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ce

@siegeweather.bsky.social

393 followers 398 following 531 posts

I work on medieval Chinese literature, calligraphy, book history, and material culture. PhD in Chinese, UC Berkeley. Professor. Translator. SF Giants fan. Go/围棋/바둑 enthusiast.

ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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This would be a good definition of “mantra.”

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Damn. Well, it’s a great idea.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Who did/is doing this?

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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If debates can’t move the needle no matter what, it was a mistake to call the debate in the first place. Losing strategy and a waste of time to call it. Losing strategy to lose it (time lost to damage control). Losing strategy to continually refer back to it. I see no wins to celebrate here.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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…about the fact that he was behind before the debate…

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Jim Zub's avatar Jim Zub @jimzub.bsky.social
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This photo is pure 2024.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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“Nothing new” guy near the top of the list of most annoying types of guys.

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slop enjoyer's avatar slop enjoyer @slop.guru
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hey man a few of us are absorbing ancient wisdom at the monastery tonight if u want to come

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Revan's avatar Revan @docrevan.xyz
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Fascinating site they’re excavating in Egypt on the Red Sea.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Yeah, there are these texts that just work. Du Fu’s poetry is like that. I’ve always thought Montaigne’s essays have an perfect tonal and generic equivalent in late Ming CC or very high register vernacular prose.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Now imagining an English language Li Bai effect that worked by subverting specifically these readers’ expectations (people who want a glimpse into the “Eastern Mind” and people who want dry, grad seminar translationese)🤔

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Right, maybe in such a way that the poem which has been unfolded with various song-lyric-coded extrametrical phrases is still visible and accessible somehow on the page.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Presumably it’s possible, it would just be really, really hard.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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So ci-poetry as a genre of written-and-no-longer-necessarily-sung poetry is what happens when people write a shi-poem as it would be sung. And it’s true, you can find a metrical skeleton of a coherent regulated shi poem floating in many ci rubrics.) But how to convey this shift!?

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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I agree. I’ve been thinking a lot about Owen’s “hypothesis” in Just A Song that at some point in the late medieval period the difference between a shi-poem and a ci-poem is that the latter is what happens to the former when someone decides to sing it w/ accompaniment. It’s a morphological shift.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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This looks really promising as a presentation format. At the same time, I think it has to be proven with a less intuitively poetic-sounding (to ears aesthetically attuned to the rhythms of modernist free verse) poet-poem combo.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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And what happens when the pleasurable distortion effects present in the original produce an effect (in translation) that poets writing in that language generally try to avoid for fear of writing bad poetry?

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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This is a tricky problem in translation. If the genre convention the original is subverting hasn’t been installed in the reader and hidden beneath the threshold of conscious reader experience, how does the translation convey the startling effect of the subversion?

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Is it because if anyone succeeded in pulling off the Li Bai local gravitational effect on diction and genre conventions in a recognizable English poetic idiom, it would cease to be good poetry (or the kind of poetry conventionally considered “good” by readers steeped in the modernist canon)?

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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First impression is that they are strangely flat, flat like soda pop goes flat. Not how I would do Li Bo. (sez the guy who hasn’t published any translations of Li Bo, let alone an entire book of them…)

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Great list. Just popping in to plug A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang, which you can buy in a cheap, lightweight paperback edition.

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SCOTUS just ruled that states do not have the right to say who is or is not on their ballot in a presidential election, did it not?

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Meredith Rose's avatar Meredith Rose @mrose.ink
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Apparently the government of the Yucatán recently erected a Poseidon statue on one of their major beaches. It’s a very heavily Mayan area, where people still pray to Chaac, the god of rainfall. They’re now being slammed with 3 hurricanes and significant flooding, leading to memes like this

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Genuine question: Who is calling for him to resign from office!? Name names.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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My bad. “Territory” is correct. Opted for a second espresso this morning and my fingers were flying.

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Celeste Ng's avatar Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social
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This isn’t a specific fact, but post-2020, I’ve noticed how virtually *every* work in the interwar period references and often wrestles with mass death, including both the 1918 flu and the huge death tolls of WWI. Everything! Sometimes it’s oblique, but often it’s just stated in there

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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As long as this is the Biden camp’s response to SCOTUS going completely rogue, the “Joe is too old” stuff will stay at the top. The campaign has the power to make headlines and shape the narrative with bold actions and positions on major issues. They won’t do it.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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But that was only after waiting a decade while the seditious faction gained strength, rigged elections, murdered political opponents, turned an entire state into a war zone, seized thousands of guns, canons, and munitions from national arsenals, and readied for war. In short, we’re right on track!

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Nathan K. Hensley's avatar Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social
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an observation: there are entire traditions of political thought, and theories of action to accompany them, that developed in periods of defeat and under conditions of sometimes total domination. these will be useful guides now.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Follow-up for the second one: “Is it still on fire?” Hence the “urgency.”

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Although I have to say the sadism of the shows from this era is something else. I watched the entire series during a grueling 34 hour trip with long layovers last summer. If the dialogue wasn’t so rich, I would have stopped six episodes in.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Even for that I’m sort of out of my depth. (Have you seen 《贫嘴张大民的辛福生活》btw? Up there with 《编辑部的故事》for me.)

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Anybody have a good example of shuochang handy? My reference point is the later pop-inflected version that appeared in the late 80s. See for example the intro to this classic Beijing TV show: youtu.be/90a3K4H1fRU?...

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Culler’s range is incredible. Beautifully concise single-page summaries of close to 100 books and articles in here. (And tons of ideas for in-class exercises and prompts, if you teach literature to undergrads, which I do, which is why I bought it.)

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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What makes this particularly great is that they are pretty clearly working with the traditional Beijing teahouse art of shuochang 说唱 (talking and singing) as a template. But the result is unambiguously rap.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Haven’t followed the Chinese hip hop scene for years so it could be that every major city now has a local rap scene with acts like 北派 (Northern Style), but at least by comparison with the more pop-inflected mainstream stuff, this is really good! youtu.be/ScHSVFDYZ68?...

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Is this the most lucid survey of a notoriously difficult (and often needlessly abstruse and opaque) philosophical/literary critical movement ever written? Probably not. But it has to be up there with the best.

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Picked up this classic for $1 at the local used book barn. 1975 paperback edition, but you already knew that just by looking at the cover design 😍 #booksky

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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On second thought, maybe beginning every answer by saying, “I don’t actually know, because I haven’t read enough about it, but here is what *sounds* to me like a plausible answer, one you will nevertheless need to verify on your own” would actually be a marked improvement!

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ce's avatar ce @siegeweather.bsky.social
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Answers to user queries will begin, “Now I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, so forgive me if I’m saying something that’s just all over the place in the scholarship on this, but could we not say, at least provisionally, that part of what seems to be going on here is…”

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