Academic Anime

This week, my home university, Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy, is partnering with the University of Waterloo to host Canada's major humanities conference, the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Basically, all the individual national scholarly organizations -like mine, the Film Studies Association of Canada- get together an hold their annual conferences at the same time in one place. We'll have over 7000 people this year, which is a massive conference by Canadian standards. (Though it makes me smile to realize what a small fraction of Comiket's 500,000 attendees that is!)

There will be a lot of live blogging and tweeting of this event, but I don't think I'll be one of the avid bloggers. Maybe I'll do a sum-up at the end, especially of the panel on "Anime/Comics: Appropriation and Adaptation." But since this is more an anime blog than an aca blog, I'll keep it low key.

That said, my presentation in a panel on post-cinematic adaptation is half about Satoshi Kon, so I have no problems posting my proposal/abstract here, for anyone who's interested!

( Hugo and Paprika )

People who don't know any academics seem to think that once classes end, professors get the summers "off" to sit around smoking pipes and reading arcane books on useless subjects. This is not at all true.(Pipes! As if.) Between committees, conference papers, meetings, and fieldwork prep, today is the first day in two weeks where I can honestly say: there is nothing I *have* to do right now.

This is deeply unsettling for me. I don't know what to do with myself.

I think I'll end up sitting on my porch reading manga to practice Japanese. Maybe later I'll sketch, or write, or watch body-horror sci-fi. But it's still up in the air at 2:00 in the afternoon, which is unusual for someone as schedule-dependent as I am.

Feel free to gag me with my own silver spoon here, but it makes me feel guilty to take time off. It feels like slacking, even on a holiday long weekend (in Canada. All hail the lingering ghost of Queen Victoria!) After getting accustomed to 10-hour work days 7 days a week during my PhD and first year of teaching, I've developed a chronic inability to relax. I think this is an endemic problem among grad students and academics, especially in cultural studies/film/lit/fine arts where our hobbies become our jobs.

Sometimes, it's a glorious thing to be watching a film or anime and taking notes and planning lectures, and then think: "oh man, I get to delve into this fascinating work as my job! Sweet!" But at other times, it's so nerve-wracking to be watching anime and taking notes and planning lectures and think: "damn, I wish I could just sit back and enjoy this. Now, how am I going to convey to 55 undergrads who know nothing about Japanese culture or the global media industry that this is actually important to study seriously?" You risk burning out your love. You risk play becoming work, and pleasure becoming stress.

Happily, I'm not burned out yet. I still enjoy anime and manga in my spare time. (Current shows: Sakamichi no Apollon and Tsuritama; current manga Nana and Fujoshi no Honkai). But it's different now. Anime is not my all-consuming obsession. I find I have to do other things, like writing my own fiction, to relax. Maybe this is a sign of balance? Or maybe I'm just a bad fan now that I've sold out to the Establishment?

For anyone who studies or works on what you love: how do you handle the work/play overlap? Is it best to keep the professional and personal sides of it separate, or meld them?

Woo, I'm excited! In a fit of initiative, I've finally created an account at Dreamwidth and I think I've configured everything to cross-post. This is the test. If you're an LJ friend of mine who's also on DW and you want me in your Circle, you can find me t/here as "sanet." I'm doing my best to add you if we're already mutual LJ friends and I know your DW username as well.

What else can I say? Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

Now that teaching is done and professional service is almost done, I'm finally getting back into concentrated anime research. And at the top of my pile (along with Mechademia 6, review coming eventually) is Marc Steinberg's new book Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. I have to say off the top that this book is mainly targeted at those interested in the history and media theory of the anime industry, not at a general reader or even fan community audience. Examples from shows are few, endnotes are many. But if you are interested in the marketing and transmedia aspects of anime, and you want to know how the current system of manga/anime/gaming/light novel integration came to be, this is a ground-breaking book based on some impressive archival research.

( Mini Media Mix )

Broadcasting live from the heart of Grading Country, it's The Merin Minute, reporting on any and all things me-related! Today's top stories:

Teaching: is done! Both classes wrote final exams this week. Now to deal with the heaps of frantically-scrawled booklets, containing occasional gems of insight and lots of hazardous waste material ("Fritz Lang's Waltz with Bashir." I kid you not.)

Research: is beginning! I'm presenting at the Film Studies Association of Canada conference, held during Canada's massive week-long humanities Congress in May. My paper: "Digital Dreams and the Nostalgia for Cinema in Hugo and Paprika." Looking forward to this one!
I'll also likely be lecturing this summer at Wako University (Japan), in Ueno Toshiya's seminar on A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. I hope to talk about the Body without Organs and "kyara" or character bodies (possibly in early shounen-ai manga/anime, possibly Hatsune Miku.) It sounds exciting, but I'm nervous about the cost of this summer's Japan research plans, in financial and emotional terms.

Anime: Apollon SQUEEEEE! The first episode of Watanabe Shinichiro's new series Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope) actually made me squee out loud. In retrospect, I get the feeling I'm being hooked by a formulaic narrative and typed characters: delicate classical music student Nishimi Kaoru transfers to a new school in backwater Kyushu, where impulsive, jazz-loving bad-boy Kawabuchi Sentarou takes a sudden liking to him. Kaoru is fascinated in return by Sentarou's "drumming." I see the bait there, Watanabe. But I like it, so I'll let the hook sink in and trust you to pull me somewhere good. Also, new music/jazz covers by Yoko Kanno, yay!

Personal: Feeling very "up-and-down" this month: content one day, overwhelmed by anxiety the next. Changes in schedule always upset me, even "positive" changes like the end of term. Still, I'm trying to be gentle and give myself more down-time. I'm drawing again, and writing fiction. Nothing I'd show the world, but it makes me happy.

Blog: Really thinking of switching to Dreamwidth, but see above about the anxiety-provoking effects of change. Any advice on how to switch over easily?

And that was your Merin-Minute. Tune in next time for another exciting installment!

My life is full of grading. 55 sets of fresh assignments per class, ranging from film journals to full-out research papers to final exams, coming in every week from now til mid-April, YAY. And the parts that aren't grading are lectures. DOUBLE YAY.

So here, for your edification and/or amusement, is the intro to a lecture I gave last week on Nina Paley's wonderful film Sita Sings the Blues. Included are many links to try and build in the context covered in class. If you like Sita, copyleft activism, or criticisms of the "exotic erotic" figure in animation, I have an article about all three things that's in peer-review with The Journal of Postcolonial Writing right now. One more thing to look for later! (/shameless boost)

( Singin' the Copyright Blues )

It was my goal this term to post things I've been teaching in my Animation class, as a way of getting back into writing about anime. But now I find it's the works I put on the syllabus that are just slightly out of my range that excite me most. I feel like I'm kind of phoning it in on anime, honestly, since I know the material I'm teaching so well already. But when it comes to things I haven't touched for a while, like the avant-garde stop-motion short films of the Brothers Quay...well, it's fascinating!

To get the class talking about stop-motion, I had them read an article by Suzanne Buchan called "Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers' Animated Worlds" (which conveniently enough you can access in the online journal EnterText). Buchan's aim is to describe how we can experience animation as a world, a haptic, embodied place, in which we "allow ourselves that most pleasurable experience of being moved, intellectually, affectively and emotionally, by what unfolds on screen" (98). It reminded me of my first startling emotional reaction to the Quay's films back in 2009 or '10. I wasn't able to fully articulate it in class, but I will post here some notes I wrote then about being moved by stop-motion.

( The Quays' Uncanny World )

I don't think anyone on my flist is in Montreal (besides eacherown), but if you are, or if you just want to know what's going on in the academic anime-sphere, check out this event being hosted by Concordia University next weekend:

Experiencing Media Mix: Anime, Manga, Video Games

The keynote speaker is Otsuka Eiji on Saturday, and on Sunday there will be papers by Ian Condry (on Miku!), Thomas Lamarre, Ueno Toshiya and Thomas Looser, among other fine scholars. I'm going, and I'm pumped!

Now if only I can manage to finish all the marking/exam writing/lecture prep that needs to be done before I go... O.o

I'd like to write a long, impassioned post on the whole SOPA/PIPA issue that's exploded this week. So many people have already raised their voices to counter the corporate and legislative restriction of the open Internet, but if the rest of us say "Oh, I don't have to do anything now, other people are speaking out," eventually, no one except the most extremist voices on each side will say anything. And that's unacceptable.

Unfortunately, I'm in such an emotional state right now that I'm sure to regret anything I post, and I can't battle that anxiety on top of everything else I have to do this weekend. I just can't find the words.

So, what do we do in times like this? We share animated .gifs and vids, of course! Because sharing is the online way!

[ETA: dammit, embed codes are not working for me today so here are the links.]

TheOatmeal.com protest gif

Nina Paley's "All Creative Work is Derivative

In the year 2000, Saitou Tamaki published Sentou bishoujo no seishin bunseki, an early attempt at (psycho)analyzing Japan's budding otaku culture. I read sections of it in Japanese in 2010, but, frustrated by the psychoanalytic terminology, ended up working more off of others' critiques (notably Tom Lamarre's in The Anime Machine). From that exposure, I came to the conclusion that I did not like Saitou's general attitude towards otaku or fujoshi. Not at all. I thought it was condescending, pathologizing, heteronormative, and universalizing, in the way the worst psychoanalysis often is.

In 2011, the book was translated as Beautiful Fighting Girl by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson at the U of Minnesota Press. And reading the whole thing in English has changed my opinion, a little. I was surprised to find some ideas that I think do have value for creating a more nuanced and flexible idea of otaku, especially regarding the relation between image, reality, and sexuality. But these ideas are not things Saitou brings out well himself, and he often falls back on frustrating Freudian/Lacanian analyses that foreclose the potential of his own earlier suggestions.

Under the cut is a shorthand list of quotes and ideas I thought were helpful, and others I thought were rage-inducing.

( Quotes and thoughts )

In conclusion, there are lots of interesting things to be found in the book, including long excerpts from letters written by Japanese and American anime fans and a comprehensive lineage of the beautiful fighting girl figure from 1958-99, with examples from dozens of series. There are also a few good concepts hiding like diamonds in the rough of lamentable psychoanalysis. It's not a long book or a very difficult one, if you've got some critical theory under your belt. Anyone who wants to study otaku should read it -if mainly as something to move on from.