So happy to have my article on The Beatles lyrics in Japan functioning as what I term "world lyric" out in Diacritics!

If you are attending the fully virtual ACLA this year, please consider stopping by the seminar I have organized, Alternatives to Narrative 🪼 The seminar will meet Friday 5/30 and Saturday 5/31

Taught the "Kiritsubo" and "Wakamurasaki" chapters of The Tale of Genji today and the discussion went so well. And then I went to the drugstore just outside campus and saw this spectacular tree 🌸

I am also planning to talk about a selection of Russian poems in the light of this same method of reading that I am developing: by Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and/or Alexander Blok.

Only the latter, however, are also nonnarrative in the psychophilosophical sense. The former tend to reflect narrative mental states, implying that life itself is a story and relying on master narratives—without constructing a literary narrative."

Both groups—'just relating feelings' (正述心緒) and 'relying on things, relating feelings' (寄物陳思)—consist of brief, passionate love poems and thus share the nonnarrative lyric form.

I develop this method based on two poetic categories in Man’yōshū, the earliest extant anthology of vernacular Japanese verse, compiled in the 8th century.

In this talk, I will argue that human beings are equally capable of narrative and nonnarrative mental states and propose a method of reading literature for psychophilosophical narrativity and nonnarrativity as complementing modes, which are not dependent on, or constitutive of, genre.

Thank you for your interest! This is the abstract:

"There is a growing awareness that the 'narrative turn' of the 20th century may have taken us too far. In the current Anglophone discourse, everyone and everything seems to have a 'story.'

Looking forward to seeing you! It's been a while

Excited to be travelling to UMass Amherst next week to share my work!

Omega Doom (1996) featuring Rutger Hauer sounded just as bad from the descriptions but is surprisingly good. Some interesting camerawork; a groovy score. The two rival gangs both consist of robots surviving a nuclear winter. One of the gangs looks like this.

One of the gang leaders is advised by a lizard. David Carradine plays the protagonist. This strapping man (appropriately) is this film's Nakadai Tatsuya. Every woman throughout the entire film is also topless.

Taught Kurosawa's Yojimbo this week and decided to explore some of the less known remakes, for my own edification. The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) is tremendously bad, in the most fun way. 78 minutes of pure hilarity. Students loved seeing a clip from this during class discussion.