This (second post) is coming a bit later than I planned. My knee surgery was healing well, and then I had—not a complication, everything is medically normal and part of the healing process—but an unexpected-for-me issue that hung me up a bit.

It’s improving now and I want to get back to posting. My goal is perhaps two posts a week for the time being until I figure out what sort of thing I am working on here and what an appropriate schedule is for that project. For now, I will bounce around various themes and ideas, each with a header section so you can navigate to what interests you and skip what does not.

Current Reading

Neal Stephenson Quicksilver (2003)

This is the first part of a trilogy (The Baroque Cycle) and with the semester starting, I’m not sure I will get to the second and third volumes (each is about 800 pages). But it’s fascinating stuff.

I’m working on a longer post as I finish up reading, so I won’t go into it here, but it is set in the late 1600s, and features Newton, Leibniz, Louis XIV, and William of Orange. It deals with the emergence of something like modern science from alchemy, Puritanism, and the birth of modern finance. It’s heady stuff, but told with wit and a lot of humor.

Current Teaching

My courses this semester are my Introduction to Humanities II course (which I’ve taught for many years) and our American Literature Survey, which is newer to me.

In Humanities II we cover a rough history of drama, from Greek Tragedy to modern plays by Suzanne Lori-Parks and Lynn Nottage. This is not my formal academic training, but I’m an old theater kid (and one time, theater minor in college) so it feels comfortable. I also have a decent grounding in the older stuff (Classics and Shakespeare) through my education and reading, so I’m pretty confident with the material at this point.

The semester starts with Sophocles and I like the students to read both “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone” in sequence. I think the students enjoy “Antigone” more but “Oedipus” allows me to set up the semester a little better, particularly as I try to connect theater to communal religious practices. This is important because it allows for a more extensive view of early theater than some typically chauvanistic Western Civilization origin story of the greatness of tragedy.

Mask drama and ritual, as represented by Greek drama, is a common feature in human cultures all over the planet. Wole Soyinka’s plays make the connections between West African mask rituals and Greek theater explicit—I’m thinking of his retelling of “The Bachae” of Euripides. Similarly, you can see Kurasowa’s insights into the connections between Japanese Noh theater and “Western” tragic traditions in his film adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly “Throne of Blood.” Structural anthropologists have traced out the shared function of such mask drama in rituals of communal purging of pollutants—i.e. carrier rituals. So that is some of the framework we use at Howard to teach Greek tragedy, not as an origin of a tradition, but because it reflects common themes of theatrical traditions the world over. It happens to have been written down and been transmitted to us, unlike the mask dramas of oral cultures, so it makes for useful texts in a classroom. However, even that sequence of transmission is not through the West but through the Middle East and North Africa—a point I emphasize to my students, alongside how the three monotheistic religions that emerged from the Middle East reflect carrier rituals in their sacred texts and spiritual practices.

This is a world lit/comparative literature approach to Greek Drama. I’ve inherited it from Howard professors before me, but it’s the most compelling and relevant framework for teaching it in this moment, in my opinion. I’ve had to learn it myself, but I’m an old hand at this point and the class is fun to teach.

In American Literature, I use settler colonialism and indigenous literature as twin frameworks to reframe some major texts of the U.S. canon. I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the semester goes on, but we are just digging in. We start with the great Native American Renaissance novel, Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko and then we go back to Columbus and work our way to the end of the 19th century. C19 American Literature is what I’m trained in and what I wrote my dissertation and major publications on, so it’s always exciting to work through this material with students.

Watching

I guess I’ve been entering into a full weeaboo phase, as I’m finally catching up with Shonen Anime after it being on the periphery of my cultural awareness since Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z became a phenomenon in the U.S. during my teenage years. Even at that time, I never really watched Shonen, I did go through an Anime phase, but that largely consisted of the more “adult” shows of the time (relatively) like Cowboy Bebop and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I never got into Dragonball, and Pokemon hit just in time for me to be obsessed with the Gameboy game for a year and then grow out of it. I missed the “Big Three” of the early aughts (Naruto, One Piece and Bleach) and more recent hits like Death Note and Attack on Titan were completely beyond my awareness until recently. I dropped anime as an interest when I went to college with the major exception of Miyazaki/Ghibli movies, which I’ll always love and have already started sharing with my four-year-old (who loves Totoro).

But for whatever reason, I got entirely consumed by One Piece over the summer. When a cultural phenomenon is this huge and yet I barely heard about it until Netflix did its live-action adaptation last year, I know I’ve missed something. And honestly, I’m not sure what. I can watch episodes like popcorn when I’m tired before bed, and I’ve made it through about 200 in a few months (out of a daunting 1000+ and still running), but is it that good? I don’t know. The best I can figure out is that it’s kind of annoying and goofy until suddenly it becomes comforting and enticing. There’s no real moment when it gets good (although the arcs everyone heralds do ratchet things up) it just sort of burrows into you until you are watching a single fight scene last for 10 or more episodes and thinking about how much this feels like animated Buster Keaton mixed with videogame logics and an optimism and sweetness that starts cloying but that hammers you over the head until you start to feel it.

The Buster Keaton comment probably bears an explanation. Shonen animes are essentially for kids, and many after Dragon Ball Z are what’s called Battle Shonen, so there’s a lot of focus on animating fights between characters with outlandish powers. It’s all about the spectacle. But also there’s an unexpected level of thoughtfulness and wit sometimes—the powers have rules and almost present a puzzle logic. How will the hero overcome this villain with the tools at his disposal? The best sequences land on solutions that generate spectacle without feeling like it’s some deus ex machina or plot armor, but rather a natural idea of the hero. Of course, this is something of an illusion created by the writers and animators, but feeling credible seems important.

One Piece does this, but in a way that is overwhelmingly grounded in recognizable traditions of physical comedy—whether Looney Tunes or silent film or Jackie Chan. The character’s powers are outlandish and absurd—rubber arms, separating flying limbs, and being made of lightning or smoke. How does a boy with rubber arms fight a king made of lightning? The answers are always pratfalls of a type—but pratfalls that obey some internal logic of absurdity. That’s what I mean by comparing One Piece to Buster Keaton—his films are absurd but they obey internal rules and that makes the visual humor satisfyingly witty. How will Keaton’s character survive this predicament given the rules of the universe he’s created?

I’ve also sampled other Shonen like Naruto and the original Dragon Ball (sans Z). There are things I find annoying about them and things I enjoy, but nothing has captured me quite as much as One Piece. Goku (of Dragon Ball) is of course the model protagonist for much Shonen (certainly for Naruto and Monkey D. Luffy of One Piece). The creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, modeled Goku after the character of Monkey from Journey to the West and the entire first season of the show is loosely adapting the novel. Monkey is based on classic Chinese trickster myths, so I’ve found an interesting overlap between the anime I’ve been watching and the Native American trickster myths on my American Lit syllabus. Perhaps I will explore that more here at some point.

Playing

Dragon Quest XI

Speaking of Akira Toriyama, I’ve finally started playing Dragon Quest XI. He was the character designer for all Dragon Quest games going back to the very first in the 80s for the NES. His style looks gorgeous in the fully animated 3-D models of this latest DQ game, which is sadly one of the last projects he worked on. It’s a classic JRPG with very old-school mechanics and a conventional “chosen one” fantasy story, but it’s such a delight to play. The score is fantastic and I love finding new enemies to fight just to see new Toriyama designs.

Politics

While I write and think and debate politics often in my life, for the time being, I am going to avoid it in this space. That is not a long-term commitment, but I find the things I have to say about politics are the least interesting and the least thought out when I’m at the height of election season anxiety. In a few months, I may have thoughts that I find relevant but for now, it is just anxious brain chatter and poll-watching, and there’s too much of that clogging up the web already.

Listening

Nick Cave, Wild God

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Woodland

The Gun Club, Miami

Fairport Convention, Liege and Lief

Two brand new albums, two classics of their genre, all in steady rotation. I’m a huge Nick Cave fan and love the new one, I’m sure I’ll write up something about him or it at some point.