Today (7/7) is Tanabata, the Star Festival, a celebration based on a legend out of China about the Weaver Princess (aka the star Vega), daughter of the King of Heaven, and a cowherd (aka the star Altair), who fell in love and were secretly married. The girl’s father got mad, of course, and as these things go in myth, he separated them in the sky, with the Milky Way river between them. If it’s a clear night tonight, they will be able to have their one conjugal visitation per year, but if it’s raining, then sucks to be them. Since this is often still the Rainy Season, they rarely get lucky, but this year should be a good one for getting it on in heaven, as the Rainy Season seems to have given up the ghost a little early this year, with a nice thunderstorm a couple nights ago.

This of course has nothing to do with utopia, but the Chinese mythology, the activities of gods and such, got me thinking of my favorite role-playing game, Exalted, which unlike almost every other fantasy RPG available, goes for an Asian feel rather than a Western European one, and not only that, does it well, which I think is unique among FRPGs.

But it certainly shares some characteristics with other FRPGs, and one of them is that it is set in a time long after the fall of a great Golden Age, one that everyone talks about and longs for and that your characters just might be able to reestablish. But again, while most FRPGs just have that as a vague background which is then almost totally ignored, the First Age looms large in the Exalted setting, because the characters are reincarnations of the great god-kings of that period–they are the ones who created that utopia…and are really the ones responsible for destroying it. Thus, the question of whether they should even try to reestablish it is a complex one; the game examines the question of whether utopia is such a good idea at all.

White Wolf recently published a super-keen box set called Dreams of the First Age, which is a two-book alternate campaign setting for playing in that utopia before it fell, back when your character was powerful enough to destroy cities without breaking a sweat. The set comes with a cloth map of Creation, which was a bit different in the First Age; a guidebook to the mega-city of Meru, capital of the Solar Deliberative; a battle wheel (apparently tossed in just for the hell of it); a book on the setting, and a book on the characters.

As usual, the books are fascinating reading–I haven’t had a chance to put together an Exalted game for, man, going on two years now, but I still buy the books and drop everything else to read them when they arrive in the mail. The glories of the First Age are awesome, as is the rot that will obviously result in its fall. The Solar Exalted have created utopia, but their madness grows with their age and power. The game blames this madness on a curse laid on them by their ancient enemies, but it serves as a metaphor for the inability of humans to handle godlike powers and immortality.

From my point of view, this is more than just a FRPG setting–it’s a utopia in the sense that Thomas More’s Utopia is one, and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun is one, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is one. That is, it’s not a novel set in a utopia; it is a book that describes a utopia for our consideration. And comparing it to the classic utopias, I have to say that it’s one of the most fascinating and deep I’ve ever read. Like any utopia, it is a metaphor for our real world, questioning whether we’re on the right path, whether we couldn’t be doing it better–and whether it would be better for us NOT to try for utopia.

The only complaint I have about it is in the Characters book, which is about important figures in the setting and rules tweaks for making characters of the period. The complaint is that, when it lists the stats for important characters, it lists ALL of their Charms (magical abilities), which for a mature First Age Solar can run to 2 pages of close type. Why don’t they just say, "He has any Charm the GM wants him to have, but here are a dozen of the ones he favors"? Did the writers actually think it would be useful to list hundreds of Charms, almost every Charm available?

This is a weakness of the game itself, that as characters get powerful, even the players can forget what powers their characters have–and the GM is in a nightmare situation, trying to keep track of the powers of, say, a half-dozen powerful NPCs at once. Personally, I would solve it by saying they could only have a number of "ready" Charms equal to some multiple of their Essence characteristic, say Essence x 4–and Combos count as a single Charm, encouraging players to invent cool custom Combos.

Anyway, if I weren’t already planning to focus on utopias in the fiction of African-American writers for my dissertation, I would be all up for writing a big paper on utopia in Exalted.

Can we really call the USA a utopian experiment? Depends on your definition. If a utopia is heaven on Earth, then no, not really, because the Founders were too practical for that. But if a utopia can be called an attempt to create a radically different, vastly better society that attempts to increase happiness for the greatest number of people, then yes, definitely.

That’s not to say that the Founders achieved total success. They were, well, less-than-perfect men, what with slavery, and genocide of the aboriginal population, and treating women like property, and all that. But without that initial utopian dream, put into practice through grimy political compromise, how would the evolution of ideas of freedom and equality have occurred? By making the idea of democracy work, imperfectly at first and certainly still imperfect, they proved it was viable. If it had failed, as it did in France due to their reaching too high (resulting in the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, etc.), it could have discredited the whole notion of democracy as dangerously radical for decades or even centuries, just as the notion of communism is discredited today by the disaster that was the Soviet Union.

John Gray claims that utopia is a nightmare that is doomed to end "in a huge river of human blood," and what with the Khmer Rouge and North Korea and Stalin and so on, he has a lot of supporting evidence on his side. And I think he may be right, in the sense that trying to create a heaven on earth, right now, is going to end up badly. But without that utopian dream and the desire to experiment, how do we improve?

What it takes is a balance of dream and practicality, leavened with a good dose of human compassion. America, at any time, is home to hundreds of small-scale utopian experiments, and the vast majority of them, like hippie communes and Brook Farm, fail due to a lack of practicality. Some survive, like the Amish colonies, but in a way that will keep them limited in scope.

The compassion is needed to avoid the fate of many large-scale totalitarian utopias, such as North Korea. Even successful ones that survive for centuries, such as ancient Sparta, manage to be utopias only by building upon the misery of state-terrorized slaves and ideologically enslaved citizens. This is why that bit about the "pursuit of happiness" is so important.

So, while America is far from perfect and no utopia from most people’s points of view, it is in the constant process of becoming a utopia. That it will never reach that indefinable state is probably a good thing, on the whole, but the dream needs to be held onto in order to keep the process going. As long as we’re on the road to utopia, we’re being true to the spirit of America.

Happy 232nd birthday.

Hurray! My blog finally reached the very last position of blog listings.

Well, not really the last, just the last on the front page of them.

I’ve just been quite busy lately, but that’s an easy excuse, as I am never not busy. I’m reading some of James Baldwin’s essays in preparation for my utopian paper on him, alternating with reading some of Ernst Bloch’s utopian musings on music in The Principles of Hope. Bloch is a trip: a Christian-mystic communist. Trying to wrap my head around some of his statements is as good as playing through a whole game of Brain-Age. Fun, but a bit tiring.

"Nova Atlantis" is meant to be an homage to both Francis Bacon’s 17th-century utopia, New Atlantis, and Ursula Le Guin’s excellent 1975 short story of the same name.

As a big Iain M. Banks fan, I would’ve called it "The Culture," but wgk333 beat me to it!

Setting terms: Lyman Tower Sargent (who I met in Australia last December) and Gregory Claeys offer some definitions in their book, The Utopia Reader (NYU Press, 1999):

Now, their definitions are good ones, but not, I think, the only ones, and sometimes not the best ones for the kind of literature I’m into. Like, for a paper I got published a few months ago, I examined real-life utopias in Herman Melville’s first two novels, Typee and Omoo. These were Polynesian utopias: the Taipi Valley in the Marquesas Islands (a utopia about to be invaded and destroyed), Tahiti (a utopia dying from contact with the modern world), and Hawaii (an already-fallen utopia). Melville fictionalized them a bit, but they were essentially real.

Then there is the utopia in the paper I’m working on now, in James Baldwin’s masterpiece short story, "Sonny’s Blues." It’s an ephemeral utopia, a moment of communion among the people listening the to the title character play jazz, when they escape from the dystopia that is mid-century Harlem (and, for black people, pre-civil-rights America as a whole) and enter, only for a moment, an imaginary space where race no longer matters, where being the older brother or the younger brother no longer matters, where people who simply could not articulate their truths or listen to each other can finally understand each other. It is a society only in the loosest definition, and it exists only in the space of shared understanding.

Some little points which readers may or may not know: In Greek, "u topos" means "no place." Thomas More, writer of the essay/book Utopia, coined the word as the name of his fictional land, which reads very much like an early-twentieth-century SF story–no plot, just description of a society. But "eu topos" sounds the same and means "good place." "Dystopia" of course means "bad place," and is a more recent coinage.

I’ll try to provide some examples of genre books/stories that fit into the categories above, or which break the categories, but that is for another day. I need to write a quiz right now.

For quite some time I’ve been thinking I ought to focus this blog on something, and Dharma’s recent comment on the Boards just gave me the push to get off my pasty white butt and do it.

So, this blog will no longer be about the random crap it has long been about. For those who want to see pics of Japan, my family, and my dog, or ruminations about this and that, I’ve started a new blog here. (By the way, there’s nothing there yet, but I will make update announcements here for that tiny number of you who are interested.)

Instead, I’m going to focus on the theme of utopia. As you probably know, utopian themes are the focus of my literature studies these days, and I’m planning to start a PhD in a couple months with the same focus. So I’m sure to come across a lot of stuff connected to that, stuff that may not fit into my papers, but that I can share with you. Or even if it does fit into my papers, I can still share it with you.

Utopia, of course, is an important part of SF–today, it’s pretty rare for non-SF utopias to be written, though that certainly wasn’t always true. And to make a utopia, you pretty much have to go through a revolution, even if the result of many revolutions is dystopia. So I figure it fits well here at the Revolution SF community.

Right, more later.

Golden Week has actually been over for a few days, but this is the first Monday since it ended, so I’m really feeling it now.

We had a guest for about 2 weeks: Lucie, a ceramics artist from Ottawa, who had studied in Arita ("Birthplace of Japanese Porcelain") for awhile and had met Junko there. This was her first return to Japan in about 12 years. It was a lot of fun having her–she left on Saturday to spend some time with a friend in Kyoto.

With the guest and working on my paper for the lit conference, I haven’t had much time to just relax. But my presentation was on Saturday, and it was well-attended and well-received, with some really good questions asked that will help me in revising for publication.

Also, there was an announcement at the conference that my proposal for a presentation at the national Japan American Literature Society conference has been officially accepted. Whoo!

The conference went well over all. Since my current job ends in less than a year, I was in full-on schmooze mode, handing out my namecard and mentioning, "Yeah, this job I have now is great, but this is my final year, so if you hear of any openings, email me, OK?" Starting this week, I’ll be emailing everyone who gave me their cards, plus checking the job postings and updating my CV in English and Japanese. I’m not worried, but I don’t want to be like my previous officemate, who let it go, thought that a vague answer was a promise of employment, and didn’t have a backup when that fell through. I intend to have a job firmly nailed down, with a backup, before the beginning of next semester in October.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Listening to  ]
Taking a quick break from working on a big paper. I’m in my office at Kyushu University, surrounded by piles of books and photocopied articles and notes. This is the big push to finish a paper I’ll be submitting in a couple of days, and presenting at a conference in about two weeks.

It’s nearing 9pm and I can tell I still have at least a half a dozen pages to go. I’m not finding the flow, that mode where it all comes fast and furious. This is largely because I haven’t prepped as thoroughly as I sometimes do. Specifically, I didn’t write out most of my quotes and paraphrases ahead of times, inserting them into an outline. I have to keep stopping to look stuff up.

So I know that six more pages means at least six more hours; no way I’m going to catch the last subway home. I’ll be here all night. Oh well, I have an old but decent sofa, plus a couple of pillows and a blanket that I brought from home months ago, for just such a situation. Called Junko a little while ago to let her know–she’s taking Lili for a walk now.

Right, must eat now. Then back to ferreting out utopian themes in Melville’s novel Mardi.

EDIT: Done! And 10 minutes before 3am! That’s actually really good for me–I usually finish a paper sometime around sunup. All that stuff I tell my writing students about pacing and preparation–hah! I’m such a hypocrite. I just read and think, read and think, make a few notes, read and think…and then write it the first draft in a non-stop white-hot flurry. Eh, it works for me.

[  Mood: Confused ]
I’ve dropped out of one of the two D&D campaigns I was in–in fact, they are playing without me right now.

There was a fundamental disagreement about gaming. I tried to write out a summary of it all, and the details just sounded so stupid and pointless that I deleted the explanation–so suffice it to say that I and another guy at the table simply fall on different ends of a spectrum of gamers. He’s really concerned with everybody knowing all the rules down to the last obscure exception to be found on page 197 of the Player’s Handbook, while I’m of the opinion that D&D has way too many rules as it is, and if we don’t get everything perfect all the time, so be it. He thinks all of us should choose what classes to take levels in so that we can make our party super-efficient and win fights fast, so we can have more fights per session; I think people should make choices like that based on what their characters, as they conceive them, would realistically choose. He thinks we should never split up in town, and go off and, you know, roleplay; I think that if my character can’t do a little interaction with some interesting NPCs, then what’s the point of playing? I mean, I have Halo on my PC–I could always play that.

Basically, he wants to play like it’s a tactical tabletop miniatures game with a little roleplaying smeared on top, and I think battles only slow things down and get in the way of the fun parts.

Now I don’t want to denigrate his way of doing things, because I was like that once too. It’s just another way of gaming, and I respect that as valid. But it’s not my thing. And it does irk me that I was already compromising a lot, playing as much his way as I could, and he didn’t even seem to see that there was any other valid way of playing. I think he just thought I was being lazy and selfish.

And since most of the other players are closer to his end of the spectrum than mine, I figured the best thing to do is just drop out and let them play the way they like to play. There was an earlier campaign that I was not in, but I heard about it, and the same thing happened, and once the emails started flying, it just all went to hell. People were amazingly stressed out. And from the outside, I was just telling them, "Guys, it’s just a game, come on!"

So I didn’t want that to happen again, and anyway, once the stress levels start to exceed the fun levels, it’s time to walk away from the table.

I can almost remember taking games so seriously that I’d get into a big fight over them…and I remember one day realizing that, by doing that, I wasn’t really enjoying them anymore. I’ll miss my character a bit, but he’s only about the three hundredth character I’ve played in my life, probably. And the gold was just imaginary gold, and the monsters slain weren’t real, and the magic items were never more than notes on a character sheet.

The only thing you really take away from a game is good memories, and I wonder how many of those you can have if you’re so focused on combat efficiency and who owns which imaginary magic item, that you can’t stop and flirt with the NPC barmaids.

To avoid the Wrath of Mom, here are some more family pictures from Sayumi’s visit a couple of days ago. Readers of this blog who are not related to me may want to skip this.

At a little over 3 months, Mei is smiling a lot now:

She’s focusing and responding to people’s expressions:

And once in awhile, looking in the direction you want her to look in for a picture:

Sayumi is smiling more, too. She’s always been so withdrawn, and we wondered if having a baby would change that. It has–she was cooing and talking to Mei the whole time, laughing at her faces–it was great.

And as long as I’m inundating the world with cuteness, here is Lili a few days after visiting the groomer’s. I think she wants that donut Sayumi was holding–she’s making her patented Attack of Cuteness!

She seems to have hurt her leg during a walk last night; if she’s not all better in a couple of days, I’ll take her to the vet. Today and tomorrow are going to be very rainy, so she would’ve had to rest inside anyway.