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imomus1. Hello! I'm a philosopher-cat. How do you lay out a city, how do you lay out a room, how do you lay out a story?
2. Well, that's easy enough to answer. The author lays out a story, the architect lays out a house full of rooms, the city planner lays out a city.
3. They don't do it in a vacuum, though. The surrounding culture is lending a guiding hand. It's the ghost-writer, the uncredited (but obvious) co-author.
4. Who writes the culture then, if the culture co-writes the things we write?
5. Well, we write the culture as it writes us. Two hands drawing each other.
6. The organisation of space is culture made visible.
7. Give me an example!
8. Okay, a good place to look at this happening -- watch culture organising space, and watch culture co-authoring a narrative -- would be in the anime Azumanga Daioh.
9. Let's watch a dream sequence from the middle of Episode 8, New Year's Dream Special. The sequence starts 9 minutes and 50 seconds into the 24 minute episode, and is announced with the intertitle "In Sakaki's Case".
10. Summary of scene: Endlessly frustrated animal lover Sakaki sleeps under a duvet decorated with cats. Dissolve to her dream, shot of a purple pansy, violin music begins. Sakaki is approaching the cute little grey cat that usually bites her. This time it runs off instead. Wind chimes over the pansy. A tiny (even tinier) Chiyo comes up and tells her that she must adopt a cat which has been abadoned and is in terrible condition. The cat then drifts down from the sky -- a kind of orange balloon with staring, enthusiastic eyes. Accompanied by strange gloopy sound effects, the cat salutes her in a rather mannered man's voice. There's an intertitle in which Sakaki says "Ah!", as if some kind of coin has dropped.
11. Summary continued: Next we see Sakaki and the cat walking together. But the cat is floating on its leash, clearly not quite of this world. Its extra-territoriality is emphasized by spooky synth noises. Sakaki wanders through idyllic countryside with the enthusiastic cat -- fields of purple pansies, rice, wheat. Flute music. "You like cats?" asks the cat. Sakaki hums an affirmative. The cat then starts to pulse, all spooky and purple. "Did you say that knowing that I am a cat?" he asks. Sakaki is perplexed by the oddness of this, but murmurs a yes.
12. More about the dream sequence: Autumn passes, and winter. The cat at last says that he must go, then reveals that he is not, in fact, a cat, but Chiyo's father in disguise. "Thank you for always being so good to my daughter," he says, bowing slightly then ascending into the sky. "You must now go in search of a real cat, but it will be impossible for you, the way you are now".
13. Next: Sakaki's at Chiyo's house. There's a penguin maid who freaks her out. The maid is clumsy and freezes up sometimes. The orange cat -- Chiyo's father -- descends the stairs. He acts like he's never met Sakaki. He invites her to dinner, saying, with strange and sinister significance, that there will be some red things available (akaimono). As the penguin maid freezes and drops things near the table, the family eats red tomatoes. "Is it good?" asks Dad. "They are so red, and yet Chiyo says they are delicious." (The "and yet" reminds us of the oddness of his line about Sakaki liking cats "even knowing he was a cat".)
14. Sakaki asks where she might find a real cat, and Dad gets angry: "Are you saying that I am a fake cat? You mean to say that there are cats that are real and cats that are fake, do you?" He erupts with indignation at this suggestion. Chiyo announces another visitor. It's Osaka, come to tell Sakaki to wake up. To help round off the dream, she shows her three things it's lucky to see in your New Year's dream: Mount Fuji, a hawk and an aubergine.
15. Analysis of sequence begins here: Now, there are things that are universal human experiences in this sequence. The odd logic of dreams, for instance. Or the class-signifying space of rich girl Chiyo's enormous mansion staffed with (bizarre) servants. And then there are things which make the arrangement of space here specifically Japanese -- the Japanese folk belief that the first dream of the New Year is especially significant and will foretell what kind of year you'll have, and the specific symbols of the hawk, the aubergine and Mount Fuji.
16. The spaces we see in the sequence are also structured by more general Japanese things. For instance, there are scenes of Sakaki and the cat walking in nature through various seasons -- summer, autumn, winter. This emphasis on seasons, and on a bond with nature, is "being written" by Japanese cultural ideas. Or rather, it's being co-written by Japanese culture and the author, Kiyohiko Azuma. He has had help from a cosmology we could even go so far as to call Shinto.
17. The character of the cat-father (it toggles between human and animal without really ever changing its shape) could be seen as "universal" in the sense that it recalls, say, Ovid's Metamorphosis (and Kafka's), or folk tales from all over the world. But it's also a specifically Japanese image. The cat takes its place alongside the Japanese fox and raccoon (kitsune and tanuki) as a possessor of magical abilities, a sort of spirit guide. The line "You must now go in search of a real cat, but it will be impossible for you, the way you are now", for instance, points to the cat's heritage as a spirit guide disguised as an animal.
18. But there's also a reference to horror films -- the cat-father is an unreliable narrator whose voice is laced with sinister, perverse significance. Poor Sasaki has been led by her essentially maternal need to care for an animal into a sort of trap. It seems at first a touchingly benign one -- Chiyo's father has disguised himself to observe Sasaki's goodness and, revealing himself as human, to thank her.
19. But this "god" in animal form is a perverse and frightening one, as we soon see. The logic of "Did you say you like cats despite knowing I am one?" is vaguely comprehensible (Sasaki isn't just flattering the cat), but later it transmutes into the baffling logic of the tomatoes being good despite the redness Chiyo's cat-father seems to prize in them, and the frightening reaction he has when, having told Sasaki he's not a cat, he gets offended by the implication that he's a fake cat, or rather, that there are real cats and fake cats in the world.
20. "Culture organizes itself in the form of a special space-time and cannot exist without it," says Yuri Lotman. Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin talked about time and space as an interwoven "chronotope".
21. When you're writing a story (and I'm writing a novel just now), one thing you quickly notice is how hard it is to break away from culture, your co-author. How hard it is, in other words, to try to make arrangements of event and space ("chronotopes") which are not those endorsed by your own culture. You might set out to write a story around a "Japanese" conception of space, but pretty quickly "boy" or "room" or "chase" revert to the spatial arrangements your culture has written for them. Event and setting are always tending back to the default settings, which are those of your own culture.
22. One way to escape these domestic cultural meanings -- to evade the co-author's heavy hand -- is to copy cultural space in a work of art from another culture. Shakespeare did this, for instance, when he made English versions of Petrarch's cosmology. Shakespeare plus Petrarch make a very interesting culturally hybrid sort of space. And so you get two very English gentlemen in "Verona", or you get an English negotiation of gender taking place in "Padua".
23. I personally rather like this sort of hybrid cultural space, the result of tracing, borrowing, pakuri, whatever you want to call it. Of course, it's also responsible for lame Japanese R&B or rap songs -- Japanese lyrics mapped to a copy of a Timbaland backing track.
24. Lauro Zavala describes three types of narrative, Classic, Modern and Postmodern: "Classic narration is sequential, and the logics of narration and the construction of space are both organized according to the point of view of a particular, trustworthy viewer, a sort of knowledgeable witness. Modern narration is organized in terms of what Joseph Frank called a "spatialization of time", that is, a subjective and subjunctive way to reconstruct any human experience. This way to organize time introduces the concept of formal simultaneity in narrative strategies. Postmodern narration is a result of what we might call a "textualization of space", meaning the multiple possible ways to constitute an imaginary world that can only be created in the context of fiction itself. This is not just having a narration that looks "as if" it were reality (thanks to realism and its conventions), nor posing metalinguistic statements, but having both contradictory strategies at once."
25. I think that summary of postmodern narration includes the idea that the "real world" is writeable space -- space which is both written by us and writes us, like M.C. Escher's self-drawing hand. In other words, the cat is right: he's not a real cat, but he's not a fake cat either. He's Carroll's cat (a grinning not-cat, a "grin without a cat"), and Schrödinger's. He's cat-and-father, real-and-fake, there-and-not-there, alive-and-dead. And if we can swallow those paradoxes, we can deal with the idea that narrative space-time is both culturally determined and able to determine culture in its turn; it both writes and is written by us.
2. Well, that's easy enough to answer. The author lays out a story, the architect lays out a house full of rooms, the city planner lays out a city.
3. They don't do it in a vacuum, though. The surrounding culture is lending a guiding hand. It's the ghost-writer, the uncredited (but obvious) co-author.
4. Who writes the culture then, if the culture co-writes the things we write?
5. Well, we write the culture as it writes us. Two hands drawing each other.
6. The organisation of space is culture made visible.
7. Give me an example!
8. Okay, a good place to look at this happening -- watch culture organising space, and watch culture co-authoring a narrative -- would be in the anime Azumanga Daioh.
9. Let's watch a dream sequence from the middle of Episode 8, New Year's Dream Special. The sequence starts 9 minutes and 50 seconds into the 24 minute episode, and is announced with the intertitle "In Sakaki's Case".
10. Summary of scene: Endlessly frustrated animal lover Sakaki sleeps under a duvet decorated with cats. Dissolve to her dream, shot of a purple pansy, violin music begins. Sakaki is approaching the cute little grey cat that usually bites her. This time it runs off instead. Wind chimes over the pansy. A tiny (even tinier) Chiyo comes up and tells her that she must adopt a cat which has been abadoned and is in terrible condition. The cat then drifts down from the sky -- a kind of orange balloon with staring, enthusiastic eyes. Accompanied by strange gloopy sound effects, the cat salutes her in a rather mannered man's voice. There's an intertitle in which Sakaki says "Ah!", as if some kind of coin has dropped.
11. Summary continued: Next we see Sakaki and the cat walking together. But the cat is floating on its leash, clearly not quite of this world. Its extra-territoriality is emphasized by spooky synth noises. Sakaki wanders through idyllic countryside with the enthusiastic cat -- fields of purple pansies, rice, wheat. Flute music. "You like cats?" asks the cat. Sakaki hums an affirmative. The cat then starts to pulse, all spooky and purple. "Did you say that knowing that I am a cat?" he asks. Sakaki is perplexed by the oddness of this, but murmurs a yes.
12. More about the dream sequence: Autumn passes, and winter. The cat at last says that he must go, then reveals that he is not, in fact, a cat, but Chiyo's father in disguise. "Thank you for always being so good to my daughter," he says, bowing slightly then ascending into the sky. "You must now go in search of a real cat, but it will be impossible for you, the way you are now".
13. Next: Sakaki's at Chiyo's house. There's a penguin maid who freaks her out. The maid is clumsy and freezes up sometimes. The orange cat -- Chiyo's father -- descends the stairs. He acts like he's never met Sakaki. He invites her to dinner, saying, with strange and sinister significance, that there will be some red things available (akaimono). As the penguin maid freezes and drops things near the table, the family eats red tomatoes. "Is it good?" asks Dad. "They are so red, and yet Chiyo says they are delicious." (The "and yet" reminds us of the oddness of his line about Sakaki liking cats "even knowing he was a cat".)
14. Sakaki asks where she might find a real cat, and Dad gets angry: "Are you saying that I am a fake cat? You mean to say that there are cats that are real and cats that are fake, do you?" He erupts with indignation at this suggestion. Chiyo announces another visitor. It's Osaka, come to tell Sakaki to wake up. To help round off the dream, she shows her three things it's lucky to see in your New Year's dream: Mount Fuji, a hawk and an aubergine.
15. Analysis of sequence begins here: Now, there are things that are universal human experiences in this sequence. The odd logic of dreams, for instance. Or the class-signifying space of rich girl Chiyo's enormous mansion staffed with (bizarre) servants. And then there are things which make the arrangement of space here specifically Japanese -- the Japanese folk belief that the first dream of the New Year is especially significant and will foretell what kind of year you'll have, and the specific symbols of the hawk, the aubergine and Mount Fuji.
16. The spaces we see in the sequence are also structured by more general Japanese things. For instance, there are scenes of Sakaki and the cat walking in nature through various seasons -- summer, autumn, winter. This emphasis on seasons, and on a bond with nature, is "being written" by Japanese cultural ideas. Or rather, it's being co-written by Japanese culture and the author, Kiyohiko Azuma. He has had help from a cosmology we could even go so far as to call Shinto.
17. The character of the cat-father (it toggles between human and animal without really ever changing its shape) could be seen as "universal" in the sense that it recalls, say, Ovid's Metamorphosis (and Kafka's), or folk tales from all over the world. But it's also a specifically Japanese image. The cat takes its place alongside the Japanese fox and raccoon (kitsune and tanuki) as a possessor of magical abilities, a sort of spirit guide. The line "You must now go in search of a real cat, but it will be impossible for you, the way you are now", for instance, points to the cat's heritage as a spirit guide disguised as an animal.
18. But there's also a reference to horror films -- the cat-father is an unreliable narrator whose voice is laced with sinister, perverse significance. Poor Sasaki has been led by her essentially maternal need to care for an animal into a sort of trap. It seems at first a touchingly benign one -- Chiyo's father has disguised himself to observe Sasaki's goodness and, revealing himself as human, to thank her.
19. But this "god" in animal form is a perverse and frightening one, as we soon see. The logic of "Did you say you like cats despite knowing I am one?" is vaguely comprehensible (Sasaki isn't just flattering the cat), but later it transmutes into the baffling logic of the tomatoes being good despite the redness Chiyo's cat-father seems to prize in them, and the frightening reaction he has when, having told Sasaki he's not a cat, he gets offended by the implication that he's a fake cat, or rather, that there are real cats and fake cats in the world.
20. "Culture organizes itself in the form of a special space-time and cannot exist without it," says Yuri Lotman. Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin talked about time and space as an interwoven "chronotope".
21. When you're writing a story (and I'm writing a novel just now), one thing you quickly notice is how hard it is to break away from culture, your co-author. How hard it is, in other words, to try to make arrangements of event and space ("chronotopes") which are not those endorsed by your own culture. You might set out to write a story around a "Japanese" conception of space, but pretty quickly "boy" or "room" or "chase" revert to the spatial arrangements your culture has written for them. Event and setting are always tending back to the default settings, which are those of your own culture.
22. One way to escape these domestic cultural meanings -- to evade the co-author's heavy hand -- is to copy cultural space in a work of art from another culture. Shakespeare did this, for instance, when he made English versions of Petrarch's cosmology. Shakespeare plus Petrarch make a very interesting culturally hybrid sort of space. And so you get two very English gentlemen in "Verona", or you get an English negotiation of gender taking place in "Padua".
23. I personally rather like this sort of hybrid cultural space, the result of tracing, borrowing, pakuri, whatever you want to call it. Of course, it's also responsible for lame Japanese R&B or rap songs -- Japanese lyrics mapped to a copy of a Timbaland backing track.
24. Lauro Zavala describes three types of narrative, Classic, Modern and Postmodern: "Classic narration is sequential, and the logics of narration and the construction of space are both organized according to the point of view of a particular, trustworthy viewer, a sort of knowledgeable witness. Modern narration is organized in terms of what Joseph Frank called a "spatialization of time", that is, a subjective and subjunctive way to reconstruct any human experience. This way to organize time introduces the concept of formal simultaneity in narrative strategies. Postmodern narration is a result of what we might call a "textualization of space", meaning the multiple possible ways to constitute an imaginary world that can only be created in the context of fiction itself. This is not just having a narration that looks "as if" it were reality (thanks to realism and its conventions), nor posing metalinguistic statements, but having both contradictory strategies at once."
25. I think that summary of postmodern narration includes the idea that the "real world" is writeable space -- space which is both written by us and writes us, like M.C. Escher's self-drawing hand. In other words, the cat is right: he's not a real cat, but he's not a fake cat either. He's Carroll's cat (a grinning not-cat, a "grin without a cat"), and Schrödinger's. He's cat-and-father, real-and-fake, there-and-not-there, alive-and-dead. And if we can swallow those paradoxes, we can deal with the idea that narrative space-time is both culturally determined and able to determine culture in its turn; it both writes and is written by us.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:12 am (UTC)But 16. tipped me off to something lacking in your argument. Why are the seasons used? Well, they are also a common montage sequence technique to show the passing of time. Were they used to connect with nature, or simply to show visually that time has passed, within the strictures of the particular (moving image) medium? (Time passing, showing a potential space for deep emotional bonding...)
It's not just culture and the author which govern the space, of course, it is also the space itself. Take care to recall the Russian futurists place the noosphere on the biosphere and the biosphere on the geosphere. The novel is still a book with so many pages, a movie still a projection of many thousands of still frames, and so on... :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:10 am (UTC)Why are the seasons used? Well, they are also a common montage sequence technique to show the passing of time.
Agreed, but there are many common ways to show the passing of time. Pages tearing off a calendar, newsreel footage, facial signs of aging, technological progress, etc. I think the choice of corny natural imagery of the seasons changing is a particularly Japanese device, and it's also used to trick us (with Sakaki) into thinking the cat is an animal and her life with it is the idyllic life she has longed for with animals, but never achieved (cats running away from or biting her is a recurrent motif). So there's a fantasy-wish-fulfillment element which is psychologically realistic. Then the "unreliable spirit teacher" motif kicks in and paranoia replaces sentimentality as the "cat" becomes a "human" authority figure, and bafflingly inconsistent. And we're back in the city from then on, because that idyllic sentimental fantasy nature-bond with the cat is broken. The dream becomes a nightmare -- much as Sakaki's waking experience with animals does.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:20 am (UTC)Would it be just as Japanese for it to be a clock ticking, because of the connection to salaryman mechanization? (Though I think the first would be Japanese, the second more a outsider's perspective of Japanese?) It just feels so slippery to connect such a general symbol to a particular culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 07:03 am (UTC)Could do with more Japan:
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 07:42 am (UTC)so most japanese literature before meiji would be post-modern then . (see karitani's great book, i forgot the title, on the birth of the japanese modern novel and subjectivity etc.) -- anyway point is most classic japanese lit is about "textualization of space" than "sequential, and the logics of narration and the construction of space are both organized according to the point of view of a particular, trustworthy viewer, a sort of knowledgeable witness." which really would be to say that japan's always been post-modern (which is what some people occasionally do say ... or do a shift of paradigm and avoid the western classic->modern->postmodern dogma .. which paradoxically is what so-called post-modernists have been doing all along yet only been able to do it by refering it back to itself. one ought to really try and see the big western narrative as just one of the guys, as a minor
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:27 am (UTC)It's worth saying that that breakdown of classic, modern and postmodern styles doesn't necessarily follow a set historical sequence. For instance, a lot of early British novels are "postmodern" (Sterne) and late ones (Jeffrey Archer) are "classic".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:56 am (UTC)i think i'm basically with marxy (as much as i dislike the modern-ist design of his site) in thinking that you might have something of a blindspot for modern(-ist,)in all its implications, japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 10:27 am (UTC)On the other hand, it's part of the genius of Postmodernism that it can assimilate everything (another thing it has in common with Japan) and make it Postmodern.
Are you having a Modern or a Postmodern experience when you visit Cow Books to look at secondhand radical tracts, or when you go to the Mori Museum to see the Le Corbusier exhibition, then buy a tiny replica of the Villa Savoye in the gift shop? I'd say it's PoMo both times, just as Ian Lynam's retro radical chic design for Neojaponisme is PoMo.
And how about this: to revive Modernism in entirely Postmodern terms is also to have "a blind spot for Modernism".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:20 pm (UTC)the name "post-modern" contradicts the very meaning behind post-modernism. It doesnt however change what post-modernism is.
It's easy to conclude that for something to be post modern it has to follow this sequence: classic>modern>postmodern
Post-modernism casts doubt on the very idea of sequences, in fact, it casts doubt on all meaning, which means to use it correctly you have to be aware of its contradictory nature.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:37 pm (UTC)Classic: Invested in timelessness but also in revival cycles (classical, neo-classical, neo-neo-classical etc).
Modern: Linear sequence of progress led by the avant garde.
Postmodern: Endless recycling, revival, an eternal now dominated by an eternal return.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:35 am (UTC)I Sing the Body Electric!
Date: 2008-01-02 02:51 pm (UTC)Anyway, from Creative Writing lecturers to Life Coaches and Cultural Theorists, everyone seeks solutions in the head when the problem could be the body and disallowed energy (how will it get to the head when it is cut off at the body)? Or trying to fit/honour/improve an amorphous web called ‘culture’, when the body-electric will always be your axis to create sparks within the cultural.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:05 am (UTC)2008 begins with Momus doing a postmodern narrative analysis of one of my favorite scenes from Azumanga Daioh.
I am.. just.. unable to deal with all of my nerd buttons being pressed at once. And so to bed.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:59 pm (UTC)(Note my Mayaa icon :) )
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:31 am (UTC)23. I personally rather like this sort of hybrid cultural space, the result of tracing, borrowing, pakuri, whatever you want to call it.
This is not unlike Nietzsche’s example of writing and rewriting on a palimpsest, our cultural space-time written over, but still legible to us. We (re)write our cultures onto the landscape, but the landscape (re)writes us, the individual (+ our memory) and society (+ our history), etc. This is also hermeneutic (Hermes, god of writing), that is, interpretive, actively made and changed, its very reading is in itself creative -- creating a new myth in situ, which then means we get into making historical, socio-cultural space-times ex nihilo, myths from tabula rasa, vaticinium ex eventu, (i.e.: the very issue of Modernism) and some other fancy Latin terms.
Post-Modernism is pretty liberating in that sense, being that you don’t have to be Japanese for the cultural space-time to be legible, since all authority and “grand narratives” are in question anyway. But how are we do read Azumanga Diaoh, or read your reading (or “how do you read Azumanga Diaoh”)? As a romantic Modernist, an Other-as-exotic Japanophile? Whether it’s an English-translated Kafka on the Shore (me thinks you’re thinking of, anon – but this can work for Karatani translations -- sans the cats) or your analysis, we’re always going to get an Anglo-(Scottish) negotiation (or loss in translation) of a Japanese (philosopher-)cat in a Japanese dream (puns intended).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 10:46 am (UTC)Great post!
-r
East and West
Date: 2008-01-02 11:46 am (UTC)Anyone know it this is indeed the case? If so why?
(Apologies to Mr Momus if you have covered this in a previous blog.)
Re: East and West
Date: 2008-01-02 06:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 12:51 pm (UTC)Try playing this clip again and switching around the words "individual" and "culture":
"Individuals are not your friend. They insult you, they disempower you, they use and abuse you. None of us are well treated by individuals. And yet we glorify the creative potential of culture, the rights of culture, we understand the felt presence of experience is what is most important. But the individual is a perversion. He fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding..."
That's just as true, just as false, and just as one-sided as what he's saying here.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:08 pm (UTC)Make art to fight back? Pathetic.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:53 pm (UTC)"He spent the years after his graduation teaching English in Japan"
Sorta Metropolis
Date: 2008-01-02 08:33 pm (UTC)nihil sine deo
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 02:09 pm (UTC)The bit from 9:04 to 9:36 made me laugh, it reminds me of the Kids In the Hall sketch: "I've got a spike through my head, a spike through my head, a spike through my head, a spike through my head. A spike through my head, a spike through my head" ...etc (http://igastmh.ytmnd.com/).
I am way behind on my Bakhtin, but I remember In the Penal Colony by Kafka who you've mentioned, to be a story lacking specifics like location or personal names so a reader in most any language would understand what the characters were doing, at least as far as anyone can understand Kafka. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, which has similar colonial themes to Kafka's story, also takes place in a nameless empire with a nameless colony, relying on the universal theme of imperialism inevitably crumbling to describe the setting.
I imagine it would be very difficult to make something new which didn't have some contribution from the creator's culture, to just have pure story without a sense of bite into the surrounding society. I wonder if such a story would just be math actually.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 04:50 pm (UTC)YAPPARI
Date: 2008-01-02 05:59 pm (UTC)I think that the narrative quality of the series as a whole is pretty interesting; it's almost formal. It sticks so closely to genre tropes that the story itself disappears and we're left with only "texture." There are episodes actually titled bunkasai 1, 2 & 3 and natsuyasumi 1, 2 & 3 for christ's sake.
--LS
Re: YAPPARI
Date: 2008-01-02 06:39 pm (UTC)You did indeed, LS, whoever you are. Thanks for hours of pleasure (and textual analysis)!
Re: YAPPARI
Date: 2008-01-02 07:32 pm (UTC)http://del.icio.us/smith (http://del.icio.us/smith)
Now just take care you don't fall into the dark clutches of Ichigo Mashimaro or Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei.
--LS
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:42 pm (UTC)Anyway, I have no idea why they don't work, sorry.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 07:50 pm (UTC)Damnit. Well, as it´s the only reason I installed this damn script I might as well get rid of it again. Unfolder script is not working either, btw.
But I´m making a frowny face at you >>>>:(
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 08:19 pm (UTC)Some authors "write" their books by "dreaming them".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 09:22 am (UTC)(How did you do that, twice even?)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 12:33 pm (UTC)Kuja
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 05:57 pm (UTC)The term "individual", in this context requires specification. It is not the biological individual, nor is it the abstract being of general psychology, nor is it this or that more or less gifted individual, it is not even the average individual who partakes of the given civilization. The individual who counts here may be designated as the biographical individual. He is a historic complex sui generis. Neither biological nor psychological, nor civilizational factors exhaust his content. He has partaken of the culture of his social environment, but only of certain aspects of it, and these have come to him in a certain individual order, received and absorbed by a psyche that was unique. This is concrete individual of historic society.
So, my friends, your culture is not MY culture as YOURS culture is not mine.
And, this anime cat veers more into Madame Schroedinger's Cat (http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424024250/969/duane-michals-madame-schroedingers-cat.html) than anything else.
Greetings from a giant fundie Brazil.
Kuja
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 06:39 pm (UTC)