Would have been a good comment for the last thread.
How would they even know? Is there some centralised IQ database?
2: yes. They keep it at Trader Vic's
Ke$ha holds the record for Nashville.
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Does anyone here know anybody at any of the major teaching hospitals in Boston who are engaged in research and/or some of the MA health policy institutes?
There are some jobs I'm looking at.
Please e-mail if you do.
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4: I liked the bit on Glee where Principle Figgis kept referring to her as "Key Dollar Sign Ha"
Although appreciating the random wackiness of the factoid, if I didn't know better I might think this post was the sneering work of an overly-mannered coastal elite operating within a hermetic bubble.
6: I don't watch Glee, but my wife mentioned that part and it is probably why the name was on my mind.
I'm not as into Glee as a used to be. Any time they try to handle Deep Themes it just bombs.
I've only recently started watching Glee. No one told me it was a comedy, or I would have watched it earlier.
"According to a commenter on YouTube" works as a sort of reverse intensifier. The opposite of "in Wisconsin", as it were. For example:
This cheesecake is delicious…[under breath] according to a commenter on YouTube.
Nobody told me CSI: Miami wasn't a comedy, or I'd have quit watching earlier.
12: I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall over the weekend. I cracked up at the name of their CSI-esque parody: Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime.
Thanks to my ever-spiraling descent into YouTube addiction, I have seen every Kesha video, and lots and lots of clips of Glee.
I saw Zevon on tour multiple times during the downward arc of his career. Each time he came to Philly, it was a smaller venue. It was like the progression of gigs in Spinal Tap. The last time I saw him was in a bar small enough that if the anyone in the audience yelled something, everybody on stage and the audience heard it. At the time I was on a campaign to get the entire world to switch from yelling "Freebird" at concerts to yelling "911 is a Joke" instead. When I yelled it, the entire backing band laughed, and Zevon looked at me like I had bogarted all of the heroin, leaving none for him.
And then the 5 bucks, bitches!
Leaving aside the urban or coastal prejudice displayed in the post title ("highest" could mean 50 points higher than 2nd best;distributions of talents...never mind
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I've started Genji, 2nd piece of fiction in a decade. I was going to begin more modern but This Marvel doesn't have any Tanizaki or Kawabata. Shayo is tempting me. But Genji just gets irresistible. And the online resources are of course insane. Frames of Classic, Modernized and Romaji. I have the Seidensticker. And I picked up Rikaichan. I don't quite know what I will do, probably "facing page", but I can play for a while.
Part of what turned me were these images, which are very well protected online. Masao Ebina just seems to capture my feeling for the time and book, with obvious reference to the 12th century illustrations and 17th century work.
George Scialabba...gets all gedoffamylawn at CT. I think we may be reaching a point where youth not only find Aeschylus and Murasaki difficult and alien, but due to changes in mores and values, impossibly repellent and disgusting, unbearably wicked. Real nobility, Nietzsche's nobility, cannot be faced or examined, like a Gorgon. Or a mirror. Nietzsche predicted us.
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Nietzsche predicted us.
I thought it was Kafka who predicted us.
15: No offense bob, but I think you and Scialabba are barking up the wrong tree. As I was just saying to some grad student friends the other night, it's very easy to fall back on the vision of intellectual life that was advanced as part of the post-war consensus, i.e. that every educatable person ought to get at least a bachelor's degree, and be conversant with a canon, and hold Tolstoy in high esteem (while, of course, deploring the Bolsheviki).
But that's completely an artifact of a very brief and transient historical moment. Look back to the 19th century, and most people, most of the time, if they could even read, were not reading the then-canonical great literature. They were reading Dickens and Conan-Doyle and dime novels. If they watched Shakespeare, that's a testament to Shakespeare's enduring power to appeal to popular tastes. If they went to lectures, then sure, occasionally they got to see an Emma Goldman or someone of that stature, but they also sat there for dreary moralizers and carnivalesque mountebanks.
O tempura, o morels!
O tempura, o morels!
I like shrimp tempura, but I've never tried morels.
I'm with Scialabba on this one. People are empty vessels that yearn to be filled. If it's not Tolstoy, then it will be megapreachers and "The Secret".
19: Yeah, but, my point is that it was ever thus, millenarian cults, get-rich-quick schemes, low entertainments and all.
"Send literature, guns, and money."
20: These have always competed with high culture, but high culture has since quit the field. People have an aspirational, self-improving side, and if some genuine form of self-improvement is not available, then the need will be filled by charlatans alone.
For example, right now I am listening to the music from the opening credits for Final Fantasy VIII. It makes me a better person.
Everybody Wang Chung tonight! (What does that mean, guys?)
TED is certainly quicker than War and Peace.
21: Moby's such an excitable man.
Moby doesn't like novels with too many pages between sword fights.
27: I know just the book for you.
27: You're not supposed to let the pages have swords at all during the fights. They're there to watch and learn.
27: You're in luck. Thanks to Napolean, War and Peace has a new war every few pages.
I am not really even talking about high culture. I am talkin about culture, from which high culture is emergent.
The sexism and misogyny (yeah, matrilineal, complex, whatever) of Lady Murasaki's book was understood by women, because they lived at best in an only slightly better Patriarchy, for 1000 years. My contention is (not speaking for geo) that if we lose the Patriarchy we will lose Murasaki, any ability to really read Murasaki. And I think that is what is happening, and this is a freaking drastic change.
The peasants understood war well enough. I grew up in a country and a world that still understood war. Three guys on my block didn't come back, and everybody I knew enlisted or was drafted. And I didn't know anybody. And we endured and survived and prospered, and griped. You can say what you want, but without much chance of invasion, without a draft or likelihood of big war, you don't grok war.
That, to me, means that not only will you not understand Caesar. It means you will not understand Jesus or Assisi or Gandhi, because they were in reaction to a world of war.
And so on Hereditary aristocracy, religion and spirituality, etc. Stuff that defined "human."
This doesn't mean I don't have the same values y'all do, or am nostalgic. Not at all. I just believe there will be a cost, something lost as something is gained, in equal proportion, something lost as big and as important as the Patriarchy. I try to not be normative about this stuff, but objectively, dispassionately, sympathetically observe the chittering cuddling little rodents we are rapidly becoming.
These have always competed with high culture, but high culture has since quit the field.
Huh? Are you saying that "high culture" doesn't try to reach the masses any more, or that high culture doesn't exist any more? Because I don't think either is true.
As I was just saying to some grad student friends the other night, it's very easy to fall back on the vision of intellectual life that was advanced as part of the post-war consensus, i.e. that every educatable person ought to get at least a bachelor's degree, and be conversant with a canon, and hold Tolstoy in high esteem (while, of course, deploring the Bolsheviki).
I just read James B. Conant's unhinged forward to Kuhn's THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION:
Good god.
I find it heartening that you're starting on Japanese language texts with Genji, bob. It shows that you're willing to punish yourself along with the rest of humanity.
Incidentally, I've just discovered how easy it is to write Japanese text on my phone. If I could go back in time and show my students at IBM who were working on what was then the monumental problem of kanji support, they would weep, or maybe commit seppuku.
30: I tried to read it once, but failed. Maybe the sword fights don't start until you get into it.
33: That may be prescriptively horrific, but it's not especially wrong descriptively, at least for the time.
31: Woohoo! Clarissa The Norman Mailer of the Midlands explains it all.
I wondered why Bob was talking about Heian culture the other day.
I thought 33 was written by the current James Conant (who I believe is doing some work with Kuhn's papers) and I was really taken aback.
I like the Sponge Bob macaroni and cheese. It's shaped for fun!
YOU BETTER STOP MAKING FUN OF ME!
Sort of re: 10/12
A friend of mine in high school told me that Wuthering Heights was only bearable if you read it as a comedy. I always found this hilarious. I later used the same tactic with Dancer in the Dark and it really helped.
I ask all you jaded cynics: could this have been accomplished under a Republican administration? No. No, it could not.
Fresno, Calif
I find it very insensitive, neb, that you would put this in a front page post. I still suffer from horrible post-traumatic stress from my unwanted adventures in Fresno on my way to a party for this very blog! And which kept me from meeting such delightful persons as yourself.
35:Synecdoche of shomin-geki
Akutagawa: "Life's tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child." Epigram to Ozu's 1935 movie The Only Son
Hmm. I didn't know where the quote came from before, and wouldn't have had a clue about the author. Now that I do, Ozu becomes just a few percent even more interesting.
38:Well, I have the 2nd volume (already read 20th Century) of the Cambridge History also open, and is my primary reading. Sometimes I get tired of dry history (new words:"capitatim" "garth") so this morning I thought that breaks with Murasaki would be appropriate and synergistic. Planned order is Showa, Heian, Meiji, Muromachi, Tokugawa, with a lighter book in between each.
43: WH is great. So :-P
46: You've already read S/ei Shon/agon, right? (I only g-proof because I've been teaching her for almost a year now, and my students are sort of obsessed.)
44: HOORAY!!!
It's probably too much to ask for Don Henley to follow suit, huh?
46:No. Read, oh ten non-fiction books on 20th century Japan so far, and watched ~200 movies. Bunch of ukiyo-e. The last was Varley's Japanese Culture, which goes up to the 80s maybe, and seems strongest on novels.
I don't know when I would do Pillow. I have Leisure Hour Notes and I am most interested in the 20th Century modernists. But I feel I would miss so much of Snow Country in translation.
I thought 33 was written by the current James Conant (who I believe is doing some work with Kuhn's papers) and I was really taken aback.
Incidentally, is there any chance that you're related to Harry Austryn Nosflow?
The pillow doesn't need to be read all at once, of course. You could spread it out over a year and it wouldn't matter. I make my students read it in two translations for comparison's sake, but they both have their beauties.
Incidentally, is there any chance that you're related to Harry Austryn Nosflow?
It's not impossible—part of my family is from Belarus—but I really have no idea. I'm much better informed about the genealogy as it relates to my maternal grandmother than I am about it as it relates to either my father (from whom my family name, obvs) or my maternal grandfather.
I also recommend it (and teach it) because it feels nice to be reading it, as a practice. Always Be Reading S/ei Shon/agon.
my father (from whom my family name, obvs)
Neb can still read Muraski.
Possibly. I can't read Mursa Mir what you said much less write it due to my terminal feminism.
Muraski is Murasaki's Polish cousin. Crappy books, nice pierogi.
high culture has since quit the field.
Yesterday Nick posted a link to theology from Randy Newman. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Bolano's 2666 both sold well in the US. So for this claim to hold, I think that a very conservative definition of high culture is necessary.
I just finished Cloud Atlas, and am about to start 2666. So I think we can safely rule them out as high culture.
60: Walt likes to think he's just a regular guy.
61: But he doesn't eat nearly enough fiber.
I thought 33 was written by the current James Conant (who I believe is doing some work with Kuhn's papers) and I was really taken aback.
What's really aback-taking about the quote in 33 is that the author, a president of Harvard, was (and is still) considered the Great Democratizer among the occupants of that office.
What, 2666 doesn't have enough fiber? That book is like a thousand pages!
63: A low bar, to be sure, and the legacy of standardized tests is not an unmixed one.
You know what book was disappointing? Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not bad, as bad goes, but not very powerful or beautiful in the Borgesian way that he seemed (in translation; in Spanish his goal may seem different) to be going for.
63: My favorite J.B.C. anecdote involves the telephone operator at Harvard getting a call from the White House, and asking Conant's secretary to "Please tell President Conant that Mr. Roosevelt is on the line for him."
Oh, and I do not much believe that high culture leads to effective self-improvement, with Germany in the 30s as the refuting example. Maybe it helps at the margins, maybe the conditions for high culture to actually connect with more people than a crust of the elite are uncommon.
I agree that there's a common impulse for self-improvement in the US, but I think this makes the US unusual.
Bolano's short stories seemed like nothing special to me, I read them and 2666 in english.
I don't do high culture, but as long as we're talking about books I wanted to provide an update, because I once complained about Tana French's novels on these pages. Anyway, I just finished her latest, after waiting months and months on the library hold list, and it is miles better than anything she has previously written. Very identifiably Tana French (laconic undercover detective, grisly murder, compulsion of the former to investigate the latter due to personal history and an unlikely connection), but so much smarter and more satisfying.
47: Which translation would you recommend for reading alone? My library seems to have all of them post-1900.
This is the kind of thing I wanted to do on Japan, but on the Internet everything has already been done, better than you could do.
He writes about declining Japan, extensively and very well.
Another one Tons of fascinating information in every post, from Meiji child prostitutes to highway and airport politics.
We are stuck with the word "bubble" to describe asset manias, thanks to the South Sea Bubble of 1711-1720, but its childish overtones, suggestive of the soap bubbles blown by a toddler, the bubbles rising from the mouth of a child's drawing of a fish, or the bubblegum bubble blown by a teen, fail to capture the damage done by real-world asset-price bubbles, which are more like malevolent pockets of methane gas lingering in some forgotten pipe missing from the plat which, hit by some contractor's drill, explode to kill and maim those known in movie credits as innocent bystanders.
He is a professional translator, living in Tokyo, in I think a finance field. His attitude scares me, and I don't think I like him, but living in a nation in slow inexorable decline might warp one.
70: The I/van Mo/rris is the one I fell in love with (it's swoony), but the Mc/Kinney is much sharper, especially in the representation of the poetry, which is phenomenal.
My students are divided. Some of them are in love with the Mo/rris and finally understand why it's supposed to be such a great book, and others have started a campaign to write fan letters to Mc/Kinney to get her to come visit us from Australia. It's actually a source of friction in the class.
The poetry seems to rely a lot on some form of puns and allusions. If Stanley had been born in Se/i Sho/nagon's world, would he have been considered among the greatest of artists?
