Info - Useful information: February 2011 Archives

A student asked me for books about sexuality in Japan so I began to think what a preliminary reading list might look like. Here goes. The first half is from my review essay "Chrysanthemum and the Queer":

• EMERGING LESBIAN VOICES FROM JAPAN. Chalmers, Sharon. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002.
• COMING OUT IN JAPAN: THE STORY OF SATURO AND RYUTA. Ito, Satoru, and Ryuta Yanase. Melbourne and Portland, OR: Trans Pacific Press, 2001.
• LOVE UPON THE CHOPPING BOARD. Izumo, Marou, and Claire Maree. North Melbourne, Victoria: Spinifex, 2000.
• MALE COLORS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN (1603-1868). Leupp, Gary P. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
• BEYOND COMMON SENSE: SEXUALITY AND GENDER IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN. Lunsing, Wim. London; New York: Kegan Paul, 2001.
• MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN: CULTURAL MYTHS AND SOCIAL REALITIES. McLelland, Mark J. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.
• CARTOGRAPHIES OF DESIRE: MALE-MALE SEXUALITY IN JAPANESE DISCOURSE 1600-1950. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
• TAKARAZUKA: SEXUAL POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE IN MODERN JAPAN. Robertson, Jennifer Ellen. Berkeley, CA: Uni- versity of California Press, 1998, ISBN 0520211510, 1998.
• 0QUEER JAPAN: PERSONAL STORIES OF JAPANESE LESBIANS, GAYS,TRANSSEXUALS,ANDBISEXUALS.Summerhawk,Barbara, Cheiron McMahill, and Darren McDonald, eds. Norwich, Vt.: New Victoria Publishers, 1998.
• GREAT MIRRORS SHATTERED: HOMOSEXUALITY, ORI- ENTALISM, AND JAPAN. Treat, John Whittier. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

and some new volumes:

• Bad Girls of Japan, edited by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
• Queer Voices from Japan: First Person Narratives from Japan's Sexual Minorities Edited by Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker 2007.
• Queer Japanese Gender and Sexual Identities through Linguistic Practices Hideko Abe 2010.

Suggestions?

So I'm in my hotel in Tokyo, trying in vain to get my Kindle3 to connect to my shared Internet Sharing connection with my Mac so that I can get it to sync and download all my blogs for on-board reading. My hotel only offers a hardwired ethernet connection, so I have to provide my own wireless.

Argh! My Kindle just doesn't connect with my Mac. My iPhone 3 connects just fine.

Some browsing around reveals that there is apparently a bug in the Apple Internet Sharing feature -- some people think it has to do with the DHCP provisioning. In any case, it makes the Kindle and other non-Apple devices have problems connecting. Let's leave aside the fact that Apple only has WEP encryption in Internet Sharing. Lame.

To fix it, you have to connect your Kindle manually. It's best to copy the settings from a device that *can* connect such as your iPhone, but if not, here are generic settings:

DHCP: 10.0.2.100   <- change the last digit from what your iPhone displays, '100' is usually safe
Mask: 255.255.255.0
Router: 10.0.2.1
DNS: 10.0.2.1

Thanks, internet magicians!

I have a little Neat Receipts Travel Scanner that I originally bought for my Windows netbook when I'm travelling. It's so cute I wish I could use it on my Mac ... and not under VMWare or BootCamp.

Neat Receipts would sell me their bloatware for the Mac for $80. I looked for a cheaper option... My favorite, VueScan, unfortunately doesn't work with it.

Then, I saw a forum post that said that the Neat Receipts was actually a rebadged PlusTek M12 scanner. I went to their website and downloaded their M12 installer for the Mac (PlustekM12Series.dmg BETA dated 7/2010), clicked on the installer and ... the installer crashed with a Rosetta error, of all things.

On a hunch, I opened up the installation package (right click on it and select "Show Package Contents") and found inside it two other sub-installation packages (opticslimM12Digiscan.pkg and opticslimM12Support.pkg).

I installed those two installes one-by-one and rebooted, and presto, my Neat Receipts scanner works just fine as a PDF or JPG/PNG/TIF scanner under Mac OSX natively using the DigiScan application. Yippeee!