Ghosts of the Tsunami (and other ghosts)
I found this book through an excerpt that had been reposted somewhere in Twitter. The book had come out a few years ago — I missed it then. Long story short, the author traveled to the area in Japan that was hit by the massive earthquake/tsunami in 2011, to focus on the one school that had lost 3/4 of its students (75 kids or so). Its teachers couldn’t decide what to do: the school manual wasn’t specific enough, so nobody wanted to take the initiative to climb up a nearby hill. And then they evacuated towards the tsunami, not realising that it was the river through which it would arrive.
The book dives deeply into the events that day and the years to follow, as parents kept searching for their children. One mother got a license to operate an excavator, to literally keep digging for years — and that’s just one of the many completely heartbreaking details in the book (I gotta eat less onions, they make my eyes much too watery).
The book mentions that there is a video that someone took from a hill overlooking the little village the school was in — it’s a solid two miles from the ocean, but right next to the river. I had seen tsunami videos before, but this one is especially eerie:
There’s a fascinating article by Tavi Gevinson about the Britney Spears documentary that people have been talking about (I haven’t watched it). There’s much to chew on in the article. Its center argument might be the following:
With beauty as the only such capital, being considered “in your prime” is not a position of power if you are a girl alone in a room with a man. The deceitful notion that you have power because you’re considered desirable centers male desire, rather than your own pleasure. “In her prime” hurts men, too, by teaching them to see women as commodities and to define their own self-worth according to what they can obtain. […] This value structure hurts everyone, even though the ignorance and spiritual emptiness that it preserves for those with power is by no means equal to the violence that everyone else must suffer as a result. I’ve heard this so many times that I don’t know who to attribute it to, but it always bears repeating: Having power is not the same as being free.
Somewhat related, Joanna Cresswell wrote an article about Angelcore. I had been familiar with some of the work discussed in the article, but some was new to me — as was the term itself (lest you wonder: even though it sounds like it, it’s not a sub-genre of heavy metal).
The following is a complete truism: good writing teaches me to see the world differently. These two articles might have had the maybe most profound impact on me seeing the world of late.
I have no children, so I have no connection to the world that these articles deal with. If I had had children and if there had been a daughter, she would be about the age of the young women who are discussed in these pieces, young women who have to navigate a world that puts enormous expectations on them. I can only speculate how I would navigate that situation as a father.
Sadly, I don’t have speculate how many men my age will see the pictures in question (even if they have daughters): as expressions of vanity, a lack of understanding… You know the old misogynistic caper. That there is a lot more to consider and to think about — Gevinson’s and Cresswell’s articles make this very clear.
If anything, this points at what good criticism can do (and why we need it): it helps us see and understand aspects of a piece of art that for whatever reason so far has eluded us.
So if you see a nice piece of writing, why don’t you send its author a note of appreciation (obviously, I don’t intend to solicit responses regarding my own writing here).
Maybe it’s the pandemic that has brought me closer to all my fellow writer critics and to the fact that all-too-often it’s simply a thankless, badly paying task (assuming you even get paid). Regardless of whether I agree with them all or some or most of the time (or maybe never), I’m incredibly grateful for their company.
It’s good company to be in.
Well, there you have it (as they tend to say on America’s Test Kitchen, the world’s most joyless cooking show). I hope you’re in good spirits and
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
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