“Instead of stalkers, today we have bloggers, who go home an re-write every detail of us, to hundreds of people. Some of these feel I’m getting too old to lecture; one girl on the west coast, after seeing my white hair and my little red shawl commented that I looked like a Q-tip on fire. My family is hard-hearted, and laughed about this. Personally, I don’t find it rude. I’d rather be a Q-tip on fire than just a Q-tip, and more than that, my inner instigator saw hers, and said; that’s artistry.”
-Margaret Atwood.
What. An amazing lecture. Atwood was unreservedly hilarious in every aspect of her speech, with the kind of sharp-edge wit that had her discussing why the writer should “skip the larval stage” of plots, and ending with Palin on figure skates, trying to lift McCain as Obama leaped gracefully across stage in a tour de force figure skate-off.
Her lecture was on debt; or the fabrication thereof. Human ideas of monetary values, and the very real (at this point in time) suggestion that banks do not exist unless we believe in them—and the minute we stop, like the fairies in Peter Pan, they die.
And there certainly was a lot of hand-clapping going on today. She re-told the story of Scrooge as a modern gentleman, who instead of ‘bah humbug’ to charities, simply said ‘I am in a meeting.’ Her caricatures of the modern ideals of wealth and their implications to moral, social, and economical debt were fabulous.
One point she made which I particularly found intriguing was her classification of
human reaction in times of crises. She stated that there are five brands of people; Those who run away, shut in, and ignore. Those who rush in to help, and offer suffer along with those they aid. Those who do neither, but record everything that happens, noticing and studying and writing. Those who seek to benefit and exploit disaster. And those who simply go on living their daily lives, as best as they are capable.
(It makes you wonder, huh…? In the times of Black Death, would you be wearing a mask over your face, or doctoring, or documenting, or grave robbing, or just trying to make end’s meat? What moral debts do each of these positions owe, or are owed?)Another point she made was the transition of earth as the ‘giver’, central to old religions, to that of the ‘victim’, used and battered on a global scale. It’s downfall from, literally, God, to, literally, a household disposable item, really made me reflect on ideas of wealth. Money, as a concept, was never something I was able to wrap my head around as important; the only real power of money is societal, constructed, defined, and created. We can dispose and revolt against it at any time we so wish. Wealth, then, is
actually a lot more simple; wealth is food, water, air, and the accumulation of these things. It’s why, when I studied archeology in Scotland, I was particularly fascinated by Roman tradition of
painting granaries on the tombs of the ‘upperclass’ dead. How much bread you control = how wealthy you were.
…Anyway, I had to leave before she even got to the second ghost, to go to another lecture aufhauhefhah.
BUT. BUT BUT BUT BUT. Before leaving I went to buy her new book auhuiahfuiah AND THE BOOKS WERE IN THESE HUGE STACKS, and I just picked on randomly, and the guy was like,
Lol “Congratulations, you picked out the only signed copy.” ?!!?!?! Apparently, she signed one of the copies, and one person would randomly get it?! AUHDUAHDAUHDUA ♥
Anyway, then I attended a lecture by a Harvard Professor hosted by the Japanese Department on
Comfort Women, and Korean identity in Japanese Society. Super, super interesting. I had a giant literarygasm with all of the American professors in the department, discussing Muraki’s book
Underground, and how anti-sensationalist mindframe in Japan is restrictive over news and produces severely revisionist histories.
For anyone who doesn’t know,
“Comfort Women” is the term given to Korean women who, thereabouts of 50 years ago, were tricked into being forced sex-workers in Japan, who went jailed, unpaid, and underfed while being subjected. The few surviving women involved have repeatedly asked the Japanese Government, who was about 20 years ago discovered by a news archivist to have been DIRECTLY INVOLVED with sanctioning this slavery trade, to apologize. They still have not. (And to this day, the yakuza is now in charge of it, though it isn’t given the same name.)
I was able to have a really interesting live chat with the Professor about the ideas of apology, implications thereof, and of course, ever popular, the talk on how it’s being opened to the public, and how it’s being taught.
Just because I’m a Japanese major, doesn’t mean I feel Japan is always right. Part of the reason I love to study it is because of how rigid a lot of what I think is a twisted set of rules are within that society, and how changes occur in it, and people’s reactions to these changes. (Believe it or not, if you’re an anime or a manga fan, you’re pretty much interested in the same thing, whether you realize it or not, fyi. o/)
In fact, the most… well, eye-opening part of the lecture for me was chasing Yoshimura-sensei down after it, to ask her thoughts on it, as the only Japanese person I saw in attendance. She was really reluctant to speak, but once she got going, man… ;;;
Yoshimura-sensei is my Japanese 326 Language Professor. For those of you who don’t know, I basically tend to think of her as a nazi incarnate. ;;;; Here’s what she had to say about Comfort Women—
“Americans tend to want to make a story out of everything, and do not look at topics objectively. If these women were having these things done to them—then why would they only speak about it fifty years after the fact? People can forget what really happened after such a long time. Moreover, it was in a time of war… and in war, there is famine. So you can’t be sure that these women didn’t CHOOSE to do this themselves, as a way of getting paid and staying fed. Prostitutes—I don’t know if you think it’s okay for me to use this word when speaking about these people—may then later make claims that they were ‘forced’ into it, to protect their social status, and for a little bit of money.”
Obviously, I in and of myself find this view appalling, and I think if Japan is trying to call itself abstinent, one needs only look at what they did to the Chinese in World War II. (But in general, I don’t like ‘they’ as a tagword, because obviously, not all of Japan did these things, not half of the Japanese people living TODAY did these things, and defining people under a collective history is something I tend to find repulsive in general, something that leads to racism. But that’s getting into a different topic entirely.) I did seriously appreciate getting to hear her view on it, though, the way it was taught to her, and her very serious disgust with these people, who, in my opinion, have been thoroughly abused by the Japanese government, and still are today. She did bring up a good point about objectivity, though.
How do you define objectivity, however? How can you define anything? Korean or Japanese, forced or choice. That’s a very societal construct in and of itself, and also a means for information control. Like, what makes a book a work of ‘literature’? In America, if you go in the Barnes & Noble, there’s a section called ‘literature’, because we divide books by genre, and split genre by ‘merit’.
In Japan, however, if you walk into a bookstore, books are split between ‘females wrote these’ and ‘males wrote these’. Who comes up with these divisions, ranks them in terms of importance, and distributes them really effects how we process information. That’s so important in discussing any culture, or historical conflicts.
Anyway, I’m done now.
Comments are disabled here, because this is my second post today. HOWEVER, it would make my day if anyone wanted to discuss ANY of the topics I brought up in ANY capacity, share your thoughts on this, or just ask questions. Even if someone read all the way through this, it’d make me smile. ;;; So please feel FREE to comment HERE (on my last entry) with anything you want to say, and I promise that any comments I get pertaining to this entry I will reply to /tonight/, asap. I’m really interested in hearing what some of you guys think. ♥Fandom’s great and all, but sometimes a little Y SO SRS? Is amazing, too. You're ALL really smart and have great ideas. Let's hear them.
Collegeeeeeee I AM SO PUMPED TO STUDY NOW.
ALSO I WANT TO MINOR IN SCOCIO-ETHICS, SOB.PS: “I’d like to think that half-hung Mary was my ancestor. …Mainly because, she had a strong neck.” –Atwood aeijhfuhafh hahaha;;;
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