Chinese or Japanese?
Jun. 14th, 2009 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus* A day walking around Athens -- Plaka, the Acropolis, Kolonaki Square and the floral slopes of Likabetos, dinner in Keiramikos -- taking out-of-focus snaps with my cheap Camson camera. I'm torn between rage that a whole tranche of memories will be blurred, and fascination with the highly original effects the Camson produces.
* At the Parthenon Hisae and I play "Chinese or Japanese?" It's getting more difficult; as Hisae points out, chains like Uniqlo are now pan-Asian, and economically there's also convergence between the two nations (they're neck-and-neck). But differences remain; I become fascinated by a young tour guide in a blue and white pinstriped shirt, United Bamboo style. This handsome woman in her late 20s is dressed as the kind of Edwardian English boy who might have played with a hoop-and-stick, ipso facto she can only be Japanese.
* Babis tries to convince me of the virtues of Cormac McCarthy. I read chunks of one of his novels, The Road, and admit that it's (inverted commas) good writing. But something annoys me about it. It's "emotionally correct". There's a man in it who acts as men should, and a child who acts as children should. Profound emotion is milked from their relationship, in words that are well-chosen. A critic on the jacket calls for the Nobel Prize for McCarthy, but I tell Babis the Nobel goes to much more subversive writers, people like Elfriede Jelinek, who constantly surprise and outrage and subvert.
* I'm much more interested in remembering the communist writer Aldo De Jaco. Aldo was married to Babis' mother until his death in 2003. He loomed over my holudays with Babis in Rome in the early eighties, a "reticent statue". Aldo and B's mother, both communists, met in prison in Athens during the military regime of the colonels. They lived together in Rome. Aldo wrote novels, accounts of his trips to Moscow, books about his beloved Sicily, and a constant flow of journalism for left wing Italian newspapers and magazines. Although he didn't speak much to me, he impressed me deeply. Not just intellectually -- as a member of a venerable generation of "committed" European intellectuals -- but physically. He was like a bust of Karl Marx brought to life in flesh. If I get a chance, I might interview Babis' mother -- she lives in Athens now -- about Aldo. Long mp3s are something my Camson handles with panache.
* For some reason Greece and Italy always put me in a literary frame of mind. I'm getting ideas for a second novel. It will be called Balbus, or The Book of Fuck, and concern a purely instinctual man-mountain, part-Baal, part Mr Hyde, trying to exist in a graph-paper, airport security sort of world. Late Freudian stuff about the incompatibility of instinct and civilisation, then, but -- oh hell! -- I've jinxed it now.
* At the Parthenon Hisae and I play "Chinese or Japanese?" It's getting more difficult; as Hisae points out, chains like Uniqlo are now pan-Asian, and economically there's also convergence between the two nations (they're neck-and-neck). But differences remain; I become fascinated by a young tour guide in a blue and white pinstriped shirt, United Bamboo style. This handsome woman in her late 20s is dressed as the kind of Edwardian English boy who might have played with a hoop-and-stick, ipso facto she can only be Japanese.
* Babis tries to convince me of the virtues of Cormac McCarthy. I read chunks of one of his novels, The Road, and admit that it's (inverted commas) good writing. But something annoys me about it. It's "emotionally correct". There's a man in it who acts as men should, and a child who acts as children should. Profound emotion is milked from their relationship, in words that are well-chosen. A critic on the jacket calls for the Nobel Prize for McCarthy, but I tell Babis the Nobel goes to much more subversive writers, people like Elfriede Jelinek, who constantly surprise and outrage and subvert.
* I'm much more interested in remembering the communist writer Aldo De Jaco. Aldo was married to Babis' mother until his death in 2003. He loomed over my holudays with Babis in Rome in the early eighties, a "reticent statue". Aldo and B's mother, both communists, met in prison in Athens during the military regime of the colonels. They lived together in Rome. Aldo wrote novels, accounts of his trips to Moscow, books about his beloved Sicily, and a constant flow of journalism for left wing Italian newspapers and magazines. Although he didn't speak much to me, he impressed me deeply. Not just intellectually -- as a member of a venerable generation of "committed" European intellectuals -- but physically. He was like a bust of Karl Marx brought to life in flesh. If I get a chance, I might interview Babis' mother -- she lives in Athens now -- about Aldo. Long mp3s are something my Camson handles with panache.* For some reason Greece and Italy always put me in a literary frame of mind. I'm getting ideas for a second novel. It will be called Balbus, or The Book of Fuck, and concern a purely instinctual man-mountain, part-Baal, part Mr Hyde, trying to exist in a graph-paper, airport security sort of world. Late Freudian stuff about the incompatibility of instinct and civilisation, then, but -- oh hell! -- I've jinxed it now.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 11:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 01:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 12:22 pm (UTC)Good luck with The Book of Fuck you twit.
Chinese or Japanese
Date: 2009-06-14 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 12:58 pm (UTC)This sort of national/ethnic stereotyping is also more difficult because Chinese people have been diasporic for, ooh at least a few centuries now, so your ethnic (and therefore in appearance) Chinese people are just as likely (prob more likely) to be Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Malaysian, Canadian, Australian, British, American, etc, etc, etc, than Chinese nationals...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-15 06:45 am (UTC)I.e. Chinese.
Nationality doesn't count.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 01:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-24 05:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-24 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-01 06:31 am (UTC)subversive would be to truly subvert the typical wild west narrative. no, mccarthy only adds more gory details to the already understood wild west; he reinforces the established mythology, he doesn't subvert it. if you know his background, he's hardly a bleeding heart liberal making commentary about the savagery of the whites in the wild west; he's more the tarantino of western novels.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-01 12:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-01 06:23 am (UTC)aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 02:18 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 02:19 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 03:45 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 03:53 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 04:18 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-14 11:58 pm (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-15 08:06 am (UTC)Re: aldo de jaco
Date: 2009-06-16 09:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 03:15 pm (UTC)Pass on The Road too. Read it, didn't care. Was playing Fallout 3 contemporaneously. Much more better.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-14 08:26 pm (UTC)Ive been trying to contrast that spontaneous splurt ever since but I cant tell anymore, the statement has overpowered what i see. What do you think?
m
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-15 06:47 am (UTC)How anyone could think that a particular way of distributing material goods, property and power alone could be a solution after the twentieth century beats me.
No, you need LOVE. It's quite something else my friends.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.
When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I am known. But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13
Chinese or Japanese?
Date: 2009-06-21 06:48 am (UTC)I think that's a dated way of seeing the world old man!
Re: Chinese or Japanese?
Date: 2009-06-22 06:38 pm (UTC)