Moyoco Anno's Husband
Feb. 14th, 2021 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingBecause the United States has been shit since at least 2008, a lot of the good academic jobs that have opened during the past several years have been in Canada, which means that a not insignificant number of my friends from my graduate cohort (by which I mean people who were in grad school at around the same time I was, although not at the same school) have recently emigrated to Canada.
Don't get me wrong, Zoom is awful, but one of the benefits of online teaching is that it's easy to invite people to come talk in your classes. It also means that you get to use your university's money to pay people honorariums to do this, and so a lot of us have been helping out each other (and each other's grad students) by offering guest speaking gigs. "Fun" is a strong word to use for guest lectures on Zoom, but I think it's useful and worthwhile to expose students (especially grad students) to different academic cultures and different ways of doing scholarship.
This has also been an interesting opportunity for me to learn more about Canada. When people could still fly places, I used to visit Toronto and Vancouver at least once a year for one thing or another, but I've only been to Montreal maybe two or three times. I always knew that Québec has its own sort of "more connected to Europe than to the rest of Canada" culture, but I don't think I really appreciated this until I got a chance to start speaking to Québécois undergrads.
Case in point:
This past week I was having a discussion with a group of students at a certain university in Montreal about Magic Knight Rayearth, and we were talking about how it was picking up on the "reluctant hero" theme of many giant robot anime. Someone said, "Like Evangelion?" and the other kids were like, "What's Evangelion?" Another kid said, "It's directed by Hideaki Anno," and the other kids were like, "Oh, of course, he's Moyoco Anno's husband." And that seemed to sort out the confusion.
And I laughed to myself, because sometimes I forget that, in some parts of the world, Hideaki Anno is considered to have done nothing of note aside from having the good fortune to be married to Moyoco Anno.
Don't get me wrong, Zoom is awful, but one of the benefits of online teaching is that it's easy to invite people to come talk in your classes. It also means that you get to use your university's money to pay people honorariums to do this, and so a lot of us have been helping out each other (and each other's grad students) by offering guest speaking gigs. "Fun" is a strong word to use for guest lectures on Zoom, but I think it's useful and worthwhile to expose students (especially grad students) to different academic cultures and different ways of doing scholarship.
This has also been an interesting opportunity for me to learn more about Canada. When people could still fly places, I used to visit Toronto and Vancouver at least once a year for one thing or another, but I've only been to Montreal maybe two or three times. I always knew that Québec has its own sort of "more connected to Europe than to the rest of Canada" culture, but I don't think I really appreciated this until I got a chance to start speaking to Québécois undergrads.
Case in point:
This past week I was having a discussion with a group of students at a certain university in Montreal about Magic Knight Rayearth, and we were talking about how it was picking up on the "reluctant hero" theme of many giant robot anime. Someone said, "Like Evangelion?" and the other kids were like, "What's Evangelion?" Another kid said, "It's directed by Hideaki Anno," and the other kids were like, "Oh, of course, he's Moyoco Anno's husband." And that seemed to sort out the confusion.
And I laughed to myself, because sometimes I forget that, in some parts of the world, Hideaki Anno is considered to have done nothing of note aside from having the good fortune to be married to Moyoco Anno.
