Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Berbstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses
What is communicated from one generation to the next is not only what is explicitly stated or what is set forth by precept and example, but also what is unconscious communicated. Unless we pay attention to these unconscious dynamics of transmission, we will never understand the receptivity (and resistance) to a living tradition.
Obama on his smoking habit
A day after signing major legislation regulating tobacco, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he still smokes cigarettes from time to time, something his aides refused to discuss on Monday.
“As a former smoker, have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes,” he said in response to a question. “Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don’t do it in front of my kids. I don’t do it in front of my family. I would say I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where I mess up.”
from NYT
“As a former smoker, have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes,” he said in response to a question. “Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don’t do it in front of my kids. I don’t do it in front of my family. I would say I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where I mess up.”
from NYT
Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China
Edgar Snow and his widow Lois Snow
http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/interviews/int.snow.html
http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/interviews/int.snow.html
Monday, June 08, 2009
From The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
waxing and waning of the moon (p. 28).
"Well I have to admit," she said with a note of resignation (p. 30).
tiff: 1. A fit of irritation. 2. A petty quarrel.
The sudden mention of Kumiko's elder brother had put me on (off) guard (p. 33).
"too busy, I'll probably buy myself a sandwich later" (p. 33).
"Would you by any chance be free this afternoon?" "You might say that." (p. 34)
"I had better do as I was told" (p. 35).
Would you by any chance be acquainted with the Pacific Hotel across from the Shinagawa Station?" (p. 35).
Stop yanking at me! (To pull with a quick, strong movement; jerk)
Commute to and from work
I restrained myself (p. 38).
The more I spent time with this woman, the more I seem to smell trouble (p. 41).
She was defiled by Noboru Wataya (p. 41).
I kept hoping all the while that there were no acquaintances of mine in the vicinity (p. 44).
I nodded silently - without the slightest inkling of what she was talking about (p. 44).
I poured myself some more beer (p. 47).
He was apparently a rather famous fortune-teller, but he lived very simply - even ascetically (p. 50).
After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm (p. 51).
Space out:
space someone out
to cause someone to become giddy. The circus clowns just spaced me out. The hilarious spectacle spaced out the entire audience.
See also: out, space
space out
to become giddy or disoriented. Judy spaced out during the meeting and I didn't understand a word she said. I have a tendency to space out at the end of a hard day.
Most cleaners will get rid of things that aren't claimed in three months (p. 54).
I stood still, straining my ears, but I couldn't tell whether it was our phone or a neighbor's (p. 58).
I passed directly beneath the eaves of other houses (p. 58).
I snapped my eyes open (p. 61).
Again she walked with a slight limp (p. 61).
I don't know the tune, but it had no melody at all" (p.61).
"Come to think of it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," she said, "you were unemployed. Are you still?" (p. 64).
I limp when my parents are around because I don't want to go to school (pp. 64-65).
In the weeks follwing the decision to send he back, her grandmother became increasingly overwrought (p. 70).
Kumiko became a difficult, taciturn child in these new surroundings (p. 71).
Why hadn't I died in my sister's place? (p. 71).
She did everything she could to find a way into Kumiko's heart (p. 71).
I didn't need yet another way to demonstrate how inferior I was to her as a human being (p. 71).
They egged him on, providing him with the best tutors their money could buy (p. 73).
But he was tall and slim and had an air of good breeding (p. 75).
"Well I have to admit," she said with a note of resignation (p. 30).
tiff: 1. A fit of irritation. 2. A petty quarrel.
The sudden mention of Kumiko's elder brother had put me on (off) guard (p. 33).
"too busy, I'll probably buy myself a sandwich later" (p. 33).
"Would you by any chance be free this afternoon?" "You might say that." (p. 34)
"I had better do as I was told" (p. 35).
Would you by any chance be acquainted with the Pacific Hotel across from the Shinagawa Station?" (p. 35).
Stop yanking at me! (To pull with a quick, strong movement; jerk)
Commute to and from work
I restrained myself (p. 38).
The more I spent time with this woman, the more I seem to smell trouble (p. 41).
She was defiled by Noboru Wataya (p. 41).
I kept hoping all the while that there were no acquaintances of mine in the vicinity (p. 44).
I nodded silently - without the slightest inkling of what she was talking about (p. 44).
I poured myself some more beer (p. 47).
He was apparently a rather famous fortune-teller, but he lived very simply - even ascetically (p. 50).
After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm (p. 51).
Space out:
space someone out
to cause someone to become giddy. The circus clowns just spaced me out. The hilarious spectacle spaced out the entire audience.
See also: out, space
space out
to become giddy or disoriented. Judy spaced out during the meeting and I didn't understand a word she said. I have a tendency to space out at the end of a hard day.
Most cleaners will get rid of things that aren't claimed in three months (p. 54).
I stood still, straining my ears, but I couldn't tell whether it was our phone or a neighbor's (p. 58).
I passed directly beneath the eaves of other houses (p. 58).
I snapped my eyes open (p. 61).
Again she walked with a slight limp (p. 61).
I don't know the tune, but it had no melody at all" (p.61).
"Come to think of it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," she said, "you were unemployed. Are you still?" (p. 64).
I limp when my parents are around because I don't want to go to school (pp. 64-65).
In the weeks follwing the decision to send he back, her grandmother became increasingly overwrought (p. 70).
Kumiko became a difficult, taciturn child in these new surroundings (p. 71).
Why hadn't I died in my sister's place? (p. 71).
She did everything she could to find a way into Kumiko's heart (p. 71).
I didn't need yet another way to demonstrate how inferior I was to her as a human being (p. 71).
They egged him on, providing him with the best tutors their money could buy (p. 73).
But he was tall and slim and had an air of good breeding (p. 75).
Salon article on Murakami
The heroes in Haruki Murakami's dazzling, addictive and rather strange novels ("A Wild Sheep Chase," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World") don't fit the stereotype of conformist, work-obsessed Japanese men at all. They're dreamy, brainy introverts, drunk on culture (high and pop), with a tendency to get mixed up with mysterious women and outlandish conspiracies. Toru Okada, the narrator of Murakami's latest opus, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," spends a good portion of the novel in luxuriant unemployment -- cooking, reading, swimming and waiting for a series of peculiar characters to pop by and tell him their tragic stories. Since Murakami doesn't hide his identification with his heroes, it's no surprise to learn that he has long felt like an odd man out in his native land, even among other writers. What's more remarkable is the novelist's recent rapprochement with Japan and his countrymen, culminating in the year he spent interviewing victims of the Aum cult's poison gas attack on a Tokyo subway in March 1995.
Murakami says this reassessment began during the four years he spent at Princeton, writing "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Besides giving him an impressive command of English, Murakami's sojourn in America had an emotional impact that he finds difficult to articulate even today, two years after his return to Japan. With Wanderlust editor Don George, who stepped in to translate at a key moment, I met with Murakami during his brief West Coast book tour to promote "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." The novelist's slow, careful responses to our questions seemed more the result of a rare, utterly unself-conscious sincerity (he seldom gives interviews) than any language barrier.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html
Murakami says this reassessment began during the four years he spent at Princeton, writing "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Besides giving him an impressive command of English, Murakami's sojourn in America had an emotional impact that he finds difficult to articulate even today, two years after his return to Japan. With Wanderlust editor Don George, who stepped in to translate at a key moment, I met with Murakami during his brief West Coast book tour to promote "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." The novelist's slow, careful responses to our questions seemed more the result of a rare, utterly unself-conscious sincerity (he seldom gives interviews) than any language barrier.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html
Noboru Wataya and Academe
"In any case, Noboru Wataya graduated from his elite private preparatory school, majored in economics at the University of Tokyo, and graduated from this top institution with top grades.
His father expected him to enter the government or a major corporation upon graduation from the university, but Noboru Wataya chose to remain in academe and become a scholar. He was no fool. He know what he was best suited for: not the real world of group (communal) action but a world that called for the disciplined and systematic use of knowledge, that prized the individual skills of the intellect. He did two years of graduate study at Yale before returning to the graduate school at Tokyo. He followed hi parents' promptings shortly thereafter and agreed to an arranged marriage, but that lated no more than two years. After his divorce, he returned to his parents' home to live with them. By the time I first met him, Noboru Wataya was a fully developed oddity, a thoroughly disagreeable character (p. 74).
Murakami, Haruki (1997). The wind up bird chronicle. Knope: New York.
His father expected him to enter the government or a major corporation upon graduation from the university, but Noboru Wataya chose to remain in academe and become a scholar. He was no fool. He know what he was best suited for: not the real world of group (communal) action but a world that called for the disciplined and systematic use of knowledge, that prized the individual skills of the intellect. He did two years of graduate study at Yale before returning to the graduate school at Tokyo. He followed hi parents' promptings shortly thereafter and agreed to an arranged marriage, but that lated no more than two years. After his divorce, he returned to his parents' home to live with them. By the time I first met him, Noboru Wataya was a fully developed oddity, a thoroughly disagreeable character (p. 74).
Murakami, Haruki (1997). The wind up bird chronicle. Knope: New York.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
In 1954 Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School where she was one of only nine women in a class of more than five hundred. After the birth of their daughter, Martin was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During this period, Ginsburg attended class and took notes for both of them, typed her husband's papers to his dictation, and cared for their daughter and her sick husband, while making Harvard Law Review.
Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" (1956), celebrating his friends who were members of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity
Brian Reynolds Myers
Myers concentrates his research in the field of North Korean Studies. He claims that the Soviet Stalinist literary doctrine of socialist realism failed in North Korea, that late President Kim Il Sung’s 1955 Juche speech is not nationalist, that son and successor Kim Jong Il is a symbolic "mother" figure for the regime, and that North Korea is a fascistic race-based nationalist state, not a Stalinist state.
far-lightest country
nationalistic
racist country
http://web.dongseo.ac.kr/~dis/sub3.html
far-lightest country
nationalistic
racist country
http://web.dongseo.ac.kr/~dis/sub3.html
Friday, June 05, 2009
Wear Out / Tear Out
http://dic.impact.pe.kr/ecmaster-cgi/search.cgi?kwd=wear
http://www.pronunciationworkshop.com/americanpronunciationdemo.htm?gclid=CLbB-pT385oCFSAgDQodGjHHeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XBogKE-A0&feature=channel
http://www.pronunciationworkshop.com/americanpronunciationdemo.htm?gclid=CLbB-pT385oCFSAgDQodGjHHeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XBogKE-A0&feature=channel
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
ZELIZER MEMORY AND JOURNALISM
Part of this disregard may have to do with a lingering presumption that journalism’s treatments of the past are more closely aligned with mainstream historical work than
with memory. In that journalists’ address to the past by defi nition runs contrary to their
own concern for the present, journalism at fi rst glance seems an ill-suited setting to
provide a meaningful tracking of the past. For as long as journalism has been around,
the popular assumption has been that it provides a fi rst, rather than fi nal, draft of the past, leaving to the historians the fi nal processing of journalism’s raw events. Against such a division of labor, journalism has come to be seen as a setting driven more by its emphasis on the here-and-now than on the there-and-then, restricted by temporal limitations associated with rapidly overturning deadlines. Journalists distinguish themselves from those dealing with the past by aspiring to a sense of newsworthiness that draws from proximity, topicality and novelty, and they are motivated by an ongoing need to fill a depleting news-hole despite high stakes, a frantic pace and uncertain resources. In this regard, the past seems somewhat beyond the boundaries of what journalists can and ought to do in accomplishing their work goals (Zelizer, 1993a).
As Edy (1999: 74) succinctly states:
the fact that news media make use of historical events at all is somewhat counterintuitive.
Journalists have traditionally placed a high value on being the fi rst to publicize
new information. Extra editions, news fl ashes, and program interruptions for
important new information all testify to a desire to present the latest information to
audiences. Many stories go out of date and cannot be used if there is not space in
the news product for them on the day that they occur.
All of this suggests that the particular division of labor by which journalists take care of the present and historians take care of the past, both sharing a reverence for truth, facts and reality, has blinded both in considering what else happens when journalists look backward. That myopic vision has extended in large part to memory studies. Not only has there been little attempt to single out what is unique about journalism in addressing the days of yore, but discussions of memory have not suffi ciently recognized that journalism’s treatment of the present often includes a treatment of the past. Nor have they accounted for the fact that journalism’s treatment of the past tends to be as variable, malleable and dynamic as other kinds of memory work. Journalism and journalists are an unobvious but fertile site of memory, and their status as memory agents needs to be better understood.
with memory. In that journalists’ address to the past by defi nition runs contrary to their
own concern for the present, journalism at fi rst glance seems an ill-suited setting to
provide a meaningful tracking of the past. For as long as journalism has been around,
the popular assumption has been that it provides a fi rst, rather than fi nal, draft of the past, leaving to the historians the fi nal processing of journalism’s raw events. Against such a division of labor, journalism has come to be seen as a setting driven more by its emphasis on the here-and-now than on the there-and-then, restricted by temporal limitations associated with rapidly overturning deadlines. Journalists distinguish themselves from those dealing with the past by aspiring to a sense of newsworthiness that draws from proximity, topicality and novelty, and they are motivated by an ongoing need to fill a depleting news-hole despite high stakes, a frantic pace and uncertain resources. In this regard, the past seems somewhat beyond the boundaries of what journalists can and ought to do in accomplishing their work goals (Zelizer, 1993a).
As Edy (1999: 74) succinctly states:
the fact that news media make use of historical events at all is somewhat counterintuitive.
Journalists have traditionally placed a high value on being the fi rst to publicize
new information. Extra editions, news fl ashes, and program interruptions for
important new information all testify to a desire to present the latest information to
audiences. Many stories go out of date and cannot be used if there is not space in
the news product for them on the day that they occur.
All of this suggests that the particular division of labor by which journalists take care of the present and historians take care of the past, both sharing a reverence for truth, facts and reality, has blinded both in considering what else happens when journalists look backward. That myopic vision has extended in large part to memory studies. Not only has there been little attempt to single out what is unique about journalism in addressing the days of yore, but discussions of memory have not suffi ciently recognized that journalism’s treatment of the present often includes a treatment of the past. Nor have they accounted for the fact that journalism’s treatment of the past tends to be as variable, malleable and dynamic as other kinds of memory work. Journalism and journalists are an unobvious but fertile site of memory, and their status as memory agents needs to be better understood.
Paul Connerton
http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/researchFellowsAndAssociates.html
How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences)
How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences)
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