There is a God of Death on my bookshelf!

Actually, there are four!

Amidst tirelessly attempting to complete the readings of the fifty-some books for my cultural history PhD minor, my collection (!) grew. In the past couple of months, I've been: reading all about the boundaries of commodification (apparently - a negative term!) and the evils of capitalism (!) that most scholars emphasize in a sustained ideological assault on my brain; memorizing disturbing amounts of information about 19th century sewing machines and farming equipment; finding out all about American coffins, managerial patterns, and female working class fashions in the early 20th century; most of all - learning that I apparently have the obligation to spend my hard-earned dollars using my social conscience (read: fitting the left definition of morality). Strangely, all these texts did not preclude me from desiring more Ryuks. Fusing Marx and Freud, scholars call it "commodity fetishism". So, my apparently immoral purchase of this doll doesn't save rainforests, cure AIDS, or ban sweatshops. But, his carnivorous grin sure is cute!

Ryuk is a God of Death from a popular manga-turned anime-turned movie-turned endless merchandise Death Note. My only miniscule feeling of guilt comes from the seeming incompatibility of my age and such a childish interest. Of course, this interest speaks to the sheer success of Japanese cross-platform media production and cross-border marketing. Interestingly, the mighty resource, Wikipedia, suggests that the notion of a God of Death, as loosely referenced in Death Note, actually came to Japan from the West in the 19th century. And, here I am, consuming this God of Death in the West through a Japanese lens. Remember those evils of globalist capitalism in all their multivalent glory! (More specifically, "hypercapitalism" via the web, according to those aforementioned scholars.)

I've never considered myself a collector, despite owning hundreds of (largely heavy metal) CDs. The closest I've come to this coveted status is the multiple Orthodox and Catholic miniature icon reproductions, which happen to sit on my other bookshelf. (I am way ahead of you: I don't consider myself a book collector either, despite certain noticeable patterns!) Or, perhaps, my Russian tin soldiers qualify. In contrast to the icons and the soldiers, I've actively sought out Ryuk. My strategy even included transparent gift hints (including this one)!

Stranger yet, I've never been interested in other anime-related media. Sure, like any aware film fan, I enjoy a Japanese comedy or two: some would say that I have a curious sense of humor when it comes to over-the-top splatterific gore as administered by a huggable drill bra (!) in Machine Girl. But that's where it ends. I swear.

So, what is it about this God of Death that leaves me wanting to "collect them all"? His wobbly yellow eyes? His insatiable appetite for..........red apples? Perhaps, the fur around his neck subliminally reminds me of those fashionable twenty thousand shirtwaist worker women who went on strike in New York in 1909-1910, as my readings tell me.

Salmon, death of the West, and Eco's runaway beard

I didn't even recognize him until he began speaking, shaved face and all. He seems to really dislike publicity photos and has a Baudrillard-like attitude toward the media. The presenters greedily emphasized that Travels in Hyperreality predated Simulacra and Simulation. I wasn't surprised, considering how the latter is academically privileged over the former across the board.

Attending a lecture by Umberto Eco has been on my "top ten things to do before I die" list ever since I was introduced to his work in 1998. A decade later, I had purchased and consumed all of his fiction, read a large bulk of his cultural criticism, starting from his republished PhD thesis on medieval aesthetics, and took a crack at some of his strictly academic work in the field of semiotics.

Even my teenage days of standing in line in subzero midwestern temperatures to get concert tickets and be "rokken-like-dokken" couldn't match my literary fandom in this case. I changed my schedule and worked two full shifts with an hour of sleep in between in order to attend this event. Then I withstood the strategic, repeated bag-kicking and foot-stomping attack by an angry old lady, who evidently wanted our seats.

During this round table discussion, Eco focused on some of his more recent essays from the Turning Back the Clock collection. His talk included issues of technology: degrading from Vista to XP and politics: using 19th century methods to solve 21st century concerns. He took multiple jabs at Berlusconi and urged for a bilateral solution to the problem of migration and ethnic replacement in Europe.

The most surprising part of the lecture was not this scholar's runaway beard, but rather his demeanor. Beyond the level of cosmopolitan erudition, one of the most stand-out aspects of Eco's fiction is his subtle, clever sense of humor. I wasn't expecting it to translate well into the live environment with spontaneous audience questions. After all, some of my other literary favorites like Zoschenko and Iskander are also funny men. Yet, at least according to the Soviet rumor mill, they are publicly known to have unpleasant, dreary personalities. Charming and quick-witted, this Italian academic destroyed my expecations by having the audience laughing out loud throughout the entire lecture.

In the true, but inadvertent spirit of turning back the clock, I recycled an old illustration of mine to make Eco a thank-you postcard. I took away some hair, but the token beard stayed!

A tiny T-34

When I saw this little guy, he reminded me of my favorite tank. Just like the Soviet T34, he looks crude, sturdy, and is about to (hopefully!) consume that technologically advanced fly.

*If you thought that I was feeling totally zen as a result of not only taking, but also posting a nature-lovin', tree-huggin', water bottle-recyclin' photograph of a frog, I trust that my tank analogy totally destroyed your initial assumption.

Shock-worker

It's been several months since I've even looked at this blog, and my never-updated personal website has been down inexplicably for two weeks. (Web hosting money well spent! And there I was thinking of redesigning it.) I'm amidst transcribing a lengthy interview regarding the unofficial Soviet rock (unfortunately, not metal specifically) music publications for one of my multiple jobs in the pre-"dissertating" stage. Stalinist shock-worker style.

I have an irreconcilable attitude toward being swept into Russia's irreconcilable history by the mere fact of having been born at the USSR's epicenter nearly twenty-eight years ago. Nonetheless, I've always admired the 30s Stakhanovite shock workers, despite having read many a book on Stalinist economics by "free" and Gulag laborers alike. And, it is not so much the peculiar brand of an ambitious work ethic than is motivating, but rather the fact that it fits my lifestyle.

The only way I can maintain the crazy train (not the Ozzy kind) pace that I've signed myself up for is by subscribing to the udarnik technique. So, whereas a normal PhD student would spread the work over a few days, with sleep and socializing-with-other-humans breaks in between, I am going to do this entire job in one go. By choice and no longer by choice.

Whereas the man who mined one hundred and two tonnes of coal in five hours and forty-five minutes may inspire me to do the same via Microsoft Word, the strange reason I came back to the blog has to do with Sex Machineguns. With the help of the Google translator, I've been reading Anchang's blog for the past week (naturally, during my well earned Stakhanovite breaks). Presumably as a result of the automated translator's limitations and my cliched perception, some of the entries sound like haikus. What I really enjoy about his blog (apart from the multiple photos of objects great and small that carry a heavy metal significance), is the fact that this Japanese rock celebrity manages to keep things succinct, frequent, entertaining, sufficiently personal, yet private at the same time (as his status would require). I'm neither succinct, Japanese, nor a celebrity (phew!), but perhaps the South-East Asian rockstar public diary is just what I need to balance out Alexey Stakhanov.