Nescafe: implicated by Gaddafi

Of course, most revolutions tend to end in dictatorships. It’s one of the sad fallacies of humanity that the people who should rule never want to, while the people who lust after power are precisely the ones who should not be allowed to be in power. But some good might come of it. I love the idea of revolution, if not the practicalities of it.

And on the theme of revolution, my life is … revolting! I’m afraid to report that after a long struggle with Failure, my BA in Japanese has passed away peacefully after receiving poor marks in the recent exams. In all seriousness, I think this is the third and final time I’ll be thinking of packing it in. Even though I only have a year left, my Japanese just isn’t going to get any better. I gave it a year, and it’s not coming together, and it’s become a frustrating chore. This just isn’t what I want to do. Best to cut my losses and try for a decent English degree rather than a poor joint honours one. I don’t think doing English will be any easier – it might well be harder – but I’ll be able to concentrate on one subject, rather than the ungainly hodge-podge of joint honours, and it’s a difficulty I enjoy – a challenge, not the immovable mountain that is trying to learn Japanese.

Wheels are in motion, and I’m reasonably certain that this time there’s nothing to stop me – I’ve got the marks, and I should get funding for an extra year. This gives me the rest of the semester off. A kind of sabbatical, if you will. Sort my head out. Get a job. Do some writing. Here’s hoping it goes well.

I ended up with a slightly-bonkers set-up with my netbook on my left, plugged into my radio streaming Japanese TV; Anki open on the left half of my desktop monitor for flashcards; and JDIC open on the right half of my monitor for looking up words; and a remarkable program called Synergy which lets you use one mouse and keyboard on two PCs as if my laptop was just another monitor. Another monitor and an iPhone somewhere in there and I would truly be a self-facilitating media node.

I wish I had any idea what this diagram was about

Last night I found these streams for Japanese TV and started watching TBSテレビ. Eventually the 3am teleshopping ceased and the breakfast show came on, and it was a strange sensation of jetlag to be watching people wide awake in the morning while I was getting ready for bed. But oddly enough, I slept really well.

So for the next two days I’m just going to have Japanese TV on as much as possible in preparation for the listening exam on Thursday. It bothers me that I only really study at my best when I have exams coming up, but I suppose that can’t be helped. It’s how I passed the exam last year, after all, and it did lead to genuine long-term gains in reading proficiency.

It is [hot/cold] because it is [summer/winter]! I hope you are well. n years have passed since I graduated from [university] and now I am living in [place]. Things were [difficult/bad] to start with, but then they became [easy/good]. I am working as a [occupation].

The truth is, I need to ask a favour. Because of [reason], could you do [request] for me? It’d be really good if you could.
Give my regards to your [wife/husband].

Then you throw in some 「もっと早くご連絡しようと思っておりましたが、遅くなり、申し訳ありません。」 (“I thought I’d contact you quickly, but it became late. My deepest apologies.”) or 「桜の美しい季節になりましたが」 (“It has become the season of cherry blossom’s beauty.”) and the killer 「仕事応募の為、身元保証をご提出して頂き、有難う御座います。」 (“For bestowing on me the honourable submission of a personal reference for the benefit of my job application, my deep thanks.” written with ridiciously showy-off kanji that will probably make the marker either shake their head or admire my pluck).

So I revised that while listening to some amazing jazz (I find it the perfect revision music because it’s sort of soothing and exciting all at the same time, and there’s no words to distract you) and went into the exam this morning, wrote a half-decent letter, and finished neatly before the end.

A future classic, surely.

Walked back listening to Classic FM on my phone because I deleted all my MP3s while upgrading to Android 2.2. It was Chopin’s beautiful Romance Larghetto, which really went well with the drizzling rain. Listening to a lot more radio, these days, which is nice. Sometimes you can get a bit fed up of having so many MP3s always available.

It’s a cold November Sunday afternoon, and I’m listening to the amazing Kaji Meiko sing enka. I wrote a haiku:

秋納め、
演歌聴いたり、お茶を飲む

The end of autumn
I’m listening to enka
And drinking my tea

I’m actually drinking coffee, but that’s three morae in Japanese and ‘tea’ is only two, one if you drop the honorific. It’s interesting to compare the English haiku to the Japanese – the Japanese version is based on 5/7/5 morae and not syllables, so a word like enka, two syllables, is three morae. Also, Japanese haikus traditionally require a seasonal element – so you get stuff like the autumn leaves, the summer sea, obviously, but then there’s massive lists of kigo (seasonal words), each with a deeper meaning – harvesting burdock in autumn, pickling wasabi in summer.

I tried looking up some haiku for inspiration, and found ひとり暮らしの５・７・５ (Haiku of a Single Man):

電球を　またも忘れて　暗黒湯』
Once again I forgot
To change the light bulb. I bathe
Sitting in darkness

呪怨見て
表紙のサップが
俺見てる
So I watched “The Grudge”.
After, from a wrestling mag
Bob Sapp stares at me

I guess I should get back to work.

We land on a cloud and I hop off his back, realising in mid-air that I’m jumping onto something entirely insubstantial, and yet I land on a soft, solid surface. I run through it, and it’s like running through fallen autumn leaves, a sense of wonderful, childish joy. He sits catching his breath, watching me run. I feel a little silly, but it’s absolutely incredible. I run and scream my head off, jumping without fear into the soft white fluff, spinning around with abandon in sheer awe at the unscaleable dome of blue sky that hangs in every direction. I run back to him, grab his hand, and we stand on top of the world, on a white meadow, in a perfectly silent world.

NaNoWriMo is back! I’ve come to look forward to November – first my birthday, then NaNoWriMo (3rd time this year), and finally my first Movember (feel free to donate to my ‘tache here).

Back at home for the weekend. Regular readers of my blog will know I very seriously considered giving up Japanese last spring, but somehow I pulled through the exams and started back at Leeds for the third year of this degree. But it feels like a Pyrrhic victory; sure, I passed, but I didn’t pass very well, and it may have been better to just bite the bullet back then and come to terms with the fact that I’m not really that into Japanese.

It occurred to me, the week before last, when I had to write this English essay. It was pretty complex and I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing, but I happily hunkered down in the library for ten hours with a stack of books and crafted a deeply imperfect, but ultimately finished essay. I realised I really enjoy that kind of work – essay writing and such – because it’s creative work. I find creating something – a story, an essay, something in a computer game, a piece of art, a blog post – to be a wonderfully rewarding experience.

The thing is, I get none of that buzz from learning Japanese because it’s mainly passive learning. I know you create conversations and write compositions, but it’s really not the same thing at all, for me.

Anyway, my real point is, I really don’t think I necessarily need to be doing Japanese any more. The big problem is that I can’t drop it. I investigated, and was a little taken aback on Thursday to be told that I’m two weeks too late to drop the necessary credits to have room to take up English modules for next semester.

So I’m stuck. But! There is a plan C: abort this year entirely, get a job until August 2011, then start again at Level 2 next academic year doing Single Honours English. This would mean I graduate in 2013, not 2012. The job would earn me a nice bit of extra cash (and I certainly need all I can get) and I believe that since I’d still be registered as a student, I wouldn’t have to pay council tax.

This is kind of scary and exciting all at the same time. But then, it might be just what I need to do. There’s that great Talking Heads song, “Found a Job”¹, with the line “if work isn’t what you love / Then something isn’t right” and I’ve always thought I’ll never be one of those people trapped in a boring job they hate just because they’re too scared of things changing. But, to shamelessly quote another song, for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same². So I guess I should perhaps go for this. It certainly beats being bored and miserable in Japanese class all day.

¹: Byrne, David. “Found a Job” in More Songs About Buildings and Food. Talking Heads, CD, Sire Records (1978).
²: Cave, Nick, et al, “Jesus of the Moon” in Dig Lazarus Dig. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, CD, Mute Records (2009).

Anamorphotical portrait of Charles II of England. Oil on canvas

My arch-nemesis Miles, over at Memoirs of a Gaijin, has had no less than three people recognise him from his blog in real life, which I think is enough people to get a little first-tier ‘internet celebrity’ badge. I’m pretty sure all my readers stick to the shadows and, upon seeing me, flee in terror and respect. Or I don’t have any readers. Anyway.

Classes started! Civil War literature hasn’t been quite as dull as I imagined. I mean, you got hacks like Edward Waller who just drone on about how radiant and majestic Charleses I & II were (chinless autocratic amoral bastards, the lot of ‘em) but there’s some interesting things hidden away, and there’s the whole turmoil of the period when England stood on a precipice between being playing second fiddle to Spain and the Heiliges Römisches Reich and becoming the most powerful nation in the world – kind of like England’s difficult teenage years? Mandarin is pretty easy – everything’s monosyllabic and I find it really easy to think in Chinese characters. Being used to Japanese means I have no problem with a language without proper plurals or gender or articles, which I imagine must be quite a shock if you’ve only done French or Spanish.

Anamorphotical portrait of Charles I of England. Oil on canvas

Japanese is … kinda weird. Everyone’s pretty much better than me, as I expected, but so far the grammar and such is stuff I did last year, so … the classes are kind of easy at the moment? But it’s still hair-raising to have to speak in front of people, and make conversation, and stuff. I just hide in the library and lurk on 2-channel, which is fun.

Today I had a meeting about my Short Research Dissertation. It’s 4,000 words, and it doesn’t seem like an enormous undertaking, but it will certainly be enjoyable, I think. Well, I say that now. I’ve narrowed it down to being about the phenomenon of NEETs and freeters and the Japanese youth counter-culture – where it comes from, and whether it exists as a short-term phenomenon or whether it will have wider implications for society. Will the monolithic kaisha culture fall or will it remain depressingly intact? These, and other important questions, I hope to answer.

It’s really weird, but I’m sort of enjoying studying. I know, right? It’s just there’s really nothing else to do, and it’s nice to sit down in the Brotherton with a copy of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) and slowly decipher the contents into OneNote (which is my new favourite program, being that I can take my laptop down to uni, make notes or write something, then sync it with my desktop seamlessly when I get home). Certainly, light novels such as Haruhi are a lot easier than real literature like Mishima’s 潮騒 (The Sound of Waves), which I imagine is difficult reading even for fluent Japanese, what with obscure kanji and unconventional readings.

Speaking of difficult reading, Baudrillard! I mean, I consider myself pretty intelligent, and I did philosophy at A-Level, but this guy … Maybe it’s a bad translation. I certainly hope it’s a bad translation, because it reads like a dodgy Babelfish job from French to English via Hungarian. To give you an idea of what it’s like, I will temporarily write in the style of Baudrillard’s prose: certainly the style of one who’s vaudevillian rhapsody runs counter to the mainstream philosophy, which is to say a certain je ne sais quoi of proto-normal Russian doctrine, vis-à-vis the normal interacting with the hyperunsymbotic. Kennedy knew this: thus, the ultimate symbol of American satiety is the death of consumerist ballet as seen in the unbalance of Trotsky minus the special luminosity of what one might call the wrangling of modern fixation on the zabological mannichopology of the general public’s resistance to santological deflectance (PPEP!) and ultimately, what Walt Disney was getting at was this: that there can be no society without the emblence of grisstitude.

No, that barely manages to capture the sheer confusion of reading Simulacra and Simulation. Perhaps I need to read more. He still has some good points, in the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day and how a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn and other sayings. But as Baudrillard writes on page 15,

Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect, between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning, the gap, the difference, the smallest possible gap (PPEP!), irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it, because it is itself a determined order.

PPEP! PPEP! PPEP! The rallying cry of the postmodernists! PPEP!

I knew which of the candidates I’d hire, and I wasn’t one of them. Nevertheless, the next day I was called along for a final interview (after missing the callback the day before and getting one in the morning at 10:30 asking where I was – embarrassing) and I thought it went quite well. Obviously I couldn’t lie about my experience, but I tried to make it clear that I was eager to learn and could pick up technical stuff in no time at all. Waiting for the call that evening was agonising, but I was put out of my misery by a polite email informing me that I hadn’t got the job. Oh well. It genuinely was a good experience. I’ve never failed a job interview before (the whole Gaba debacle notwithstanding) and I’ve never been through such a gruelling interview process, so I really hope the next time I do something like this I’m better prepared.

Now, someone reminded me that due to my change in circumstances I have gone, in the space of a year, from being entirely ineligible for the Leeds bursary to (hopefully) receiving the entire payment of £1,540 next spring. So if I spend sensibly, money … well, there’s a gaping hole in my finances by mid-autumn, but I should actually break even by next year even without the job. To be honest, I’m going to have enough work on my hands without a part-time job, so perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps.

My housemates arrived! and it has been great fun. We’ve been playing poker, and I cooked dinner, and we have drunk wine and played video games and cleaned the kitchen and moved the sofas and made visits to other people’s houses and flats as the class of 2012 flits back into town one by one.

I’m not entirely confident about this third year. I’m taking on Mandarin and a dissertation in addition to my first proper year of English (unlike Japanese but like most degrees, English has a mickey-mouse first year that counts for naught). And then there’s Japanese, in which all fifty-so of us are now supposedly at the same level, which is patently untrue. I’m living with Rob and Hugo, who are essentially fluent (though they protest otherwise), and I get the feeling everyone else is better than me. Japanese is just really hard, you know? And I’m not sure if I care enough any more. I mean, plenty of people don’t care about their job and still do it, but at least they’re getting paid.

Brg. Maybe things will be better once term begins.

You know how athletes will run at high altitudes with heavy weights so that, when they’re accustomed to that, running unladen at sea level feels like a breeze? It’s like that after studying Japanese. Two years of banging my head against the brick wall of fluency in Nippongese, and when I try my hand at Swedish, it’s like punching through cardboard. There’s so many cognates that vocabulary – lång (long), hem (home), också (also, pronounced ockso) – just pops into my memory in a way that Japanese words never do. Knowing a little German helps too – läsa (lese, read), arbeta (arbeite, work).

It always seems remarkable to monolinguists like myself when you hear of people who can speak three or four or six languages, but once you’ve learned the skill-set necessary to learn a language – which tools to use, how conjugating works, what articles and particles do – the next language is half as hard. Conjugating Swedish verbs is essentially the same as conjugating Japanese verbs – it’s just a matter of learning different ‘bits’.

I watched Tora Tora Tora today (remarkably, half-directed by Kinji Fukasaku, he of the Yazuka Papers and Battle Royale) and as a test, tried to understand the spoken Japanese without the subtitles. Entirely hopeless. Been studying this two, three years and I can’t understand even a sentence or two.
I know the answer is “study more” but it’s hella depressing.

I also watched the much-hyped The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor) and found it to be pretty enjoyable, even if I’m always suspicious when beautiful troubled young women end up sleeping with chubby, middle-aged author surrogates. (When I’m an author, my protagonists will be celibate and miserable.) I liked Lisbeth – she put me in mind of one of William Gibson’s heroines, and in a way the whole film is like some kind of modern post-cyberpunk thriller. Sort of. You know, the stuff that Gibson was pioneering in the 80s – technology as an integral part of our daily lives, a world where everything’s on the net and information is a commodity, all those cliches which were revolutionary then but today sound ancient – that sort of stuff is so mainstream now that you hardly notice it.

I noticed Lisbeth’s password was only four characters, though. No real hacker would let that slide.

So I’ve hopefully got an interesting little job lined up, if I pass the final interview next week. Heading up to Leeds this weekend to move into my house and kill a few days before the interview and then, if I get it, starting my induction the week after – then it’s Freshers’ Week and finally, after that, lessons begin again.

I’ve been worrying about what to do for my dissertation, but the other day I found myself writing a blog post about the future of Japan – slowing economy, fossilised government, aging population, freeters, continued backwards attitude to immigration – and realised I’ve got a beautiful paper to write right there. If I do it right. The New World: Changing Paradigms For Japan In New 21st Century Economic Realities – Demarking the Migrant Pathos and the Erotics of Primal Pathology, it will be titled.

Until then, then, I chill out, raid the fridge, learn lines like “Du bröt dig in i mitt hem. Jag kan ha ihjäl dig utan vidare.”* and try to put off packing until Friday.

* “You broke into my house. I can kill you without consequence.” Learning lines from films is much more fun than “I am Herr Smitt,” don’t you think?