a creature feminine

Basel

So it's been almost a month since my last post - my life has been a bit crazy, traversing three continents in that time period. I returned to Philly from my stint in Tokyo on the 22 September, gave a talk on Kawahara Izumi at the Word and Image (IAWIS) conference at Penn on the 27th only to hear Art Spiegelman bash all Japanese manga wholesale as "this manga thing" that very evening. If only he knew the variety and quality of some of the manga in Japan - he is misled by the American otaku market that seems only to translate sci-fi mecha porn. Nihon no manga gyoukai mo, mouchotto manga o toushite nihon ga kokusai teki ni dou mirareteruka kangai naosu beki dato omou. The only person who seems to get it is Murakami Takashi, who unfortunately exploits the market dynamics for his own cynical gain, not for any deeply socially-conscious aesthetic.

Frantic unpacking, frantic meeting with advisors and grad chair re: going on the job market this year, a brief stay in Philly punctuated happily by fun outings with good friends (thanks to Lok, I got to see "Three Times," an amazing new film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien at the NY Film Festival, plus I got to hang out with the one and only Tung Hui-Hu who was in town from Berkeley for the aforementioned conference), frantic re-packing and flying off to Basel via Detroit and Amsterdam (thanks to Northwest Airlines, a company immensely talented in finding the most byzantine route to get to your final destination). So now I am in this charmingly surreal Swiss town about an hour outside Zurich, living on the top floor of a 15th century monastery store house which also once served as the home of Herman Hesse (who eventually moved out when he discovered he couldn't write here - hope that doesn't happen to me, since I have two articles to churn out very quickly, plus continuing work on the Rengetsu chapter of my dissertation). Some unnamed art guerilla tagger went around and painted Warhol-Velvet Underground banana labels on the facades of cool galleries in town, so all one has to do is make like a conceptual pop chimpanzee and follow the trail of one's superstructural appetites. It was an unseasonably balmy day for October, so I took a little stroll down to the Rhine river and watched the Sunday afternoon promenaders.

posted by sayumi @ 1:33 PM