thinking cross-culturally

Posted on 1 May 2012 at 11:13 in

Not comparatively, mind you, though the distinction is slight in this case.

This medieval Slovene glory referred, on the one hand, to the notion that the Slovene ethnic territory of the 9th century was three times bigger than it is today, extending to the north as far as the Danube between Vienna and Linz and even across the river. This belief has survived into the present and until recently nobody has thought of questioning it and consigning it the place where it really belongs—the dustbin of historical myths. (Štih 2010, p. 17)

I cannot help thinking of Korean assertions about Koguryŏ (Goguryeo) and especially Gojoseon in this vein, regarding the extreme difficulty of discerning not only the linguistic landscape of the region before the tenth century (and especially before the seventh), but also the political and socioeconomic landscapes. If speakers of a Korean language held part of what’s now Manchuria, that is, as seems likely, it doesn’t mean that Silla’s ultimately failed attempt to subsume that area was a thwarted reunion, nor does the subsequent translatio imperii to the Khitans indicate that they caused a Korean state to vanish. And we know already that premodern Korean-speakers comprised multiple ethnic groups; it’s a common nationalizing fallacy to pretend that one language == one gens == one shared history. [ETA There's a flip side to these musings: given how subjectively the fragments of evidence may be interpreted, if it really were the case that an ethnic Korean-in-the-narrow-sense polity existed from the peninsula's tip to a considerable stretch north, how could it be proven? The Slovene versus Slavic distinction pertains, in particular---there were Slavs by the Danube and north of it, but not Slovenes, in Štih's example.]

And, as ever, I wonder how scholars writing in East Asian languages treat these issues, because I cannot read their work. Štih’s volume is itself a translation into English of eighteen essays he’s published across his career, and I am reading it after seeing its TMR review because we scholars of the Western European Middle Ages know dangerously little about anything Slavic. (I have UCLA’s copy via inter-library loan, FWIW.)

Štih, Peter. The Middle Ages between the Eastern Alps and the Northern Adriatic: Select Papers on Slovene Historiography and Medieval History. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

signal boost

Posted on 30 Apr 2012 at 15:20 in

Programming for Sirens—which sinks or swims based upon individual submissions—closes in a week, on 6 May. If you’ve been considering something, now’s the time! Their programming posts on LJ may also be of interest.

2012-apr consuming

Posted on 29 Apr 2012 at 12:52 in

I don’t care how excited some bloggers become about The King 2 Hearts; I’m sticking to reading recaps. Their excitement got me to start watching Secret Garden, and though parts of it are good, I ended up loathing the way the principal characters were written, so much that I couldn’t watch the final episodes. Haven’t time to watch anything right now, anyway, and if I did I’d be returning to Bloody Monday or BOSS to cross them off my list. Three eps into one show, one ep into the other, interrupted by then-imminence of baby and then-massive workload? Something like that.

Have begun playing Persona 3 Portable, the PSP version, on the PSVita, because if I don’t play it before attempting the forthcoming Persona 4: The Golden, I probably never will. I’ve peeked at a few walkthroughs, and the version of P3P currently in the online PlayStation store seems to partake of Persona 3: FES (PlayStation 2). There’s word that P3: FES will be ported to PSP. I don’t even know.

Reading: flattened this month due to combined whammy of the “producing” post’s items. It’s only Gary Schmidt’s Trouble, which I’ve blogged.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Touch My Katamari fills the same twitchy-idle gap that a hidden-object game does, and Persona 3 wipes out both of them as well as my next library-lent novel. I’ve barely begun the novel, a book many of you like. It’s not that P3P‘s storyline is more compelling; it’s that it comes with a time-consuming dungeon crawl, where Death—the allegorical personification thereof, not only the result of too few hit points—may appear at any time. If I want to see more of P3P‘s story—and I do—I have to keep crawling. (If I wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel?) That said, I can’t have spent more than three hours with P3P so far, and as anyone who’s met a Shin Megami Tensei title knows, the game’s likely to run 60-100. I logged 63 hours with Persona 4 on the full-sized PS3 before trailing off and didn’t even reach the excitement of December (both games follow the Japanese school year, which begins in April). Note that I wouldn’t be embarking upon a 40+ hour game if it weren’t on a mobile platform; more on that and P3P‘s content/gameplay are for another post.

2012-apr producing

Posted on 28 Apr 2012 at 11:37 in

I wrote a conference talk, deliberately limiting the writing to two weeks so that it wouldn’t consume my life (I kind of hate conference papers), then delivered it. First one in four years. Went fairly well; got some wider attention online afterwards. By the night before, I’d squashed stress by determining that I could lose nothing, so perhaps my assessment of relative success is flawed—but it does achieve one thing that may look crucial in retrospect: repositions me in the world after a long absence due partly to having had a child. You know, that thing that many women are instructed by their older colleagues to obsess about—how time off for “family” is like the guillotine for one’s career. *ticks box* One talk isn’t a cure-all, but then, I’m not on the professorial track(s) and separately, to be honest, don’t have much interest in being Known.

That said, I’ve begun thinking again about blogging publicly (legal name, professional focus). At least once a month, perhaps. The blog itself exists already.

I’ve done some…it’s halfway between proofreading and copy-editing, since I’ve rephrased a few things that’re correct and sound clumsy, but haven’t fact-checked or spent time pondering continuity (someone else is responsible for continuity). Copy-editing lite? Anyway, clue one: after you and your collaborators agree upon a style standard, follow it or waste money paying me to fix all the places where you forgot. Clue two: if you’re writing a branching game that reuses snippets between branches, copy and paste accurately—don’t retype—because introducing different errors in three out of five identical versions of a single paragraph makes you look bad. And it wastes your money.

Take two of my cousin’s mitten proceeds apace, though the pace has been hobbled somewhat by, like, needing to sleep at night. Reason’s molars, on the move, have hobbled my ability to sleep in the early morning; she wakes up from the pain, asks for reassurance (“Mama?” quietly), then dozes off. Do I doze? Mostly not. But I lie there for the sake of my spine, which complains if I don’t get enough sleep, in case lying awake is better for it than being upright.

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