DOW-N-WOD (ThAt CroWn DoN't MaKe You A PriNce)
What an absolute moron. It's like the kid at a Bowie concert years ago who stupidly screamed out,
"Why is this old man singing Kurt Cobain's song?!?" (The Man Who Stole The World)
WEEKLY READING LIST:
Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America: I'm not sure, but I really think Eiichiro Azuma is going to argue that Japanese-Americans prior to and during the Second World War weren't the stand-up, flag-waving, Pro-Yankee good guys they've been painted as since the end of the war. After all, anyone with a bit of savvy can go pick up Ernest Allan Jr's essay Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943 (which I'm pretty sure is on the internet) and the history of Niihau during Pearl Harbor (pro-tip: never shoot a Hawai'ian three times...). Should be worth the read.
Pekin University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898-1937: I know next to nothing about Beijing during the twenties, apart from the burning of the Forbidden Palace in '24 and the exodus of the eunechs. So... yeah. Who knows what Xiaoqing Diana Lin has to say on Sino-edumacation of the early 20th century. And more importantly, what's the fascination with the name 'Diana'?
G.I. Jews: Deborah Moore argues that American Judaism was fundamentally reshaped by the crucible of the the Second World War (no really; ya-think?). To be fair, I'm more interested in the social and military aspect than anything else - so it should be a veritable treasure-trove there, but I can't say I'm going to understand all the intricacies of Semitic thought transference. Ah well - one never knows!
Dead Centre: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Medical Examiner's Office: I actually wanted The Body Garden, a history of the acres big pathology department in Texas where they do 'on-site' CSI, but this shall suffice. Shiya Ribowsky and Tom Schatman describe daily life in the New York M.E. office before, during and after 9/11. Light reading before bed, I'm sure. Also: FAPFAPFAPFAP
The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi: I'm actually more than half way through this and it's been a quick and simple read (why was I reading it? well, because I could - and also Masks of Nyarlathotep background). Some of the more interesting aspects are actually about the mass-conversions to Islam by prostitutes due to its highly progressive acceptance of female property ownership etc. - at least for the time. I can see interesting social contexts for writing/gaming here...
The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi - Detective Stories of Old Edo: After going through the detective stories of 1920s Shanghai, why not dabble in the literature of a Meiji-era legend - Okamoto Kidou. I've heard of Okamoto before, and apparently he was an English-language fluent translator and writer who enjoyed Sherlock Holmes so much he started writing his own. They're more enjoyable than the Chinese 'Sherlockian' stories, though I'm not sure if it's because the translator is better or because it feels more like a detective story than a thinly veiled allegory (the best part, as the introduction explains, is that the stories were written in the 1900s but set in the 1870s - not as an attempt to show a 'glorious past era' but because the differences between 1904 and 1876 were so staggering that most readers would look upon them the same way as we today might look upon a novel set in the Elizabethan times).