Gapnotes

Notes from the gap

Study diary

Week 2: 6-12 January 2020

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I started the week with sending the dōjinshi to print on Monday and ended it with sending the English translation to print today. So I’ll await two heavy packages from UPS next week! Steven Pressfield would be proud.

I read Pressfield’s 2002 book The War of Art this week (a very fast read) and was as blown away as by Do the Work, although the books overlap a lot, even literally. But it doesn’t matter. I really love the idea of muses and angels and fighting off resistance. Maybe that’s what I did this week, when shipping (a keyword in Pressfield’s books) two products.

On Tuesday I got my grade for the Thesis proposal. Extremely fast and I think it was accurate. So the only grade I’m still waiting for now is Space and place. It’s approaching four months, but I waited even longer for Theory and history.

We had Artistic practices and the last unit of Images, race, representation this week. The former inspired me to watch Herman’s House with S, a movie I loved.

We also watched Festen, an old favourite of mine which I could now see with more critical eyes. And we watched the pilot episode of the Netflix series The Circle. It felt like watching typical TV for the first time in years. So boring!

I finished Postill, which was a rest from Media activism.

Me and S have taken turns battling severe colds this week. The one I had the other week came back with a vengeance – I’m keeping my mouth shut today in order not to lose my voice.

Otherwise the big news is that I’ve bought Japan tickets for me and S – we’ll leave in less than a month!

Images, race, representation

Unit 7: Telling our own stories

Artistic practices

Unit 6: Dreams

  • Herman’s House (Angad Singh Bhalla, 2012, 81 min)

Final project

  • Welker, James. 2015. “A Brief History of Shōnen’ai, Yaoi, and Boys Love.” In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, 42–75. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Book

  • Steven Pressfield: The War of Art. 2002.

Book chapters

  • Postill, John. 2018. The Rise of Nerd Politics. London: Pluto Press.
    • 6: “Formal Politics”, pp. 143–68.
    • 7: “A Thriving Social World”, pp. 169–83.

Anime

Film

  • Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998, 106 min)

TV

  • The Circle, S1E1 (Netflix, 2020, 64 min)

Week 1: 30 December 2019 – 5 January 2020

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I started the new decade by being completely immersed in my dōjinshi. The event has released the official circle participation list, and I’m in! This triggered a creative rush the like of which I haven’t experienced for a long time. I was delirious. I dreamt about the event. I experienced a dizziness that I remember from the one time in my life that I worked a 93-hour week (at a magazine). And I got back pains. In any case, the dōjinshi is basically finished now, and I’m extremely proud of it.

I recorded a summary of the books I read in 2019:

Click here to display content from YouTube

On New Year’s Day we were invited for coffee and schnaps to our neighbour, an old lady, and her female friend. It was a bit like Golden Girls.

Today I went with S to see Liebe und Ethnologie, which closes tomorrow. It’s been talked about so much and we really wanted to see it, but it was a disappointment, at least from an anthropological perspective. And we hadn’t realised that it was an exhibition completely about Hubert Fichte, a sort of hommage. The adjoining exhibition Spektral-Weiß showed how white colonialists were depicted by locals in art.

I’ve battled a severe cold the whole week, but I think I finally got rid of it today. Now S is getting it.

Japanese

  • Started the Try N2 book.

Anime

Book

  • Steven Pressfield: Do the Work. 2011. (So good! Reading the previous one now: The War of Art.)

Book chapters

  • Postill, John. 2018. The Rise of Nerd Politics. London: Pluto Press.
    • 4: “Digital Rights”, pp. 89–120.
    • 5: “Social Protest”, pp. 121–42.

Exhibitions

Week 52: 23-29 December 2019

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I spent Christmas with S in Sweden. Three cities, three nights. Lots of family, some friends, and some new acquaintances. We came back late Friday night. On Saturday we had Vietbowl dinner with fimmakers/anthopologists L&B.

Today I finished Patrick W. Galbraith’s “otaku” book, which was all I could have hoped for and more – extremely well researched and with some very important pointers for my own research. Kudos also for the striking cover design (and overall typography) by Matthew Tauch.

Speaking of my own research, I’m thrilled to be back at the computer and the dōjinshi, although it’s hardly coming along at all yet, and the reason for that is that I spend a lot of time drawing and – thereby – getting to know my character – my own shota. Which is a new experience for me and a way to connect to my research participants through the act of sharing imaginations (key words in Galbraith).

Book chapters

  • Galbraith, Patrick W. 2019. Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • 3: “Moe: An Affective Response to Fictional Characters”, pp. 76–126.
    • 4: “Akihabara: ‘Otaku’ and Contested Imaginaries in Japan”, pp. 127–83.
    • 5: “Maid Cafés: Relations with Fictional and Real Others in Spaces Between”, pp. 184–226.
    • Conclusion: “Eshi 100: The Politics of Japanese, ‘Otaku’, Popular Culture in Akihabara and Beyond”, pp. 227–60.

Articles

Anime

Film

  • Densha Otoko (Japan, 2005, 101 min)

Week 51: 16-22 December 2019

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There will be an event in Japan in February that I want to participate in, as in having my own desk and sell my work, but in order to do so I need a Japanese address and bank account. All my attempts to contact the organisers failed – I think they might have blocked contact attempts from outside Japan. In the end I contacted my closest research participant again and he volunteered to register for me. So he’s now officially a member of my “circle”, and although we haven’t got confirmation yet (they tweeted that they were already 90 percent full at the time we registered), I count on being approved. That means I’ll have to create my first dōjinshi (yes, I’ve finally switched to “Revised Hepburn” for romanisation after reading up on it and especially checking CMOS; previously I used to write “doujinshi”). And that feels amazing, although I’m so very short on time. It’s good to be forced to do this though, cause otherwise I’d never do it. I’ve spent hours and days this week drawing, disappearing into the world of the character I’m developing. It’s truly embodied research.

Three dinners: Traditional goose with my colleagues and S at Café Einstein on Tuesday, delicious fryroll at Vietbowl with A and S on Friday, and a home dinner with S at F&E’s place on Saturday – a very lovely dinner that went on into the early morning.

I finished Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, which I think was brilliant and enlightening, but more than anything enraging.

And I started reading Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, which came out this month and which is highly relevant for my research. I like how he brings in Gabriella Coleman, bell hooks, W.J.T. Mitchell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Anna Tsing already in the introduction. All except Kosofsky Sedgwick have featured in various courses in this programme. Only the other week I read Mitchell’s “What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want”, which Galbraith cites, for Artistic practices unit 4 (although I seem to have forgotten to enter it into the study diary), and really liked it. This is on top of all the obvious names for a work like this. But most of all I like Galbraith’s own research and his analysis. A book to devour! I bought the print copy for identity reasons, and because I hate Kindle.

I managed to repair the flushing system in the studio by buying an identical flusher for 30 euro and exchange only the broken parts.

And I gave S and myself an early Christmas gift. I can’t believe it’s Christmas Eve already on Tuesday. Time for a short break!

Book chapters

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.
    • 6: “Race and Class”, pp. 118–30.
    • 7: “There’s No Justice, There’s Just Us”, pp. 131–37.
  • Galbraith, Patrick W. 2019. Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Introduction: “‘Otaku’ and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan”, pp. 1–19.
    • 1: “Seeking an Alternative: ‘Male’ Shōjo Fans since the 1970s”, pp. 20–48.
    • 2: “‘Otaku’ Research and Reality Problems”, pp. 49–75.

Articles

Anime

Video

Week 50: 9-15 December 2019

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Monday was a work day.

Tuesday was Nobel – me and S watched basically everything streaming on SVT Play, starting at 1pm with the peace prize ceremony in Oslo and Abiy Ahmed’s impressive speech.

On Wednesday I started rewriting my master’s thesis proposal.

On Thursday I went to the yearly house meeting which went on for over four hours, so I missed Artistic practices.

On Friday I finished the proposal. Images, race and representation was cancelled.

On Saturday me and S participated as actors (read: extras) in a film shooting in a party setting. Interesting for me to see how a professional shoot is organised: The different roles, the generous timetable where basically the whole day is used for preparations that lead up to the relatively short actual shooting. And the feeling of everyone in the team working together, doing their part, to create something. The film will be used for applying to a film school.

They shot the film on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. I’ve never seriously checked out Blackmagic cameras, but now that I do they seem very interesting for filmmaking. Unfortunately it seems they won’t work with the expensive Sony lenses that S and I have invested in.

Today I polished the master’s thesis proposal, let S read it (he had especially one small but important change suggestion), and finally sent it off – submitted! It feels great to put the research proposal behind me so that I can start focusing more on the actual research.

I read an interesting article on information warfare. The authors’ points go very well with what we studied in Unit 10 of Digital Anthropology. Two good excerpts:

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so.

Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with.

The Marcel Duchamp documentary felt like an hour-long piano concert.

Book chapter

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m Not Talking to White People About Race.
    • 5: “The Feminism Question”, pp. 93-117.

Article

Anime

Film

  • Marcel Duchamp: Art of the Possible (Matthew Taylor, 2018, 53 min)

Video

Week 49: 2-8 December 2019

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I worked a lot on a draft of my thesis proposal this week and delivered it to my supervisor Thursday night (deadline). I got it back next day with very useful comments that made me want to improve it. I shared my draft (sans comments) with my fellow supervisees.

On Thursday I also presented on Superflat in Artistic Practices:

Click here to display content from YouTube

On Friday I repeated studio drinks + Vietbowl dinner with S & N and K and S. We talked a lot about my anime research (unfortunately only in English), and N offered to help me with the Japanese subtitles to my machinima, so I prepared a doc that I shared with her today.

On Saturday night we watched this year’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Atlantique, which was a beautiful and innovative love story, but politically safe, as S put it.

Today I made an effort to get on top of my research again. I put all my informants (I use that word mainly because it is shorter than “research participants”) in a spreadsheet for better overview, and started engaging in depth with an interview I did with one of them. I have quite a lot of material and I think it’s pretty good considering the circumstances. So by engaging with it I hope to arrive at some ideas about how it can be used.

Book chapter

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m Not Talking to White People About Race.
    • 4: “Fear of a Black Planet”, pp. 78-92.

Anime

Film

  • Atlantique (Mati Diop, 2019, 106 min)

Video