The Post-Apocalyptic Techno Poem

Excerpt of a recent conversation between myself and my new kitten, Yoritomo.

As I'm loading the dishwasher, a flash of black springs out of the depths and goes bounding toward the living room.

Me: Dude!
Y: [stops and looks back at me]
Me: Where you just IN the dishwasher?
Y: [blinks]
Me: What the hell were you doing in there?
Y: [bland stare]
Me: ... Okay, whatever.

In other news, I've rewritten the lyrics of "Trogdor" to be "Tomo-chan" (was a cat... I mean, he was a dragon-cat... or maybe he was just a DRAGON! but he was always TOMO-CHAN!!!) so I guess it's love.

Gummi cherries, spice cookies, and a new kitten. That is how I will live through my comprehensive exams.

End trans.

In preparation for my comprehensive exams, which I'll sit in late December or early January, I'm planning to do some intensive reading in the subject of Japanese political history. I've got books and articles covering the Kofun through Muromachi periods--roughly one-thousand years of cultural development--and with any luck I'll have read the majority of them thoroughly in the next two weeks. (I know, right?)

Here's my list, in bibliographic form, ordered alphabetically, for anyone who's interested in it:

* Adolphson, Mikael and Edward Kamens and Stacie Matsumoto, ed. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007.
* Berry, Mary Elizabeth. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
* Borgen, Robert. Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994.
* Conlon, Thomas. The Culture of Force and Farce: Fourteenth-Century Japanese Warfare. No. 2000-01 of Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies Cambridge: Harvard University, Edwin O. Reischaeur Institute of Japanese Studies, January 2000.
* ---. State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2003.
* Hall, John W. and Toyoda Takeshi, ed. Japan in the Muromachi Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
* Hurst, G. Cameron III. Insei: Abdicated Sovereigns in the Politics of Late Heian Japan, 1086-1185. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
* Mass, Jeffrey P. The Kamakura Bakufu: A Study in Documents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.
* ---. "The Origins of Kamakura Justice." Journal of Japanese Studies 3 no. 2 (Summer 1977): 299-322.
* ---. The Development of Kamakura Rule, 1180-1250: A History with Documents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979.
* ---. "Translation and Pre- 1600 History." Journal of Japanese Studies 6 no. 1 (Winter 1980): 61-88.
* ---. "Patterns of Provincial Inheritance in Late Heian Japan." Journal of Japanese Studies 9 no. 1 (Winter 1983): 67-95.
* ---. Lordship and Inheritance in Early Medieval Japan: A Study of the Kamakura Soryo System. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
* ---. Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
* ---. "The Missing Minamoto in the Twelfth-Century Kanto." Journal of Japanese Studies 19 no. 1 (Winter 1993): 121-145.
* ---. Yoritomo and the Founding of the First Bakufu: The Origins of Dual Government in Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
* ---. Family, Law, and Property in Japan, 1200-1300. No. 2000-03 of Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies Cambridge: Harvard University, Edwin O. Reischaeur Institute of Japanese Studies, December 2000.
* McCullough, William. "The Azuma Kagami Account of the Shôkyû War." Monumenta Nipponica 23 no. 1/2 (1968): 102-155.
* Piggott, Joan R. The Emergence of Japanese Kingship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
* Varley, H. Paul. The Ônin War: History of Its Origins and Background with a Selective Translation of The Chronicle of Ônin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
* ---. Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
* Williams, Yoko. Tsumi: Offense and Retribution in Early Japan. London: Routeledge Curzon, 2003.

I appear to be reading every Jeffrey Mass book/article known to man, but he is the go-to guy for Kamakura period history, so...

Wish me luck.

Since lj has become the place where I go to bitch about things, to paraphrase a super-savvy friend of mine, here it is.

I hate taking Chinese at New City University.

And I mean, I hate every fucking minute of it. Just the prospect of having to do it depresses me--putting me instantly into a sluggish, lazy, inefficient mood that makes doing even the things I enjoy difficult.

I can't remember the last time I dealt with anything as ungraciously as I've been dealing with this, but - in my defense - I can't remember the last time I had to put up with this kind of fucked-up-donkey-show.

But there is a light on the horizon. In four weeks I'll be out, and I'll never have to take Chinese again at New City University again. I'll have a Chinese-free summer, in which I will study stuff that I actually love to study, and in the fall I'll take Classical Chinese.

Four more weeks and out.

Of course, that's also four more weeks until I have to turn in a major paper that I haven't even started to write yet (although I have pretty well planned out at this point). And four more weeks to come up with ways to spend time in Japanese class, because I've really passed the point where I need to take directed readings. I read just fine on my own now.

Four more weeks.

Lord, give me the strength.

Or, you know, whatever.

From only two lines of dialogue I was able to determine that the author of an article I read for seminar had incorrectly attributed a quote from the film Flash Gordon to the film Logan's Run.

When I pointed this out in class because I just couldn't stand to let it pass without comment, my advisor noted that I never ceased to amaze her but that I might better have been a film studies major than an art historian.

Sometimes I really do think that I am beyond the reach of any aid.

*facepalm*

I wound up flunking six kids (not including the girl who cheated, who has elected to appeal the decision). One of them was a boy who begged me to assign him a G grade. He claimed to have been ill and to have been dealing with his grandfather's death. But these claims came only after repeated absences made it clear that he was not going to scrape by. I sympathize with the situation (lord knows I've had to try to carry on with school while dealing with setbacks), but ultimately I just couldn't justify an exception.

By contrast, my colleague didn't flunk anyone (once again, not including the boy who cheated), and she had more overall students enrolled in her sections! This makes me wonder if I'm just a way tougher grader, or if I just got the fuck-ups this term, or what happened.

I know I'm probably something of a hardcase, but damn.

We were on the lookout for the problem couple this time out. Five minutes into the exam, it was clear that the same thing was happening all over again so we split them up, moving the suspected cheater to the edge of the aisle. It didn't quite deter him, however, and I wound up having to stand over him through the whole test to keep him honest.

Not the best way to spend an exam, I admit, but better than having to flunk them.

An even sadder situation developed, however. In the confusion of the end of the exam period, the professor noticed another cheating couple. (J. and myself were too bombarded with test collection at the time to hone in on them.) She [the prof] snatched their booklets up right away and turned them over to us to look at. The tests were carbon copies of one another. (And I do mean carbon copies; every single word of every single question response was identical. I couldn't believe it... still can't, really.) It's really too bad we didn't catch them earlier, though I think this was due to a very slick system they had worked out, because if we had we could have separated them. By the time we caught them, we had to accept the tests as they were.

The really sad thing is that the girl in question is a hard worker; but she was working for two, and that's just not okay. It must not happen, as the professor said. 185 people took that exam today with the understanding that they would stand or fall on their own merits. It would be a betrayal of their efforts to let something like this go.

And yet... it was really hard to look this girl in the face and tell her that she was taking a zero on the exam (almost ensuring complete failure in the class). She cried.

[sigh]

Well, she'll never do that again.

Some life lessons really suck, hey?

From a New City University course description for Fall 2009:

"Students enrolled in this course will have the good fortune to complete 3 short papers and the opportunity to further enhance their lives by taking a comprehensive final exam. Sometimes life is good."

ROFL!

So, I sent an email to the manager of the Tech staff at the union where the event is taking place.  This email expressed my "discontent" with the situation.  I just received a reply, the substance of which was basically this:

I spotted my first official that-dude-is-totally-cheating cheater this morning in Intro to Asian Exam #2.  In a room of 180 people, he was the only one who couldn't seem to keep his eyes on his own paper or the projection screen.  I spotted him as I was doing my rounds and began a major concentrated surveillance of his behavior, which--given that he was on the watch for TAs--he noticed immediately.  I'm pretty sure I cut into his cheating habits significantly, and I know that I scared the hell out of him.  After about twenty minutes of my obvious maddogging, his hands began to shake and he became visibly frustrated and angry.

Unfortunately, the kid isn't mine.  He's my coworker's, and she isn't sure of his exact name--nor of the name of the girl he was cribbing off of (who we think is his girlfriend and probably in on the scheme)--so it's hard to do much about it at this point.  But for the next test, we'll have our eye on him and the professor will be aware of the potential situation.  If it appears to be happening again, I'm going to come down on them like a pile of rocks.

As an aside, I'd also love to sit that girl down and let her know that no guy is worth that kind of exploitation, and that she should kick his punk ass to the curb, but I suspect that such an action is outside of my job description and probably translatable as some form of personal harassment.  But seriously, it makes my fiercely-independent-bitch meter ping like a motherfucker.

I had a great meeting with my adviser this afternoon. We went over various things related to the semester; my upcoming paper, outstanding applications, and technical issues with the classes she's teaching this term. K. is planning to spend the spring break in Japan and is leaving a little early, so I'm going to proctor a test and possibly give a lecture. We also talked about the first stages of forming my dissertation committee. Given that I'm going to be out of the country all next year, we're not sure if I absolutely must begin the formation of my committee right now or if I can wait until I get back. But we'll figure it out. Anyway, with business concluded we talked a bit about hobbies and discovered a mutual love of mysteries. K. loves Josephine Tey and has read all of her books! (I knew there was a reason she struck me as being so great right from the first meeting.)

In other news, in a totally random--but totally cool--twist, my friend A. lent me a copy of an article on ghosts in Japanese photographs the other day. She hypothesized, rightly, that I would find it interesting. Imagine my surprise when I flipped to the back to examine the author's sources and found my undergraduate thesis listed in the bibliography! I'm pretty sure the mention was mainly due to my having written one of the few articles on the subject in English, but it was still a really delightful surprise. I have to confess that I showed it to all of my friends in the department because I could not contain my excitement. I called my parents and told them about it, too. I suppose it's a testament to how naive about and new to this lifestyle I am, but I hope that I never get blase about being able to be part of the exchange of information. It's such a privilege.

And, finally, on a completely different front, I've discovered that my cat has a passion for potato chips. How bizarre is that?