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Apr. 29th, 2012 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionRemember when I used to actually read books? More than occasionally? ;____;
The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle - Steven Pressfield. This is a short book, with lots of short chapters. Each provides expands upon some catchphrase in the chapter title, all devoted to getting the reader to break through their Resistance (yes, with a capital letter) & write. Pressfield is an ex-Marine, & a lot of this book feels like having a drill sergeant yell at you. On the one hand, sometimes that's what you need. On the other, I feel like it is often unproductive to tell people that there is no excuse for not writing, that Author X wrote Masterpiece Y while caring for a big family, or that if Lance Armstrong can overcome cancer & do great things, you should be able to overcome things too. I suspect Pressfield would merely scoff & say this is my Resistance at work. That's the conundrum of things like this. He also writes off things like Seasonal Affective Disorder & social anxiety & ADHD as being marketing ploys rather than diseases & says that seeking support from your friends & family is damaging & makes you weaker as a writer.
& I appreciate his point about how you just have to bust through your Resistance & write every single day, blah blah. But I also think that sometimes writer's block should be heeded, & sometimes gentleness & forgiveness & ease works better than the drill sergeant approach.
His advice also seems aimed squarely at people writing for money, because, as he says, while you must write motivated for the love of writing, money makes you take the game seriously. So I wonder what he would make of me, one of those fic writers that actually has no desire to write original fic. I work seriously on my fic, I don't post things I am unhappy with, but there is obviously never going to be a money motivation for me. Am I thus doomed to forever be in the amateur state of mind, rather than the pro one he tries to inculcate in readers?
The last section of the book is the seemingly requisite spiritual bit. I found it easier to ignore or adapt the religious stuff than I do with someone like Julia Cameron, but I also found lots of it less useful & pithy than the rest of the book.
Anyway! There were useful bits -- I think it would be good distilled into a page-a-day calendar, actually -- & I may flip through it now & again. But... holy caveats, Batman.
Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game - Robert K. Fitts. This is a compilation of 25 interviews with baseball players who've played in Japan since right after World War II. A significant number of these interviews were with US American players who played in Japan; I understand this may have been partly due to issues getting access to Japanese players who would talk, although I wonder if it also reflects the bias of the editor.
Anyway: having read Robert Whiting's stuff on culture clashes in baseball, I expected these reminiscences to be much more bitter than they were. Sure, some of the US players talk about the difficulties they had, but most of them say that they loved the Japanese fans, playing in Japan, & that most of their problems were with the front office. That seems possibly to be rose-colored glasses, but oh well -- anyway, some of the accounts are a bit "gee whiz!" wide-eyed sort of stuff, which I think is probably, again, the oldest players looking back with innocence on long-ago days. The more recent accounts felt more honest & lively, but also more effusive about the skill of Japanese players & the experience of playing in Japan.
I was surprised there wasn't more about race, since several of the players interviewed weren't white & I feel certain that this could affect their reception in Japan, but there's only one mention, in Orestes Destrade's chapter, about his awareness that people thought he was scary for being a "six-foot four, 240-pound, dark-skinned gaijin."
Anyway -- nothing huge stuck out on its own, but this was a valuable read for the overall themes & experiences, even if I suspect Robert Whiting's books give a more honest portrait in some ways.
30 Days of Becoming a Better Japanese Learner - Koichi@tofugu.com. No, really, that's how the author is attributed on the first page, & yes, it's Koichi from Tofugu. I was interested because I do like Tofugu, but I'm also a sucker for things that talk about not only how to learn languages more effectively but things that are applicable to productivity in general as well. OMG I love reading stuff about productivity, even if it just makes me rant or if I don't do it. Oh, I'm also a sucker for books that have little things that you do each day, like this book does. Ha! Anyway: I think a lot of the tips in here won't be new to anyone who reads Tofugu or AJATT or Fluent in Three Months or (from the productivity angle) Zen Habits or things like that, but it is useful (I think) to have them parceled out into neat little one-day packages. We will see if I am able to get myself to apply more of this (& apply it more consistently). The methods certainly make sense, reading about them, & some of them I've already found useful -- like the thing about making something a habit, something you do without much conscious thought (& thus with, one hopes, little resistance): writing 750 Words every day is a habit I sustained for v. nearly two years straight now; it's just something I do. So if I manage to do something like that with Japanese learning, well! Something might be possible.
Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Formation on the Internet - Emily Noelle Ignacio. This is an important look at how cultural identity was negotiated back in the earlier days of online communities -- this examines the soc.culture.filipino newsgroup in the late '90s -- & it's not its fault if it feels very dated right now! It did sort of take me back, heh -- I remember a lot of the debates on the authenticity of Filipinos outside the Philippines (& how that might be mitigated, or not, by having lived in the Philippines), & the "You Might Be Filipino If..." jokes, etc. from my early days on -- shall we say -- the ethnic parts of the internet, even though I didn't participate in that newsgroup.
What strikes me, of course, is how these debates are still going on, even if in different forms/with different boundaries (Ignacio notes that, at that time, most people in the newsgroup had e-mail accounts via college or work, so were using their legal names). & yes, the use of the Filipina woman as property to be defended (against the predations of colonizers), never mind what the women in question might be thinking, oh yes, still v. familiar. It also strikes me that Ignacio's good-natured, open announcement to the newsgroup that she was observing & would be using their posts as fodder for her research would get a v. different reception today.
Anyway -- important groundwork, but reading it I mostly just got itchy to see the same kind of analysis turned on any of today's Filipino blogospheres.
The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle - Steven Pressfield. This is a short book, with lots of short chapters. Each provides expands upon some catchphrase in the chapter title, all devoted to getting the reader to break through their Resistance (yes, with a capital letter) & write. Pressfield is an ex-Marine, & a lot of this book feels like having a drill sergeant yell at you. On the one hand, sometimes that's what you need. On the other, I feel like it is often unproductive to tell people that there is no excuse for not writing, that Author X wrote Masterpiece Y while caring for a big family, or that if Lance Armstrong can overcome cancer & do great things, you should be able to overcome things too. I suspect Pressfield would merely scoff & say this is my Resistance at work. That's the conundrum of things like this. He also writes off things like Seasonal Affective Disorder & social anxiety & ADHD as being marketing ploys rather than diseases & says that seeking support from your friends & family is damaging & makes you weaker as a writer.
& I appreciate his point about how you just have to bust through your Resistance & write every single day, blah blah. But I also think that sometimes writer's block should be heeded, & sometimes gentleness & forgiveness & ease works better than the drill sergeant approach.
His advice also seems aimed squarely at people writing for money, because, as he says, while you must write motivated for the love of writing, money makes you take the game seriously. So I wonder what he would make of me, one of those fic writers that actually has no desire to write original fic. I work seriously on my fic, I don't post things I am unhappy with, but there is obviously never going to be a money motivation for me. Am I thus doomed to forever be in the amateur state of mind, rather than the pro one he tries to inculcate in readers?
The last section of the book is the seemingly requisite spiritual bit. I found it easier to ignore or adapt the religious stuff than I do with someone like Julia Cameron, but I also found lots of it less useful & pithy than the rest of the book.
Anyway! There were useful bits -- I think it would be good distilled into a page-a-day calendar, actually -- & I may flip through it now & again. But... holy caveats, Batman.
Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game - Robert K. Fitts. This is a compilation of 25 interviews with baseball players who've played in Japan since right after World War II. A significant number of these interviews were with US American players who played in Japan; I understand this may have been partly due to issues getting access to Japanese players who would talk, although I wonder if it also reflects the bias of the editor.
Anyway: having read Robert Whiting's stuff on culture clashes in baseball, I expected these reminiscences to be much more bitter than they were. Sure, some of the US players talk about the difficulties they had, but most of them say that they loved the Japanese fans, playing in Japan, & that most of their problems were with the front office. That seems possibly to be rose-colored glasses, but oh well -- anyway, some of the accounts are a bit "gee whiz!" wide-eyed sort of stuff, which I think is probably, again, the oldest players looking back with innocence on long-ago days. The more recent accounts felt more honest & lively, but also more effusive about the skill of Japanese players & the experience of playing in Japan.
I was surprised there wasn't more about race, since several of the players interviewed weren't white & I feel certain that this could affect their reception in Japan, but there's only one mention, in Orestes Destrade's chapter, about his awareness that people thought he was scary for being a "six-foot four, 240-pound, dark-skinned gaijin."
Anyway -- nothing huge stuck out on its own, but this was a valuable read for the overall themes & experiences, even if I suspect Robert Whiting's books give a more honest portrait in some ways.
30 Days of Becoming a Better Japanese Learner - Koichi@tofugu.com. No, really, that's how the author is attributed on the first page, & yes, it's Koichi from Tofugu. I was interested because I do like Tofugu, but I'm also a sucker for things that talk about not only how to learn languages more effectively but things that are applicable to productivity in general as well. OMG I love reading stuff about productivity, even if it just makes me rant or if I don't do it. Oh, I'm also a sucker for books that have little things that you do each day, like this book does. Ha! Anyway: I think a lot of the tips in here won't be new to anyone who reads Tofugu or AJATT or Fluent in Three Months or (from the productivity angle) Zen Habits or things like that, but it is useful (I think) to have them parceled out into neat little one-day packages. We will see if I am able to get myself to apply more of this (& apply it more consistently). The methods certainly make sense, reading about them, & some of them I've already found useful -- like the thing about making something a habit, something you do without much conscious thought (& thus with, one hopes, little resistance): writing 750 Words every day is a habit I sustained for v. nearly two years straight now; it's just something I do. So if I manage to do something like that with Japanese learning, well! Something might be possible.
Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Formation on the Internet - Emily Noelle Ignacio. This is an important look at how cultural identity was negotiated back in the earlier days of online communities -- this examines the soc.culture.filipino newsgroup in the late '90s -- & it's not its fault if it feels very dated right now! It did sort of take me back, heh -- I remember a lot of the debates on the authenticity of Filipinos outside the Philippines (& how that might be mitigated, or not, by having lived in the Philippines), & the "You Might Be Filipino If..." jokes, etc. from my early days on -- shall we say -- the ethnic parts of the internet, even though I didn't participate in that newsgroup.
What strikes me, of course, is how these debates are still going on, even if in different forms/with different boundaries (Ignacio notes that, at that time, most people in the newsgroup had e-mail accounts via college or work, so were using their legal names). & yes, the use of the Filipina woman as property to be defended (against the predations of colonizers), never mind what the women in question might be thinking, oh yes, still v. familiar. It also strikes me that Ignacio's good-natured, open announcement to the newsgroup that she was observing & would be using their posts as fodder for her research would get a v. different reception today.
Anyway -- important groundwork, but reading it I mostly just got itchy to see the same kind of analysis turned on any of today's Filipino blogospheres.