you can actually understand what hes saying when you have more food in your stomach than just three coffees and sit outside with the birds chirping

siip...
seneng bacanya, meski udah telat kok baru sekarang tahu ada buku sebagus ini. trims untuk kris budiman yang sudah ngomporin baca!
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saya senang buku ini sebenarnya bener-bener penilaian personal saja.
pertama-tama, karena buku barthes ini ditulis dengan menggunakan jepang sebagai titik tolaknya. jadi, dengan demikian situasi saya sudah "sama": sama-sama orang luar yang kesulitan "membaca" atau memahami bagaimana sebenernya mekanisme yang menggerakkan bangsa ini.
barthes memulainya dari perkara-perkara kecil. dari sumpit, judi pachinko, komposisi dan ragam makanan, tulisan dan lukisan, dan berbagai tajuk yang sepele tapi seperti saya bilang tadi, dijadikan titik tolak utk bicara perkara-perkara baru.
dia tidak sedang mendeskripsikan chopstick shg kita ngerti apa dan bagaimana memakai benda itu. tapi dia pakai tajuk ttg chopstick selain membongkar kandungan potensinya utk menunjuk, memungut, memotong/membagi, juga utk bicara mengenai riwayat garpu, sendok, pisau di peradaban barat dan timur. itu hal kedua, yakni bagaimana perkara-perkara sesehari itu digunakan untuk menyingkapkan hal lain yang selama ini potensial terpendam.
buku ini membuat hal-hal sepele tadi jadi berpendar-pendar sehingga yang sepele tidak bisa lagi disepelekan.
saya suka, tenin!

Bello, anche se avendo un background più filosofico sono sicura l'avrei apprezzato anche di più. Barthes affronta la scrittura e il teatro giapponese con un approccio strutturalista rivelando al lettore una profondità nascosta dietro agli ideogrammi, agli Haiku e al teatro Nò.

A pretty enjoyable read.... I meant this to be my follow-up to reading _Raw and the Cooked_ earlier in the summer, thinking reading them both would help me to understand structuralism better. I think it's doubtful it will work out quite that way:)

This reads like most Barthes books (and here I guess I mostly mean _Mythologies_, but you know what I mean)-- short essays on subjects delivered in a witty and self-consciously odd style. All the essays here are demonstrations of the same thing, the arbitrary nature of the connection between signifier and signified, which I think is really interesting and also developed in kind of awesome ways. But if there was a larger tendency or argument in this book then I missed it?

The writing itself is kind of awesome-- criticism from the french can, I know, be a chore for some people, but I kind of love it, and this is no exception. It's like a funnier Adorno, the way is verges on the epigrammatic, at once spontaneous and, I don't know, labored over. And part of me thinks that's an effect, at least in part, of Howard's translation, which chooses "seism" over "earthquake," and commits a lot of other weirdly characteristic turns of phrase. Good stuff, great bedside table reading to cleanse the brain before going to sleep.

I need to give this a reread.

I have an uneasy feeling that a lot of this succumbs to Orientalism of Japan as a lot of Barthes' analysis of signs tends to take a more positive (making it more exotic than it probably is) interpretation of Japanese practices while putting it on a pedestal. The Western, or Occidental, features tend toward the negative (depicted as hollow or imperfect). But, this is an outsider attempting to decipher Japan through semiotics, so this may be perfectly reasonable considering the nature of the attempt.

pretentious orientalist horseshit

En ocasiones es verdad que he compartido sus pensamientos (cómo cuando compara los palillos con el cuchillo occidental por ejemplo) pero en otras creo que se le va...y deja volar su pluma de una forma ...porque ya ese Japón que a veces describe no existe...quizás existió para él o en su mente pero no ahora. No sé, me ha gustado leerlo pero a veces se va por las ramas y pierde el sentido de lo que compara.