cheers and jeers.

cheers to the many many people who have helped me learn more about the monbushou scholarships. It's time to put that knowledge to use.
further cheers to the people who have expressed an interest in helping me get in touch with the right people and network my way to a slot.

jeers to the one person who insists over and over that it's impossible for me to get into a top level school, and that philosophy is not closely enough related to law for the universities to be interested.

today, I'm shifting gears on the application, even though it's still not available. Networking, researching professors and their work, and begging favors are the orders of the day.

aphorism 97

...the myriads who know nothing any more except their naked, rambling interest, are the same ones who capitulate as soon as organization and terror rope them in.

copyright Adorno, 1945

lights out.

Tonight and tomorrow, I'm putting philosophy to bed for a while. It's time to get stupid serious about law, and improving my japanese. So tonight, it's 50 minima moralia aphorisms (a staggering 14 times the recommended daily allowance of 3.5), and about 50 pages of Kuhn. Tomorrow, I'll put away childish things, and move on to more concrete sets of incomprehensible jargon! Wai!

I'm doing this because I pay too much attention to the calendar. I told myself I would finish those books in February, and by gum, I'm gonna.

update. I give up. adorno himself stresses that this sort of relentless push is just bullshit. If I'm gonna take it in, I'll do it at my own pace... which is to say, when I have time. Lights out.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

"The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called emos." --Francis Fukuyama

the root of all evil.

I'm halfway through the bbc4 documentary with Dawkins, "the root of all evil". It's really fun in some spots, where he's so brazen in the face of religion, less so where he ignores any and all concept of humilty and respect for others. Granted, I side with him in most regards (except for the small issue of tact) but I think Kuhn's got it right when he says that you can't convince people from another paradigm using the language of yours.

If I had a short inteview with religion, I'd like to ask it a couple of questions in particular:

"When 'faith' ceased to mean 'belief despite the cruelty and illogic of the world', and started to mean 'belief contrary to any and all evidence', were you surprised that 'faith' remained so successful?"
and
"Seeing as the entirety of earthly goings on is all smoke and shadow according to the big (angry) 3, do you really think all the hubub about the smoke and shadow is in line with 'the word'?"

(ps, "Can you eat with chopsticks?")

update:

Reading this bit from dewey, I see that the first of my interview questions especially is relevant not just to religion, but philosophy as well. Just swap the word "faith" for "truth" or "knowledge". It's almost precisely the sort of question that Marxism and critical theory level at philosophy (via leveling it at science). This quotation from the above linked chapter sort of puts the problem that Marx tried to address in really clear terms:

As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself.

That is to say, ideal knowledges of all sorts should step down off their pedestals and engage the world they propose to regulate.

hey stanford.edu people.

I've seen you searching google for the monbushou scholarships, and coming to my blog. Stop it. I don't want to compete with people from a much better school. I'm already nervous enough about my chances without you guys coming around searching for the "test content" and stuff.

Please don't apply to the program until I have been accepted.

And for safety's sake, the same goes for the people from no-name schools. Better safe than sorry.

Thanks.

why she'll never get a diamond from me.

This article via Boing Boing, is really amazing. It tells the bloodless side of the diamond industry, up until 1982 when it was originally published. The bloody side, which has been getting more and more attention lately, is wicked in its own right, but if you read this, it seems all the worse.

The whole story is interesting (with the exception of the last couple of pages). Highlights include:a discussion on the fourth page of the surprise factor of diamonds and the victorian social requirements for women to present a veneer of chastity; and a couple of choice quotes

"The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems." (regarding the situation in 1870)

"By the mid-1980s, the avalanche of Australian diamonds will be pouring onto the market. Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices."

It's amazing how long this tulip-market has been preserved. Please don't buy diamonds for any non-industrial, non-LP related reason.

step 2...... step 3 profit!

For the first time in a while, my etrade account crept back into the profitable range for a short while today. It has indeed been a bumpy ride. I was down as much as 12man earlier this week, but gritting my teeth and riding out the storm has changed that.

I suppose it's really the ability to be unconcerned that gives you any chance in the stock market. If being in the red had really bothered me, I would have made even more stupid choices. Again, the aloof, elitist attitude of the industrial bourgeosie wins again. *smiling at the camera, holding a stack of cash in each hand* thanks adorno!

goth-loli, and repressive desublimation

Both Adorno's Minima Moralia and Marcuse's One Dimensional Man contain discussions of the contrast between the "sex" and erotic fufillment. "Sex" meaning the infintely reproduceable act in itself, which has been de-immoralized through a loosening of sexual morality, is not capable of fufilling the libido. It acts mostly to temporarily divert the impulses, and keep the masses receptive of and available for domination and administration. Or so they say.

One particular series of aphorisms from Minima Moralia concerning the infinitely reproduceable act, beauty, and the freedom of women, strikes me as being quite relevant to a couple of discussions I've been party to lately: one concerning how Kate Moss, and a number of couture models aren't "TV pretty", and another about the Goth Lolita scene being constantly misinterpreted as equivalent with either the Ame/Euro Goth scene, or more mistakenly, "cosplay".

That series of aphorisms centers on one key principle. Beauty, as well as the subject are only meaningful when pulled into stark relief by the subject.

No gaze achieves beauty, without being accompanied by indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything outside of the viewed object. And it is solely through bedazzlement [Verblendung: dazzle, infatuation], the unjust closure of the gaze vis-à-vis the claim raised by everything which exists, that justice is done to what exists. (48th aphorism)

As such, the exchangeabilty of experiences is antithetical to an authentic experience of beauty, and percludes "doing justice" to the object. The idea that the ultimate subject, the human, is made into an object is further problematized when that object is an entirely interchangeable part in the infinitely reproduceable and saleable act:

Casanova’s women, not for nothing identified with letters instead of names, are scarcely to be distinguished from each other and also not from the figurines, which form complicated pyramids in Sade’s mechanical organ. Something of such sexual brutality, the incapacity to make distinctions, lives however in the great speculative systems of idealism...(54th aphorism)

What better example of this sort of incapacity to make distinctions than the sample photos from japanese delivery health sites:



Different girls, same clothes. The girls measurements and particular talents are meticulously detailed (I have seen in a magazine measurements of the various facial features of the models included as well). This is extreme objectification of what are properly subjects unto themselves. For the man, this is the whole purpose of this sort of "cosplay". The woman herself becomes relatively insignificant, compared to the concept of fucking "a high school student" or "a nurse". The same sort of interchangeable beauty fills prime-time broadcasts with similar smiles, and the world with women "who style themselves as flowers, because that’s what their husband likes." (aphorism 59)

It's in this sense that the goth-loli scene is a rebuttal of the beauty industry. The gothic lolita subculture, as much or more so than any other subcultural fashion group in japan emphasized inventiveness, and is not usually directed toward sexual attention. Perhaps, it's important to say that that has begun changing as the "movement" is more popular, saleable, and homogeneic. (We've even got a few up here in Aomori that can be spotted on the bus now and again).


In a sense, the novelty also demands at least a longer glance. I think this aspect of the presentation of goth loli is much the same as the strange fashion photography of the nineties. In at least arresting the eyes of the subject, they both attempt to steal the privelege of beauty, but since any such attempt necessetates deliberately turning the subject to pure object, I doubt you could say it escapes the problematic side of objectification.

Then again, I doubt you could make Adorno enjoy a photograph.

the most obvious thing in the world

Japan's current education system was built on the assumption that students respected their teachers, and would show at least a modicum of respect. So teachers were able to conduct classes, and keep the students in line, despite not having any real recourse for disciplining the students. Nothing harsher than inconsequentially yelling at them anyway.

In the meantime, Japan has modernized, and lost all respect for teachers. The rules didn't. So now, idealistic (and often "dainty") young women enter the teaching profession, and are instantly totally ineffective. They have no means of disciplining students, because the studentso don't seek their teacher's approval.

The students are also bound much more to one another than to the teacher. They stay in the same class all day, while the teachers come and go from "their space". The teachers rotate schools over and over, reinforcing their status as "outsiders" all the more.

That's probably why two female teachers I know have had to take recurring sick leave while hospitalized for clinical depression.

I'd like to see some means for formally disciplining students introduced in the japanese education system.... 's'all I'm sayin'.

thinking of england.

If you know how much I've crammed into my head, and how little I've been out and about since the snow started a-fallin', you should have been able to see this coming a mile away.

I'm freakin' sick of it.

With the JLPT I had a clear deadline, and a pass/fail designation to look forward to. These days, the goals are multifarious, and all too often, out of my hands. I'm not just studying japanese anymore. I'm studying japanese and law and philosophy and permutations of the three. So there are three to five open books at any given time: two to four more than there ever were in college.
As much as I wanna just cash it in for a while and get about some misbehaving, I'm going to suck it up, and stay at this for a while longer.

free ass, my market!

scratch that, reverse it.

I read the funniest editorial just now. Fortunately, they have the thing in English too. Basically the daily yomiuri, whose usual editorial fare is very "free market" directed, is saying that newspapers should be exempt from the free market.

I can't tell you much of the details, but newspapers are protected from competition in retail prices like a couple of other industries, including most notably books. That has meant that newspapers can't be sold for any price other than what the newspaper company has chosen.

Of course the newspaper companies have an interest in keeping their special status, but the bald-faced tactics they use to prove their point are ridiculous. The big winner is: "according to a recent Yomiuri Shimbun survey, an overwhelming majority of those polled support the resale system and the exception granted to newspapers." No information about said poll is available anywhere on their website, and to be sure, in the published paper either. We're lacking the phrasing of the questions, the sample size, and the percentages and margins of error among other things. The way the sentence is presented in japanese, the questions seems to have been intentionally slanted.
The smaller, but subtly charming winner is the presentation of the case as a matter of free speech, and preservation of the culture, becuase a potential price war would potentially "fundamentally shake" (weird translation) the existing delivery service. And the kicker, citing a law passed last year obligating federal and local governments to " to advance and promote print culture", the writer says that you could hardly consider encouraging price competition amongst publishers "promoting print culture".

Free markets for you.

hypocrite bastards. I hope the white knights of the gaijin community are right in their insistence that Taro Q. Public isn't really so gullible as to fall for anything he reads.

getting our name on the map.

between the pedophile child killer dude from last year and the kill to "protect my child" mom from last week, gaijin are not really garnering trust from the locals. Far from being the only child killers, they actually fit the mold for murders in japan, which seem to be disproportionately directed at children as compared with other developed countries.

I don't know how it can be anything other than a matter of national attitudes toward children that inspires this stuff. I also don't know how on earth you can inspire the young people to have children when the murder and maiming of them is so common (or at least so commonly the focus of the news).

To catch up on the news a bit, I read the last 5 days of editorials from Yomiuri, and read about no less than 13 children killed either intentionally or by drunk drivers.

Speaking of which, twice last year very drunk drivers crashed into groups of children in Japan, both times killing a few. Both drivers got 20 year sentences. The editorial stressed that these (overly) harsh sentences will be a warning to potential drunk drivers. But if the twice repeated prospect of killing multiple children with your car doesn't keep you from getting behind the wheel wasted, god knows what will.

murakami ryuu is a show off.

the fucker uses at least one kanji that doesn't seem to appear in modern dictionaries, and about 30 that aren't in standard use in the first 15 pages of 限りなく透明に近いブルー. He also almost always uses the uncommon alternative kanji at almost every possibility. And he's got something against furigana.

I picked up this book to read as an little bit of a break from murakami haruki who can be awfully heavy, and slow, but reading those first 15 pages or m ryuu took me easily twice as long as 30 pages of m haruki, who is no slouch in the vocabulary department.
This book being "shocking" drug fiction from 1978 also means it's kind of robbed of it's best selling point. needless to say, I'm not enjoying it so far.

change the way you look at ytmnd

http://ytmnd.com/users/profile/14400

this fella's flippin' it on its head. I especially reccommend this one.

(This fits in well with Minima Moralia, which I picked up again after I stopped to read One-D man. But before I become totally and unabashedly elitist, I should probably work on actually becoming elite to some extent, huh?)

the semi-hemi-demi celebrity that I resemble

Via momus... momus via japan times.


This is Martin Webb. I think he looks a lot like me. Or how I would look if I learned to bathe and do my hair properly, and then someone loaned me a very expensive suit, and a bigger nose.

Where can I learn to bathe and do my hair properly? Also what do you figure the going rate on a "martin webb impersonator" is?

game, set, match. (spoiler warning)

"Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."

That's the ending of One Dimensional Man. Hooray!

Now onto "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

slummin' at the ol' dike.

When you acheive something, and you wanna go shout it from the hills, but it's too cold outside, you shout it all over the internet. I know that I'm not gonna have anything else worth bragging about for a long while yet, and blogging about it, and writing a bunch of self-congratulatory emails just didn't satisfy completely. So I did the unthinkable. I went to brag at big daikon.

It was like a trip back to a simpler, more conflict prone time. People say the craziest things.

Anything to keep from studying.

rain falls to the ocean, and the cycle begins anew.

If'n yer gonna study law, yer gonna take the LSAT. I hadn't really been thinking about the LSAT until last week, so I missed the chance to take it on Feb 4th. That means I won't be able to take it until June.

That's not gonna stop me from taking practice tests though! Just took my first (the free one from the internet) and got a 164. I figure if I can improve that by 10 points in the next 3 months, and learn to write a decent essay relatively quickly, I'll be in good stead for applications both here in Japan and in the States if I decide to put any in.

The next test to work on is the japanese LSAT. Now that's gonna be tough. Maybe I'll start with a kanji kentei instead.

all the ladies say 合！

all the guys say 格!

(ladies:)合!
(guys:)格!

That's right 合格! I passed 1級 of the JLPT! with a 76.25% (out of 70% necessary) at that!

I'd go on, but my arms are too sore from patting myself on the back to type.

合格！

multi-dimensional marketing

Taste the qualitative (not quantitative) difference, Virgin Cola.

Pacify your struggle for low prices at Food Lion.

If your current long distance provider's prices are irrational, fulfill your savings potential with Sprint.

Like Husserl said: "I'm lovin' it."

professor from the grave!

So law is on my mind. I thought maybe I should search the internet for the guy what taught me Phil of Law a couple years back... and I found him right away. He's got a blog at the first link under his name, two actually. One is about his premature child (who seems to be doing fine now), and the other is a bunch of conservative jibes. He doesn't seem like a crazy or anything, it's just off-putting to hear your philosophy of law professor sound really irked that we can't literally torture enemy combatants, and then suggest that a ban on torture renders them useless, such that they should just be killed deliberately if they surrender.

It's really strange to have to put a professor into the context of real life. Finding out that my gay english prof writes movie reviews for the Richmond, VA weekly "style", was likewise strange, though I couldn't help but agree with his reviews.

zzzing.

I'm not often moved by simple turn of phrase, especially campaign speech, but this was really good.
"We can't stay the course to victory. The course we're on does not lead to victory."

-- a man named Duck.

monbukagakusho update.

In the last couple days, I've found out considerably more about the scholarships... or rather, put a bunch of things I already halfway knew into a much clearer context. Sadly, that implies I'm sort of fucked in a couple of places.
The big issue is that I graduated from a relatively lame school (albeit with a really good GPA), and didn't write a thesis. The application form doesn't give you a lot of space to prove your ability in your field, beyond GPA, school name, thesis, and the promise of your research proposal, so I'm coming in with two strikes against me.
My school's reputation is hopeless. I've come to terms with that. In regards to the thesis, I'm trying to cobble something together 4 years after graduation, but it's pretty difficult to do decent research without access to any facilities beyond Amazon.co.jp. I'm not even sure that they'll consider a paper written entirely outside the academic sphere, even if I now am a much better researcher, thinker and writer than I was back then. Maybe if I just don't draw attention to the freshness of the ink.

The other big trouble is that I don't really want to stay in "my field", namely philosophy. I've been considering a couple fields, cheifly economics, but I realize now that that was pretty stupid. I did realize that I'm interested in economics to some degree, but it could just be that I've got a hard on for all sorts of learning this year.

The new hotness is Law. I've only just discarded econ in the last few days, but having a much better understanding of how this is all going to work, law looks like a much more viable option. Philosophy is a much more "closely related" field, and I have a class in the philosophy of law on my transcripts. I may even be able to squeeze my "late thesis" into something legal-esque.
The real lynchpin in going law is the LSAT. I'm good at logic, reading comprehension, argumentation and most of all, at standardized testing! If I can pull a 170 (not at all out of my range based on the first practice test), I have a pretty damned good indicator of my potential that I can paperclip onto the application. Trouble is it's too late. Even the email-reported results that come in three weeks aren't quick enough to come in under the (anticipated) monbusho application deadline of July 1st. (The definite deadline will presumably be revealed in March along with this year's applications.)
The flaws so far in shooting for a law scholarship:

1 Following the master's program, as opposed to the practical law program could still mean a pretty bleak outlook for employment in japan.

2 The practical law program could have outrageously high (de facto) standards regarding the language, and being a gaijin and still possessed of a noticeable accent, post-graduation employment may still be difficult.

3 Japanese schools may not see philosophy and practical law as related to the same degree that American schools do.

(sorry if you came here looking for information about the scholarship rather than about my application process. If you want what information I can give, feel free to leave a comment)

crucifibrator

crucifibrator
Originally uploaded by notnato.

This is an image of a man crucified in a public square with clamps on his nipples. The man on the left is holding a "back massager"/vibrator which he is about to use to further stimulate/torture the crucified man.

It's what they call a batsu-game in Japan.

the second marcuse post, in which the author employs a quotation.

"The unscientific, speculative character of critical theory derives from the specific character of its concepts, which designate and define the irrational, in the rational, the mystification in the reality."


It's quite true. It's just written in a really heavy jumble of fancy language that Marcuse doesn't feel inclined to define very often. The funny thing is that the copy I'm reading was scanned and OCR'd back in a time when scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) software didn't really do their jobs well. So the word "our" appears as "Dur", "all" as "an" or the surprisingly elite "a1l". Even the word "word" tends to turn into "ward". It's like a little demon has taken control of transmissions.

Incidentally, did Pynchon lift the phrase "project a world" from Marcuse? Seems a relatively unlikely pairing of concepts.

Also incidental: I started reading "A Very Short Introduction"'s "Philosophy of Science" alongside 1-d man, and it's actually helping a bit... if making Marcuse look like a boob on occasion.

turtleneck.

turtleneck.
Originally uploaded by notnato.

Blogger is undergoing maintenance; I can't get ebay or half.com to load. I'm pullin' on my turtleneck and going to a cafe to read.

the purgative effects of a good marcuse.

I don't think I have a single regular reader that reads both this blog and my japanese blog*, but if you were reading the other, you'd know that I've been auto-didacting like crazy, trying to exorcize some of the lingering demons from my utterly wasted undergrad experience (wasted aside from having learned German). For the last couple days I've been joined in battle with the nemesis that laid me low during my senior year.

Being both very busy and very lazy at the time, I gave up on "the One-Dimensional Man" very shortly after beginning it in January 2002. That has since become my personal symbol of the repeated failure to seize my possibilities back then.

On returning to Marcuse (with some trepidation), at first I couldn't penetrate more than a couple of paragraphs. But with the help of a couple of trusty tools (pen, paper, my philosophical dictionary), I have come into the clear. Eight pages of tiny black scribbling and some orange arrows drawn to connect thoughts stand as testament to that. This morning I bested the rather daunting fifth chapter, "Negative Thinking, the Defeated Logic of Protest".

Gettting through this chapter in particular felt really refreshing. Like I had just gotten out of a sauna, having ejected some impurity through my pores.

*I say this as though I might have some reader who cares about the japanese stock market, marcuse, and the deomgraphic crisis.

you are not ready.gov!

The human-animal hybrids have already infiltrated the highest levels of government!

Boing boing points out that they do look like furry porn. I think it's the attention to detail on the muscular definition that suggests that we should be thinking of these mascots as vigorous physical bodies. That and the gay clothes.

obsolete ideas.

I've been listening to an series of lectures on Plato's(/socrates').

It's just infuriating listening to him harrangue the "sophists" for their tricks of language when his entire project of The Forms was the most basic form of mistaken language. Plato's brain broke later in life when he realized that language was not a media of perfect fidelity, and he wrote a bunch of weird mythological attempts to justify his belief that everyone should live the way he dictates, even if he has no basis for his beliefs. He became an wanna-be legislator, but wasted his chance to build up any honor by spending his life insulting democracy and political leaders. If he hadn't had the good luck of instructing Aristotle, the forms wouldn't have been remembered any better than any pre-socratic physics.

I can't really say that much about the interim revivals of platonism, but from my experience with them, they seem to be less robust than the revivals of the thoughts his and Socrates' rivals present in the Dialogues.
The professor that delivers the lectures generally has a very high opinion of Plato (as does nearly everyone else), which I think gives me a better picture than I'd get if I actually reread everything. I have meant to "get plato over with" for a long time, and this about does it for me.

(I don't hate or disrespect him that much, really. I just can't help but react to the lecturer's overly-forgiving attitude. That and I'm a little disappointed to have learned a lot more about the dialogues without having learned anything that helps me understand modern junk like Zizek or even Heidegger, who refers to plato allzuoften.)