list for impressionable young minds. My parents didn’t either, otherwise they’d probably have seen that I didn’t start my reading years with the complete works of Marcel Proust, Geoffrey Chaucer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Sadly, living in a country where I have the reading level of a 5-year old has put a serious cap on my reading habits. To be fully honest: work, miscellaneous hobbies, the sudden emergence of a social life around age 16, and above all, the damn internet, have all contributed toward dramatically lowering the 100 books-a-year rate of yore, down to a fluctuating few dozens; more when my trips abroad allow me to pack on reading material. Moving to a beach house in Madagascar with a few trunkful of books and enough supply for a year of gin tonic is still part of my projects for a very near future.

What’s the last book you bought?

It’s pretty hard to tell, seeing how these days, I buy my books by bunch of twenty, whenever I make it to a friendly western shore. I think it might be Lie Zi’s Cannon of the Perfect Void (title translation is mine: I am not even sure this book’s ever been translated into English: I bought the French translation last year in Paris. French title was: Le vrai classique du vide parfait by Lie Tseu), minor part of the early taoist canons, and slightly disappointing in fact.

What’s the last book you read?

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Ok. Just kidding. But if anybody asks, that’s what.

I always have at least two or three ongoing books at the same time. Last ones would be Antonin Artaud‘s highly deranged Umbilical Limbo and the much lighter Sputnik Sweetheart (「スプツニク恋人」) by Murakami Haruki, both good reads.

List 5 books that matter a lot to you or that you particularly enjoyed.

I am pathologically bad at lists. Even more so with books, seeing how I do not even care to attempt ranking the thousands of books I have read, and wouldn’t know where to start anyway.

All I can offer is a glimpse at my bare-bone travel library, which holds some of the books I just couldn’t bring myself to give away or leave behind with a friend, each time I moved country. They do not represent my “definitive top 5 list”: some are only there because of the memories they keep with them. Others because I enjoy opening them and reading random excerpts, every once in a while.

• Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching: not my personal bible by any stretch, but most definitely a great book to leaf through. At any rate: the best value for your page count.
• Albert Cohen – Solal (and any of the few other books he wrote): because I am still an angsty teenage girl at heart. And also because he’s the best damn writer there ever was.
• Douglas Adams – Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: overplayed as it is, it still might be the funniest book I have ever read. And Douglas Adams is one of the only sci-fi writer who can write.
• Italo Calvino – Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees): childhood’s reading that still work for any age, by one of this century’s most brilliant author.
• Charles Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du Mal: even though I am not much of a poetry reader, it’s yet again one of the best read for your buck: easy to carry around (the rather dilapidated pocket edition I own has been following me in my backpack for over ten years now) and fit for every mood. Plus: perfectly fits the angsty teenage part mentioned above.

Who are you going to forward this (3 blogs) and why?

Nobody.

For each “meme” forwarded on the blogosphere, God kills a kitten. And I’d rather do that myself.

But do feel free to take the ball and run with it: either post a link to your own entry or answer directly in the comments.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

The One-time-only Internet Meme: Books

Everything else, albeit at ludicrous prices, can be found in Tokyo.

All right, maybe not exactly everything else, but I keep a wild ferret and two gerbils on crack sitting by my computer, specially trained to go straight for the groin and bite off my nuts in a split second, were I ever to stoop low enough to make a single joke on the size of Japanese prophylactics on this blog, so we’ll leave it at that.

In fact, even foreign languages books are easy to come by in Tokyo. Some for less that Japanese ones; as German, French, Italian and Spanish books can all be borrowed freely at their respective cultural embassies. Ironically, most of the books I buy here are by Japanese authors.

If you think about it, it’s easy to see why: my current level of written Japanese barely allows me to decrypt my emails (painfully so, when the witch sending them has drawn some evil glee from purposely using utterly rare kanji forms wherever english katakanas would have done just fine). On the other hand, attempting to read Mishima and his astronomical kanji vocabulary would be as entertaining as taking on the dictionary in alphabetical order.

I have peculiar taste in translations. I have noticed that, when it comes to Japanese, English translations are rather weak and often inferior to French ones. I don’t think this is primarily a matter of translators, although there are probably much more people with a passable knowledge in both English and Japanese asked to do a job they do not have particular talents for, while French translators are more likely to have actual professional skills in the matter. Odd as it may sound: the more bilingual speakers you can find between two languages, the lower you should expect your average translator to be.

I also think there is something that makes French a much more natural fit to Japanese. If you know all three languages, you might see what I mean. But do not ask me to back up this claim with any scientific evidence or anything more than a gut feeling; and we all know how biased I can be when it comes to languages.

My latest brush with the classics has finally brought me to one Mishima book I really liked. Something I was about to give up on, after a string of mediocre ones: unable as I was to see any appeal in the bouts of nostalgic lyricism and considerations on the loss of honour that have brought him worldwide fame.

「肉体の学校」 (nikutai no gakko: “School of Flesh”) is hardly a lyrical book: cynicism dominates the story and the characters, and its faint nostalgia of a certain ancient Japan is tempered by a merciless caricature of that older aristocracy still drifting pointlessly through the modernity of post-war Japan, where the action takes place.

Mishima was not only a fervent right-winger, he was also rather openly gay, which makes this cruel romance an interesting read. I personally couldn’t help wondering all along how much was observation, how much was projection and overall what value could be granted to his interpretation of such a typical straight relationship. To make matters even more complex, male homosexuality plays an important role in the story, yet is treated with the traditional attitude taken by Japanese society toward it: mild disgust and contempt toward what is mostly considered an embarrassing weakness (as opposed to the notion of a religiously wrong and sinful behaviour that pervades western culture).

I don’t know enough of his life to quite figure out the key to it, but it is really fascinating to compare the Japanese conception of a twisted self-destructive relationship with what can be found in western literature of a similar style or era. The not-so-tragic ending is also startling for such a book.

While his life and death has certainly enthralled generations of readers, especially western ones, I cannot help noticing a profoundly pathetic, nearly comical aspect, to it. I guess seing the bearers of his political legacy, driving these tiresome little black vans, blaring military marches like they are selling yaki-imo, doesn’t help preserve the seriousness of his cause.

Even his death really can be recounted in two radically opposed ways:

The common, awe-inspiring, version tells us of an uncompromising man, still fairly young, committing seppuku in objection to the westernization of his country.

Others will tell you that it was more like a very poorly prepared attempt at sparking a reactionary revolution that utterly failed and left him with few other options than skip directly to the last step of the plan: a gruesome, slightly grotesque, double-suicide.

What is known: on November 25, 1970, aided by his personal militia, Mishima Yukio takes over the Tokyo headquarters of the Self Defense Force (post-war Japan’s euphemism of an army), and holding the commander at the threat of his katana, orders that all men in the division be gathered in front of the building where he is to address them formally. His speech, supposed to rouse their enthusiasm and possibly start some sort of nationalistic movement, is received with a mix of hostility and heckles. He cuts it short after seven painful minutes, goes back in and starts disemboweling himself the way only real samurais know how to do…

Unfortunately, his closest disciple (and presumably lover) is either too shaken or not skilled enough to proceed with the second step correctly: the part where he is supposed to neatly cut the head off in one swift blow of his katana. Instead, he misses two times, and I have to assume the whole thing is quite painful for the half-disemboweled, yet likely still alive, Mishima. At this point, another disciple takes the sword from the hands of the first, finishes the job, then helps out the first disciple who has proceeded to take care of himself in the same fashion.

Something tells me the whole bloody scene did lack the zen serenity of good old executions of yore and was not quite what these young modern-day samurais had in mind…

As for me, I think I’d rather go with poison, guns or some other equally efficient, yet substantially less painful, option. Tradition be damned.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Who’s Gonna Clean the Carpet Now ?

If I tell you I am currently a full-time music producer and arranger, full-time VoIP server architect and full-time applied mathematics student, you might get an idea of what I mean. And there is no mistake in the previous sentence: the word full-time is purposely used three times because I am very much supposed to be doing each of these occupation full-time. Which is kind of a problem given that Earth rotation period seems to be stalling around 24 hours these days. Factor in my current involvement with WordPress development as well as my attempts to keep an appearance of social life by making regular expeditions with friends to nasty local watering holes where we proceed to get absolutely plastered on cheap sake… and you have a mathematical impossibility the likes of which even Gödel would give up on.

Since there are only so many hours of sleep you can remove from your daily schedule before permanent psychosis sets in (I mean, real psychosis, not the milder form of borderline psychopathic behaviour I usually retreat to on a good day), and since I also decided that food could not safely be removed from my daily essential needs, I had to cut down on other activities. As a result, my news readings has long fallen from many hours of intense paper scrutinizing, down to a 30 second scan of my RSS feed list and a few occasional glances at online news articles, every other week… As for TV: I have barely ever watched it in my life and the only TV set of the house is currently stored in my roommate’s room where neither of us ever turn it on, so it isn’t much of an issue.

So we can safely say that I know close to nothing about the big (and small) events of the world these days, except for the rough outline (Bush has not yet declared martial law in the US, Ishihara still hates foreigners and Tokyo maintains a precise average daily temperature of: “very hot”)…

Hell, for all I know, the War of the Worlds has already begun and I am talking (writing, really, but anyway) for a bunch of unmanned computers sitting atop the ashes of what used to be the proud western civilization, while Godzilla is busy fighting evil alien spaceships off the coast of Japan.

One minor piece of news, though, recently made the cut; and only because it kept surfacing in many of the feeds and sites I try to read regularly.
It appears that Mr. Francis “the End of History?” Fukuyama has written a new book.

And since it’s been a long time since I launched some semi-qualified attack against a popular figure, I thought I might use the occasion to share a few of my thoughts on the man. Granted, nobody really cares to hear them: my cat is my only faithful reader and the closest he has ever cared to come in contact with the work of Mr. Fukuyama was on the floor of his litter box, where said work found an unexpectedly useful second life as odor absorbent material. I can’t even use boredom as an excuse for this longwinded rant, but I guess I really need the distraction, so here goes.

This article in Straits Times is what apparently started it all… it contains a fairly decent assessment of the man and his work. So you should probably go there if you are looking for a somewhat less biased piece on the topic. Of course, you will still have to start by ignoring the laughingly unfounded claim in the title that he is “America’s Most Famous Thinker” (even assuming such a title had any meaning, it can easily be argued that Noam Chomsky has long been the winner by number of this game).

What made me take a serious dislike to Mr. Fukuyama a while back was not his ultra-controversial History etc. op-ed piece and the book that ensued. The vacuity of its historical argumentation was so obvious that I do not even fathom how any political historian or modern philosopher, save for a handful of rabid Hegelians (thankfully near extinct these days), might have paid any attention to it. At least, previous attempts by philosophers and ideologists to prove “the directionality of History” were based on more than a stack of uninspired Reagan-era party lines. Hegel might not have quite gotten it, but his justifications doesn’t read like a dated edition of the Wall Street Journal, circa 1982.
And let’s not go over the bitter irony of a theory that summons Marx, of all people, to rescue its claim that the world politics are all headed toward enlightened “Liberal Democracy” (read: some kind of benevolent capitalist empire headed by a handful of western democracies) and will magically all stop budging thereafter.

But that is precisely what Fukuyama is after: controversy and publicity. The list of his books, as the article points out, reads more like a sum-up of the past decades trendy topics: each title could have been lifted off your average alarmist Time Magazine cover. He tends to go after anything that has a chance to grab the attention of the mass media. In that optic, of course, telling people what they just want to hear (that everything will be ok and capitalism will prevail in the end) at a time where it is half-plausible, all the while making folkloric claims loosely supported by outworn philosophical theories, is the surest way to get what that attention you crave for.

I can live with that: it is par for the course in this era, and he is hardly the first one to use such promotional tactics (in fact, most “thinkers” who ever left some form of legacy probably did it at one point or another).

I have a much harder time digesting his Straussian neo-con stance. That ever popular: “let’s take the good decisions for the unshaved masses at home through lie and deception and impose them abroad through economical and military wars”.

It must be mentioned that he did side against Bush and the proponents of the war in Iraq, whatever his reasons may be. However, that laudable manifestation of intellectual integrity and political independence should not let us overlook the fact the man is still, for all purposes, a fierce advocate of the “strike first, bring capitalism later” tactic. That same school of thought that brought us Paul Wolfovitz (an old chum of his, as the article reminds us), Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (though not the best student, according to his little classmates) and countless other hacks who currently make the politics of the United States and the World at large while regularly checking on Dubya to ensure he doesn’t choke on bretzels.

All these people, and Fukuyama prominently among them, have in common, how shall I put it, a “certain vision of the World”. And we can safely say that this vision involves a great deal of American meddling in the affairs of non-enlightened countries who have not yet fully opened their heart to a very specific interpretation of democratic concepts. Nothing more than a Monroe doctrine for the 21st Century, after all. But a doctrine that gives itself the moral high ground through the appropriation of philosophical theories. Leo Strauss is the name most often cited, but while his own views could certainly be debated too, it is quite unlikely he would have ever endorsed these self-proclaimed bearers of his legacy.

But Strauss, Machiavelli, the Enlightened State’s entitlement to Lie and Deception as a way to achieve Greater Good, and their very personal interpretations by some recent leaders, shall be left for another post, when I will feel in a particularly pedant mood or when I will be done with my current reading.

As for Fukuyama and his ilk, I will simply point out that more than a few countries’ right to democracy and freedom have been completely crushed as a direct application of their theories. Even though they are mere ideologists, inspiring or being used by leaders to justify their actions, they certainly still did not do much for the improvement of this planet so far.

I might feel somewhat less concerned and be able to stay off the dramatic overtones, had I not witnessed first-hand some of the consequences of these despicable policies on more occasions than I care to remember. Knowing a fair share of people who have lost their relatives and their home to such wars make it impossible for me to remain cool and distant on the topic. But that doesn’t change a thing to the fundamental wrong that is contained in these highly marketable ideologies.

Words might not kill, but ideas most definitely do.

P.S.: Regarding the title of this post: I’ll post an explanation tomorrow… need to sleep right now.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Spinoza Encule Hegel (A Sec)

I am no writer (understatement if there ever was one), but something tells me they are both dead wrong.

Then again, I do not think Dan Brown is much of an author, to say nothing of the hordes of navel-gazing, bored & boring, Parisian writers who persists in trying to give their worst second-class Bret Easton Ellis rendition every single year… So what do I know…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Letters to a Young Hip-and-Coming Writer