Category: Links

Just a few more links

Ok, this procrastination has to stop. A few more links:

  • Who’s the master? – Simon at Kikuchiyo talks about his PhD cumulative exams. Two years from now, if I survive, I’ll have to undergo a similar process.
  • Timothy Burke has an strongly worded posting on the torture issue and the dangers of abstraction. Together with John Quiggin in this posting at Crooked Timber (as always with Crooked Timber, read the lively exchange of comments attached to the posting), I think we are starting to see the blogosphere get interested in the broader debate over torture in intelligence gathering that I think we all need to think about.
  • At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil
  • Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting posting about an article in Korean Studies on the Aso Coal Strike. Far Outlers is a great blog in that there is a lot of mention of good academic articles or tidbits on the web on a range of interesting issues. The blog is a good example of how this medium is supposed to work not only for commentary or web links, but to share good sources of interesting information that may exist offline as well.
  • Antti Leppänen has an interesting posting on Paeksu, a Korean term for those not engaged in productive work or study.

Claire: Stress types

Claire has a fun posting on different kinds of people as they approach deadlines. She included my own type:

The Avoider: Suddenly becomes very sociable and good at running errands when he/she should be working.

Hmm, I need to get a conference paper out by tomorrow, perhaps that explains all the short postings I’m making to this blog this morning.

Kerim: 撒嬌

Kerim has unicode up and running at his Keywords site. He has a great posting on sajiao (撒嬌). I wish I knew that word earlier. He quotes its definition:

To deliberately act like a spoiled child in front of someone because of the awareness of the other person’s affection.

Time Travel Is Easy Postings

I have added a few articles to Claire’s history blog Time travel is easy: Interdisciplinary history for generation next.

Looking back at these articles, I guess they make me seem like I’m a bit of a grouchy anti-mainstream activist historian. I hereby blame Jai Kasturi, Professor Carol Gluck, my sixth grade teacher Don Andrews, and most of all, my mom.

Incidentally, Claire is looking for more people interested in posting on history related topics for younger readers.

Kikuchiyo on Why Fetuses Go to Hell

In his posting on the Jizo Bodhisattva statues, Aaron at Kikuchiyo explains why fetuses go to hell, and thus answers the big question that many of us have been asking recently, “Why should the hostages feel guilty for being kidnapped in Iraq?” Read more about their recent trials in the New York Times article about their return.
Update: A Japanese diet member, 柏村武昭, has now referred to the kidnapped Japanese hostages as “anti-Japanese elements” for their previously voiced opposition to Japan sending troops. 「人質の中には自衛隊のイラク派遣に公然と反対していた人もいるらしい。そんな反政府、反日的分子のために血税を用いることは強烈な違和感、不快感を持たざるを得ない」This Asahi article found via Issho. Wow, I haven’t seen this word, anti-Japanese elements, or 反日的分子, in a while.
Update: Laszlo has written a posting on this, well worth the read. I think our positions are very similar, if not identical.

Moroha

My friend Derek has just started a new blog which already looks multilingual (he is putting me to shame for not daring to post here in my bad written Japanese and Chinese). I love one of his lines, “Even if I posted a comment on slashdot, it would only be drowned and unnoticed among the flood of inane comments every post gets on slashdot. This way, my comments will instead be drowned among the thousands of inane personal blogs, like this one.” Also to check out: Sayaka has some great recent postings related to Taiwanese politics on her blog.

Muninn Meta Madness

There has been lots of unexpected things happening today. In the ‘real world’ Japan is dealing with the fact that some of its nationals may be burned alive in Iraq. The courts have also dealt a blow to the Prime Minister’s visits to Yasukuni shrine.

Much less tragic and controversial news hit me in the virtual world. Claire’s history blog for youth, Time Travel is Easy got multiple mentions at Cliopatria and my mother all of a sudden shows up in an interview on Claire’s blog!

There are lots of important questions I think should be asked about a project like Claire’s and the potential of a blog for getting young adolescents (can’t we think of a different word? Children sounds a little odd in this case, but young adolescents way to long. Teenagers sounds off as well. How about 青年, Qingnian or Seinen in Japanese, or just youth?) excited about history. For this purpose I installed a forum called ‘Muninn Meta Madness‘ to discuss her project and things like it.

Open Access

One thing I hope to think a lot about in graduate school (assuming I will still have time for personal thinking) is how academic work is published/distributed. As most of my friends know, I’m very interested in and active in the “open” source/access/content movement but I’m far from having sorted out all my thoughts on this when it comes to history and the academic world. The key word, and most troublesome issue is “peer review” or more broadly the academic world as meritocracy. There are lots of blogs talking about this already but the postings are all over the place. One particularly high concentration of stuff is being written on the Open Access News blog. For example see this entry on how the scientific journal Nature is thinking about open access publishing.

History for the Youth

My friend Duckling, over at Blackberry Picking has a fantastic idea about creating a history related blog targeting young adolescents, say 10 to 15 years old. I think this will make for a very unique and valuable project. She is nearing the close of her own graduate studies in history. In the fall I begin a half decade or more journey of a doctorate in history. I hope eventually I’ll be able to call myself a historian, and with even greater pride, a teacher. I must confess though that, at the end of the line, I have rather quaint images of myself as a writer of children’s stories, holed up in a Norwegian mountain cottage which is somehow miraculously connected to the internet.

I don’t know what Duckling’s motivations are, but I tend to agree with a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.” (p90 in my copy). Whenever I interact with children, I can almost feel the years of meaningless crap being scraped from an aging heart. It is the storyteller that inspires children. The only difference between them and us, as far as I’m concerned, is that we see this in them, but refuse to see it in ourselves. Whatever one’s stance on the relationship of history to literature, I think we can all agree that history is born of the storyteller’s craft. In my case, I fed a hunger for fantasy with reading and child’s play. The interactive element provided by a love for role-playing games was incredibly important as well. I think Duckling’s idea is an exciting one and I wish her luck in it and her other projects.