subdee

Couple canned book reviews from 750words.com:

Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire
What a title, right? This is about two brothers whose father kills himself while being held for observation at an institution. The older brother, who also struggles with depression, and is also eventually the father of two young boys, reflects on things like the fact that he, at 12, was already away from home at a reform school when their father died, while his younger brother, at 9, had been used to their father going away and coming back his whole life, and hadn't been allowed to see the body at the funeral, and so maybe on some subconscious level believed his father would come back this time, too.

Parts of this book are almost too sad to bear, but in other places the narrator obviously tries to pull back and adopt a level-headed and rational tone. The narrator's unfinished doctoral thesis/novel, which shares a title with the book, is written in this mode - it's a quite interesting work that tries to cut through all the bullshit Orientalism AND legitimate Japanese cultural baggage surrounding suicide, and to consider individual cases from a historical point of view while also taking into account modern American psychological theories. In other words, it's a very level-headed work on a difficult topic. And so is this book! The book as a whole talks a lot about memory and the psychic damage that can occur when you don't know your own history - how uniquely American that is. Anyway, recommended.

Happy Mania
This is about exactly what the title says it is about. The main character is on a quest for perfect, delirious happiness with a perfect partner forever and doesn't care about many black pits of utter despair she must fall into to get there. She has a series of disastrous relationships, because she is OBSESSED with love, but also believes (with reason) that there is something wrong with her, and that therefore there is something wrong with any guy who likes her. And so she only goes after guys who are uninterested in her - and she THROWS herself at those guys, and sleeps with them right away, and then becomes obsessed and misses work to stalk them, which, considering they were never that into her in the first place, works about as well as you might expect.

She's got two close friends: her roomate Fuka - who's also had her share of one night stands, but is older, and a pillar of sanity compared to the main character - and Takahashi, the guy at the bookstore where she works who likes her. He seems to be a genuinely nice guy, too, notwithstanding his White Knight complex. While the main character shows absolutely NO self awareness as she careens from relationship to relationship and job to job, her two friends comment quite perceptively about how Shigeta is self-destructing again -_-, giving you hope that the author is not nearly clueless as the character and so maybe, MAYBE, this won't all end as badly as you suspect.

Anyway, this manga would be quite depressing if it wasn't a comedy. ^^ Actually, it made me wonder about the state of mental health services in Japan - at one point Shigeta ends up at the hospital, where the doctor prescribes her.... a brown paper bag. You know, for breathing into when she starts to hyperventilate. ^^ At another point, she goes home to see her mother and sisters, who are JUST LIKE SHE IS and similarly untreated. (But at least they live in a house.) At least, Japan seems to have some established cultural practices that help the troubled, like regular trips to climb mountains or pray at temples, and places where you can study to be a ceramist or whatever in an atmosphere of disciplined routine - something the narrator does, and which doesn't help her, but which might help someone more settled.

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
If only I'd finished this book by Amy Chua before all that stuff about Tiger Moms got blasted across the internet, I could have contributed more to the discussion. :p Anyway, it's again exactly what it says it is: a book about how the free market creates winners, often belonging to an ethnic minority, but democracy gives collective power to (often disenfranchised) ethnic majorities. And about how this situation is inherently unstable. It's an obvious but also very sensitive thesis - what better way to bring about the instability she is describing than to point it out - which Chua can get away with because her husband is Jewish and she herself has ethnic-Chinese relatives in the Philippines.

I was most interested in her section on Brazil, because there's been a lot of talk about development in that country, but reading this I wonder, is it really the whole country that benefiting from the development? (I'm still not sure one way or the other.) But best sections of the book are probably the ones on Jewish oligarches in Russia - very VERY sensitive topic, given Russia's antisemitic past and present - and on the Chinese in SE Asia. Haven't reached the end of the book yet, so I'll have to keep going to find out whether Chua ultimately proposes any answers for this problem, or whether this will be another book, like THE DEATH OF WHY, that is better at describing a problem than proposing a solution.

While I'm on a roll, I might as well cover THE DEATH OF WHY by Andrea Schlesinger:
Picked this up on a whim for R, who is always asking "Why???" XD This is a book about a weakness of American culture, where we are fixated on having answers and forget to cultivate a spirit of thoughtful inquiry, and so we never learn as much as we could, and lots of damage is done, especially to our understanding of others and to the democratic process. She's got a really good case for the problem, but not such a good case for her proposed solution, which is to read more newspapers in the classroom, unplug ourselves from the 'net, or otherwise roll back the clock on technological advances that just ain't going to go away. She does make a very good case for bringing back Civics classes, especially over kind-of-bogus financial literacy classes. Personally, I was bored senseless by elementary school civics classes, but if they'd been taught more like labs, as Andrea proposes, maybe I'd have paid more attention. (Probably not. As the oldest child of a stable family, I was a pretty big believer in the status quo.)

Currently about halfway through Out by Natsuo Kirino. Picked up the second book in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon - because the bookstore didn't have Skippy Dies. And for my next trick, I'll pick a book that has nothing whatsoever to do with depression.

I watched two family-friendly dog movies and a Focus on the Family-approved fantasy movie with my cousins over the break.

Hachi: A Dog's Tale
This is a SAD movie. It needs to come with a warning. I'm not kidding. Spoilers hidden, because the makers of this movie go out of their way to trick you into thinking that nothing very bad is going to happen: This is based on the true story of Hachi, a Japanese dog that was born in 1923 and died in 1934. If you do the math on Hachi, you will discover that he spent two years living happily with his master, and NINE years waiting at the train station for his master to return, before finally dying of old age, still waiting. If I had known in advance that this was based on a Japanese folk story, I might have been more prepared for the valorization of futile, though admittedly touching, loyalty.

More on how this movie tricks you: Hachi and the Professor (Richard Gere) live in the kind of idealized town where you can walk to the train station with your dog, the conductor will hold the train while you say goodbye, and the dog can walk home alone, stopping to get treats from the butcher and the hot dog vendor. Everyone knows each other and everyone is kind to each other. The Professor teaches piano and his wife works at a museum and the movie is rated G. I was so totally not prepared for (spoiler again) the second half of this movie to be sad, and for Hachi's death to be the happy ending.

******

Marley and Me
Not as sad as I expected! Perhaps it is just the contrast with Hachi that makes this seem like a light-hearted comedy... but no, it actually is a romcom about a married couple with a dog and (later) some kids. Incidentally, that is a really nice house outside of Philadelphia they are able to afford on a single columnist/reporter's salary. Either this happened while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer was still lucrative, or they were living on easy credit. They even had horses!

The reason I mistakenly thought Marley and Me was going to be a sad movie was... actually I am going to skip this story, it's embarrassing. ^^ I'll just say that I heard it was a movie about a dog that constantly causes huge problems for everyone, but his family love him anyway, unlike SOME people, who just leave you alone to die in the street, etc etc. So based on this description, I was expecting something very different from what the movie turned out to be.

(Which was: a heartwarming movie for urbanites who are too sophisticated to watch heartwarming movies.)

******

Voyage of the Dawn Treader
I enjoyed this one a lot. The Narnia movies have been getting better each time, perhaps because the profits from the previous movies are being rolled into the budgets of the next ones, perhaps because the original four Pensieve children are gradually being phased out and replaced by characters (Prince Caspian and Eustace) who are played by better actors. The movie is exciting and moves at a good pace, with no dead spots and lots of cool visuals.

(Racial politics of this series are still horrible, though. British kids have fun and consequence-free adventures in exotic land, peace comes when Italian-looking Prince conquers Middle Eastern-looking people, etc etc. But leaving that aside for the moment.)

I've come around on the overt religiosity of these movies. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I was bothered, not because it is not in books (of course it is), but because it was handled very clumsily, lots of symbolism that is only emotionally affecting if you have been brought up in a certain way. There is nothing inherently moving about a lion sacrifing himself for you sins, you know. Also, the swordfighting in that movie was terrible.

But in this movie, the Christian subtext works well as an integrated theme, since the characters are basically rushing off with no plan, sailing literally towards what they believe to be the edge of the earth, because that is how heroes conduct themselves, and because they have faith that Aslan will protect them - and he does does! Hooray! This movie would not make sense without religion. With religion, it makes perfect sense.

Also, I love Eustace. In the BBC miniseries, (and in the books), he is really annoying. But his eccentricities are so pronounced in this movie that I found I was fond of him - and also he has some of the best lines. He was slimmed down a bit in the movie, as well, which I thought was a good move - keep the focus on his weaknesses of character, including his greed for gold and oranges and sweets, but don't tie it to his girth as if that is a character flaw in itself.

I am guessing that they will skip the two side story books - Magician's Nephew and Horse and His Boy - and go straight to The Silver Chair and The Last Battle. Eustace is set to star in the next movie all on his own. It's almost as if C.S. Lewis, writing in the 1940s, anticipated the difficulties of 21st century serialized epic productions which must cast child actors who will age visibly between movies.

P.S. I saw this in 3D - the kind that is fully integrated into the movie, not the kind that is added as an afterthought. It's funny, but until I got used to the effect, the actors all kind of looked like the computer generated people who'd been in half the trailers, only with really realistic skins added to the 3D models. Then I got used to the glasses and the feeling passed.

INGREDIENTS:
Water, black beans, corn, jalapeño peppers, tomato paste, onions, red bell peppers, modified food starch.
Contains less than 1% of the following: salt, sugar, spice, potassium chloride, garlic powder, onion powder, natural flavor, corn syrup solids, dried chili pepper, calcium chloride, citric acid, paprika extract (color).

It's Progresso's Black Bean Jalapeno soup! I never thought I'd see a major-brand, pre-made soup with "starch" last in the list of major ingredients, and all the sugars and preservatives hidden behind the "less than 1%" tag. Granted, there could be sugar and flour hiding in "tomato paste", and I could make the same thing myself with a couple peppers and some canned beans, corn, and tomatoes - or I could just open a can of salsa - but it's the idea of the thing, you know?

I've been swamped working on graduate school applications and avoiding work on graduation school applications. XD. But things are finally moving forward! Yesss! Or at least that's how it feels now, on a day when I was able to answer routine questions about grades and test scores. We'll see I feel about the process on a day when I've had to revise a personal statement or a research goals essay: you know, expend actual mental effort.

No entries for a while, but here are some blogs I've reading:
http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/
http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/

The first is an American comics criticism blog (but for a long discussion of old-school shojo manga I had with a knowledgeable person whom I hope will return to continue the conversation look here). The next two I found by following the blog of the head of the Applied Statistics department at Columbia.

Here are the books I've been reading:
Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (the essays Michael Lewis picks out from contemporary reports are all about institutions, while Lewis' own essays are all about people - is it because he has more connections inside, or because he's more interested in human drama? Or both?)
The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars (memoirs of a legacy British army Captain/English Literature major who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan - finally, the slang I picked up in Libertines fandom gets put to good use!)
Loups-Garrous (This is like a Japanese version of 1984 with computers, social networking, and data-mining as the tools used to control the masses, rather than TV and human surveillance/informers. There are a lot of interesting ideas here and I fully intend to write about them later - STAY TUNED.) (for context see this post) (also why didn't anyone tell me Alexander O. Smith did the translation on Summer of the Ubume?)
The Teahouse Fire (debating whether I can recommend this to a friend who's into tea ceremony, or whether it's a victim of MFA program writing. I did learn a lot about the beginning of Japanese girls' schools in the Meiji era, though. a gift.)
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found (this, on the other hand, read like something a bored MFA candidate dreamt up, but was a true story. o_O If only there had been a littlllllllle bit more detail for me weigh against the author's explanations. also a gift.)
Threepenny Memoir (for instance, as I was able to do with Carl Barat's memoir. XD. I talked about this pretty exhaustively in the Libs-comm-we-dare-not-name, but is anyone interested in the highlights version?)

Finally, and speaking of the comm-we-dare-not-name, this is a Libertines joke that will only be funny to about two people: obviously an inspiration for that Elton John-referencing number on the solo album amirite?.

I was in the mood to feel sad a few weeks ago, and I realized I'd never seen this. So I went to Youtube and watched the subbed version. (Ignoring the OP's comments. I can cry and treasure a good movie just fine without your help, but thanks anyway, dude.)

Afterwards, I went looking for some reactions and reviews. so I could put the sadness I was feeling into context. Robert Ebert has a good one, where he talks about visual "beats" and the fact that these must actually be drawn into an animated movie:



He also talks a bit about why Grave of the Fireflies works better as an animated movie - basically, no movie featuring violence can avoid making it look exciting, and no movie where a young girl starves can avoid the audience worrying about the actress.

I didn't find much else. Either no one has written any critical reviews in English - which I find hard to believe - or they wrote them back in 2000, and the internet forgot about them.

Therefore, below the cut, please see MY THOUGHTS.

( Comments )

Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6 and movie: ( Spoilers )

Final note, the Canada and Wikipedia/Craigslist references in this volume are hysterical. Also, I focused on Scott above, but what's going on with Ramona is just as interesting. She shows up initially as this tough, cool chick with a past who doesn't date scrubs. But when she's actually dating Scott, she makes a lot of compromises, almost unconsciously - grows her hair longer, wears more feminine clothes, does household chores. You can see why, as someone who values independence but can't seem to not acquiesce in a relationship, she'd run away from them so often. As Sabina says, her personal growth in the series is that she learns that after running away, she can run back.

Final final note, I seem to have come out vaguely on the comic side, but R liked the movie more. Different strokes.