From myths to national self-appraisal

I nearly broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying to say: But don’t you see that I have no arms and that therefore I cannot help you.

Hölderlin ‘grew up in the arms of the gods’; Heine’s goddess didn’t have any. The Greeks, Heine said, were of no use to Europe’s revolutions; genuine political reform required a much more mundane form of national self-appraisal.

Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas

R.I.P. E.J.H

Eric Hobsbawm 1917-2012

The ugliness of unreflective good intentions

'restored' masterpiece

An American's reflection on China

Sidney Rittenberg: Reflections on a lifetime in China

Retracing the life and times of one man in the Chinese Maritime Customs during the early 20th century

and something of a love story...

"It had been one of those peculiar relationships – common enough, or a by-product of alien circumstances? – like a broken figure of eight. She had fallen passionately in love with him; he married her with his mind elsewhere. She frustrated him physically, he disappointed her emotionally. Attachment frayed, they twisted away from each other. Yet her company became essential to him, and she accepted displacement for it. Tender and insensible, he certainly ended by loving her more than she did him, yet practically she gave up more for him, with only intermittent intensity of regret. When she was alive, he once said to her: ‘I wonder if you have ever really treated me as an equal.’ "

Part I

Part II

Rabbits

Solving simple problems

Korra

Really like how Avatar: Legend of Korra is starting out. It has the same internal consistency and production values that made the original Avatar: The Last Airbender such a great show beyond its intended audience. Things like the intrepid usage of Chinese characters (intrepid because the show is aired on an All-American children's TV network and marketed primarily to American audience [with Asian heritage or otherwise] who may or may not relate to such exoticism) and detailed martial arts fighting sequences set high standards for all future Asian mythology inspired animations.

The choreography of Republic City is simply fantastic. The scale gives a cinematic quality to the animation.

V: Korra is good but it is missing a bit of charm. It needs time to get its feet, (it feels) very action-y. Also, it's missing some themes that made the original very compelling: (that of) these three children thrust into an adult world, and the subplots of all the secondary characters, like Zuko.

The Life of Eleanor Marx, whom translated Madame Bovary

.. and whom shared similar elements with the book's protagonist.

From FT

Rather than take the path of Ibsen’s Nora, who abandons her home in order to save herself, Eleanor had submitted to the fate of Emma Bovary, a woman consumed by her own desires. 

Happiness in times post-modern

I must have felt an inescapable loneliness when I first read this a few months ago to recall it even now. 

From Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:

[T]his particular fairytale is perhaps not so affirmative when it comes to the value of chance meetings. It tells of a country boy who seeks, not to make his fortune, but only to return home with it (he has just served an apprenticeship of the traditional seven years and received his accumulated savings in the form of a lump of gold). In the first of many chance meetings, admiring the alacrity of a passing horseman, Hans is offered the horse itself in exchange for the troublesome lump of gold, an offer he is happy to accept. Then, after being thrown by the horse, he is not unwilling to exchange it for a cow, led by a farmer who explains the advantages of its sustenance, in the form of milk, butter and cheese. But it milks poorly, and a passing butcher persuades him of the benefits of a young pig, for which he gladly exchanges it; a bargain then soon enough replaced by the swap of a fat goose; and so on and so forth until he loses the final avatar – a grindstone – in a well and, no longer burdened by that weight either, joyously reaches home with nothing left in his pockets at all. ‘There is no man under the sun so fortunate as I,’ he cries happily as he greets his mother. We should take into consideration the possibility that this really is a happy ending...

The beginning of world history

From: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, by Eric Hobsbawm (Vintage, 1996), pp 46 -47.

The period from the late 1840s to the mid-1870s proved to be not so much, as the conventional wisdom of the time held, the model of economic growth, political development, intellectual progress and cultural achievement, which would persist, no doubt with suitable improvements, into the indefinite future, but rather a special kind of interlude. But its achievements were nevertheless extremely impressive. In this era industrial capitalism became a genuine world economy and the globe was therefore transformed from a geographical expression into a constant operational reality. History from now on became world history.

Dragon-Slayers

Robin, Corey. "Dragon-Slayers." London Review of Books 29.1 (2007): 18-20.

Imagining themselves as ‘dragon-slayers who went enthusiastically into far and curious lands to strange and naive peoples to slay the numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries’, colonial administrators and secret agents – the empire’s emblematic figures – took on ‘a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-man and no people for another people’: to protect those who are ‘hopelessly one’s inferiors’...

Atavistic monks and nationalism

Using religion as a talisman of conflict is a bad sign, but this perhaps has more to do with a barely concealed ethnocentrism - Vietnam to send Buddhist monks to Spratly Islands

Waking from a dream

I woke up last night, confused and disorientated. Like Zhuang Zi, I could not determine the direction in which I had been dreaming.

I recalled the various dreams I have lived in and tried to trace a continuity of memory to establish which must be real, but I was tired and scattered.

Kind

Caribbean Food Made Easy

I experience this at work...

Speaking of the British

I recently went on a business trip with three members of the British ruling classes. The late-night banter over drinks was predictably excellent. Sometimes, though, we had to work. When that happened, my companions showed up unprepared and without notes – and did just fine. No wonder, because their entire education had been a lesson in winging it. They knew that all you need to succeed is to speak well, and that’s what the British ruling classes do: they speak well.

What motivates achievers

Whither the judiciary

I wonder how the US and UK judiciaries differ. The U.S. Supreme Court judges are (expected to be) political actors. Judicial activism goes by many guises (it is easier to defend a static "original" constitution when one's goal is to defend inequality, and make acceptable the status quo)...

A young couple fall in love and marry. She is British; he is Chilean. Because they are both under 21, immigration rules, which set out Home Office policy, forbid him to settle here with his wife, who has a university place and a promising career ahead. The purpose of the rule is to inhibit the importation of spouses by forced marriage. Forced marriage is a serious matter meriting determined government action, but there is nothing to link the vast majority of young couples affected by the rule with it. The young couple bring judicial review proceedings. The impact of the rule on their right to marry and to live as a family is manifest. The rule itself has a lawful purpose, but the Home Office accepts that it has no bearing on them. How could the courts decide whether the impact on the couple was legitimate without considering in detail the justification for the rule itself? That is what both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court did. Had they not done so, the home secretary’s case would have gone unheard. All but one of the judges decided that the impact on the individuals before them was out of proportion to the policy objective. The result was not to stifle policy initiatives designed to inhibit forced marriages; these remain a matter for government alone. It was to ensure that such initiatives conformed to the law by not impacting disproportionately on individuals. This is a critical linkage which recurs in the now well developed law of legitimate expectation, which sometimes requires government to honour its promises even when its policy has legitimately shifted.

Judicial Politics

Political and Economic Exigencies in Republican China

From Sino-Americana, by Perry Anderson (London Review of Books, 2012), Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012, pages 20-22

"The historical reality was that no outstanding leaders emerged from the confused morass of the KMT in the Republican period. "

"The military clique that ruled Guangxi, on the border with Indochina, were better generals and ran a more progressive and efficient government, but their province was too poor and remote for them to be able to compete successfully against Chiang." ( whom was based in Shanghai and Zhejiang, and the surrounding Yangtze delta region, where he cultivated connections in both criminal and business worlds, in what was by far the richest and most industrialised zone in China)."

Normalization of Asian-American perceptions and power relations still have long ways to go...

 “He’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”

Harvard Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe