Filed under: Academic stumbling blocks | Tags: Academic stumbling blocks, conventions/conferences
Presenting was… hectic. We had some technical difficulties, though we were able to wrap them up during my presentation. Still, I think it went well. Some tips for people prepping their first presentations:
*Read your presentation out loud to yourself repeatedly. Time it. One of the big problems that other presenters had was simply going over time. A little more careful prep work would have totally removed that worry. Because of our technical issue, I was really worried about time, too, but I got a compliment on my calm demeanor in the face of techie adversity and I wasn’t noticeably late, so it’s all good.
*Take a watch up to the podium with you. I meant to, was startled by tech issue, forgot and regretted it.
*Relax.
*Make eye contact as much as possible.
*When you practice your presentation, figure out just what works, not just for you, but for that presentation. Be rigorously, brutally honest. For example, I usually create an outline, make a Powerpoint that follows the draft and then practice out loud a few times. This time, however, my presentation was full of theory, my responses to those theories, others’ responses to those theories, my responses to the responses… NOT the kind of thing that one can reliably get right each and every time off the cuff. So I read from a written paper. A friend presented an interesting topic without a written outline and ended up giving a bit too much weight to a minor point at the end by accident – which she then got some pointed questions about. She told me later that she wished she had written something down. On the other hand, other presentations less based in critical theory were successfully delivered informally, and at least one presenter that I went to see read a paper in such a quiet, accented, mumbly voice that I barely caught anything. It varies.
*Use criticism/questions constructively. I mean that in the sense of “not destructively. If people ask you a critical question that you have trouble answering, all it means is that they have thought of an angle or weakness you didn’t. An angle you can now follow in your research, a weakness you can correct before you publish. And really, presenting a paper with a weakness is nothing. Presented papers are often “in progress”, meaning at varying states of research. I’ve always assumed that there ought to be a weakness in a presented paper.
*When answering questions, answer quickly. If the answer is, by the nature of the question, extensive, offer to go over it in detail later. You’ll be presenting with other people, and it’s generally polite for everyone to get at least one question. Don’t take up all the Q&A time.
So, how did it go for me? I got a few compliments (yay!), a pair of interesting questions (yay!) and a suggestion for how to expand my paper (should I use it for my dissertation) with the concomitant suggestion that if I did expand it, a certain journal might be interested in publishing it (double yay!). All in all, a successful hour and a half.
Aside from the actual presentation, I was able to go to a great party (that I’m not, in retrospect, sure I was actually invited to), hang out with friends I haven’t seen in awhile and visit Grad School town, which was all sorts of fun.
M-, a friend of mine, has made a fun computer game that mildly parodies the Princess Maker series. If you haven’t been introduced to Princess Maker, the basic idea of each of the installments is that you have been gifted with a seven-ish year-old child (by a goddess) and have to raise her. When she gets to her teens, you find out how she turns out. Results include things like queen of hell, princess of the kingdom, magician and nothing much.
M-’s version was originally made as a present for his girlfriend (a Princess Maker fan) and is called Princess Faker. There’s a bit of gentle humor as far as the original is concerned – for example, the original lets you feed your daughter pills that enhance her bust, which gets taken to rather comic extremes in the parody. M- is a budding game designer, and he’s come up with a fun way to pass the hours.
Without further ado, here it is.
And yes, I know I’m late on a post about my presentation. There’s so much to mull over, and I’m suddenly busy again. What can I say, it never ends.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: conventions/conferences, influence, work
A lot of things have been happening recently. I started a new job awhile back, which is going well. I’m back in the non-profit world, working on educational events again. I get to use my Japanese a bit (and have learned just how pathetic my Japanese really is). Last week, however, was the tops. We were involved in a trio of events that all seemed to go well. The most rewarding for me, personally, was a three-day conference that brought together experts from across the world to discuss a Troubled Nation. In those three days, I had all sorts of fun, informative experiences – including witnessing a prominent television anchor prove that he can, indeed, tell a story and hearing a respected previous presidential candidate expound on TN with a depth of insight I had not realized he possessed. Though the majority of the conference focused on bringing together foreign thinkers who had not had a proper opportunity to discuss the issues before, interactions with prominent officials in the government and the IMF led me to believe that the impact of the event may extend far further than we had intended.
That’s all that I can write at the moment, but I will follow up in a few days with a discussion of my first conference paper presentation. (Also last week!) I will say this, though: When I first began work after college I was young, green. I may have felt like I knew what I was doing, but I was also feeling insecure about making even the slightest mistake. A small mistake or misunderstanding felt like a failure. In a way, going off to grad school has helped my non-academic career very unexpectedly. I now feel secure in both my abilities and my failures. If I make a mistake now, I do not feel as though I am guilty of some crime; I simply move on. Get the work done. It’s a healthier attitude, and it keeps me more engaged with my work.
“She sets them up only to knock them down, which many people have done before her, but it’s still always fun to give them a kick.”
– L-, from a course on Japanese literary theory
Hello all. Just a quick note about the Socialvibe widget off to the left of your screen. If you click on it, they’ll ask you a quick question about whatever they’re selling, and in return for your answer – no identifying information is requested – they donate some money to a pancreatic cancer research group. I’ve added it ’cause my grandmother died recently of pancreatic cancer and I wanted to help a bit. So if you’ve got a moment, please do try it once. Thank you!
Once one learns about Said’s concept of Orientalism, one starts to see it in all sorts of writings about Japan. Orientalism is the idea that the East (and it is “the East” to Orientalists, not “Japan” or “Egypt” or even “Asian nations”) is an unknowable, ineffable place, completely mysterious to all outsiders (which, of course, tend to be white men). That definition – though largely correct – makes Orientalism seem like a simple, unimportant thing. For example, if a person were to learn Japanese and a bit about the history and culture, then one might argue that that person believed that “the East” was knowable. The devil is in the details.
Recently I have been reading Alan Booth’s Looking for the Lost. I like travellers’ tales, and since it is from Kodansha (which tends to produce very well-written works) I picked it up one day at an Asian furniture/fabrics/et cetera store. The book was published after Booth’s death, so presumably there are things that he would change if he had a chance. Consequently I dislike judging him entirely based on this book. Yet something has bothered me about it from the start, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. For some reason I kept thinking back to a class that I took on Buddhist poetry last fall; one day we watched an old video about the Inland Sea area of Japan which, for an educational video, talked an awful lot about sex. The line that sparked the discussion basically said that all tourists’ most interesting thing to do was have sex with the natives. The class got side-tracked about Donald Keene (the narrator of the video), whose works apparently often discuss sex with Japanese women. (Our poor professor, who had never noticed the sex bits before, seemed rather bemused.)
I eventually realised that both the Inland Sea movie and Looking for the Lost remind me of the Orientalist stereotype of the subservient Asian woman who stands ready to meet the Western man’s every desire, sexual or otherwise. It is much less blatant in Looking for the Lost, but a sentence at the beginning of the fifth chapter finally clued me in:
All along the road I heard the scuffling of animals, but it was always the hooded women of the villages foraging for bamboo shoots and bracken.
The women here aren’t even human, and they could have been. Booth could as easily have said that he thought he heard the scuffling of animals, but it was always women instead. Now, you could easily say that he’s just trying some fancy writing there, but throughout the book he mixes animals, inanimate objects and women together. He writes of waves on a beach resembling women’s breasts, for example. Those would have to be very odd waves. Additionally, he continually inserts references to sex, such as when he mentions hostesses at bars tugging men’s penises under the tables. Asides like that don’t add to his writing, they merely serve to titillate. And they sound like a joke – at least, one assumes that the hostesses do not actually yank their customers’ private bits; that sounds more like extortion than pleasure to me. To some extent, he is just an earthy writer. After all, he also discusses relieving himself outside after drinking too much beer. But a larger part of it is him regarding the idea of the Japanese woman sexually. When he meets actual Japanese women they are always old, and he always makes fun of them in some way. There is the innkeeper with an otherwise empty inn whom he mocks for only being willing to host him if he speaks Japanese, or the passel of women at an inn who run around like busy little bees getting him settled in – until the sumo match featuring their hometown hero comes on, at which point they disappear. In the latter story, there are also men watching the wrestler, but Booth’s mockery is mostly reserved for the women. I can’t help wondering if it is because they are not the sexy, subservient, Orientalist women he wants but real, hardworking, older women who are willing to ignore their smelly, sexist, foreign customers in favor of their own interests.
I’m graduating with a Master’s this summer, but I have no idea what will come next. Oh, I know where I will be staying (parents) and what I will be doing (looking for work), but there is no clear path from here to a Ph.D. program. If I was completely fluent in Japanese then I could try to get a job as a researcher or a Japanese archivist, either of which would add to my appeal as a potential grad student. But my Japanese isn’t good enough for that.
The obvious thing to do seems to be to go to Japan to learn Japanese, right? There are a few problems with that. JET, the most common way that grad students have gone to Japan, has weird timing for U.S. applicants. If I apply (and I most likely will), I will still need a job to keep me occupied for several months beforehand. Aside from JET, I could just go as a regular assistant English teacher. But the programs that I have looked at seem to have hilariously low pay. To be fair, they tend to throw in free/reduced housing, some form of health insurance and whatever taxes are applicable. Even considering that, I’m looking at very low salaries – most likely too low to live on. The assumption seems to be that one will take some unofficial tutoring jobs on the side, but I’m leery of accepting a job where I will be financially required to take on another job, which may or may not exist. And a second job would take away time that I might spend studying Japanese.
So, Japan is a last resort. What is there in America? Moreover, what is there in the eastern half of America? There are a fair number of opportunities in politics and economics, but I do culture, and those jobs have nothing to do with teaching. I could try to get a job as an English or Japanese teacher, but apparently an advanced degree with a strong focus on Japanese literature in translation does not qualify one to teach high school students basic literature according to the No Child Left Behind Act. There aren’t any open Japanese teaching positions that I could apply for, and even if there were I would be limited to those aimed at lower-level courses because of my abilities. (I’m not bad at Japanese; I’m actually quite good at it. Just not fluent.)
In theory I could try for a more culture-focused job on the West Coast, but then I would be in the position of possibly moving across the nation for a short period of time, not being near my family or friends, and having limited options for interviewing for the job in the first place.
All of which boils down to, finding a job is hard work. No news there. I just thought that by this point in my life I would have a better handle on my career.
Well, this post is in reaction to something that I thought I saw on Beyond the Multiplex, but when I went back to find a link for the original post I couldn’t find it. So, my thoughts will now become a slightly odd stand-alone post. Sorry if it gets confusing.
The posting that prompted this asked something to the effect of “Why is G.I. Joe, a war movie, doing so well (despite being rather bad), when other war movies have done so poorly recently?”
I don’t think that this person was quite right in lumping G.I. Joe with movies like The Hurt Locker. First off, The Hurt Locker was in a limited release, while G.I. Joe was in theatres everywhere. I wanted to see The Hurt Locker, but couldn’t find it near me. G.I. Joe, on the other hand, was a five-minute walk from my apartment. If you get a movie in more theatres, more people will see it.
However, the main issue is nationalism. Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are complicated, confused because the situation on the ground is complicated and confused. G.I. Joe has no such trouble. It’s bad guys are clearly defined, and trying, as ever, for world domination. And America is clearly on the side of the good. Yes, the new G.I. Joes are multi-national and based in a desert somewhere in Africa, but the main characters amongst them are clearly American, and American audiences remember that the toys inspiring the show are good old General Issue Joes, American soldiers. In other words, it’s a feel-good movie.
It’s not a well-made feel good movie, though, and I think that I’m going to have to blame the screenplay for that. I don’t tend to notice screenplays much, but I sure did this time. The writers seemed to have no idea whatsoever what Scarlett was supposed to be like, with the result of hitting a ton of sexist stereotypes. She delivered a weird line early on about how she didn’t believe in feelings (going for an emotion-less drone?), then later seems to play it off as though she was just joking the first time (but she seemed quite serious… ). She’s the brilliant hottie who somehow falls for a hapless, clumsy – but TALENTED – guy who falls for her at first sight and promptly sets about seducing her in the most irritating way possible. And of course he manages, because the whole Scarlett-Ripcord subplot is merely a pale shadow of previous good-natured but clumsy guy chases and woos bright, pretty girl who first disses him stories.
The Baroness’ plot line was similarly confusing, though not to the same degree. For a fair portion of the movie I sat around wondering if her story could get any more sexist – I mean, her brother dies, and her response is to change from a regular girl next door to a tight-leather wearing, ass-kicking thief of experimental and highly technical weapons of mass destruction? When they tied it up at the end by saying that she was mind-controlled, my thoughts ran something along the lines of “Oh. OF COURSE. That’s the only way a person would overreact so much and change so completely. Someone has finally taken this kind of sexist plot line and actually made it make sense!” Sadly, I kept on thinking about it. I have a feeling that the screenwriters weren’t thinking at all about how weird that complete a change in someone’s personality was. For example, the Baroness is supposed, pre-mind control, to have been your sort of standard girl next door. Granted, we don’t see much of her, but what we do see is sweet and caring as apple pie. Just after Duke undoes the mind control you would expect to see some of that sweet, caring nature back, or perhaps some traumatized scenes where she’s trying to process everything she’s done over the past few years. Instead, she votes to go after the bad guy and mans the weapons herself. In another example of confusing shifts, when she gets locked up at the end of the movie (while doctors remove the rest of the mind-control nanomites), she starts acting as though it’s her just punishment for the things that she was supposed to have been forced to do. Perhaps this is to show her sweetness from way back when, but it just feels odd considering that she switched sides the first chance she got and blasted away at her previous allies with gusto.
A confusing movie, but it was a nice way to while away a few hours, particularly since I am (unhappily) avoiding District 9 over their male-only contest fiasco.
Edit: I forgot to mention it, but I was surprised to see solely previews for kids’ movies before G.I. Joe began. I guess the intended audience for this movie was a lot younger than I had anticipated. Also younger than the previews led me to believe, which may have something to do with why its box office take sank so much between weeks one and two. If you advertise for young adults, but deliver a kids’ movie and don’t screen for the critics who would inform the potential viewers that they might be interested, you probably won’t get regular viewers. Just a thought.
A quick one from a history course.
A student said that Andrew Gordon had described prewar Japan as “vibrant” and our professor thought that Gordon would never use such a positive term for that period. The discussion was tabled because the professor didn’t want anyone to have to search through several hundred pages of text for a single word. However, a few brief moments later…
“Andrew Gordon: vibrant! Page 52.” – N-
“Get out of here! Did you use GoogleBooks?” – Prof. D-
“I certainly did.” – N- smugly replied.
Last time I discussed trends in the industry, this time I want to talk about trendy things. In other words, the last post was all state of the anime and manga companies-ish, while this time I want to talk about what was popular/in style at Otakon this year. There were really only a few things with super-popularity this year, and at least two of them are tied together.
1. Alice in Wonderland
Anything and everything Alice-y. For full disclosure 
, I myself bought a black hoodie with an Alice-style print down the side. It looks very cool. It being the middle of summer, my new hoodie shall now hide in my closet for several months.
Anyway, the Alice influence was visible everywhere. Some things weren’t obviously Alice-inspired in and of themselves, but when seen with the vast array of lace-pinafore dresses, outfits splashed with images of the card suits (hearts, spades, et cetera), hoodies with rabbit ears attached and so on, their influence became very clear. And I adore it. Everything looked so cute, and I am so unemployed… Seriously though, a lot of the Alice-inspired clothing could be worn in public (i.e. at places where non-otaku reside) and still seem stylish. Aside from clothing, I was able to find Sakura Kinoshita’s manga version of Alice in Wonderland, and various and sundry similar Alice paraphenalia. This is in part related to
2. Kuroshitsuji
Kuroshitsuji is crazy popular right now. The manga begins its English serialization in August in Yen Plus, but many (myself included) have already seen the anime. A second series was already greenlit, which is interesting in light of the first series’ ending.
Kuroshitsuji follows Ciel Phantomhive, a very young English nobleman who trades his soul to a demon named Sebastian Michaelis for revenge. The clothing designs are very frilly – similar to how Alice is conceived by artists now. (Incidentally, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are making a new Alice movie. Yet more of the trend, and by two gentlemen that I very much respect.) Additionally, some of the characters in Kuroshitsuji seem similar to those in Alice, though not precisely the same. There is a Madame Red to the Red Queen; a character who dresses all in white like the White Rabbit (or, if you prefer, like the White Queen and King – this character cross-dresses); a young girl and the main character (who cross-dresses on occasion) who compare to Alice and her sister; there is also a character who trades information (worded confusingly) for funny jokes. The similarity is slim, but the emphasis on mysteriously-worded information and an eerie smile sounds like the Cheshire Cat.
Those two were the big ones, but I noticed that Code Geass‘ popularity is holding up well. Also a series called K-On seems mildly popular. Anyone else noticed anything in particular?
Edit: Incidentally, Pandora Hearts is another anime with a similar style.
