A corridor of power

The US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York

Those who serve power, and those who are served by it.

Children's books. French children's books.

I was going to write about a wedding scene in a movie I liked, but the embed option for the movie clip was disabled, so I guess I'll just have to blog about children's books.

Voilà

Two modern fairy tales

Tale 1
Tale 2

Each left her own world for his.

I'm upset

8:30 PM me: just found out x is getting married 

9:20 PM me: I wonder if she is happy 
but more to the point, I feel quite upset 

11:09 PM V: Why upset?

me: for her getting married, but not to me 

V: Why do you want to marry a girl you don't even know? 

11:34 PM me: Yes, you do have a point 
but I'm still upset

But that's a sadder story

"And the mystery knight should defeat all challengers and name the wolf maid the queen of love and beauty."  

"She was," said Meera. "But that's a sadder story."

Will we ever get a proper review of ASoIaF?

A promising review turned massive spoiler

Checking in

‘Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?’

An Entire Order Converted into What It Was Intended to End

The Decline of Italy

"In 1992-94 Italy was widely held to have been reborn. The parties that had long ruled – latterly misruled – the country were all but wiped out, after their corruption had been exposed by a fearless group of magistrates, in an election under a new and, so it was felt, more functional system, even if the government that emerged from the polls was a surprise to many who celebrated the end of the old regime. The country could now make a fresh start, in its way comparable to that of 1945."

Return to Algiers

First there was the Battle of Algiers:



"La France doit-elle rester en Algèrie?"

"Si vous rèpondez encore oui, vous devez en accepter toutes les consèquences nècessaires."


30 years later:

Some translations

A well translated poem looks something like this. I take as an example the foreword to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, as translated from the Chinese by Moss Roberts:

滚滚长江东逝水，浪花淘尽英雄。是非成败转头空。
青山依旧在，几度夕阳红。
白发渔樵江渚上，惯看秋月春风。一壶浊酒喜相逢。
古今多少事，都付笑谈中。
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　——调寄《临江仙》

On and on the Great River rolls, racing east.
Of proud and gallant heroes its white-tops leave no trace,
As right and wrong, pride and fall turn all at once unreal.
Yet ever the green hills stay
To blaze in the west-waning day.

Fishers and woodsmen comb the river isles.
White-crowned, they've seen enough of spring and autumn tide
To make good company over the wine jar,
Where many a famed event
Provides their merriment.

                                                         - From ershiwu shi tanci

Moss attributes the authorship of the poem to a collection of works "ershiwu shi tanci" (二十五史弹词??)  rather than specifically to 调寄《临江仙》.It is interesting in that this provides a wider context for people unfamiliar the genre (or the language).

A search into "ershiwu shi tanci" reveals that it is "a collection of popular songs on historical themes compiled during the Ming dynasty by Yang Shen (d. 1559)". Personally I had to look up what 调寄 means.

Alas, poor Simone

"Drama of my affections, pathos of life . . . . Indeed, I have a more complicated, more nuanced sensibility than his and a more exhausting power of love. Those problems that he lives in his mind, I live them with my arms and my legs. Has he ever known months when all the days were only tears? I do not want to lose all that . . . . Only I must make myself stronger in order to walk on despite my burden. Two cowardly attitudes: keep the burden and sit down - (this is very cowardly) - throw off the burden and walk on. One good one: keep the burden and walk on. I will walk on." 

Marketizing universities

[Marketising universities] rests on a fundamental misconception of the market and its functions: a misconception that could only be held by people who have not thought seriously about the market or its history. 

The market itself, for example, rarely drives innovation; on the contrary it usually reacts. Entrepreneurs certainly have a sense of what might be profitable, but the market does not tell them what will and what won’t. They rely, largely, on guesswork; they put something on the market and keep their fingers crossed. There is no certainty in the market. Nor does it necessarily signal what needs to be done. The market did not synthesise penicillin or put communications satellites into the heavens or discover how cholera is spread. In many cases the market can resist innovation. Businessmen get set in their ways or simply make the wrong guess. Nor are consumers natural innovators. On the contrary they are often very conservative and have to be induced to change their habits by the enormous engine of advertising.

In Defense of British Universities

Normalization by the virtue of "values"

12:51 AM me: TTV does give an impression of Taiwan as a normalized liberal society in keeping with the spirit of the times 

12:59 AM V: You talk about normalisation so skeptically, but what other perspective would they have?

1:00 AM It's like saying, boy, you can tell those Mainland TV shows are up to trouble by how hard they try to hide how naturally inscrutable and untrustworthy Chinese people are

1:04 AM me: it's like... Zhang Ailing writing about being love stricken in WW2 Japanese occupied Shanghai. One also gets the sense then that Republican China was modern and normalized, when it was actually mired in corruption and faced existential threats from the outside

1:06 AM Think about Shame...Amah! (which was published in 1944, before the war ended)

1:07 AM did you get the sense from the story that China was/or was about to be engaged in a struggle for its national survival?

1:10 AM I think normalization is meant to speak to a universal audience. In any age you would have people talking about love, nostalgia, childhood, innocence, remembrance

1:11 AM intentionally or unintentionally placed, it exists; it's reassuring

1:12 AM me: but it is tempting to think that the people on these TV shows reflect a society that has privileged access to normalization by the virtue of its "values", when another society under very different circumstances and values did experience it, as have others1:13 AM that is the skepticism I am trying to convey

View on Age of Fracture

One of the consequences of the disunity of a dominant idea is counter-revolution.

Corey Robin on Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers

Archie and the zombies

7:46 PM V: Sadly, `The Walking Dead' is as stupid and occassionally repulsive as ever

 It's all plot-based but the plotting and writing are very weak

7:51 PM It is also pretentious: it thinks its a platform for discussing serious issues on the human condition, but it aggressively shies away from having any real opinion or approaching any topic with any depth

7:58 PM       The show is also totally oblivious

8:00 PM Why does it just happen that, for a show set in the deep south, there is no attention paid to any of the minority characters, and that all the attention is paid to the white male characters?

  Who knows!

8:01 PM Why is the Asian guy an errand boy who has to prove his masculinity to the group, at which point he is rewarded with a white girlfriend?

  Who knows!

  The show is also fundamentally boring

8:02 PM There is, for example, a settlement of humans living safely under the control of an insane dictator

8:03 PM But this character is just a regular crazed villain, like an Indiana Jones Nazi

  This is an opportunity, however, where the show could delve into power structures

8:04 PM Instead of this bland one-dimensional villain, it could try something more clever and more thoughtful

8:05 PM For example, it might suggest something more fundamental about power structures: maybe this megalomania or this paranoia is actually a product of the circumstances or some necessary component of human organisation under such stressed conditions

8:06 PM Nope! He's just a mustache-twirling bad guy

8:07 PM And he's not even particularly smart in his evilness, and he's surrounded by the same old incompetent, cruel henchmen

8:08 PM One other problem with this entire genre is, well, what next?

  We have seen the devastation and gruesomeness of the zombie aftermath, great

  And this show's appeal is, supposedly, that any character could die at any time

  So what's the point? What is it building to?

8:09 PM It's like a soap opera: a new love interest appears, lingers for a few episodes, a couple of shocking revelations, then suddenly meets tragedy just in time for the next plotline to start

8:10 PM Of course, I don't think the writers really think these things through at all

  It's all very last minute, thrown together, soap operatic plotting

8:11 PM What does the world look like five years after the appearance of zombies?

  What about ten years?

  Clearly, this band of travellers running around schtick will have gotten very old, and either everyone would have died or some people would have survived.

8:12 PM How do the survivors create a new world with all the existing structures of our world destroyed?

8:13 PM This is a very interesting topic, but it's beyond the capabilities of these writers to imagine and design

8:15 PM You can see how exceptionally boring this show is in its insistence on the most trivial plot points

  It's like an Archie comic with a comet hurtling toward earth?

  Who cares if Archie goes on a date with Betty or Veronica when the world is ending on page 10?

8:16 PM How utterly trivial and pointless

Proof

Make the call

How are we getting out of here?

1) Submarine
2) Experimental teleporter
3) Let's leave by the front door.

The smartest show on television

10:35 PM V: Homeland is the smartest show on television

10:37 PM V: I'm actually too tired right now to go into why this show is so offensive

  Not just intellectually offensive

  I'll just give you an example

10:38 PM The first few episodes are all about this is-he-or-isn't-he-a-terrorist for Damien Lewis's character.

  This is a Showtime show, so it's hour-long episodes forming a season-long arc.

10:39 PM Viewership is driven by cliffhangers.

  So the cliffhanger at the end of one of this episodes is that Lewis's character, a recently returned POW whose motives are suspect, goes into his garage, takes out a prayer mat... and prays to Allah.

10:40 PM How offensive is that?

  OMG, he's a MUSLIM... THAT answers it: he MUST be a terrorist

10:41 PM Additionally, the season-long arc is that there is this incredibly detailed and complex terrorist plot to target senior political figures.

  Now, recall that this show is trying to be `The Wire' of the technothriller terrorism genre

  So we, as an audience, are supposed to believe that what we're seeing is real

10:42 PM So the aesthetics are out of `The Wire' but the sensibilities are straight out of `24'

  Again, extremely offensive (intellectually)

  In the newest episode, it turns out that Damien Lewis (who we now know to be a repentant terrorist) has become a congressman is being put on the vice presidential ticket

10:44 PM I can't tell if this is intellectually offensive (lazily ripping of `Manchurian Candidate') or offensive to our sensibilities (I seem to recall a certain political figure subject to such accusations as a result of little more than peurile racism)

10:46 PM Even the political scenes are like watching CNN political coverage

10:48 PM The writers are way too impressed with their ability to present thoughts that would be controversial and counterintuitive if they weren't already so mundane and so hackneyed

  `Veep' is a better look into the political process than `Homeland' and it's a comedy!

10:49 PM You should watch this show to see modern, post-colonial racialism at work

10:50 PM The entire cast is this supposedly hyper-competent white CIA analysts who are experts on intelligence and the middle east

10:51 PM Also, what a bad actress, Claire Danes

6 minutes

10:58 PM V: Her only acting mode is bitchy high school girl

17 minutes

11:15 PM V: hahahaha

  So Damian Lewis's character, candidate for vice president, is a secret muslim

  hmm

  Not quite offensive enough yet

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