I found his memoir to be incredibly self-consciously literary and pompous. Also, I felt like he was constantly writing about how this or that experience allowed him to tap into some primal Japanese-ness. (I don't want to prejudice you against it, though. It's been a few years since I read it, and while the bad taste lingers, the memories of specifics have faded.)
And it's good to hear your thoughts on the friendships. It was brought home to me pretty hard this weekend, when I invited a person I hadn't seen in about a year to a fundraising party for INCITE, the group that I organize with. It's someone that I love, that I have history with, but we are just not on the same page anymore, and some of the shit that he was saying...Damn!
It's sad to see friendships not functioning at the same level, but at the same time, I do feel good to be certain about my convictions. As hard as it is to kind of out myself as finding something offensive, I find that it feels better to have said it and not stew over it later. And I feel good about having many friends now that I can have hard conversations with, who don't tell me I'm overreacting or crazy if I call out racism/name-your-awful-dynamic-of-oppression that I see.
(And then again...) I think I just don't want to be at a place where I can't relate to people, can't enjoy people, unless we share the same political convictions. I want to be able to get along with all kinds of people, you know? And maybe being faced with the possibility of not having that is hard, even if I didn't have it before... It also makes me scared of being another kind of minority, which is fucked up.
Wow - something about this line of thinking has tapped into my confessional vein. Sorry to dump all that on you!
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Re: read this in a single sitting...
Mon, Jul. 30th, 2007 06:19 pm (UTC)I found his memoir to be incredibly self-consciously literary and pompous. Also, I felt like he was constantly writing about how this or that experience allowed him to tap into some primal Japanese-ness. (I don't want to prejudice you against it, though. It's been a few years since I read it, and while the bad taste lingers, the memories of specifics have faded.)
And it's good to hear your thoughts on the friendships. It was brought home to me pretty hard this weekend, when I invited a person I hadn't seen in about a year to a fundraising party for INCITE, the group that I organize with. It's someone that I love, that I have history with, but we are just not on the same page anymore, and some of the shit that he was saying...Damn!
It's sad to see friendships not functioning at the same level, but at the same time, I do feel good to be certain about my convictions. As hard as it is to kind of out myself as finding something offensive, I find that it feels better to have said it and not stew over it later. And I feel good about having many friends now that I can have hard conversations with, who don't tell me I'm overreacting or crazy if I call out racism/name-your-awful-dynamic-of-oppression that I see.
(And then again...) I think I just don't want to be at a place where I can't relate to people, can't enjoy people, unless we share the same political convictions. I want to be able to get along with all kinds of people, you know? And maybe being faced with the possibility of not having that is hard, even if I didn't have it before... It also makes me scared of being another kind of minority, which is fucked up.
Wow - something about this line of thinking has tapped into my confessional vein. Sorry to dump all that on you!