Working on my thesis...
Phew, I needed to take a break from all those (11th century and modern) Japanese novels and texts I'm reading for my thesis (The Influence of Heian texts on Modern Literature) so I started reading The Last Empress by Anchee Min. Fabulous novel written in a simple but elegant and very symbolic style. Just what I need.
I've become way too angry with the gratuitous and pointless violence and shocking images I come across in modern Japanese novels. I know this literary aspect is considered as a part of their culture but it makes me cringe every time I read about it - even Haruki Murakami attempted this sensational style (that's probably part of the reason I have issues with his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles) and you can't ignore it. Why on earth would anyone want to write novel after novel about more than slightly psychopathic teens that masturbate over pictures of shocking diseases and later become serial killers or commit suicide or become nazi's? I must've read that kind of story about a hundred times in the past few years and I'm sick of it. It's not that I don't acknowledge Japan's war history but it's just too much. What a relief that the subject I'm doing my study on - Heian literature - concerns mostly female authors who didn't follow this ancient tradition and wrote about interpersonal relations and the individual spirit. Thrilling!
And I don't want to face my Dutch teacher for a while because of something silly and very puberal. What am I, a thirteen-year-old or something? I was talking with Kimberley today, a new good friend, and we were discussing the matter of painful menstruation and the handiness that are tampons, as women do. I don't know what came over us to do so during class, though. Just as I finished saying something about how seeing a male gynaecologist is not creepy at all when you need an examination (Kimberley was afraid it would be and uttered "Ewww!" rather a lot), I noticed the deadly silence and saw that everyone was watching us wide-eyed, including the teacher. Whoops. I suspect they heard the whole conversation. It cracks me up now but I must've done a perfect impression of a tomatoe at that point, surely. Plz to be forgetting about this, teacher, since you're the assigned promotor of my thesis and I don't want you to think about tampons every time I talk to you!
ETA: Watched part one of the repeat of Stephen Fry weekend on BBC2. How I love him! *snuggles Stephen* And what a naughty man he is, secretly liking to swear the hell out of people. But showing an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth after Who Do You think You Are? (in which he discovered that part of his fanily perished in Auschwitz) was a total mistake on behalf of the BBC. I know it's about WWI and not WWII and maybe I'm a bit sensitive about those things but hasn't Stephen played in Blackadder The Third also? Why not pick an episode of that series or just show the war ep the day after this shocking documentary?
I've become way too angry with the gratuitous and pointless violence and shocking images I come across in modern Japanese novels. I know this literary aspect is considered as a part of their culture but it makes me cringe every time I read about it - even Haruki Murakami attempted this sensational style (that's probably part of the reason I have issues with his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles) and you can't ignore it. Why on earth would anyone want to write novel after novel about more than slightly psychopathic teens that masturbate over pictures of shocking diseases and later become serial killers or commit suicide or become nazi's? I must've read that kind of story about a hundred times in the past few years and I'm sick of it. It's not that I don't acknowledge Japan's war history but it's just too much. What a relief that the subject I'm doing my study on - Heian literature - concerns mostly female authors who didn't follow this ancient tradition and wrote about interpersonal relations and the individual spirit. Thrilling!
And I don't want to face my Dutch teacher for a while because of something silly and very puberal. What am I, a thirteen-year-old or something? I was talking with Kimberley today, a new good friend, and we were discussing the matter of painful menstruation and the handiness that are tampons, as women do. I don't know what came over us to do so during class, though. Just as I finished saying something about how seeing a male gynaecologist is not creepy at all when you need an examination (Kimberley was afraid it would be and uttered "Ewww!" rather a lot), I noticed the deadly silence and saw that everyone was watching us wide-eyed, including the teacher. Whoops. I suspect they heard the whole conversation. It cracks me up now but I must've done a perfect impression of a tomatoe at that point, surely. Plz to be forgetting about this, teacher, since you're the assigned promotor of my thesis and I don't want you to think about tampons every time I talk to you!
ETA: Watched part one of the repeat of Stephen Fry weekend on BBC2. How I love him! *snuggles Stephen* And what a naughty man he is, secretly liking to swear the hell out of people. But showing an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth after Who Do You think You Are? (in which he discovered that part of his fanily perished in Auschwitz) was a total mistake on behalf of the BBC. I know it's about WWI and not WWII and maybe I'm a bit sensitive about those things but hasn't Stephen played in Blackadder The Third also? Why not pick an episode of that series or just show the war ep the day after this shocking documentary?