What’s up with me:
Past entries
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K. Bourdaghs homepage
(Entries for the year 2005 can be found here; those for 2004 can be
found here; those for 2003 can be
found here.)
Posted on 6/11/06:
I traveled up to the lovely city of
The next day I visited Komoro, a town
near
The park also contains a nice museum devoted to the painter Koyama Keizô, a native of Komoro. The guilty
pleasure of the day: the
memorial hall devoted to Atsumi Kiyoshi, the actor who played Tora-san in the 48 films of the Otoko wa tsurai yo series. Not quite as spectacular as the Misora
Hibari Memorial Hall that I visited in
Posted on 5/30/06
We’ve been living in madhouse fashion
lately, constantly juggling a dozen different unfolding crises. It’s probably just as well that we’ve had a
rain-infested spring here in
I did manage to get out to the spring
meeting of the Japan
Modern Literature Association this past Saturday. I bumped into many old friends and heard
several interesting papers. Kawakatsu Mari (
Yesterday, I went to a lecture at ICU by Bambang
Wibawarta on Mori Ôgai and
the Meiji state, focusing especially on the High Treason Incident and Ôgai’s relations to Yamagata Aritomo. Bambang is now
Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Indonesia, but I know him from when
we were both grad students at Tôhoku back in the mid
1990s.
On Sunday, we were supposed to attend the “undôkai” (track and field day) at my daughter’s elementary
school, but it was cancelled—rain, of course.
It’s been rescheduled for today, but all I see out the window this
morning are gray clouds. The newspaper
says there’s a 30% change of precipitation, but given our recent experiences, I’d
call that as close to a sure thing as a betting man could want. I’ll bring my new umbrella with me. [Update on 5/31/06: The "undokai" came off without a hitch. Mostly clear
skies the whole day through, so I ended up using the umbrella as a parasol. I
still got a nasty sunburn. Go figure....]
Posted on 5/17/06:
I
spent last Thursday in
On Sunday, Mother's Day, I made brunch for the mother in our
family and then took our youngest off to Ryogoku to
watch sumo. It's been a rather low key tournament, with two of the
favorites -- Asashoryu and Tochiazuma
-- pulling out early with injuries. But we enjoyed ourselves, nonetheless,
and we both noted how many foreigners there were in the audience. In the
cheap seats that we buy, these days something like a quarter of the spectators
are non-Japanese.
Back on the ICU campus on Monday, I caught an interesting
lecture by Gavin McCormack (
I agree with most of McCormack's very sharp analysis.
But I see more commonalities than he does between
popular nationalism, one that would be properly anti-U.S. in bent, might rise
up and block the attempts to revise the constitution. But it strikes me
that bottom-up popular nationalism is potentially as dangerous as the top-down
state nationalism that he was targeting in his talk. In a sense,
McCormack's position tends to echo the victimization narrative used in the
postwar era: that the common people of
Those Tohoku farmers I saw out in their rice fields last
Saturday, in other words, are no doubt fine and decent people. And yet,
like all of us, they are capable of great mischief, especially when banded
together in anger, vowing to redress the wounds of injured national pride.
Posted on 5/10/06:
In the fantasyland that is home to
most characters from trendy Japanese tv
dramas, all the beautiful young people work for either a). television
networks, or b). airlines. On top of that, there is one basic plot line
you can never go wrong with: a spunky,
utterly unpolished girl with a heart of gold (and a pretty smile, of course)
manages through pluck and charm to achieve great success. Combine those two conditions, and you account
for about 33% of all the television programs ever broadcast here, I think,
including the two I’ve suckered myself into watching this season.
Top
Caster (Monday nights at 9:00
on the Fuji Network) stars Amami Yuki, who was so
terrific last year in Joô no
kyôshitsu, as a veteran dedicated news anchor.
Yada Akiko plays the dipsy
young weathergirl that Amami is determined to mold
into a true reporter. Attention Please (Tuesday nights at 9:00,
also on the Fuji Network), on the other hand, is the story of a
rough-and-tumble young woman (Ueto Aya) determined to make it as a flight attendant. The scripts for both shows are, well,
awful: I am always the last one to
figure out who the killer is when I watch a mystery movie, but I can see the
plot twists in these shows coming from a mile off. The performances are below average, too, and
the music is mostly forgettable, although Attention
Please does feature a lively remake of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” by
Kimura Kaela over its closing credits. At this point, it’s mostly inertia that keeps
me watching both.
The ongoing sumo tournament was
thrown for a loop when Asashôryû was injured on the second day and
withdrew. It’s wide open now, and it’s
anyone’s guess who will walk away with the title. I’ll be there next Sunday to watch in person. Before that, I’m off to
Posted on 5/7/06:
It's Golden Week now, that lovely
string of consecutive national holidays in
I’ve also been allowing myself to
wallow in sports. Yesterday, I strolled
over to Ajinomoto
Stadium, the fine soccer stadium near our house, to take in the J-League soccer
match between FC Tokyo and Omiya Ardija. It was a lovely day, but a rather disappointing
match. After grabbing an early lead on a
penalty-kick goal, the hometown heroes retreated into a defensive shell and
basically stopped trying. They surrendered
the tying goal in the second half, and then gave up the losing goal just as
injury time was winding down at the end of the game. Sigh.
But I’ve been getting quite
accustomed to losing these days. In
baseball, the Minnesota Twins have been busy (to risk imitating the inimitable Batgirl) sucking all year
long. Brad Zellar on his blog has captured the mood of
the early season well. Here in
Sumo, on the other hand, is looking
up. Tickets are selling briskly for the
new tournament, which begins today. The
great yokozuna Asashôryû looks to be in top form, but he at
long last has genuine rivals: Tochiazuma, who could be promoted to yokozuna if he wins this tournament; the Bulgarian ozeki Kotoôshû who managed a winning record last
tournament despite having to fight basically on one leg; and the brand new
Mongolian ozeki Hakuhô, who has bulleted up the banzuke rankings over the past
two years. We also get to look forward to the first
tournament in the top division for the great young Baruto, the first blonde sumo wrestler in
history. I have tickets for the middle
day of the tournament, next Sunday. I
can hardly wait! It should at least
take my mind off of baseball for the day.
Posted on 4/29/06:
As I write these words, I'm
listening to the new Neil Young album, Living With War, which he's made
available free on-line. One of the hopeful signs of
the last few years (a period marked by large, ugly swaths of hopelessness, to
be sure) is the way artists, writers, and musicians have stepped forward again
to take up the good fight. I'm just old enough to remember the
anti-Vietnam war movement and the way students, artists, and activists worked
together back then. It's clear that Young has something like that in
mind.
This week, the wonderful on-line satirical newspaper The Onion has as its feature story,
"Scholars Discover 23 Blank
Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play." I guess great minds think
alike: a few years ago, on a now-discontinued section here I called "Stuff and Nonsense," I posted the following
trifle. Unfortunately, the Onion's version is funnier than
mine....
(Imaginary) Music News of the Day
(Los Angles)
Seattle-based Cold Pop Records has announced the forthcoming release of Oh No!
A Tribute to John Lennon, in which fourteen musicians and musical
groups contribute cover versions of the classic song, “Two Minutes Silence”
from the late Beatle’s 1969 album Unfinished Music #2: Life With
The Lions. The tribute’s producer, 34-year-old Rick
“Stocky Fingers” Frederick, who was also the guiding light behind last year’s The Door’s Not Shut: A Celebration of Jim Morrison,
describes the album as a statement of love for Lennon “by some of today’s
up-and-coming best young bands, and by some of the biggest names in the
industry. When people heard about the
project, everyone just came together in a warm statement of love. Love is just about all you need when it comes
to John Lennon, I guess.”
Beatles’
fans around the world were electrified earlier this year by rumors that the new
album would include legendary lost recordings of a silent 1966 jam session
involving Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton. The stolen tapes of that session were
recently unearthed in a
Fortunately,
however, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono provided her blessings to the project—as well
as a previously unreleased twelve-second tape segment of Lennon’s silence,
recorded at the Power Plant Studio in New York City during the Double Fantasy sessions from 1979. “It’s short, but it’s really cool,”
Among
the contributors to the new tribute album are rock-and-roll legend Little
Richard, who issued several statements and repeatedly contacted reporters to
explain his role in the project. “I love
John Lennon and the Beatles,” Richard enthused.
“But I invented rock ‘n’ roll music, including silence. Just listen to those little gaps between the
songs on my first album, Here’s Little
Richard. Pure
silence. I was the first one to
do that, and that’s 1957, when John Lennon was still a young punk in
Famed
Beatles’ tribute band The Fab Four also contribute a track,
a laboriously faithful recreation of the original recording, which consists—as
the title suggests—of two minutes of pure silence. Peter Noone of
Herman’s Hermits fame contributes a raved up, high-energy version of the
song. Michael Bolton, who recently
announced that he will soon be releasing an album consisting entirely of old
standards, provides a velvety smooth reading of the song. “I hope this will help me reconnect with the
fans who may have lost track of where Michael Bolton
is at,” the balladeer said in a telephone interview from
In a
related development, surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo
Starr, along with representatives from the George Harrison estate, met recently
with legal counsel in
Posted on 4/23/06:
Yesterday morning, as I rode the JR Chûô Line east toward Shinjuku,
you could see
I was riding that train yesterday with my sister and
her husband, who were bound for
Now we're all recovering from the various viruses and
bacteria that we exchanged across the Pacific. I've been sneezing and
coughing for days, but seem to be on the mend now. And spring is here,
Golden Week is on the horizon (right there, next to Mount Fuji), and the government has even reached a truce
of sorts with South Korea in the never-ending tussle over territorial rights for
small bits of rock sticking out of the Sea of Japan.
Posted on 4/9/06:
The cherry blossoms were at their peak in western
On Wednesday, I traveled down to
Then it was back home and back to the office on
Friday. That evening, we organized a scavenger hunt for newly arrived UC
students in the Kichijôji
neighborhood. The cherry blossoms in Inogashira Park were on their last legs,
but there were still plenty of revelers (and plenty of blue vinyl sheets) out.
While the students tracked down various shops and monuments in the area, my
daughter and I planned to rent a pedal boat in the pond, but they were already
closed for the day when we arrived. We had to content ourselves with
feeding the carp in the pond, and watching the last of the cherry blossoms
scatter in the chilly wind.
Posted on 3/31/06:
It's been downright hectic the last two weeks, which--together with my
general slothfulness--explains why updates here have been so scarce as of
late. But the cherry blossoms are now at their peak in the western
suburbs of
My in-laws visited us from
In the interstices of all that, I caught as much of the
Osaka Sumo tournament as I could. It ended in spectacular fashion last
Sunday: the ozeki Kaio managing to save his
career on the final day with a strong win over up-and-coming sekiwake Hakuho (who a few days earlier
assured his own promotion to ozeki), and ozeki Tochiazuma keeping his hopes of
future promotion to yokozuna alive with a win over yokozuna Asashoryu. The tournament
championship came down to a playoff between Asashoryu
and Hakuho, one of the best sumo bouts I've ever
seen: two evenly matched masters going after one another full tilt.
Asashoryu won it all, a greatly deserved
championship: tears streamed down his face, and the fans even tossed zabuton for him, a tribute usually reserved for moments
when a yokozuna is defeated.
The 2006 Pacific League baseball season is also
underway. I'm determined to follow the Sendai Rakuten Eagles, who as an expansion franchise last
year challenged the 1899 Cleveland Spiders and the 1961 New York Mets for the
most-hapless-baseball-team-of-all-time prize. Things look little better
for them this year. I watched an inning of their game against Orix last night and in the space of ten minutes saw a). their third baseman Jose Fernandez toss a perfect
double-play grounder into centerfield to allow the tying run to score, b). their starting pitcher Hiroki Yamamura throw two wild pitches
to allow the go-ahead run to score, and c). two
separate time-outs when pitchers complained there was something hard in the
dirt of the pitching mound that prevented them from getting good footing; the
grounds crew came out with shovels and (I swear I'm not making this up)
proceeded to dig up a half-dozen bricks from the mound. It's going to be
another very long year for the Eagles, but I also suspect it's going to be
great masochistic (or perhaps sadistic) fun to watch.
Posted on 3/21/06:
Our wayward professor reports on his recent trip to the home country:
I board the Northwest flight at Narita and find myself
sitting next to a young Japanese man with an alarming habit: he coughs
deeply and then pounds his chest several times afterward, as if not satisfied
with whatever it is he has dredged up from his lungs. He keeps this up
the entire eleven hours of the flight, except for when he is pouring himself
drinks out of his duty-free bottle of Wild Turkey. In the meanwhile, the flight attendants
announce that the video system isn't working, and neither are our individual
overhead lights. Which means, yes, I spend eleven
hours in the dark, unable to read, unable to watch movies. What am I able
to do? Basically, inhale whiskey fumes, listen to coughing, and wonder
what disease it is that makes a man pound on his chest like that.
We finally land in
But my one-day sojourn in the Twin Cities turned out to be quite
pleasant. I spent time with my parents and friends, ate some good food, and watched another six inches of
snow fall. Then it was off to the East Coast on a thankfully uneventful
flight, and the March 17 workshop on Natsume Sôseki's
Bungakuron (Theory of Literature, 1907)
at
Even through the filter of my dazed, jet-lagged brain, the
workshop was fascinating. In the morning panel, which I chaired, Keith
Vincent spoke about the relationship between the finite and the infinite in Sôseki's
theory of literature, with special reference to Sôseki's guilt over the
death of his friend Masaoka Shiki from tuberculosis
(I wonder if Shiki pounded his chest when he coughed?) and Shiki's famous
prediction about the coming extinction of haiku as a genre. Anna-Marie Farrier discussed the traces of the gothic in Sôseki's
works, especially in relation to images of madness and the supernatural that
haunt his supposedly scientific theories. Atsuko Ueda situated Sôseki's
theory as a tense critique of the rising discourse of literary history in late
Meiji
In the afternoon session, chaired by Joe Murphy, Richard Okada explored
the disfigurement of rhetoric and the rhetoric of disfigurement in Sôseki΄s theory, especially
in reference to the ways Sôseki
was positioned in the discourses of empire and race. Dan O΄Neill explored the
ways Sôseki
tried to theorize tragedy to close a gap in his system, a gesture that links up
with a masochistic undercurrent that seems to run throughout the theory. Masumitsu Keiko
contrasted Sôseki΄s repeated use of the
imagery of the murkiness of being underwater with the clarity of scientific,
enlightenment reason that otherwise underwrites his analysis of
literature. Mark Anderson traced
inherent links to Spencerian Social Darwinism in Sôseki΄s use of William
James and Henri Bergson, who on the surface seemed to have broken with Spencerian racialism.
Tom Looser acted as discussant, raising in particular the question of
how history functions in Sôseki
and in the papers presented. The discussion
that followed was quite productive—all in all, a very useful day.
We all went out to a fine Indian restaurant to celebrate St. Patrick΄s
Day, and then early the next day I found myself back at
Posted on 3/9/06:
The death of Kirby
Puckett this past Monday knocked me for a loop.
If you lived in
Here (in slightly
modified form) is a short-short story I published back in 1987 in the old Minneapolis Review of Baseball (which
later became the Elysian Fields Quarterly).
"Dream of a Twins Fan, October 1986"
In my dream, it is the bottom of the
ninth. Harold Baines faces Ron Davis–a
fastball, what else? Baines whacks the
pitch hard. The ball sails far over
Kirby Puckett's head, landing many rows back in the centerfield stands. Puckett walks in slowly from center, watching
Cruz, Cangelosi, and finally Baines cross homeplate.
Two hours later:
Electric floodlights still paint the
Oliva lofts a dozen white baseballs into the sky. Puckett chases each down, first jogging to
his left, then racing to his right. He
runs one ball back to the warning track to snatch it from the air. Next, he charges in, sliding his glove out
along the dewy grass in front of him.
The ball plops in. The night is
so still that I can hear not only the crack of the bat, but also Puckett's
footsteps and the grunts he makes as he runs.
When Oliva's bucket is
empty, a dozen white baseballs lie scattered in the outfield grass, paintdrops splattered on the artist's floor. Kirby races in from center. At homeplate, he
speaks to Oliva.
"It's okay," Puckett says. "If the ball had been in the park, I
would have caught it."
The two men walk back into the visitor's
dugout. I hear a metal door click
shut. The old ballpark falls silent
again. It must be early June; the night
air and the baseball season still feel fresh and dewy on my skin.
Posted on 2/25/06
I usually write here about things I have done lately, but today will
focus instead on something I haven’t done.
It’s an odd form of confession, really.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned:
I have ducked going to see Memoirs
of a Geisha. The film, known in
I’ve never read the book, either, despite my responsibilities as a
scholar of modern Japanese literature.
Why? It’s a complex issue. To begin with, I’m professionally obligated
to hate the thing: it reeks of Orientalism, of the highly profitable transformation of
racial stereotypes into sexual fantasies.
When the novel first came out, I remember a small gathering of Japanese
literature specialists at which an older scholar—a very nice man, actually, but
a man a decade or two behind the times—expressed admiration for it: he liked the writing, the use of figurative
language. An embarrassed
silence descended on the group: it was as
if our senior colleague had announced a particular fondness for black-faced minstrel
shows.
In other words, I’m supposed to be outraged by a film like this. Even if I like it (and everything I’ve heard
or read about it makes me think I wouldn’t—honest!), I can’t like it. So, what’s the point in going to see a movie
that I know I won’t enjoy, even if I enjoy it?
The outrage I would no doubt feel is all too predictable and therefore boring. There are, in short, more fruitful ways to
spend an evening.
Of course, it’s important to
denounce racism and stereotypes whenever they rear their ugly heads. Some of the reviews I read of the film
properly took it to task for this—good thing, too, since I’m clearly not up to
the job. But we face a huge problem here,
approaching the scale of Original Sin:
almost all of our popular culture is rooted in ethnic and racial
stereotypes that we all are too civilized to espouse: think about our movies, our tv commercials, our fashions, our
restaurant menus, our pornography, our sports, our music, our jokes. Even when pop culture deliberately pokes fun
at stereotypes (for example, the brilliant comedy of Richard Pryor or Margaret
Cho), it inevitably keeps those stereotypes in play, regurgitating them. Clearly, a huge part of the enjoyment we
derive from popular culture (me as much as anyone) is at root an enjoyment of
those stereotypes. Even
as we properly reject those stereotypes.
But if, for example, you’re going to complain about ethnic stereotypes
in a gangster film, you might as well not watch gangster films: the stereotypes are a definitive component of
the genre.
To invoke Walter Benjamin here (whose death under the threat of Nazi
capture reminds us of the stakes here), there is no document of civilization
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. I’m not sure that our popular culture
constitutes a document of civilization, but the barbarism is hard to miss. And so I won’t be going to see Memoirs of a Geisha anytime soon, I’m
afraid. I can’t claim the moral
legitimacy of a boycott, however, since I will probably eat at a Chinese
restaurant in the next few days, watch some of the Olympics on tv, and enjoy some nice tunes, too—maybe the new Prince
singles: “Te Amo
Corazon” and “Black Sweat,” for instance.
Hail Mary, full of grace…..
Posted on 2/18/06:
Doing a walk-on on the Fox News network does
not constitute "taking responsibility." I know I'm a little
late in jumping in on the Cheney-with-a-gun bandwagon, but there's a hell of a
lot to learn here. In other words, I think it's worth our while to take
time and think through the whole sorry incident.
For starters, there is the remarkable manner in which it
encapsulates the entire Cheney and Bush approach to governing: first deny
that you've made a mistake and try to cover it up (in this case, we're talking
about both the actual shooting and the fact that Cheney was drinking that
day). Then, when that fails, scramble to find someone else to blame it
on. Finally, when that doesn't work, make some public statement about
"taking responsibility" and hope the whole thing blows over so you
don't actually have to take responsibility.
We all make mistakes, of course, and it's often hard
to figure out how best to take responsibility for them. But it's clear
that Cheney has done nothing of the sort: he wants to claim credit for
taking responsibility without actually doing so. What would constitute
taking responsibility here? For starters, as the word implies, being
responsible--responding openly and truthfully to questions and accusations from
others. A public press conference would be a reasonable step in this
direction. Secondly, taking concrete steps to make sure something like
this never happens again. Thirdly, engaging in
some sort of penance: an apology would be a good start.
I wish the media would get beyond the notion that simply
mouthing the words "I take full responsibility" somehow actually
constitutes taking responsibility. The words have to be followed by
deeds, and we have seen nothing of the sort from the moral coward who currently
occupies the Vice Presidency of the
Posted on 2/9/06:
Personal
inventory: I've felt like I've been insanely busy lately, and thought I'd
sit down here and figure out why. What exactly have I been up to the last
few months?
A series of articles have just appeared, or are about
to appear. "What It Sounds Like to Lose an Empire: Happy End
and the Kinks," an exploration of the vagaries of historical memory in
1960s and 70s Japanese and British rock, just appeared in Tsu
Hun Yui, ed., Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan (Global
Oriental). A related piece, "Za Kinkusu: Ray Davies and the Rise and Fall and Rise of
Japanese Rock and Roll," an article on how Japanese rock bands since the
1960s have responded to The Kinks, will appear in the May 2006 issue
of the journal Popular Music and Society. A third article, this one a Japanese-language essay
on Natsume Sôseki's 1907 Bungakuron (Theory of literature) has just
appeared in the March 2006 issue of the journal Kokubungaku.
And a book review I wrote late last year will appear in the next issue of the
journal Pacific Affairs.
[Update as of 2/17/06: it’s out
now: the Fall
’05 issue].
In addition to those projects, I have one book that I
edited, a collection of essays on the use of linguistic theories in
contemporary Japanese literary studies, currently being copy-edited. I am
also preparing to submit another volume I am co-editing (this on the multiple
ways that "theory" is translated, appropriated, used and abused,
etc., across
So that's why I
feel like I'm going crazy....
Posted on 1/30/06:
It's been quite
cold n
A week ago Sunday, as I headed off to the Kokugikan arena in Ryogoku for
the last day of the New Years sumo tournament, I found myself wondering how
sumo wrestlers cope with snowy weather. I arrived a bit early, so I stood
outside the wrestlers' entrance to see what they were wearing in the biting
cold. I watched Hakurozan and many others
arrive and depart. They had switched, of course, from the light cotton yukata that they wear in summer to thicker,
padded kimono. But they still wear simple open-foot sandals, and half of
them didn't even wear socks under those. Out of the twenty or thirty
wrestlers I saw outside that afternoon, only one had a winter coat pulled on
over his kimono. The sumo was, by the way, great fun, with Tochiazuma pulling off an utterly unexpected win in the
tournament, and some up-and-comers (Hakuho, Baruto, Hokutoriki) making things
interesting. I was concerned to see the great yokozuna
Asashoryu hurt his arm; let's hope this is just a
minor blip in his career, rather than a turning point. At any rate, it
was the first time in a year and a half that someone other than him walked away
as the champion.
And so it remains chilly and icy here in
Posted on 1/20/06:
I had an odd experience last week. Walking near my home one sunny afternoon, I
spotted my nine-year-old daughter up the block.
She was walking home from the local Japanese public elementary school;
the sidewalk was bustling with other kids from her school, all on their way
home. I started running to catch up with
her and called out her name—whereupon I caught the look on the face of one of
the neighborhood ladies standing out on the corner, a look that froze my heart,
an anguished jumble of fear, anger, and panic. I knew immediately that I had committed a
no-no: after a few horrific kidnappings
and murders of school children walking home after classes over the past few
months, I had set off every possible alarm bell.
People in
It’s a sad change, really. The
terrible murders of children over the past few months broke my heart—but statistically
they were flukes. Crime numbers are up
slightly over the past decade in
Why is all of this happening? I
suppose changes in the economy and social structures are partly
responsible. But I can’t help also
remembering Michael Moore’s Bowling for
Columbine from a few years back. In
that film, he traced the fear that permeates American life in part to
unresolved guilt and fear over the violence that has marked
I don’t know whether
The neo-nationalists always boast that they will make
Posted on 1/16/06:
I spent a chunk of last week in the company (well, in the far-distant
company, but at least I was in the same room) of the brilliant feminist
theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, who made her first-ever
visit to
Her title that afternoon was "Undoing
Gender," and much of the lecture retraced arguments from her recent book of that title. It all led into a
reconsideration of Freud's essay "On
Mourning and Melancholia" as a framework for understanding the tensions at
the heart of living transgendered in society
today. The melancholic deals with a loss in the social world as a loss in
the self--thus providing a model for how the social and the interior are
inseparably linked. Furthermore, the melancholic responds to this loss
not simply through self-directed violence, but also aggressively as a complaint
made repeatedly to others out in the world--giving voice to the complaint
becomes a matter of survival. Moreover, she argued, the violence directed
against transgendered persons by society at large
arises from the same model. She suggested this framework provided both a
means of understanding social violence and a survival strategy for living out
the tensions inherent in a life of non-normative sexual and gender practices.
The previous Thursday,
Posted 1/12/06:
Back in
We enjoyed a White Christmas back in
We spent the week of New Years in
But now it is 2006 and we are again
home in