we're going on a bear hunt.

Driven by the unanimous advice of the internet, I tried to find literary magazines in bookstores so I could actually read them.  Borders was the obvious choice - the Barnes and Noble version 2 is the biggest bookstore in Melbourne.  As Stephen King had warned me, the magazines are all piled in the back, out of sight and out of mind, but at least for Stephen King, he did find literary magazines, even if he had to stoop for them.  The only magazines I found were The Literary Review, something called Good Reading, and Australian Book Review. 

Next I tried the Melbourne Library.  I'd only seen the Famous exhibit previously, but had never entered the real holdings - and they are beautiful, like a cleaner, smoother Butler Library, with plenty of tables and IKEA-esque chairs, spacious and well-lit with high ceilings, elegant architecture, and some art galleries thrown in for good measure.  I had high hopes - they had a whole glass-enclosed journals collection.  I walked through said collection and was dismayed to find that ninety percent of the journals were civil/administrative/occupational, or related to animals.  There was one measly bookcase for literature, and it featured Shakespearean Quarterly and the ilk.  However, I did discover that one of the statues outside the Melbourne Library is of one of my favorite historical figures, Jeunne d' Arc. 

A complete bust at Angus & Robertson - they don't even sell magazines, and their only clients seem to be little old ladies.  There was, however, one of those living statue street performers nearby.  It reminded me of Hot Fuzz.  I suppose it does take talent to blink at such a slow speed.

I tried to find Collins, but failed - however, I did find a store I wish I'd gone into, Minotaur, some kind of pop-culture basement superstore that won my heart not by the anime covers on display but for pinning up my favorite H. R. Giger painting, Li II.  I also found what i thought would save me for sure - a cute little nook in Elizabeth St. called NationMag, featuring only magazines (and three-dollar coffee).  Grown-up hipsters pushed past me, children sat under the stairs with laptops - yes, it was one of those "secret" hang-outs, cool and carpeted.  I went to their Art & Literature section - no luck.  The same Good Reading offers, and some rather condescending magazines called Writer that are supposed to help fools like me.

I finally went into a Tattersall's.  At least here I found a new Granta and Zoetrope: All Story.  Granta, "the magazine for new writers" is of course anything but - the writing, however, was not too "precious"* and it remains an option in the far, far future.  Zoetrope: All Story has amazing photography and some of the essays were "precious", but the stories were awful.  The first one was a banal account of some guy's sexual encounters ("That lips.  That face.  I  yanked her panties down") and the second one actually made me laugh and put the entire magazine away.  Only a man would describe a girl's first period as feeling like "a tiny egg cracked open between her legs".

I crossed Lonsdale St. because I saw a sign for The Strand.  I was, I suppose, delirious by then and thought it was actually possible that a New York specialty would make it to nearly Antarctica.  And yes, I was wrong - it was just the name of a shopping arcade filled with flight booking agencies and jewelry stores.  Crossing the street did, however, rescue me from another bookstore: The Catholic Bookshop. 

*: like precocious, except grown-up and having artistic skill, if not purpose. 

conclusion: I am awesome.

Is it a telling sign that my NYTimes update email was called "Today's Headlines: null"? I need to take my mind off this story (which is now called "Everyone I Love Has Died", how's that for bright and shiny?) and off corruption (research) because those two things have combined to make me feel not-myself. In other words, I need to take quizzes.

( amber is the color of your energy. )

Ah, that feels better!

Also:

( does this mean I'm doomed for Columbia forever? )

Here's an interesting tidbit of info from the front: Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones.  I'm not sure how it'll work, but it seems like a step in the right direction.  Also, I love George Clooney.  Why are all his movies amazing?  

lucian pye = on my bad list.

I am rapidly turning against relativism. I'm still a constructivist, of course, but I'm starting to see a suspicious trend in relativists: basically, blaming the problems (which they insist, condescendingly, are not real "problems" but just "quirks") of developing countries on those countries' cultures, and not, say, on anything anyone else (like their own countries) might have done. Hey, you know who's a relativist? Katzenstein. You know who else is? Samuel Huntington. I tell you, there's Old School Relativism, defined by Huntington, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are broken, because I say so". Then there's New School Relativism, defined by Katzenstein and now Pye, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are just 'different', and we should love them despite these differences, the way we love special ed children".  Either way it's a brand of racism.

I mean, you gotta love this guy. First he has the obligatory politically correct statement that he clearly doesn't believe in:

Instinctively we pause before accepting such a conclusion because several generations of Americans, taught by the texts of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, know that it is wrong to be ethnocentric. 28

Right, boys and girls, remember, it's wrong *wink wink* to be ethnocentric *wink wink*.  Then he tells us that Suharto had "bold and imaginative" policies (332) - such thinking will get you disowned in my family.  Here's the clincher, though, his cleansing of his Western guilt and declaration that Asian nationalism (or just all Asians?) are racist:

In the immediate postwar years it was assumed that Asian nationalism was largely a reaction to colonialism and the Western impact, which to a degree it was. Since then it has become clear that the intensity of xenophobia is more closely correlated with the strength of paternalistic styles of authority. The more the culture conceives of authority as being a nurturing force for a ‘family’ collectivity, the sharper the sense of boundary between its members and foreigners. Distrust of the foreigner has resulted not so much from bad experiences with outsiders as from a deeply felt need to repay paternalistic authority and maintain the cohesion of the collectivity. 329

LOVE IT.