Kanji kanji kanji.

I have been doing so many kanji flashcards they have taken over certain other vital neural processes, including quantifying time and the sensations of pain and heat. I think I had a dream about flashcards. I have the idea in my head of the master kanji, with a stroke order requiring nine simultaneous strokes, properly writable only by the thousand-armed Kannon. The last attempt to write it was a five-person effort conducted in Sapporo in 1916. Four died, and the fifth, responsible for only one stroke, went mad.

We went to Nashville over the weekend, and I bought some substandard Houjicha for much more than I should have spent. I was unaware that there was a 1:1 model of the Parthenon in Nashville! There were a lot of reproductions of statues of naked men there, of the variety that had apparently at some point been partially genitally modified by the Roman Catholic Church. By this I mean that the phalli had been removed, but mostly not the testicles. There were also newer statues created for the reproduction by some late-1800s American artists, which reproduced the effect of the Catholic Church’s efforts. So I guess there is a whole Vandalized Art tradition in which these people were working, in which it is necessary to treat the vandalization itself as a valid part of the art? I guess.

I’m positive that it is some sort of sin that I was standing around the tourist trap holding my camera and squinting at small plaster crotches and thinking these thoughts. It can’t be a new sin.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)