Brett's A-Pop Blog

Since seminar this morning, I’ve been thinking a lot about the title of Paper Bullets, and all the things it could possibly mean within the context of the novel. I think it mostly just refers to all of the different dualities relating to Kip. One idea I had was that it refers to the balance between Kip’s sensitivity (paper, soft) and his masculinity (bullets, hard). In the novel, Kip conditions himself to keep his emotions locked up from other people based on his experiences with abusive relationships as well as indulging in his own masculinity. One one hand, he’s really insecure and sensitive, and has a ‘people pleasing’ complex (which his therapist tells him is a common Asian trait). On the other, he wants to assert his own strength through his relationships, using sex as a tool for that.

The masculine side of him always seemed like more of a projection, or a defense mechanism to me. Maybe an idea of someone he ideally wanted to be, or thought he should be. It could have also been his own insecurity about his identity in regards to Asian stereotypes, particularly ones associated with passiveness. But, this side of him had this certain abrasive quality to it, and it was reflected in his writing when describing his moments of masculinity. I think that mostly has to do with his frank and detailed descriptions of sex, and by extension his feeling towards the woman he was with at the time.

With his sensitive side, I noticed how eager Kip was to have that be brought out, despite his efforts to keep it concealed. With Katherine, she says something about him being a “sweet lover” and he immediately is more taken to her than he was before. He wants to settle down with her and have children, or at least he thinks he does, despite her being a despicable human being (which he acknowledges). It could have to do with his own need of approval, which was probably rooted in his relationship with his father, but I don’t want to psychoanalyze that too much.

I just thought it could be another duality of many that make up his character. It also makes me wonder how many more dualities I missed in this book while reading it.

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I’m sitting in the airport right now, with about 3 hours to kill until my flight boards, which means it’s time to generate blog content.

I realized in seminar yesterday that there’s a lot of nuance in the books that we’re reading that I don’t catch on the initial read. We spent a while discussing the section in the book about the weird teacher that Lovey finds herself enamored with. It was a really fulfilling discussion in which we were able to look at how Yamanaka structured the chapter in relation to the narrative of the chapter. On second glance, it actually read like a horror movie after the kids go to see the Exorcist. Which raises a lot of questions, especially in regards to the communication between Lovey and her mother, as well as the haunting experience with the teacher. I thought this was really interesting, and I wish I had caught it when I was initially reading and annotating.

But, I’m one of those people that doesn’t find annotating necessarily helpful for retaining and analyzing information. At least with novels. I really prefer just to read it through, uninterrupted. For whatever reason I feel pressure to just put things on the page, even if I don’t necessarily read anything that I think really needs to be pointed out. I do see how annotation is a useful tool, and I would be lying if I said I haven’t made some significant connections through it this quarter, but I think it caters to a certain type of reader or student. Maybe I’m not allowing myself to look closer, and to be fair I should probably give myself the time to look closer because I often squeeze the reading into a whole day or two, whenever I’m not swamped with my other class.

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Again…. I don’t really know what to write for this section this week. It was nice having a long weekend, I’ve felt pretty burnt out this quarter, but that’s probably more due to me taking twenty credits than taking this class in general.

The week after next I’ll be going to Vegas for Thanksgiving, which is a city I have a weird relationship with. My family just relocated there this year from Indiana, and I’ve always had family there and have been there a number of times, but it’s always felt weird and isolating to be there. It’s probably because I don’t do well in heat, and I’m not generally interested in the things Vegas has to offer. I plan on moving there after I graduate this year, mostly just to take at least a year (or nine) off from school and to work and save up money for whatever comes next. Or maybe I’ll take the big dive and become a blackjack dealer and stay there forever. What does this have to do with anything?

Sorry for the Low Effort Content.

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In seminar this week, it came up that the books we are reading don’t generally have a sense of closure in their narrative. It was pointed out that the implementation of closure in narrative is largely Western. It was something I never really considered before, just how much emphasis is placed on the happy ending or a sense of closure in the media we consume in this country. We have been so conditioned to expect it, which is really sort of disturbing when you think about it. It reminds me of this music theory class I took in high school where our teacher was playing the major scales and would leave out the tonic note (the first and last note in a scale) to make us feel uncomfortable without that closure. People were squirming at this, and begging that the teacher finish it. When he finally did, there was a collective sigh of relief. It’s really a fascinating/terrifying thing.

I’ve noticed that generally some people have been put off by this lack of closure in the books we’ve read, and that it has seemed to impact their overall opinion of the book. I think it’s important not to let that overlook what the author was trying to say throughout the book, though. There’s a reason for that lack of closure, it’s not just there to provoke. The subjects we’re touching on are messy, to say the least. History is messy. I think we need to sit with that messiness and lack of closure, not only to challenge this weird thing we’ve been conditioned to expect, but also to be able to fully take in the meat of the author’s writing. Or else, what are we really doing here?

I hope this wasn’t too soapbox-y.

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Welp.

We’re halfway done with the quarter now, which came really fast. I feel as if I have a bunch of threads in my mind from what we’ve studied so far that have been connecting with each lecture, book we read and film we watch. I’m really scatterbrained typically, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how I, but mostly everyone else, have been able to connect all of these different texts together. It’s felt like a really fulfilling experience so far, especially hearing other people’s perspectives and lived experiences which have greatly helped to inform my notes, and connections in this program.

For some reason these personal posts are always the most difficult for me to write, and I’m trying to figure that one out. Another thread. Maybe it’s because I don’t enjoy talking about myself that much? Or maybe I’m too tired? Hungry? I think that maybe I haven’t been actively thinking about my own connections to the films we’ve watched or the books we’ve read. I know I connected to Dark Blue Suit through the relationship between Buddy and his father, but, do I want to talk about that? I made the previous post about how I lived in suburbia and connected it to Better Luck Tomorrow, and I guess that’s the only time I’ve felt confident about discussing my personal connections. Maybe it’s just a fear of opening up even though I largely see this blog as talking into an abyss, even though it’s open for everyone to see. Regardless, I think it’s something I’ll pay attention to in the coming weeks, and I’ll try to churn out some more personal connections in these posts. I’ll try to rectify all these halfway thoughts.

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After our class on Tuesday, I’ve found myself fascinated in all the ways comedy is used, subtle or not. I liked Chico’s definition of satire as being something that destroys something else, hopefully in order to build something on top of it. I had never thought about it that way before. This week, and in the article on Black humor that we read, humor has been described as something that protects, attacks, heals and empowers people. Thinking about humor in all of these different contexts was actually sort of mind blowing to me, but I think that might be reflective of how little I’ve really thought about or valued humor in my own life.

For me personally, I always associated the word humor with “stand up comedy” exclusively. I don’t know if that speaks to the prevalence or popularity of stand up in America, but that’s always what I sort of conflated the idea of humor with. Obviously humor takes forms in different mediums like visual art, literature, performance art etc. But to me it says a lot that the first thing I associate (typically) when the word humor comes out is stand up. Maybe it is because it is the most visible in our culture? The most subversive? The most offensive? The most honest? I think it probably has something to do with the cult of personality (or celebrity) that America has, and once someone gains notoriety we’re more inclined to listen to them and flock to them. I also think that stand up is something that is close to universal, at least in our culture. There is seemingly a comic for anybody (for better or for worse). Regardless, it is a powerful platform to have.

Thinking about humor this week, it’s really dawned on me that it is a sort of universal language. I think that this can be an incredibly powerful tool, especially for marginalized people.

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The movie Better Luck Tomorrow reminded me of my own adolescence growing up in the suburbs. Minus the crime syndicate and murder. Mostly. It reminded me of how much of a bubble it is to live in suburbia, especially as a satellite to a larger city. It’s too small to have its own distinct identity, but generally there’s one common thread between all of suburbia: boredom. I saw Better Luck Tomorrow as taking this idea of suburban boredom and ennui and showcasing how apathetic it can make some people, obviously to an exaggerated extent. The town I grew up created this same sense of apathy in a lot of people as well, leaving them to their own devices. Living in such a bubble, especially one that was voted the #1 safest place to live according to some in-flight magazine, makes it hard to truly consider the gravity of your decisions. It always felt as if this atmosphere invited people to behave in cruel ways simply for entertainment value. Since I’ve been four years removed from living in that suburb, it’s given me a lot of time to think about how a place like suburbia functions, and why it is that way. I still hold the opinion that suburbia is one of the strangest living communities to be in, just based on what’s on the surface vs. what bubbles underneath it. One girl I knew put it as living in a place that was “physically safe, but mentally and emotionally unsafe.” I thought the film played on the idea of apathetic boredom in a really great way, with the ending sort of creating this open ended scene where you don’t actually know if it has resonated with the main character that he has killed the boyfriend of the girl he is now seeing. It made me think of something that happened right before I moved away where two guys that lived in my town got into a fight over a girl, and one of them stabbed the other in the heart, which killed him. The ending of this movie made me think of that and wonder, “Because of this bubble that we lived in, did the gravity of that situation ever really dawn on him?” I think that’s a really terrifying thought.

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Minidoka No. 5 (442nd), Roger Shimomura

While at the Tacoma Art Museum I saw this piece by Roger Shimomura, an artist from Seattle, entitled Minidoka No. 5 (442nd). According to the corresponding information it was created in a pop art style, a movement most known for being pioneered by Andy Warhol, and was created to confront the stereotypes that are associated with Asian Americans. It also serves as a piece to pay tribute to the Japanese American men who were in the U.S. military during World War 2, in spite of being prisoners due to their ancestry.

I guess I just wanted to make a post about this piece because it was my personal favorite that I saw at the art museum that day. I really loved how it specifically used the pop art style to convey its message, considering the works by Andy Warhol utilized American iconography like Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn Monroe; two things that are associated with dominant American culture in the 20th century. I also noticed that, in comparison with the Marilyn Monroe piece by Warhol, the men represented in each of the portraits are distinct, whereas the Monroe piece only shows the same picture of her over and over again, creating this narcissistic and homogenous effect. The Monroe piece was made soon after her death to memorialize her, but again through Warhol’s lense it seems narcissistic and self serving. This piece actually memorializes these men, while also subverting the stereotypes of the Japanese army, and Japanese men during World War 2.

I’m not really a great art critic, but this piece appealed to me due to the fact that it borrows from a style that has become iconic and ingrained in the American consciousness for years, despite the fact of it being glorified navel gazing and mostly devoid of any real meaning in my opinion, and makes it into something deeply personal and meaningful. Anyways, my opinions on Andy Warhol aside, I’m glad I was fortunate enough to see this piece in person, especially considering the reading this week.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of the Major’s new Scarlett Johansson body being referred to as a “shell” in the movie. This thought mostly persisted in my head because of the saying referring to someone as “a shell of their former self”. I haven’t seen the original film, or read the manga, but I would assume the usage of “shell” referring to the new body would be pointing to the disconnect of the original soul and the new manufactured body, slightly altering the wording of the theory of the “ghost in the machine”. Going back to the “former self” saying, given that Scarlett Johansson’s character is revealed to be Japanese, does that add a new dimension to that saying? Her new body is capable of doing extraordinary superhuman things, which supposedly wouldn’t lead someone to levy that claim against her physically. But is she a shell of her former self in that her soul now inhabits someone of a different race, furthering the distance between the soul and the body even more? I don’t think the film addresses that, with the reveal of the Major’s past seeming more like a cheap way to keep the character Japanese while also keeping Scarlett in the role and having a needless twist.

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