NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I read Murakami as a younger man and enjoyed the first book I read, but disliked the next two and so I, in a way said abayo to Japan literature for a while after that. When I spent a month in mainland Japan over the summer I quickly ran out of English books to read and resorted to picking up some Japanese texts translated into English. I don't think I'll ever give Murakami a try again, but some of them were worth the time. I really enjoyed the book  Confessions of a Yakuza by Junihi Saga. I ended up giving a copy of it to my brother, as research for the Asian gangster books or films he is always dreaming of penning. I read two books by Keigo Higashino Salvation of a Saint and The Devotion of Suspect X, which were interesting and led me to get a copy of the rebooted Millennium series with a new author at the helm. I saw this article on Facebook and became intrigued. I might try to pick up a copy of it. ****************** Natsume Soseki goes to hell and back in "The

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou

Yesterday the prospective students for my department came by, and so naturally the discussions always inevitable in an Ethnic Studies Program took place. The origin of Ethnic Studies is a mixture of explicit politics and academics, and so the eternal struggle in any such department is how to balance the rigors of both life spheres. What are we to do with the divisions between the "abstract" world of academia and "concrete" world of real life? I should point here that my point here will not be that these divisions are false, but that how we position ourselves in relation to them is what makes all the difference on whether we will implicitly/explicitly accept them or transgress them. A crucial mistake that I see students make when posing philosophically these problems, is that rather than narrating a relationship to this particular division, which might in some way reveal its contingency, they instead narrate themselves into an interpassive state, whereby the divis