Mushishi - Pillars

Two fics in two days, I'm on a roll! Actually this story has been 90% complete for the last three weeks, but I had no desire to work on it because I hated it. SO. MUCH. It's very long. There's a lot of extraneous description. It's not very original. It doesn't exactly match my impression of the series either. To be honest I wasn't going to finish it, but then I figured, it is 90% done, and I hate wasting effort more than I hate this fic, so. >_< suggestions for improvement welcome.

Title: Pillars
Fandom: Mushishi
Characters: Ginko, original
Genre: Psuedo-episode type thing
Notes: Absolutely no knowledge of Mushishi required to read this. In fact it might be better if you don't know anything. I've only seen the anime to episode 12 and I haven't read the manga, so if I got anything wrong feel free to correct me.

( Mushishi fanfiiiiiiic )

AUGH. I've got another four five ideas for this series, maybe one of those will turn out better.

Mushishi (the anime) is not like this story in that:
1) we don't like the characters for their weaknesses, we like them because they are supernaturally calm, loyal, stoic, and dependable.
2) If there's a character in Mushishi with negative emotions, 9 / 10 of the time it's a mushi causing them and not human weakness.
3) When a character tells a story in Mushishi, all the numbers have been filed off. The stories are stripped to their most essential parts.

Mushishi (the anime) is like this story, unlike the horror stories that inspired it, in that
1) Mushi can sometimes be harmful, but they are not actively malicious. They only harm incidentally.
2) Humans live at the mercy of nature, and ACCEPT this fact. Hence my previous mention of STOICISM.
3) Is that really a child? Capable children, children who are more reliable than adults.

I love watching Mushishi because:
1) No one is ever mean or cruel; no one lets the total arbitrariness unfairness of the mushi to get to them.
2) By the end of the episode Ginko always manages to rationally explain the mushi's behavior which, it turns out, is not so arbitrary after all! It's like salve for the post-modern soul!
3) It's pretty.

YAY AN ACADEMIC POST (Alamin Mazrui: George Orwell, East Africa...)

I've been going to one or two talks a month, then writing two page reports for extra credit. It's something I wish I'd done more often at Michigan (gone to talks, I mean, not written reports). I was going to post this one private-locked like all the others but then I figured, at least a couple people on my flist will probably have an interest in the topic.

( Alamin Mazrui: George Orwell, post-colonial East Africa and the politics of translation )

Notes:
[1] An interesting aside: the novel God Dies By the Nile was originally written in Arabic by an Egyptian author. God Dies by the Nile is the author's preferred title, but because it violates Muslim sensibilities the publisher had it changed to Death of the Only Man (in Arabic). God Dies by the Nile is the title of the English translation: strangely, it more closely resembles what the author intended than the original.
[2] Although I say "East Africa," many of Mazrui's points in this section refer specifically to Kenya, with the implication that there are implications for the wider region. Similarly, by "Swahili" I mean "KiSwahili".
[3] When I say "post-colonial India" I'm thinking of the novel A Suitable Boy, which is set in 1950s Brahmpur, Calcutta, etc., and when I say "post-colonial America" I'm thinking of The Dante Club, which is set in 1868 Boston. WHY YES I DO LEARN MOST OF MY HISTORY FROM HISTORICAL FICTION, WHY DO YOU ASK?
[4] I got a lot of what I said earlier in the post on this topic from the Question-and-answer section afterwards. I think, to Mazrui, the connection was obvious: he'd just given an hour and a half talk on the politics of translation, but most of what he said only applied to academic translation. There is very little overlap between academic and popular translation. Therefore, the logical way to end his talk is with a warning that something must be done to create overlap, to bridge the gap. Speaking as someone unfamiliar with the area or the subject, however, I can say that this connection was not obvious. The specifics of Mazri's talk were fascinating, but a little more grounding wouldn't have hurt.[5]
[5] On the other hand I'm far from the ideal audience. David Harvey and I were the only undergrads, the rest of the audience was professors or related.

we now return you to your regularly scheduled linkblogging

• Posted some Band AU fic recs to fanthology and you should too, because damn if I haven't been having way more fun reading these than the fairytale fics.

• I bet McCauley Culkin has a blog.

• A short lesson in How To Use the Internet: internet image formats (summary: photos = use jpeg, cartoons = use png, animation = use gif)

• Techonrati: the next generation in vanity searches. (It seems that people with technorati profiles show up in search results more regularly than people without profiles, so if you do a search on yourself and the first three results are me, ummm, I'm really sorry about that.)

SEE ALSO: GOOGLE BLOGSEARCH

• Greatest invention ever. (Well, no, but the story makes you go awwwww!)

***

Good Night, and Good Luck:

God, the writing on Murrow's show. It almost feels cheap that Clooney should get the credit for this, when the words were there and the footage was there and in many cases spliced into the movie unedited. I liked what he did with the spies, though, they way they weren't targetted while innocent people were. Emphasizes how much McCarthy's actions were a power trip rather than an effective strategy.

Marginally related: a friend of the family is about to publish a book about fear in the fifties. (She said at dinner that people have forgotten how idotic Civil Defense was and how much protest there was against it, but I don't think that's true: there was that episode of South Park with the volcano, wasn't there?)