head #17

It is alleged by the internet that Apple intends to come out with the latest in Mac mini technology later today. Oh, fingers crossed. Hopefully they won’t have moved the price point into another tax bracket and I will be able to afford a new one, and I can finally put poor malfunctioning Eugenie out to pasture. [EDIT: THE INTERNET LIED.]

I have been busy, sort of, but (dammit!) not busy enough. Also I have been a very bad DW citizen. I am sorry, I was reading actual books instead. A poor excuse, I know. Here are the things I would’ve posted, in order, had I been able to marshall the effort —

WARNING: This post is disturbingly long, even for me. Behind every one of those cuts is a 'normal-sized,' Emma-style entry. Even if you really love me (MOM!), do not attempt to read it all at the same time. Especially if you hope to keep loving me. And I really want you to keep loving me, really I do.

( SHERLOCK POST )

( GOOD OMENS POST )

( SUSANNA CLARKE POST )

( KINDLE POST )

( HERE ARE SOME IMAGES & PHOTOS WHICH I INTENDED TO BE AMUSING )

( A BIZARRE & MASSIVE LINKS POST )

Also, I just received this book in the mail. I’ve been trying to get it off various specialty Japanese bookstores for years, and then on a whim I searched for it on Amazon, where I found it for sale for, like, $10 used. FOILED AGAIN, CAPITALISM! YOU ARE A WORTHY OPPONENT. It is the most perfect Japanese grammar book I have ever seen and I am kind of excited to get the chance to study it; the authors wrote it specifically to aid people who are interested in doing academic research in Japanese, and it features sentential structures that I’ve never seen anyplace else. Except in actual Japanese, I mean. (I hope to use it to — among other things — bring you some gay-themed comic content that does not involve, say, the presentation of love-rape as an adorable courtship ritual.) (Or that features some female characters who are not toxically obnoxious!) (Assuming such content exists, of course.) It also has an entire index of nonintuitive Japanese expressions involving "気," one of which (気を付ける, which means "be careful" or "pay attention," or more literally "fasten your essence," haha, what? what??) left me scratching my pointy head for a week when I saw it in a Suzuki Tsuta comic (I can’t remember which one, they’ve all merged together into one giant run-on sentence strung together with でs and のs that’s made of understated masculine angst and misconstrued regret with a light grey background and a cat on it, like a fictive, gay Voltron).

(Parentheses!) (Parentheses?) (Parentheses…)

Okay, done.
See you in July!
(Of 2015.)

For some reason — and despite the fact that it is officially the Future, now — we are entering a new ring of the never-ending Circus of Hurrrr! that is the perpetual attempts by various idiots to censor Huckleberry Finn. The latest assault has been launched, apparently, by some sort of professor or something — and they must not be making professors like they used to when I was a kid, because all my English professors were a minimum of 113 years old and they could not have been persuaded, ever, singly or as a group and even upon pain of death, to strike so much as one unnecessary "as" out of the Introduction to Grammatical Principles. Which is what God intended them to do; professors profess, they do not edit for fucking content. But, whatever. Look the story up yourself, it gives me an unwieldy and massive sad.

I understand that people don’t want to look at the word "nigger." I don’t want to look at the word "nigger," either — but, you know, probably the best way to stop being forced to look at the word "nigger" over and over is to make as many people as possible read Huckleberry Finn, unaltered and unabridged. Censorship, no matter how noble its intentions, doesn’t change history. (This is what we’ve been trying to tell Texas all along, you guys. You’re setting a bad example.)

What are we gonna take out next? The bigwords? The prejudicial representations of white Southern characters? The unvarnished portrayal of the horrifying effects of ignorance and poverty? Twain’s loathing for the British aristocracy? References to smallpox? And witchcraft? Should we turn Huckleberry into a middle-class female child, maybe? And Jim into her speech therapist? Because you can de-nigger the shit out of the book if it makes you feel better about yourself and your worthless white ancestors, but I want to see what’s left when you’ve gotten rid of all the rest of the objectionable content.

Because that’s what Huckleberry Finn is, you know: It is a novel-length objection to America, and to mankind. It is a perfectly-shaped literary weapon of perfectly-placed hatred and grief and rage. And as far as I’m concerned, if you touch so much as one comma, for any reason, you are Hitler.

As an American citizen, you are not allowed to hide from your own fucking history. If it’s so bad that you have to edit it to be able to stomach it, the primary problem is not the word "nigger," or any word at all, actually. The problem is that you are a fucking coward who has confused being offended with being injured. The word "nigger" didn’t make it into Huckleberry Finn by accident. It is not an embarrassing defect of Huck’s patois. Twain wanted you to read the book and squirm. He wanted you, the reader, to see how civilization turns every man that fits into it and keeps his head down and follows the rules and goes to church and believes in the importance of hard work and community spirit into a slave-owner or a murderer or an even worse variety of monster. You, the reader, are supposed to be appalled by the word "nigger." You are supposed to be appalled by American culture. You are supposed to be appalled by the vicious, conventional evils of humankind. You are supposed to be appalled by yourself.

You ought to crawl out of that book, heavy-hearted, burdened with all of Twain’s fatal sorrow and endless anger, and with some of your own to boot — and if you can’t or you don’t, then you might as well censor not just "nigger," but every other word in the English language. None of them will ever do you any good, anyway.

Cf.

So, I saw this on somebody’s otherwise totally inoffensive tumblr (a feat, btw):



Some thoughts:
1. If I am going to plagiarize my sense of self, wholecloth, from a work of written fiction, I am probably going to want to get out of the Young Adult section first.
2. Nobody who is smart would marry Ron Weasley. Seriously. He is a million times worse than Edward Cullen, who is at least considered to be superficially physically attractive by many people. Pretty is a talent!

I have updates coming! I know. So exciting!!

So, Glee was actually really good tonight, probably just because I said it sucked — although I think it should probably change its name to We Love You, Kurt, Because You Are So Very Adorable and Also Good at Acting. So, it is exactly like Buffy: The Crap Years: every fourth episode is great enough that you forget how bad the other three were, I adore exactly one character and I want to split-kick everybody else in the face, and imaginary gayness is still far more entertaining than imaginary straightness. Dude, I’d better go refill my Accutane prescription! Don’t wanna run out of that stuff :[

Here’s the always-awesome BTB on Glee’s use of the word "tranny." Glee is possibly the only show on television that enrages both fundamentalist Christians and vagina-necklace feminists in equal and constant measure, which is actually kind of comical, sadly enough; I don’t find it transgressive (usually), because it is almost impossible for me to be "offended" by anything that could be even generically classified as art. Also, I am pretty chill with the idea that all Americans — black Americans, gay Americans, Asian-Americans, whatever other kinds of Americans may be hiding out there who have yet to receive their convenient, easy-to-apply identity-politics labels in the mail — labor under stereotypes which can be fruitfully engaged and mocked in public, without hurting anybody. So if, say, Asian-Americans find themselves battling the deeply insulting notion that they all look alike and are indistinguishable from one another (which is just weird, anyway), and then someone on a popular teevee show (Glee, remember) refers to an Asian-American character as the "Other Asian," that doesn’t twist my knickers into an anchor knot at all. Not because I am a hipster racist! (I promise!) But because, you know, at least somebody finally noticed. I can understand why other people might be sort of put-off by it, though. This is America! A lot of brave men died in the cold at Valley Forge so that you could be offended by anything you like. But, I cannot understand why these already-angry people continue to get so het up about every possible 'controversial’ topic that ever appears on Glee, nor do I understand why they keep watching it if it’s so terribly, terribly abusive to their fragile psyches. Turn Glee off and find something else to do with your time, kids! It’s fun and easy. I turn the teevee off five or six times a day. Just, please don’t get all boycott-happy on me and start accusing me of being a bad feminist because I won’t stop watching Glee myself. That’s some Rush Limbaugh shit right there, is what that is. It’s only a teevee show! Just like Sarah Palin.

Anyway, my renaissance of Glee love is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about this:



Or, I will want to talk about it (I’m sure) after I’ve read it. I am a little worried about it, quite frankly; Dream looks very muscular and competent and butch in this comic, as though he's the one who goes around opening all of the other Endless's pickle jars. Also, he is sporting a relatively restrained hairstyle, and he is wearing a very restrained (and incredibly un-Japanese) outfit. With a color on it! That is a little unfortunate for him, I think. Dream is engaged in a hot, highly-constested race for Biggest Hater of Colors on My Clothes with his bff/soulmate Angelina Jolie, and I would hate to see him lose just because of this one story. You know how Angelina gloats.

But, what I really wanted to talk about was this thing I found on Demonoid while I was futilely Googling Sandman comics as I waited for my copy of Dream Hunters to be shipped to me. It is called The Song of Orpheus, and boy, does it ever suck.

( Let me explain why, because I can tell by that look in your eyes that you care. )

Yes, yes, of course I will find this thing in the comics store and buy it. I am not like that. You know what I am like! I learned Japanese so that I could stop subjecting my precious, precious eyeballs to the illegitimate whore-bath that is scanlations. I will totally give Neil Gaiman his richly-deserved Orpheus money, because Gaiman is still kind of hot, and who wants to make hot people sad? I am a total masochist who likes it when Daddy hits me.

I am always having really bright ideas for blog posts while I’m sitting around in the backs of cabs staring out the window or painstakingly explaining to one of my students, yet again, what a preposition is and why we do not end sentences with them when we are writing research papers (MIDTERMS!!), and then I log into DreamWidth and my brain goes: RIBBIT.

Currently I am entertaining the dramz, which I will describe in loving detail once I’ve dealt with them, but I did learn a valuable lesson: Do not ever attempt to edit a freshly-made translation while you are having a panic attack. It does not end well for anybody (especially the commas).

Also I am translating five or eight different comics for The Heart Goes Nine, which I am hoping to have online sometime in the Christmas/New Year’s tunnel. I know I said exactly the same thing last Christmas, but luckily for me I am a prize-winning procrastinator: Last Christmas, I did not have any idea what the fuck I was doing. My concept of "の" as a nominalizer did not exist, for example. I did not know that から, when it shows up after a て-form verb, means "after," etc. (If you don’t give a shit about Japanese, you should know that these things are, like, super-elementary stuff a tiny Japanese child would be embarrassed to hear from a kindergarten teacher.)

But, I am much better now! Now, I am only surprised by things like the fact that "ってゆうか," which is one of Japan’s many exciting quotacular postpositions, can be shortened to "つーか," especially if you have animal ears.

I still want to babble about Sherlock, which I am going to watch for possibly the fifth time this weekend on PBS, and I also have a colossal post about the newer wave of "licensed" manga — but right now: RIGHT NOW YOU GET LINKS!

» This guy is going to be Dirk Gently! Which is a little odd, given that Dirk Gently is supposed to be a short, rotund, ethnically Scandinavian man, and also Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is utterly unfilmable, but don’t let that distract you from the fact that somebody is making a Dirk Gently movie!

» I was poking around Edroso’s archives last night because I was bored/flipping out, and I found this thing and loled for ten minutes.

» Benedict Cumberbatch said some words and then somebody wrote them down. This doesn’t happen enough.

» Google keeps taking The Song of Lunch off YouTube because, like the new Final Fantasy trailer, it is highly sought after by copyright-disregarding, record industry-bankrupting, adolescent digital pirates? Really? That’s an interesting idea, Google. I think you may have missed a memo somewhere. Anyway, here’s the trailer. NOTE: I downloaded The Song of Lunch off TPB, and it was horrible. Really horrible. Boring. Stupid. It wasn’t even a real poem, anyway; it didn’t rhyme and there were no shipwrecks or anything. Everyone is all, nobody has filmed a poem on teevee for like a million years! And I’m like, dude, there’s a reason for that. (And you know I would watch Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman stir spaghetti sauce for an hour with stars in my eyes, so it can’t be my fault.)

» We are T-minus 33 days until the deployment of something Susanna Clarke wrote into our mailboxes. Yes, it is an essay about Jane Austen novels, but desperation has lowered our standards considerably.

I also have a new, readable layout, which I got from here and did not edit like at all.

Next week, then?