i was suddenly thinking about addison and steele, and how challenging it is to write daily and to write well. i wonder if i can keep up journalling if i wrote entries that aren't merely self-indulgent but that cared more about readers. care in a way more than just worrying that von will correct my spelling or call me an ignoramus for not knowing something, but to write complete essays with considered opinions on very recent events, and to write about them with clarity and grace without excessiveness of style (what johnson calls the "middle style".) both under the pressures of time and the dailiness of effort. addison never missed a day - when i do, von complains! i think the expectations of people who do read this journal really stresses me out, and i've objected a thousand times to the way that von, for instance, would pester me (directly and indirectly) if i don't get something up twice a day, but the reverse is also true: i like getting the sense from people's emails and responses that they are reading my journal daily, and like what they see, or are affected by it. cindy wrote me yesterday afternoon complaining that because of my ayako miura entry, she is having trouble keeping creepy thoughts out of her mind when she cooks japanese curry!! heehee. i suppose we always have to balance, on the one hand, yeats saying "did that play of mine sent out certain men the english shot" and, on the other, paul muldoon's blunt reply: "if yeats had saved his pencil lead, would certain men have stayed in bed?" and then a certain amount of candidness comes with the freedom of anonymity, or at least a freedom from the necessity of knowing (actually, it's more a sort of "i don't care who knows as long as i don't know they know and they don't know i know they know") and also the repercussions of non-anonymity - the way almost anything on the web is eventually found by anyone who wants to find it. one of the recent picks by arts and letters daily was precisely on the loss of privacy with the rise of the internet, titled a nation of voyeurs (although a great deal of it also covers the development of google, and is a fascinating read) heck, these days, just typing in nohrnberg would call up any number of my journals, and even innocent ornithologists could end up here.

after surviving two short essays and two sections i came home to cook more curry and had an early night. well, i also watched disney's mulan. i've forgotten how much i liked it! aside from the really blatant historical and cultural inaccuracies, of course, but then, which movie doesn't have some of those? it all depends on whether it's offensive or only misguided, and the latter isn't really bad. i probably also like mulan because although it's less funny than many other disney movies and has few good songs, it has an epic quality that is in no other disney film that i can think of. you see this in that unforgettable battle scene, when the armies clash across the snow, that magnificent descent of the army down the mountain - and the destroyed village - and even in the way mulan dresses in armour and prepares to leave her home. has real, you know, seh. at the time that it came out, kenneth was crazy about it, and i think i saw it twice, once in english and once in chinese.first year at college, one of my suitemates bought the video and watched it every few weeks or so, so passing in and out of the living room i saw much of it again. though i've almost forgotten how wonderful it is. it's also the only disney movie that has made me cry every single time i watch it. of course, people quite likely would point out that i have olympic-standard kitsch-reaction tear-ducts at the movies anyway, and they wouldn't be far wrong, but this one, this one genuinely moves me. for one thing, this one doesn't have suggest that romantic love is the ultimate virtue. and there is a great deal of dignity in family relations, and i really love the relationship between mulan and her father. reminds me of my relationship with mine, actually.

oh good it's stopped raining. i am off to lunch. in the meantime, i seem to have done something to my glasses, so that its feet slide about. i'm going to have to wait till von comes at the end of march to fix it for me, and also to impart that long-held paperclip trick to me in person.