Saint Patrick's Week Continued

Happy Saint Patrick's Day again. I fell asleep watching The Butcher Boy last night. It's strange how hard it is to find that movie, it's so delightful. Sure, it's also extremely grim. Maybe that's it. There's something oddly admirable about Francie Brady's resilience, though. He's hurt by the loss of his friend, Joe, but, despite taking insane revenge, he somehow never seems resentful.

Earlier in the day, I was reading from my copy of The Norton Anthology: The Victorian Age. I read a bit from George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, another example of an intellectual treatment of prostitution.

I also read an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's Study of Celtic Literature and found this bit interesting:

. . . no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.

It's funny Arnold keeps using male pronouns when discussing the Celtic insight into the feminine, as though there were no possibility of consulting a female Celt on Celtic attitudes towards the feminine. I suppose Arnold is using "he" as a gender neutral pronoun, as it could be employed in his time. Even so, it's slightly odd, but it's bound up with the same Victorian conception of the feminine that leads him to apply the adjective to Celtic nature generally. What does "feminine" mean to him that he can apply the word so?

I'm not even saying he's wrong to. I often think Japanese culture is more feminine than American culture. If you took Oscar Wilde's maxim, "Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty," and swapped out "Women" for "Japanese" and "Men" for "American", you'd have a pretty accurate comparison. A popular topic of discussion on the internet recently is how American video games seem to be allergic to portraying beautiful women (here's one of the many YouTube videos on the topic). I wouldn't say it applies universally. The women in the Guild Wars games are pretty and, while the Japanese clearly love the artificial, given the phenomena of VTubers and Vocoloids, there are examples of great art in modern Japan from Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto.

Incidentally, I was served by a robot yesterday. It wasn't even some kind of high-tech, fancy restaurant, just a cheap little Chinese ramen place well outside the city centre. It was similar to this one only without the cat ears:

It had a theme song it was constantly playing, a sort of ultra-jubilant, vaguely samba-esque tune, I guess to mitigate any creepiness. It brought over my ramen and explained to me in a child's voice that my side item, gyoza, would be along shortly. As usual with encroaching automation, I appreciate it as an introvert but can't ignore the implications for the labour force. On the other hand, it could be a perfect solution for Japan's declining population.

This was supposed to be a Saint Patrick's Day post. Oh, well.