现实一种

Criticism of Chinese society, a people suffocated by its environment, where it sharpens the physical sense and intellect but leaves empathy and compassion undeveloped.

Is it fair if we use it as a explanation for behavior of some Chinese people in the U.S.? Where we are often perceived as intelligent but emotionally cold people?

How do we reconcile it with our experiences? The community and kinship within a extended Chinese family? That, against the isolation of the suburbs in another country? Of teamwork and call-you-by-your-first-name-while-stab-you-in-the-back type of false courtesy that exist among one's colleagues?

Questions, questions...

Inviting Writers to Drink

"So I urge you to cease your songs of the snow,
and in turn drink sadly the rose-cloud wine.
When we sober up, we cannot pass over
this ocean of sorrow, vast without shore."

- Meng Jiao (751-814)

Froth and Bubble

The Museum of Broken Relationships Storms Berlin

Piano

Wish I know how to play the piano, "just like almost every Asian kid".

Funny, I still remember who said that (approximately).

Marat/Sade

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Directions of The Marquis de Sade

Marat:
[speaking to Sade across the empty arena]
I read in your books de Sade
in one of your immortal works
that the basis of all of life is death

Sade:
Correct Marat
But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature's compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created
Death is simply part of the process
Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
[rising]
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts
[breathing heavily]
Haven't we always beaten down those weaker
than ourselves
Haven't we torn at their throats
with continuous villainy and lust
Haven't we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution
Let me remind you of the execution of Damiens
...
...
...
That
was a festival with which today's festivals can't compete
Even our inquisition gives us no pleasure
nowadays
Although we've only just started
there's no passion in our post-revolutionary
murders
Now they are all official
We condemn to death without emotion
and there's no singular personal death to be
had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes for all life
to be extinguished

Marat:
Citizen Marquis
you may have fought for us last September
when we dragged out of the gaols
the aristocrats who plotted against us
but you still talk like a grand seigneur
and what you call the indifference of Nature
is your own lack of compassion

Sade:
Compassion
Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat
Compassion is the property of the privileged
classes
When the pitier lowers himself
to give to a beggar
he throbs with contempt
To protect his riches he pretends to be moved
and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more
than a kick [lute chord]
No Marat
no small emotions please
your feelings were never petty
For you just as for me
only the most extreme actions matter

Marat:
If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same
way as you
Against Nature's silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don't watch unmoved I intervene
and say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes

Rain began three in the morning. By nine the wind started and my glasses, being large as they are, would catch the perspiration of breathing. It is a bit chilly outside and I had to run back home from the bus stop to put on a jacket.

爸爸爸

I grow tired of this preoccupation with backwardness, corruption and provincialism in Chinese popular culture and contemporary literary memory. Having said that, I despised reading yet another satire, 爸爸爸. It is no different than watching the mindless dramas and TV shows, except just imagine having that told to you as a story in a mocking tone as oppose to watching:

1) nasal gazing historic dramas which falls further into two categories:
a) costume dramas that dulls the viewer's senses, that which not only do not encourage people to look to the future but glorify a backward, hideous, and pitiful past where China was shut off to the outside world
b) pre-civil war 1920-30 Shanghai, whore of the orient, how good it was for the rich and corrupt that pay no attention to the nation's survival. You too, as oppose to the intended revulsion, will secretly admire their decadence
2) imitation of the worst type of schadenfreude western reality TV shows

With a TV I can alway skip it, the unfortunate thing with a novel is that you don't realized how much time was wasted until after you grind through parts or all of the reading. Utterly lacking in the Chinese literary memory are science and pluralism. The world is spinning too slowly. I wish it were fast as to throw Chinese people out of their seats.

To the Last Salute

Was expecting something more from this book, but oh well.

Ghost in the Machine

A Profile of Hu by FT

Freedom of space saved us from nuclear armageddon

Sputnik 'was force for world peace'

von Trapp's career before before The Sound of Music

Also reading this one:

Paul Kagame - a Lee Kuan Yew of Africa

Time for Africa to insist on defining its own future

Naipal writes of his friend Anthony Powell

Reviews: 'A way in the world' by Ian Jack | Prospect Magazine October 2007 issue 139