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Thursday, January 31st, 2002
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who wants to write my first draft of the huge_great_dissertation about the end of the tokugawa regime/beginning of meiji era goddamnit i don't /get/ this period why am i doing history anyway for me?
no, come on, please. It's approximately a third of my a2, and I /can't/ summarily fail it. And my two main sources for sources - neither of which i've yet been able to find and read - appear neither of them to be in print or indeed available /anywhere/. Oh, look, one of them's an article. darn. You know, seems like the /Heian/ era would have been easier. Or european millenarianism and the apocalypse in the middle ages, which was the other option. Or, of course, the Samurai (but such a /large/ topic), or The Gay In The Tokugawa Regime.
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But that, Sarah, was back in the good ol' days of propaganda: before the teenage girls got into it, don'tchaknow. Now /everyone/ knows about the propaganda thing, and /everyone/'s doing it, and it's getting a little... tired. Because, really, they don't do it as well as Uncle Jo did - those /wonderful/ group photos where the undesirables were rooted out, or rather blacked out, one by one until finally all that was left was a Socialist-Realist portrait of Our Glorious Leader, alone and bravely standing For Us All.
I have a lovely piece of anti-drunkenness propaganda somewhere about - a well-brought up Russian lad, clean-shaven but for the moustache, settled over his meat and two veg, his hand outstretched in dramatic denial: HET! he says, or rather 'nyet', what with cyrillic script and roman not being all that similar, and those that view the picture are instantly buoyed up with the desire to emulate his hard-working bravery and eschew the glasses of vodka held out to us all, even though they are glasses of pretty slovakian crystal and all engravéd in diametric patterns. But the world is no longer so simple, so trusting. We've been soured.
We can't take propaganda seriously: thus the solution is to have only propaganda that doesn't necessitate being taken seriously.
Propaganda, nowadays, has to be more a matter of humour than of po-faced "Your Country Needs You", "Walls Have Ears", "She May Be Pretty, But She's In Fact A German Spy Out To Destroy The World Through Sleeping With British Men And Then Writing Down Their Most Intimate Secrets, Like Where They Have... Moles" (I paraphrase: the exact words, they fail me). I firmly believe the most effective method of propaganda in any modern conflict to be stuff which is /obviously/ unreal and yet makes people laugh, since it engenders a lack of respect for the enemy, and thus the assumption that the person who is being fought against is stupid, laughable, and ultimately subhuman. Like calling them bombs 'Doodlebugs', and that. This is why badly-made flash animation of World_Evil in embarrasing and highly unlikely situation is far more effective than neatly-photoshopped 'realistic' goings-on.
In his own way, Comrade Stalin understood this: that's why you could /see/ where the traitors had been cut out or blacked out in certain of the ex-group photos, that's why the teachers had to make the kids bring out the scissors and go through their textbooks. You /knew/ what had happened to them from the flecks of misplaced paint on the reproduction, as if the image were a testament to the reality. With bad flash, it's neither slick nor clever, but where those old badly-doctored photos say "this has been done. may it not happen to you.", it says "oh, this /so/ could happen! well, okay, it couldn't - we /are/ using the medium of wile e. coyote, after all, only less well done - but! Imagine If It Were!" and because if you're western a cartoon means childhood and the suspension of belief, you /can/. Or something. I don't really know, to be honest.
Procrastinating. Not realising that if i get my work done sooner, i may even get some sleep tonight. Yeah, that'd be me.
[edit: "Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb". I was close.]
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you know, coffee sends me to sleep. out like a light. effect of only starting to drink coffee at the end of huge great massive italian dinners, when completely exhausted/bloated. Anyway, no-one in my family drinks coffee (anymore, or ever), so there's never any around, and the instant has gone the way of all flesh. The best stuff was cafinesse, which was just pure hyperstrong coffee, and if you mixed it with cold milk you had the caffiene! kick! of! death!, aka 'cold comfort'.
but jasmine tea? jasmine tea /keeps me awake/. and makes me /hyper/. twitchy scary no-attention-span sudden-desire-to-write-XD verysmallhandwriting hyper, but hyper nonetheless.
this message brought to you by: pulling an all-nighter! yay! ...and spending it avoiding the week-late english essay by reading gen hp fic! and doing greek! and... writing what is possibly the least convincing history dissertation 'plan' could ever ever be written ever ever!
I forsee pokka canned coffee and acerola in my near future. well, about six hours from now, anyway. until then: jasmine tea! *twitch* *twitch* *gibber* *twitch*
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| Time: | 9:04 pm. |
| Mood: | contemplative. | | Music: | system of a down - sugar. |
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Kings Cross is so very beautiful. You don't realise it, of course, making jokes about having to look out when you cross the road because they'll only scrape your bloodied remains off the street and put it on the doner kebab rails that turn and turn eternal, but sometimes it is.
The Water Rats isn't just memories of six pounds to see a minor indie band whose setlist you still have and name you've forgotten, it's that front that smiles across the Grays Inn Road, endlessly comforting. The British Library is so beautiful, George III's books - he /read/? - arranged in such a way that none can read them, Blake's satirical portrait of Newton made into a glorifying statue: paradoxes curling around one another and the clocktower like that on the tate modern and the white inside that overlaps itself in shelves and stairways. And the vibrations of the tube trains beneath your feet as you lean against a ticketselling machine and smoke, the feeling of movement and the grey and dirt and the endless taxis in the taxirank and the wind and the medical students shaking collection boxes out of time and the evening standard stands standing like sandstone blocks under slow erosion: this is beauty, for today.
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