Mei was born two hours ago, at 10:01pm, Dec. 30. Mom Sayumi is fine, but boy did she yell during delivery. We could hear her on the other side of the building. Good for her–she’s usually so quiet.

A friend absolutely inundated me with literally hundreds of pictures of her baby when he was born, and he looked the same in all of them, so for the blog, just this one:

That’s Junko, Sayumi’s mother-in-law, and her hubby Shuuji.

Oh OK, one more–after all, Mei is named after the character from the Studio Ghibli movie, My Neighbor Totoro, so that makes this blog entry actually on-topic for a RevSF blog, a rare event for me, I know:

[  Mood: Cool ]
My stepdaughter Sayumi is in hospital, awaiting her induced labor to finally get started so she can get on with having her baby. The hatching should occur tonight or tomorrow.

Feel free to call me Gramps.

[  Mood: Happy ]
MERRY RASTA CHRISTMAS from LILI & FAMILY!!!

The day after I returned to Japan, Junko had an evening recital with her chanson class. It was much like the previous one, but Junko was positioned as the second the final three singers, who all did Edith Piaf songs, and were sort of the anchor of the whole thing.

Junko sang "Hymne à l’Amour" in Japanese–here is a Youtube with the original singer and English subtitles. When she started, I went close to the stage to get pictures and to give her a bouquet of roses at the end–she fixed her eyes on me and sang the song directly to me for most of it. Ah, romance! Backstage afterwards, she cried in relief that it was finally over–she’d been practicing for months–hugging me and telling me that she sang it for me.

That’s right, I’m da man.

My 5am wakeup call got me up and into the still-dribbling shower at Hotel June. Checked the TV–yep, they’re still playing Starcraft. Went down to the basement diner and refused breakfast, just had some tea. Packed into the hotel bus with some other guests, all Korean, to head to the airport, where I bought Junko a bottle of duty-free Chanel Allure for about $30 cheaper that it would’ve been in Japan.

I was a bit nervous in the Fukuoka airport: I had a suitcase filled with cheese and ziplock sandwich-sized baggies of sunflower seeds, like bags of gray-striped cocaine. But nobody even checked my bag. Japan may be an island nation and thus as endangered by foreign pests as Australia is, but they just don’t take it as seriously.

Finally, home. Junko and I embraced as Lili the Schnauzer danced around my ankles. 19-year-old Natsumi was sleeping on the sofa, and would not wake up until about 3 in the afternoon, saying, "Oh, you’re home."

And so, that’s it, the big adventure to Australia. Right now, I’m discussing with a couple of professors the possibility of doing a part-time PhD through Monash University, and if I go for it, I’ll be Down Under pretty often, at least once a year, for the next five or six years. I hope that does happen–I really liked it there.

The final day of the conference opened with a keynote address by Lucy Sussex, an Australian SF writer, speaking on utopias in Australian fiction. Good speaker, good sense of humor–I went right out and bought her latest collection, A Tour Guide in Utopia.

We had had a cold front move in that night, and it was raining a bit and very windy, so there was a door to the outside that kept banging and rattling. Andrew Milner, one of the conference organizers, went over to fix it–after many tries, he finally just stood there and held the door shut so it wouldn’t rattle. After about 20 minutes of that, I could see he was getting tired, so I relieved him and held it the rest of the talk. At the end, Lucy thanked us for being such good doorstops.

There was a camera crew there today and the day before, and I asked them if they were recording this for university archives, or for local TV, or what. I was told that they are making a documentary with a guy named Petty, that will be half live, half animated, on utopianism. No funding yet, though, so no idea if it will ever be made.

I went to one presentation on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and then another by Chris Yorke on "Utopia and the Death of Virtue"–interesting ideas floated there, about whether virtue can exist in a society with no struggle. I skipped a couple presentations after that and hit to bookstore, acquiring Lucy Sussex’s book and a couple of others. Books, by the way, are even more expensive in Australia than the imported English-language books in Japan. I have just ordered several from Amazon.com that I had decided were just too expensive to buy in Melbourne.

Then back to the conference, and Andrew Milner’s presentation on American pulp-SF utopias, followed up by a discussion of Aboriginal Dreamtime as utopia and expressions of utopia in New Zealand Maori films like The Whale Rider and Once Were Warriors. Finally, Lyman Tower Sargent gave the closing keynote, and we were done.

Brain bursting, wallet nearly emptied of my own cards and filled with other people’s cards, folder full of handouts and requested Works Cited lists, I headed back over to Mannix College. I would have to leave at the crack of dawn the next morning to get to the airport in time, so I went into the canteen to ask if I could stick a little food in my room’s fridge, since breakfast wouldn’t be open by the time I left. The woman there loaded me down with more food than I could possibly eat–I had to surreptitiously leave some of it in the canteen so it wouldn’t go to waste.

Rob Shankly came by to pick me up, and took me over to Tim Betz’s place for a BBQ. There was had good conversation, excellent beer, wonderful meat.

Tim brought me out a little cup of sunflower seeds, something I had asked about, since I can’t get them roasted in the shell here in Japan. Seems they’re not eaten in Australia to any great extent either, but Tim had managed to find some at an Indian grocer’s. I tried them and pronounced them quite tasty: much more lightly salted than the usual American ones, but that’s a good thing–since living in non-spicy, non-salty, non-sugary Japan, my taste buds have grown more sensitive and easily overwhelmed. So then Tim brought out a LOT of sunflower seeds–he said they sold them by the kilogram, so he’d bought a whole kilo of the things. He kept some of it, but what was left over would end up filling every spare space in my suitcase.

Got home, packed, called Junko in Japan for the last time, got everything ready for departure. Slept like a log until 5am, ate gobs of fruit and yogurt, left a note of thanks to the staff at Mannix, and went out to wait for Rob, who was driving me, Angela, Chris, and Hyijin to the airport, there being no buses or trains going there from the university early enough.

In the airport, picked up a few last-minute omiyage, mostly chocolate-covered macadamias, which is about the most boring souvenir ever, but whatcha gonna do, eh? I grabbed a nice Aboriginal-art necktie for myself, thus pretty much polishing off the last of my very colorful Australian cash. I did manage to keep a couple of the enormous 50-cent coins as souvenirs, though–seriously, there must be some case in which these things were used as a murder weapon. They are deadly. I can imagine ninja in bush hats using them as very heavy impact-damage shuriken.

The flight back was a lot more crowded than the flight in, but then it was a Saturday. I did my best to sleep, but it was daylight all the way, so not much luck. Watched a Korean movie about an unemployed father who gets his old college rock band back together after a member dies–not bad. Read 8 chapters of Moby-Dick to prep for Wednesday’s lecture, and Isaac Singer’s "Gimpel the Fool" for my other lit class.

At Incheon Airport outside of Seoul, there was some confusing instructions at the info desk that caused me to miss my bus to the free hotel for Korean Air’s overnighters, but I caught it about 90 minutes later. Hotel June: 2 stars on a 5-star scale. Though dinner and breakfast were free, I vowed to skip breakfast after the really terrible dinner. The room was enormous, with a single bed and a double bed, and a gorgeous bath/shower with so many nozzles that it was scary. I could only get the shower head working anyway, and the water pressure was so low it just dribbled. The traditional heated floor was nice, though, and after watching a few minutes of people playing Starcraft on what appeared to be the all-Starcraft channel, I went to sleep.

The night had been almost as warm as the day, and my little room really only had the one little window–I could’ve propped open the balcony door, but who knows what kind of insect would take up residence. I still had visions of bizarre, incredibly poisonous, Discovery Channel mostrosities. Botflies, maybe. Oh wait, those are South America, right?

I had stayed up late with my beer and my paper, practicing and looking for stuff to cut. The conference planners had put me right after another guy presenting on the same author, Iain M. Banks, and I’d met the other guy, Michael Kulbicki, the day before and confirmed that he was doing more of a general overview of Banks’ Culture novels, so I knew I could cut several big chunks out of my paper since they’d be redundant. So that combined with the heat kept me from getting much sleep.

The keynote speaker this morning was Terry Eagleton, Marxist culture theorist and rockstar academic. His address was erudite, funny, very entertaining, and it was only later that I realized it was pretty much just an ad for his soon-to-be-published book on the New Testament.

A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests. That doesn’t mean the theorists are always actual Marxists–one can study the theory in order to criticize it, after all. That’s kind of where I am. I sure do wish we could create a perfect world where everyone is truly equal and the cruelty of capitalism is reigned in, but barring the development of Star Trek replicator technology or Ken MacLeod’s cornucopia machines, I don’t see it happening. Still it’s a good dream to have. Granted, taken to extremes you get Nazi Germany or North Korea or the Khmer Rouge or Wahhabist terrorism, but the USA was arguably an attempt at creating a practical utopia, and that may be why so many fictional utopias come from America.

Anyway, our block of presentations was ably moderated by Angela–she kept us each to the 20-minute limit, largely through having let slip the day before that she had a rep for being really strict about time limits, so I think we all trimmed as much as we could.

The presentation styles were interesting. Michael, the first speaker, was a grad student doing his first conference presentation, and he spoke in a low monotone, never looking up from his paper. I was a debate-club kid in high school, and here in Japan I sometimes teach public speaking courses, and I am into acting, so I spoke clearly, projected, made as much eye contact as I could, varied pitch and tone, all that. I hadn’t practiced enough and could’ve done better, though. Dougal McNeill, the third guy, who was speaking on another Scottish author, James Kelman, turned it up to 11, however. He’s this incredibly earnest, intense public speaker–a couple of times, I thought he was going to leap across the table and grab a random audience member by the lapels. His face flushed crimson, and he kept shifting in his chair, often kneeling on it to raise himself up. The quotations from the book were in a Glaswegian dialect as well, full of expletives. He definitely kept the audience awake.

We only had about 10 people in the audience, but I got a question from Lyman Tower Sargent, another of the eminent keynote speakers, so that was nice.

The rest of the day was much like the day before, packed with presentations. Of note was Alec Charles on utopias and dystopias in current TV shows; he focused on the new Dr. Who and Torchwood, but touched on many others, especially Battlestar Galactica. Alec is a media-studies prof who used to live in this part of Japan, and we talked about mutual acquaintances between blocks. And in the early-evening block, Angela presented on early-20th-century utopian schemes in Japan.

That evening, Angela, Alec, and a couple from the University of Tokyo, Canadian Chris Yorke and Korean Hyijin Lee, allowed me to lead them back to the train station, where we spent a pleasant evening in an Indian-run pizza restaurant. Damn fine pizza, and much better beer–most of us drank Boags. On the way back, in the now-cool, fly-free dark, Angela and Hyijin fell behind for some girl talk (we suspect largely about Chris and the future), while I listened to Chris and Alec trading gossip about the keynote speakers. Alec had actually been a student of Eagleton’s, and boy did he have some juicy stuff. The "rockstar academic" thing is well-earned, it seems.

Oh, almost forgot to mention what happened pre-night-out. I had gone back to my room to change out of coat-and-tie, intending to meet the others in the lobby. I had a few minutes, so I decided to go out on my balcony and take some pics of the lovely courtyard. I swear, I made certain that the balcony door was unlocked! But when it closed behind me, apparently it latched all by itself, and I was unable to get back in. After 10 minutes of rattling the handle and looking over the edge, wondering if I could climb down 3 floors without shattering my bones, I decided that I’m no Spiderman. Swallowing my pride, I shouted for help. Finally, a German guy on the first floor came out to see what all the shouting was about, and he went to the office and got someone to come unlock my room door and let me back in. Very embarrassing, but dammit, they need to fix that door!

Which, by the way, I did not even open again for the rest of my stay.

The subject is a little confusing, as this is the first day of the actual conference. Anyway, came down for breakfast and met some fellow-attendees, all pleasant folks. I found out that one of them, Angela Yiu, would be moderating the block of presentations that I’d be part of, so we got to talking. She’s from Hong Kong but teaches Japanese literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, a really nice school. Her husband is Japanese, though he has lived most of his life in the USA, so she claims to speak better Japanese than he does. They have two daughters and a whole lot of pets, including a goat, which makes them semi-celebrities in Tokyo, though they always turn down the numerous requests to feature them in "check out the weirdies" type TV shows. Anyway, she turned out to be really nice, and we did a lot of hanging out together during the conference.

Then it was over to campus. There had been a huge storm the day before I arrived, but now things had dried out and the bush flies were starting to get out in force. They don’t bite, thank goodness, and they’re smaller and have a lighter touch than American houseflies, so they’re not too hard to ignore, but they can be quite annoying if there are a lot of them–as there would be the next day. Luckily, when the sun goes down, they disappear, so evenings were nice.

Tom Moylan, scholar of utopia and dystopia in SF, kicked things off with a lecture titled, "Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction," in which he compared utopian writing to the Subtle Knife from Pullman’s series, something to slice a window into another world, allowing us a glimpse.

After that, the regular presentations began. I went to one by Paul Cheung on a whimsical pre-WW2 Chinese SF novel, Lao She’s Cat Country, about cat people living on Mars, one that called for a communist revolution but which also made it clear that the revolution would end in disaster. The author later under interrogation by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. This was followed by Kong Xinren’s presentation on several recent Chinese SF novels, but her English skills left a lot to be desired, and nobody really got much out of it.

The rest of the day was a mix of really interesting presentations, barely comprehensible ones, and the occasional "who let this guy in?" disasters. I was really sad that I opted to go to one block that ended up having nothing interesting, causing me to miss a presentation on Farscape’s wormholes (never figured out what that had to do with utopias), and grad-student Evie Kendal’s one on the role of the author in utopian writing, which I was told later was one of the best presentations in the conference.

We ended at 6pm, a really packed day of lecture after lecture, Q&A sessions, my brain left bursting with new ideas. Despite the few damp squibs, I was really enjoying the conference as a whole, having lots of conversations between blocks.

That evening after dinner at the dorm, I decided to wander out to the shopping area about 25 minutes away by foot. The flies were still around, since the sun wouldn’t be setting until about 8:30. Again I was reminded of Texas–the little houses with tile roofs and dry, scruffy yards achingly reminded me of South Austin. This is out in Clayton, a suburb of Melbourne, and so like in most American cities, everything is far away and hardly anyone walks, so I was pretty much by myself. As I approached Clayton’s "downtown," I was really happy to see the Korean and Indian and Greek and Malaysian shops and restaurants, a kind of ethnic diversity I’ve missed in Japan. Fukuoka has some diversity of course, but it’s 95% Japanese and most of the rest is American fast-food. I regretted having already eaten, but I bought a few things to take back to my room anyway. I was downing a local beer in my room when I suddenly realized I might be breaking some rule of the College–oh well, too late.

I’ve been back in Japan for 3 days now, and I’m just getting caught up enough that I wanted to make a quick post to start off with what happened on my trip Down Under. I still haven’t uploaded pics to Photobucket yet, so I’ll add them in later.

OK, so I took Korean Air, Fukuoka to Seoul to Melbourne, way more direct than any of the other choices, and cheaper than all but Vietnam Air, which would’ve been a lot less convenient schedule-wise (but would’ve given me to option of visiting Saigon…hmm, maybe next time). Anyway, I can recommend Korean Air–not great, but far from the worst airline I’ve flown on. Surprisingly awful kimchee with the dinner, though, and I had this confirmed by Lee, the Korean PhD student I was to meet later. Korean Air’s kimchee was kind of like eating spicy tree roots.

It’s less than an hour from Fukuoka to Seoul, but about 11 hours to Melbourne after that, overnight on the way there. I brought along my MP3 player and listened to This Week in Tech and PC Gamer Podcast and This American Life and Savage Love and so on. One of the last ones I listened to on the way back was the Episode 64 of Chicken-Fried Radio, which features Mary Jo Pehl, aka Dr. Clayton Forrester’s mom from Mystery Science Theater 3000. She’s a hoot, and it saddens me that CFR hasn’t put up any new episodes since October.

Anyway, with the plane less than half full, I could stretch out, and got way more sleep than I usually do on flights.

Arriving at Tullamarine Airport, I queued up and went through the very slow line of people who had something to declare. I knew that Australia’s quarantine laws are strict, and as someone who grew up in Hawaii for awhile, I understand why. But next time I’m not bringing ANYTHING that I have to declare–no snacks, nothing. I got passed through with no problems, but I could’ve gotten out of there a lot faster if I hadn’t put some snacks for friends in my bag.

Then I met Tim Betz, a friend from the Delta Green Mailing List, who must’ve been waiting at least an hour for me. Tim had kindly agreed to pick me up at the airport, because Melbourne’s public transportation leaves a bit to be desired. We headed out and it reminded me a lot of Texas, but with everyone driving on the other side of the road.

As a former student of Monash University, my destination, he still lives in the area, which is great because Monash is pretty far out in the suburbs. Tim dropped me off at Mannix College, which is not a college in the American sense, but rather a Catholic-run dormitory, and a very pleasant one at that, right across the street from the university.

While they were getting my room ready, I went in search of Dr. Andrew Milner, a professor with the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash. I had emailed him earlier and arranged to meet him, and he turned out to be a very friendly, engaging guy who gladly answered all my questions. You see, I’m trying to get started on a PhD that I can do by distance study, and Monash is rated pretty highly, plus it’s almost in the same time zone, making communication easier. I may very well decide to go with Monash, assuming they’ll have me.

After finally checking into my room and dropping off my stuff, I rejoined Tim and we went to meet Rob Shankly, another DGMLer, and they took me downtown to show me around Melbourne a bit. Sadly, I just didn’t have time to do some of the touristy things, like visit the Ned Kelly Museum. Hopefully I’ll be making trips down there once or twice a year, though. But we had some good food, and I bought some souvenirs just in case I didn’t have time later: a plush platypus for Natsumi, an Aboriginal-art tshirt for Sayumi, a coffee mug for a coworker. On the way back, Tim took me to a supermarket where I mainly bought cheese, since cheese is very expensive and limited in variety in Japan.

Finally, I slipped into Mannix College late and quietly went to my room. Not as small as I’d imagined, and with a beautiful view of the flower-filled courtyard. I phoned Junko, failed to get an answer, took a shower and phoned her again–success! Hearing her voice was wonderful, and I fell asleep on my narrow bed soon after turning out the light.

Tomorrow: Utopia!

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
Well, I finished my paper on Iain M. Banks late last night, and tomorrow I board a jet for Australia. I’ll be gone for one week; Joe and Shane will be manning the Boards and squashing spammers while I’m gone. (So if you spot any problems, send a message to them.)

I’m almost sad to make this entry–I was the longest-unupdated blog for about a week there.

After I get back, I’ll try to be more social. Man, it’s going to be good, not researching for a month or so. Just teaching my classes and other work will seem like a vacation!