May 2011
1 post
February 2009
1 post
Han Han’s (韩寒) Censored Comments on CCTV Fire
Long, long time no-blog, I know, but seeing this has inspired to dust off this tumblr…
Han Han (韩寒), a Shanghai based twenty six years old popular young writer, race car driver and leading blogger, immediately posted a comment on his blog when he heard about the CCTV fire, before any news had been reported about the cause of the accident or the death of a firefighter on the scene. Han...
December 2008
2 posts
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Outrage of the day: the dickheads of Zhongnanhai have now seen fit to block the New York Times. I can still access it, of course, but only through excruciatingly slow medium of proxies. I can live without the HuffPo and most of the other stuff routinely banned, but having to ritually kowtow to get the NYT? Infuriating. 肏他祖宗十八代!!
Sojourns in the Parallel World by Denise Levertov We live our lives of human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our preoccupations, free from apprehension--though affected, certainly, by our actions. A world parallel to our own though overlapping. We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly...
November 2008
2 posts
Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana... →
via Wood S Lot
Neglectful
What to say? Like many Americans I was profoundly moved by Obama’s election…so moved that I have very little to add to the many, many folks who’ve already posted about this new chapter in the American experiment. I’m only middle-aged, but am inexpressibly grateful that I, too, should have “lived to see the day.”
In a similar, but lesser, vein I feel as though...
October 2008
7 posts
希望还是恐怕?
Voted the other day, absentee, of course. Never have I felt so much trepidation about an election, not even in ‘04 when the stakes seemed so impossibly high. Despite the rosy projections on pollster.com, I think it’s going to be a nail-biter. I want Obama to win so badly it makes my bones ache.
It’s a little surprising that it should turn out this way, as I still really...
Democracy as Storytelling →
Nice to see Joan Didion hasn’t lost her touch after all these years.
“If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a...”
– Hendrick Hertzberg, in the New Yorker
My Gal →
Good Luck Cow Happy Happy!
Further to Chinese superstition / synchroicity: it was drawn to my attention today that the Official Mascot (tm) of the Beijing Paralympics was 福牛乐乐, a.k.a. Good Luck Cow Happy Happy, and that with the Sanlu melamine scandal it joins the other chirpy-yet-creepy FuWa in being taken by the Chinese as sinister avatars of this year’s bad news, to wit:
贝贝： the sturgeon, symbolizing flooding in...
September 2008
12 posts
Fey as Palin, Redux →
Can’t embed this for some reason, but it’s essential viewing. Spot on.
A PhD in Parochialism
Nearly a month into classes already and all’s going swimmingly, except, alas, for “PhD Oral English,” which—and I scarcely would have thought it possible—I despise even more than last year. A more sheepish, passive, moon-faced group would be hard to imagine outside a home for advanced Alzheimer’s patients.
Struggling to elicit any sort of response from them, in my last class I hit upon the idea...
To Niúbī or not to Niúbī? →
A consideration of my favorite Chinese word. (Hat-tip to TW for the link.)
Is Obama another Dukakis? →
Let’s hope not. But whether or not you agree with him, Hitch always asks useful questions. If Obama can’t reach undecided voters on some kind of emotional level during the upcoming debates, he’s toast: there are simply too many addle-pated Americans who vote “passion” not “policy.” McCain is guaranteed to go for the jugular; if Obama hesitates he—and...
...like watching Gidget address the Reichstag →
I’m trying very hard not to see this election in strictly Manichaean terms. I am not succeeding. Matt Taibbi hasn’t changed his m.o. since his years at the eXile, but the times virtually demand philippics, and he delivers.
“We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most...”
– Sam Harris, in Newsweek
DFW: Commencement Address at Kenyon →
CC sent me this link: a brief, vivid demonstaration how very clear-sighted DFW was. Alas, mere clear-sightedness was not enough to save him in the end.
DFW
At the behest of my MA candidates, this summer I compiled a 10 page list of “Suggested Readings in English Prose” from the 18th century to the present day.
The Chinese, unsurprisingly, have a somewhat better idea of Anglo-American Lit. than 99.99 % of Westerners have of Chinese Lit. (Quick: How many Chinese writers can you name? If you can name five—from 5000 B.C. to the...
A Structured Approach to Chinglish →
At first I was horrified by this…but then it dawned on me that it’s not that different from non-pinyin Mandarin phrasebooks on the market in the West.
P is for...?
Let’s get this straight: “Pitbull in lipstick” = great! “Pig in lipstick” = bad, very bad!
Hmmm. Well, I know which one I’d rather have around my own house…
However, the issue with this particular animal—whatever it may be—is not its maquillage. The issue is that it’s being sold to us “in a poke.” (Caveat emptor!!!)
Отвык
Я отвык—thus the Russians, with uncharacteristic economy, express the idea “I’ve gotten out of the habit / become unaccustomed” So I’ve felt since returning to Beijing. Did I miss it? Not a lick, it turns out. It’s not that I’m displeased to be back—just indifferent. But in some ways that can be a bigger challenge than being displeased.
Remarkable how much changed in the neighborhood in the 7...
What Condoleezza Said →
I don’t buy the Condi conspiracy theory here; nevertheless, this is a cogent, succinct account of how we got where we are now in Sakartvelo. I think the writer is certainly right that viewing the Russian invasion as a “victory” is short-term and one-dimensional. There are many balls still in the air here…
August 2008
12 posts
Palin!
Wrong Palin, you say? Darn!
My insta-pundit take: the only Hillary supporters who are going to gravitate to McCain merely because he chose a woman are those Rachel Maddow has termed “post-rational.” This is a choice clearly based on the proposition that there’s a sucker born every minute…but that’s never worse than an even-money bet in American politics.
History...
Caucasian Langage Barriers →
(via languagehat)
U.S. Advises Allies Not To Border Russia →
“Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the...”
– Mikheil Saakashvili
(Perhaps I should volunteer as a “beard consultant” to the kartvelebi!)
Biden Time!
Well, of course, I’m delighted. There was never the smallest chance that I’d vote McCain, but I still do genuinely find the choice reassuring.
Was it just me, though, or was the whole cloak-and-dagger, midnight-messaging just a bit American Idol? A more dignified announcement about a week ago would have been much more to my druthers.
South Ossetia: The War We Don't Know →
Interesting take from Mark Ames….a useful corrective, perhaps, to the canonization of St. Misha the Democrat. Likewise, surprised and amused to learn that the eXile has finally been shut down by the Russian authorities. It won’t be lamented by me—it was occasionally funny, but always tasteless—but it’s yet another canary in the coal mine for freedom in Russia.
Tough Choices
Still following the news from Georgia obsessively…wondering what’s become of the poor family I lived with in Gori and where it’s all going to end. The administration is dithering, of course, but so is everyone else: I winced when Barack Obama called for a Security Council resolution, the emptiest of empty gestures, even if Russia didn’t have veto power.
It’s time to get real. Instead of Condi Rice...
À la recherche du temps perdu
It’s been a weird summer of searching for lost time: 1986, 1990, 1996, 2006. I’ve journeyed hither and yon, 5000 miles and more, occasionally jarred by my own discordant notes. Yes, this is who I was…but is this who I am now? Not always. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great to see everybody that I managed to see.
The highlight was certainly the dreamlike days on the shores of Lake Michigan. This...
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than...”
– George Bernard Shaw
The March of Folly
Very distressing to read about the bombing of Gori, a city in which I lived for several months in 2005. There is a Georgian military base in Gori, but what’s been bombed today are ordinary Georgian apartment buildings. The Russian objective is clearly to instill terror in the civilian population. They are succeeding. Vile. Evidence, if such were needed, that “terror” is part and parcel of any war,...
Jing! Jing! Jing!
Much, much water under the bridge since my last post: Ballakeyll, Moose Jaw, Craters of the Moon; blueberry pie and nightswimming; sturm und drang and summer idylls. Oh, and the shit has just hit the fan in South Ossetia. Boom.
But at the moment what I really want to say is there no French ‘j’ sound in Chinese. It is NOT Beizhing, with a sound like the ‘s’ in...
July 2008
5 posts
My Winnipeg →
Saw this last week on (where else?) Air Canada. Very odd…but, oddly, I quite enjoyed it. Best non-G-rated film I’ve seen this year.
Signs You've Spent a Long Time in Asia 2
When you find it incredibly irritating that you’re expected to bus your own fast-food detritus.
When you have to remind yourself to actually throw your used tp into the toilet.
When you find yourself thinking “Old women really should wear quilted jackets…not hot pants.”
When mixed salad seems a revlelation. Especially if it includes avocados.
When the...
Signs You've a Spent Long Time in Asia 1
When you think how very unfortuate it is that the public bathrooms at Vancouver Intl. Airport don’t have squatters, and how vastly superior in every way squatters are to Western toilets, which are a perversion of nature and unhygenic to boot. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to have to park my arse anywhere that hundreds of other people have parked theirs on any given day.
[Note, this...
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
I’ve spent the last couple weeks somewhat wearily tramping around the Chinese heartland like a superannuated acetic —not 老子, but 老林, perhaps —or a latter-day Marco Polo. In fact, I was largely in Polo’s old stomping grounds: Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Tunxi, Shanghai, Huangshan, and a number of other places more difficult to find on a map. Alas, I doubt Marco would be very pleased what...
June 2008
9 posts
Cody's R.I.P. →
Now, this is sad. When I read, not long ago, of the woes of B&N and Borders—cheese-ball McBooksellers both, run by soulless number-crunchers—I felt nothing but schadenfreude, but this is quite another matter. The Big Bad Wolf of internet retailing, is, of course, partially to blame for blowing down the bricks-and-mortar, but I think it’s much worse than that. Even if literacy isn’t...
欢迎光临!!! (Your presence is welcome!) →
Ha ha! No, not really! Psyche!
No news at all to anyone who lives here, but the secret Chinese strategy for the “perfect Olympics” is the “all-Chinese Olympics.”
China as an Island →
Another gem from the always-intriguing Strange Maps blog.
爸爸 in Oz
W came by last night to sort out a “summer reading” assignment for the incoming MA students. I wasn’t keen on the idea at all—grad students are grown-ups and should be free to spend their time off reading any damn thing they please—and, what’s more, we had trouble agreeing on an appropriate text. (W’s tastes in Eng. Lit are as rigid as his tastes in everything else, gravitating toward...
I am the very model of a modern megalopolis →
The brutal desecration of my history is not-a-bliss…
5-second Reviews: Creepy, Omnipresent Fúwá Edition
Foxboro Hot Tubs—Stop, Drop and Roll !!!: Green Day (incognito) show their debt to Nuggets-style 60’s garage rock. Fans only, but this is actually better than several of the legit GD albums. Key tracks: Dark Side of Night; Ruby Room.
Aimee Mann—@#&*%! Smilers: Yeah, I get the criticism that her albums are beginning to sound “samey.” Don’t care. She’s still one of...
Modern Problems (or 他是谁?)
Here’s a 2008 dilemma for you: What do you do if you run into someone you have “de-friended” on Facebook?
Such was my experience last Saturday night when I joined R. for a belated celebration of her birthday at a (well-known, but actually surprisingly bad) Cantonese place near the Lama Temple. Among the eight at the table was a Chinese friend of hers who’d friended me (=”become my FB friend”)...