…I’m sitting in a dimly-lit room on Gibraltar Point, polishing my thesis and working on more stories about robots. I lucked into this place — which is beautiful, and spooky, and exactly what I need — because Peter Watts got lucky in Germany and couldn’t take his usual Point position, and offered me the spot. The turnabout happened so quickly, in fact, that his name is still on my key fob.
My luck has been good, lately. Through random chance, DeathRay happened to check out his favourite band’s website (not following musicians online, he only does this rarely) and found out that The New Deal would be making a quick stop in Toronto between Tokyo and Halifax. This is how I got to see these guys:
To say that they’re great live would be an understatement of epic proportion. These guys kill their shows. As in, they duct tape their shows’ hands and feet together, give them a vicious beating with a rusty crowbar, throw them in the back of a truck, drive them to a ditch, and then light them on fire. They’re that good. Last night’s audience went crazy for them.
However, I was also lucky enough to receive some very helpful notes and recommendations on my thesis, and that’s what I should be concentrating on at the moment. Once this is out of the way, it’s all robots all the time. Wish me luck.
Still, the “K/S” material confirmed something that I already knew from my own life: that there are just as many heterosexual women who are turned on by the idea of men having sex with one another as there are heterosexual men who are turned on by the idea of women having sex with one another — that the engines of desire are far more complex than we usually give them credit for; and that if lesbians and gay men didn’t exist, heterosexual men and women would have had to invent them — because they constantly do.
–Samuel R. Delany, quoted in “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” (Dery, Mark. Duke: 1994, 206)
I went to Dery’s book looking for stuff on fan labour, but found this fantastic quotation (which summarizes both slash fandom and Foucault quite neatly, I think) instead.
“There’s a present outside your window,” Singer says.
Now Brandon does get up. He pads to the window and opens it. The shutters squeak dryly. Outside, hovering, is their drone: four wings, all black, her hindparts heavy with twelve hours of surveillance.
“Hello, Tink,” Brandon says, extending his hand. The UAS does a brief identity check (it takes about four seconds) and flits over to his open palm. He carries her gently into his room, opens his laptop, watches her crawl delicately to an open USB port and insert herself there. Data streams from her body: shipment logs for aid packages, border sentry comments regarding volunteers and their orgs, patterns of food voucher distribution, search-and-record audio keyed to specific phrases associated with the black market. The afterglow of a war long waged, codified and made sensible through transfer from one machine to the next, ultimately destined for some years-from-now report doubtless coloured by self-congratulation on the part of those least responsible for its success. From “,” a story I’m working on. I quite like this bit.
Amy quickly wrapped the towel around herself. It was easier than looking at Javier’s face, and it made her feel a tiny bit more in control of herself. “Granny says I can help your clade. But I don’t know why you should trust her.”
“At least we agree on one thing.”
Amy hugged her arms. “Granny also says that I’m not really dying. But I’m not sure I should believe that, either. Maybe she’s just lying so she can use me to do more damage.”
“I’d say that’s a pretty safe bet.”
Amy looked at her toes wiggling on the bloodstained carpet. “…Can I call my mom and dad, please?” Her fingers dug into her ribs. “I’d like to say goodbye.”
The gun lowered a fraction. “…Okay.” From my VN stuff. The closest thing to hard sf YA I’ll probably ever get. Note the presence of guns, blood, and naked girls. I’ll probably cut this dialogue as I really don’t like the power dynamic at play, although the afore-mentioned ingredients will remain.
Palmer reads these prostheses not only as physical stopgaps or crutches, but as emotional coping “mechanisms” that highlight each character as an adolescent on the way to maturity and self-sufficiency. These prostheses can be figurative as well as literal, taking the form of attendant cameras or personal mentors which initiate a constant negotiation of power in worlds where technology, like adulthood, offers the mixed blessing of simultaneous opportunity and constraint. From my thesis, in a chapter on “Fullmetal Alchemist.”
８月13日から８月２６日、日本 りょうこうりました。。。My Japanese homework.
…You’ll notice the descending level of quality. I have to re-write that FMA chapter tomorrow.
Their economic power enabled Japanese to somehow pleasurably indulge themselves in nostalgia for a pre-modern innocence that Japan had lost. By the mid-1990’s, however, this nostalgia had become more related to the deterioration of the Japanese economy and society. It arose in the context of a prolonged economic recession and a series of gloomy social incidents, such as an increasing number of brutal murders by teenagers and the nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo railway system by the Aum Supreme sect. Nostalgia for Asia was no longer just a matter of pleasurable yearning for what Japan had lost; instead, it was now an attempt to regain the energy and vitality Japan had lost by identifying itself with the promising land of “Asia.” — Koichi Iwabuchi, Re-Centering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism
Most of you know that I’m at work on a Master’s thesis. This thesis involves anime, cyborg theory, and fan culture. It involves reading a lot of Henry Jenkins, Donna Haraway, Susan J. Napier, and other big names. Having finally finished my chapter on FMA and cognitive narratology (not to my satisfaction, but that’s another story), I have begun gathering resources and drawing up outlines for the next — which is on anime fandom and the spectre of Orientalism.
Last year I took a great course on the making of Asian Studies, and it contained a fantastic book by Robert Young called White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. My university library has a couple of deadwood editions of the book, and one electronic version. How long can I download the book for?
THREE. DAYS.
Yeah. Three days. Because grad students can get all their reading and citing done in that amount of time. Right.
Not only is this an especially unrealistic expectation, it’s an unfair one: if I march all the way to the library and reserve a pulp copy, my grad student status grants me a six-week hold. That’s a hell of a lot longer than three measly days. If the school insists on DRM, why not grant me use of the file for the same amount of time that I would be allowed for the use of a paper copy?
And now, for your pleasure, some quotes on cognitive narratology, the intersection of narrative theory and cognitive science: Read the rest of this entry »
In preparation for a chapter on anime fandom and cognitive narratology, I’m re-watching Fullmetal Alchemist.
I didn’t much care for FMA upon first viewing a few years ago. I found the character designs too simple, and the plot painted in broad strokes. But I kept up with it on the advice of others, and I’m happy I did. For all its cute moments, the series occasionally dips into moments of disturbing grotesquerie and genuine emotional engagement. These moments increase as the series progresses, so that by the end what was an entertaining YA sci-fantasy narrative has become an epic saga of war, post-humanity, and family drama.
But the genius is there from the first episode. As pilots go, it does everything it should: it introduces the major themes of the larger series (science vs. faith, brotherly love, sacrifice, redemption) while wrapping it up in a shiny coating of action and adventure about two adolescent boys with a whole lot of brains and nothing left to lose. Above all, what strikes me this time around is the way FMA tells the story of two very different people (brothers Edward and Alphonse) who believe fundamentally opposite things (that science is the answer to all questions, and that some things should remain unknown) but who continue to work together toward a shared goal. Don’t take my word for it, though:
...is a science fiction writer, grad student, おたく, and immigrant. She has lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, where she is now a member of the Cecil Street Irregulars and a contributor to both Tor.com and WorldChanging Canada. Her fiction has been published in Tesseracts, FLURB, and Nature.
