The decision to name China as the guest country of the 2009 Book Fair made the clash of the economic-superpower-China and the repressive-Communist-regime China virtually inevitable. Both images are simplistic and little more than caricatures of the complexities embodied by contemporary China. It is discomforting to see, then, how easily an otherwise well-informed European public could be taken hostage by images so crude and superficial.
Informed observers, including those from the academic community, have tried for years to emphasize the diversity of contemporary China and the complexity of its cultural sphere, but as the tumultuous symposium shows, they seem to have made little headway in communicating this more nuanced understanding to the public at large, which all too readily looks at China through the lens of Stalinist Eastern Germany.
...the conceptualization of the event reads like a public demonstration of a European brand of tolerance and dialogue that never took place. A stage-managed confrontation of different opinions has little to do with the commitment to nuance and mutual respect that real dialogue requires.
The public is unlikely to be served any better unless decision makers such as those in charge of the Book Fair take into serious account the significant amount of expertise on China that is available in Europe, and develop a more nuanced understanding of China that goes beyond the economic-powerhouse and repressive-Communist-regime dichotomy.
5:55 PM basti: Bebel Gilberto is pretty good. I haven't listened to her stuff in a while. But there is some nice vocalisation here.
me: you mean Astrud?
basti: No, Bebel Astrud has much less polished vocalisation than Bebel.
me: yes, but it is intentional English is not Astrud's native tongue
5:57 PM basti: I think that she just didn't undergo the same degree of formal training. The result, of course, is spectacular. But even in Portuguese, her vocalisation is less polished.
me: and you get all these terrible anime song tracks try to imitate her (Astrud's) style (a la "Fly Me to the Moon" of Evangelion horridness)
basti: Japanese pop music often has too much polish. It is too formalised. It lacks texture and genuineness.
But ‘Tanto Tempo’ and ‘Aganjú’ are very beautiful songs. (‘Tanto Tempo’ benefits from the contribution of Amon Tobin.)
It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of "Nietzsche and German Idealism". The annual recruiting season had long since gone. My life savings had dwindled into three digits. It came to me in a pub, over a game of pool. I was losing badly to a pair of undergraduates who had recently received offers from a prestigious management consulting firm. They were about 22-years-old; I was going on 26. As I gazed at the pool balls ricocheting around the table, it hit me that, instead of spending the next year watching daytime TV, I too, could earn some ready cash by offering strategy tips to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
The more I thought about it, the grander it seemed. The next morning, I sent out 10 CVs. One ended up in the hands of the founding partner of a small and enlightened consultancy firm based in New York. I landed the job by providing a credible response to this question: How many pubs are there in Great Britain? The purpose of that question, I realised after the interview, was to see how easily I could talk about a subject of which I knew almost nothing, on the basis of facts that were almost entirely fictional. It was an excellent introduction to management consulting.
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