Definitions

It looks like it's sort of official with K and me...though quite what official in this context means is anyone's guess. I'd stop short of calling her my girlfriend just yet...though I can't really go around introducing her as "hello, this is the-girl-I'm-dating". Seems a little gauche, I think.

The venue for Saturday night was a bar called Kanvas down in Chelsea, a rather trendy part of New York, or so I am led to believe. I have no real idea, unfortunately, as I rarely make it outside of Morningside Heights when I do go drinking. It was nice enough, though as one might expect on a Saturday evening very crowded. I met some of Juliet's friends, most of whom were over from England, including a guy who flew Lynx helicopters for the British Army. Being as how he's currently serving in Northern Ireland, he was not particularly impressed by the New Yorkers' predilection for the drink known sensitively enough as the Irish Carbomb.

It was an OK night, I suppose - I didn't really know that many people, and I've found recently that I have very little to talk about with Business School people, even fellow Brits. I wonder how much of that is just me and how much of that is the MBA crowd. Have I, I wonder, become desocialised, and only able to talk to people who have lived in Japan?

The weather here is completely schizophrenic right now; it was gorgeous at lunchtime, like 18 degrees, and now it's freezing again.

Theory and practice

So, had lunch at Cafe Swish with K on Thursday. It was very pleasant...a relaxed chat and a meal, a short walk in Riverside Park afterwards to aid digestion, and so forth. Short it was, because it's bloody cold right now; the wind from off the Hudson is not one you want to stand around in for very long. Party tomorrow night downtown, to which we're both going, as I think I've mentioned.

Been reading Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (insert gag as appropriate) as part of the theory course and have been pleasantly surprised; it's almost approaching readable, and certainly provides some interesting and thought-provoking material.

One stray thought...there are a lot of people talking to themselves on the streets of New York. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what with the iPods and hands-free mobile sets, plus all the wannabe rappers busting out their lyrics as they walk or work their day job at the 7-11, it's not at all easy to work out who's up with the latest fashions and who's simply deranged.

Well Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, better known as the Met, rocks. Not only do I get in free, it's also a wonderfully interesting museum with a mind-boggling collection just about everything. Seriously, you could spend several days going around the Met and never see it all. The highlight for me was the Temple of Dundur, which, despite sounding like something from Lord of the Rings, is a completely authentic Egyptian temple (literally - they shipped it across stone by stone from the Aswan valley, and it still has the graffiti of Napoleon's soldiers on it), in a stunning setting inside the Met. I forgot to take my camera though, dimwit that I am.

So I went there with my date, who for the time being shall remain nameless. It was a beautiful day, feeling much more like spring than winter, so we walked across the park, spent the afternoon strolling around the Met and discussing the various merits of the stuff on display, went for a coffee afterwards, had a cheeky snog, and went our separate ways. I'm having lunch with her on Thurs and she and I are both attending a party thrown by a mutual friend on Saturday, so...yeah. Things are looking alright, right now.

On Sunday, I popped downtown to meet Laura Mann, who was in town visiting. Another member of the Shiogama clan, as was, who loved Japan so much she went back there even after JET. I'm not sure quite if I should call her an old friend - she'll probably object to the "old" part - but nonetheless it was great to see her and act as tour guide; we took a walk up Broadway to Central Park, before I left her and her friends to do their own thing, as I had to head back to the library unfortunately.

Classes are keeping me busy, but not quite as insanely so as last semester. A bit more reasonable, this time round, thank God.

Beyond parody?

While I think of it, I'd like to draw your attention to something that I find it useful to dip into now and again when confronted by particularly egregious lit theory gibberish. It's the story of Alan Sokal, who managed to get a completely fraudulent paper published in the journal Social Text. Sokal thought that he could get a piece of complete nonsense published if it sounded good and if it flattered the editor's ideological preconceptions. In the piece, he argued among other things that the uncertainty in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (a construct in quantum physics) is a result of the unease felt by former colonial powers after they lost their colonies, and that gravity is essentially a racist Western invention. None of this transparent nonsense stopped it from being published, much to everyone's amusement. As Sokal himself later remarked:

"In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes] ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.'' Not our theoriesof physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)"

Well, if you're interested (which most of you won't be) you can read more here.

Not so much fun

A quick post-library pint last night at West End, the bar across the street from Columbia, turned into a bit of an unintentional session. I didn't know that West End had a dance floor from 11 p.m. or so onwards, but naturally I went and shook my booty for a bit, which was quite fun. I left around 1 a.m., though I hear that various others were still going at 5 a.m., which takes some stamina. I had been intending to go to the gym this morning, but other matters demanded my attention.

We had another episode with the guy in the room next to me this morning at about 6:45 a.m., unfortunately, waking me and several other people on the floor. Not being able to get hold of the building superintendent, I went off to talk to the University Housing authority up on 119th. They seemed to be aware of the situation but not that there'd been another occurrence after the guy in question had been told to knock it off on Sunday. After a short talk, during which I pointed out that he was either unwilling, or more worryingly unable to control himself, they said they'd put the wheels in motion to get the guy kicked out.

I feel sorry for the man in question, I really do - as I mentioned, he's not a happy camper, but the situation can't be allowed to drift. He may be having a rough time of it, but that doesn't give him carte blanche to act like an asshole himself. After this morning, I have to question his stability, and while I personally just find the noise annoying and slightly unsettling, the girls on the floor are understandably really quite scared by him and almost afraid to leave their rooms. It's had the effect of creating an atmosphere of general unease and tension on the floor as a whole, which is hardly conducive to a relaxed living environment. Better for everyone that he leaves and gets some psychiatric help.

Didn't give me any pleasure, but needed to be done. Nobody else seemed willing to do it, so...

In other news, it's unseasonably warm in NYC right now, 16℃ today, which is definitely not the January weather I was told to expect. I hope it stays nice for my walk across Central Park to the Met tomorrow...I'll keep you posted.

May you live in interesting times...

...or so runs an alleged Chinese curse. If curse it is, then I am indeed maladicted. It has been an interesting week or so, in the various possibilities of the word...

Anyway, Friday night, went out for a few drinks at a rather unneccessarily expensive bar down on 78th, a lounge called Evelyn or something. Had a couple of G&T's and a shot of tequila, the latter of which, let the record show, I did note beforehand as a bad idea...not half as bad for me as for my compadre Tim Yang, who wound up having to be put to bed after little more of the same. A rare medical condition called tequilaphobia, they say.

Sunday...well, they - or rather, I - do say that there's always something going on in New York, and this time there was rather too much of something. The guy who lives next to me in my dorm had what seems to have been a mental health episode. He was gibbering and crying loudly in his room and slamming his door. Unfortunately it wasn't the first time this has happened, and not entirely sure what to do, I ended up calling campus security. We managed to get him to calm down, then sat him down for a while and impressed upon him that this sort of behaviour ain't acceptable. Poor fella - he's not a happy guy, and while it's not for me to talk about his personal problems in my blog, let's just say I and the building superintendent heard all about them in detail. Fingers crossed not just for him, but for the general peace of the block. I wasn't the only one weirded out, it was most of my floor. Seems to have been quiet since then.

So on a different note, term started today, and I had a seminar this afternoon with the semi-legendary Donald Keene, author of myriad books on all aspects of Japanese lit. This was more or less why I came to Columbia (aside from the fact it was the only place that'd have me), and it's a real honour to be able to study with him. He's in remarkably good shape for 83, still mentally very alert, with a fine sense of humour and obviously an in-depth command of his stuff - he was able to talk about Basho from memory with no notes for nearly 90 minutes. I look forward to this seminar, mainly because it doesn't have a term paper or exam attached...

Finishing off the last dregs of the reading list Prof. Suzuki gave me for the winter, I've been wading through Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. I find most lit. theory stuff to be very heavy going and sometimes incomprehensible. I'm not alone - there is a general tendency in British academia to be very suspicious of theory, perhaps not coincidentally because much of it is produced by the French. Still, I can't help but feel that there's an element of intellectual masturbation about stuff like the following:

"Is Nietzsche's desire (as Derrida sees it) to place the castrating idea within history akin to Freud's rewriting of the primal "scene" into the child's primal "fantasy"? Is the Nietzschean text, in suggesting that in order to have (possess) the truth (woman) the philosopher must be the truth (woman), undoing Freud's incipient phallocentrism, which provides quite a different alternative: if the son (man) disavows sexual difference, he seeks to be the phallus for the mother (woman) and becomes "the lost object"..."

I know it's decontextualised, but I defy you to tell me what the hell that's about.

Oh, and I have a date on Saturday...

Well, so...

..yeah. It's been a busy week or so since I got back, been dividing my time between studying and working in the library. For the first couple of days I wound up cleaning the shelves and making sure the books were lined up correctly...partly because of a Japanese tradition of New Year cleaning, and partly, I suspect, because Yukino the librarian doesn't know what to do with me now that I'm there on increased hours. And in case la inmigra is reading this, I'm still legal...just about.

The rest of the time I have devoted to getting that damn Ogai paper finished, and thankfully it seems to be near completion, which means that I might even have that rarest of things, a free weekend. Term starts on Tuesday, and I will be taking the usual round of classes - things totally useless in the real world, like Japanese poetry. The seminar is on Basho and is taught by Donald Keene, a hugely respected figure in the world of J-studies, so I suppose I'm very lucky to get to study with him.

I've been meeting a few people here and there as well; Rich Shelley, of Shiroishi fame, popped in on his way to a friend's wedding, and we met up for a beer (literally - it was late when he got in touch). Bizarrely enough I also ran into Steve O' Connor, a guy I knew at Wadham who has spent the last five years here at Columbia. We used to play on the same football team in college, and I never knew. He sort of remembered me, my surname at least.

So, here we go. Reasonably optimistic about the next six months. I'll have a Master's soon enough (a proper one, as opposed to the fake Oxford one), and by March will even know where I'm headed next. I'm going places.

Back in the U.S.S.A....

...I don't know how lucky I am. Back I am, after ten days or so in the UK. Much as I expected, it was damp and overcast most of the time, although not actually all that cold - it's about five degrees warmer than New York, although it's blue skies and dry right here now.

It was good to be home, although increasingly I find that short stays are enough to remind me of both the good things about Britain, and also why I left in the first place. I've spent about two and a half months out of the last three years there, so perhaps it's not surprising I'm a little out of touch. There's good stuff - the telly, Cambridge in the morning mists, London, all my friends - and bad stuff, like the fact that everything is absurdly overpriced, the trains don't work, and the weather is horrible. Much like any country, I suppose...one has to take the rough with the smooth.

I spent most of the time at home, having Christmas Eve at Mum's place, Christmas Day at my Dad's place and going up to Birmingham (or the general area - Kidderminster, actually, for those of you that know) on Boxing Day to see my aunt and uncle, as well as my grandma - thought I'd better pay my respects, since I didn't go to the funeral. Nothing particularly exciting over the duration - unlike the last couple of Christmases, I'm not on a salary to splurge, so I spent most of my time sitting at home and eating or watching TV. Precisely what was needed.

But I'm back now, and more of the same beckons - I have a Master's thesis to do this semester, as well as a whole lot of worrying to do about whether I'm going to be able to stay at Columbia. I'll be upping my hours at the Law Library before term starts to earn some extra cash, and trying to get a couple of annoying uncompleted assigments from last term finished before this one starts. Not taking quite as heavy a courseload as before, so if all goes well I won't be quite so occupied 24-7 with J-stuff. And the obligatory New Year's resolution? Along with (apparently), half of New York, it's to lose some weight...