weilide

A Directionless Teaching Philosophy Zero Draft Freewriting Thing

weilide — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:41:25 GMT

Students will respect you as a teacher if you:
- Know your stuff. Thoroughly. Students respect expertise.
- Challenge them, but not impossibly so. They’ll live up to your high expectations of them provided they’re within reach.
- Respect them and treat them with dignity and honesty. This means treating them like adults and being able to provide reasons for your decisions. Never do anything that you can’t provide a good reason for.
Students want good teachers, not friends –– they’ve already got plenty of those already.
They’ll be more willing to invest their time in the class if they see that you have done the same.
Be micro-specific in your syllabus. If there’s a gray area you’ll find yourself constantly negotiating the particulars. It’s much easier for you to get things to go your way if you set everything down in writing at the start.
Oversharing is a big mistake but the occasional slice of emotion, personal history, etc, judiciously revealed, can do wonders in building a positive relationship with your students.
When it comes to classroom discussion know when something is a matter of opinion and when it’s a matter of fact. Make the distinction clear.
There’s nothing more frustrating to a student than playing the mind-reading game. Avoid it where possible. Or, if you know you want to drive discussion somewhere specific at least try to be upfront about it.
Ask your students to fill out evaluations at the start of a class session rather than the end. That way they won’t rush to get through them. Explain what evals mean to you and to the school
Try to inject a little variety into the classroom routine whenever possible. It helps to maintain focus.
Try to ensure that assignments have a justification apart from being mere busywork. Ideally, they should build in a logical sort of way throughout the semester and prepare students for related activities outside of or after the semester.
Nobody wants to feel that they are wasting their time. Make sure that everyone feels their time, money, and energy have been well-spent.
Not all reading is created equal: some things will take longer to read than others and some things will generate more discussion than others. Literature tends to read quicker and lead to more passionate discussion whereas scholarly writing is a slower read and requires a more structured discussion.
It is better to assign a little reading and see that it is thoroughly understood than to assign a lot of reading that will be half-digested.
About three to five students seems to be optimal for encouraging discussion. It is sometimes useful in large discussion sections to subdivide students into smaller groups and have each group report its findings to the others.
Students will tend to more naturally fall into discussion if they are seated near to one another and can see most of their classmates without turning their heads or sitting uncomfortably. For this reason it is better in a discussion-based class to seat students in a circle or semicircle rather than rows.
It’s easier to keep a high energy level if you teach on your feet.
It’s a good idea to dress very professionally for teaching, especially at the start of a semester. Students will associate this sort of self-presentation with authority.
Give up on making everyone happy all the time. I always want everyone to be my friend but there will always come a time where your teaching duties clash with your desire to sew good cheer. If you’re a good teacher first you might become a friend later. If you try to be liked instead of being a good teacher you can never win. You’ll lose your students’ respect and they won’t want you as a teacher or a friend. You’ll be nothing.
Distribute treats––e.g., holding class outside, letting everyone go five minutes early––sparingly, and when you do try to give the impression that you’re responding to the tenor of the class. You don’t want to seem like a pushover but you don’t want to be inflexible. Giving out big payoffs rarely (like a slot machine) is a good way to get people hooked.

After a Dry Spell, A Sprout

weilide — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:05:32 GMT

It’s been over seven months since my last entry in this thing but I was inspired by a chance meeting with Sarah-with-an-H, (one of the Ridgley Hall Irregulars), to try taking it up again. As before, it will probably be a mixture of personal diary and dissertation journal, with the occasional grouse about current events not unfolding as they would if I were in charge of the universe. (Any day now, people. Any day now.)

In the intervening time I’ve come back to the States from Taiwan and mostly devoted myself to teaching and working on my dissertation. My class, you might recall, is a self-designed thing in which I look at certain works of seventeenth century Chinese short vernacular fiction through a narratological lens. I ended up with five undergraduates enrolled (plus, for a time, a visiting PhD student from Beijing) and, apart from a few hiccoughs here and there, things have been quite wonderful. My students are all bright, engaged, and often quite funny. Really, I couldn’t have asked for a better group to have on my first experience as a solo teacher.

Even with the best people in the world, however, there’s a certain fatigue that sets in around the last few weeks of the semester. In the spring, at least, this is undercut by a warm, green blooming of the universe, unlike in the fall, when the days get colder and darker and shorter, with the general sense that everyone is riding slump-shouldered and glass-eyed toward ruin and the world's ending. So, even with the understanding that things could certainly be much much worse than they are, believe me when I say I’m ready to transition to the summer mode of droning insects and unimproving books read on the balcony.

After months spent spinning my academic wheels in Taiwan, I came back to St Louis raring to make progress on my dissertation, which is exciting and anxiety-making in pretty equal measure. I agreed with my advisor that I would shoot to have a chapter draft ready every two months in one of those Odysseus-lashed-to-the-mast type deals, which so far has resulted in a first chapter (the most page-turning-est fifty-eight pages you’re ever likely to read) in on time and second chapter healthily en route. It’s the fourth chapter (print and material culture) that has me the most worried because it’s the farthest from my wheelhouse, in a whole other district from my bailiwick, but that is fine, if not great. It will change if it needs to.

There was a time, a few weeks ago, that I was feeling very down for reason that I could not identify. It may be that there was no reason other than the usual neuro-chemical sloshing that tips me into the slough of despond from time to time. In part, I think, it was a function of my grinding against the final days of chapter one, at which point I felt I had exhausted I had to say on the subject without exhausting the subject itself. It was big enough that it had grown beyond my ability to manipulate it effectively, casting me in the role of someone trying to single-handedly wrestle a California king-sized duvet cover into shape. Happily, I was rescued by my colleagues in the Comparative Literature Dissertation Support Group (“CompLiDissSuGuh!”), a newly founded organization I now can’t imagine dissertating without, bless their hearts.

In Which I Go On a Bit About Academia

weilide — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:54:14 GMT

I’ve been getting shaggier and shaggier lately so yesterday afternoon I went to get a haircut near campus. It was a straightforward, fifteen minute affair but I have to say there’s nothing that makes me feel like an adult man making his way in the world quite like getting shaved with a straight razor. The heaping of hot towels, the sense that if you have a muscle spasm your head could go flying off –– it feels downright Victorian. If you can manage it in the “Far East” (granting that the term is pretty silly these days), then so much the better.

The last few days I’ve been thinking about what it means to get an advanced degree in the humanities. This may have been precipitated by a recent Slate article bemoaning certain structural issues in academia (e.g. the explosion of adjunct profs, etc) and a follow-up consisting of rejoinders from English grad students. They were both fine but I was more struck by the comments accompanying each: as is to be expected, the comment boards reflected a kind of war with hostilities on two fronts. That is to say, graduate students in the humanities defending their right to intellectually exist from the “intellectuals are elitist jackasses” crowd on one side, and on the other side from the “education is great IF you’re studying math, hard science, or engineering but if you study words then you have a degree in bullshit” crowd (who are mostly annoyed because their team name doesn’t fit comfortably on a T-shirt, even when rendered an acronym).

So, the traditional defense of the “liberal arts” education typically goes something like this: “I may not learn any specific professional skills such as spot-welding or jujitsu but I’m learning to think really well. In an age during which the typical American will change careers X number of times in his or her lifetime, this is the best training you could ask for.” This is sometimes buttressed by the “finer things” argument: “So, you say you want to become an internet billionaire? A liberal arts education will enable you to appreciate all the fine books, art, and music that you will suddenly afford to be able to fill your life with.”

These arguments are dandy but they’re generally applied to undergraduate education. The stance shifts a bit when graduate students enter the picture. Grad students, we’re told, learn how to manage sustained intellectual engagement with a complex problem (eventually, the dissertation) and on top of this become these super disputants who are able to argue the hell out of a problem and, by extension, find the weaknesses in someone else’s argument. Here’s where we academics become vulnerable to attack by the people who pick up some work of critical theory, say, and dismiss it as so much jargony bullshit.

Clearly, some percentage of thorny academic prose is naked nonsense holding a thesaurus over its genitals like a fig leave. Clearly again, some percentage of really difficult academic writing is actually very smart and has something valuable to say, provided you buy into the underlying assumption that art / music / poetry / fiction is ever worth discussing. The problem becomes separating the good stuff from the dross, which turns out to be rather difficult.

This is arguably a style issue, at least in part. Is it necessary for academic prose to read like the EULA for a particle accelerator? (Consider, for example, this gem from Judith Butler: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”)

Certainly, there are those who say that nonspecialists wouldn’t expect to understand every word in a journal of genetics, so why should they in a journal of comparative literature? Fair enough, but it’s specious reasoning to assume that just because something is hard to understand it must necessarily be really smart. Sometimes things are hard to read just because they’re poorly written. For example, the authors behind Style: Toward Clarity and Grace argue (if I recall correctly) that writing can be divided into three types: simple ideas expressed with elegance; complex ideas expressed with necessary complexity; and simple ideas obscured by unnecessary complexity. Writing of the third sort is depressingly endemic in academia, but this no more invalidates the whole enterprise than the presence of quack physicians means all medicine is a waste of time.

Of what use is the good stuff, then? My degree is in “Chinese and Comparative Literature,” so that’s the apple crate I’ll be preaching from. Basically, my work consists of three parts: language study, narratology, and literary history. Language study practically speaks for itself: in an increasingly multicultural world, the ability to communicate with people with backgrounds different from one’s own is a tremendous asset. Along with greatly expanding one’s pool of potential contacts in life, the ability to talk, read, and think in foreign language gives the practitioner access to previously unimagined ways of thinking about the world and articulating one’s position within it.

I see the study of literary history as an extension of that first point. (The history component here is important. Nothing annoys me more than the assumption that literary scholars write three hundred page books about how a poem "makes them feel." (That's what footnotes are for)). My ability to (laboriously and imperfectly, let there be no doubt) read the literature of seventeenth century China and, as a result, mentally enter that distant time and place has greatly enriched my experience of the present (both in the West and the East) by allowing for a point of comparison.

Finally, there is narratology (in other words, the study of narrative), which superficially seems the most abstruse but actually, I would argue, is the most universally applicable. The study of narrative equips one with the skills necessary to dissect nearly all human communication at its most fundamental level. If, for example, you’re a sophisticated reader of journalism, you’re engaging in a kind of narratology, whether you know it or not.

To wrap up, these skills are essential and nourishing. In other words, academia has its problems but you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

I, CLAUDIUS

weilide — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:55:26 GMT

I had originally meant to describe the events of yesterday evening but they’re quite sad (they involve an attempt to rescue an injured street cat, with sad but somewhat predictable results). Instead I’d like to discuss one serious downside to the electronic book revolution, which is that e-book readers are not very well suited to being read in the tub.

I’ve been in the habit of reading in the tub more or less since I became an independent reader as a small boy. I’m not certain why this ever seemed like a good idea because there are a number of obvious problems with the practice: the water is apt to get cold, pages can get wet, and of course there’s the whole pruning issue. Why carry on with it then? It might be that the feeling of decadence appeals –– it’s as close as I’m likely to get to true Greco-Roman splendor (at least without a vomitorium or team of odalisques). One might bathe in milk, of course, but it’s not good home finance. My former Skinker / McPherson apartment was ideal for reading of this sort. It was on the sixth floor, meaning I could open my bathroom window and get gentle, cool breezes and not be too troubled by traffic noise. Summer might mean insect noise in the evenings and autumn was accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves. It’s a lovely way to take in a book.

Burn Notice, Now Starring Claude Rains

weilide — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:22:11 GMT

Two days after my return to Taiwan I accompanied some friends in frolicking around the beach at Fulong where, in a master stroke, I managed to put on too little sunscreen and ended up getting pretty severely sunburnt, a fun treat I hadn’t previously managed since I was in the third grade. (Cathy: “You always make fun of how I say ‘lobster’ and now you are one! Karma’s a bitch!”) The burns were extensive enough that I went to a local clinic to mitigate the pain a bit. This turned out be a local place specializing in burns and other skin ailments. I’m not sure of the full extent of their services because they seemed to respond to just about every patient (yours truly included) by slathering them in a kind of greasy, hot pink medicinal pâté and wrapping the offended tissue in layer after layer of gauze. Their waiting room looked like an open casting call for The Invisible Man. At any rate, the magic health slurry did the trick after several days and I stand now before you a little pinker, a little wiser, but –– gloriously –– alive.

It was a great relief to get back to work on Monday since the previous week had been oozingly spent at home huddled beneath the air conditioner (doctor’s orders). This week’s selection from Gujin is number six, 葛令公生遣弄珠儿 (“Lord Ge Gives Away Pearl Maiden”), in which the titular Lord Ge gives away a beloved concubine to an underling who really likes her and has shown good hustle on the field of battle. This comes as something of a surprise to the Pearl Maiden in question, who thought things were going quite well with Ge, and whom Ge has not bothered to consult with ahead of time. Happily, she and her new husband (who was previously given to staring at her, flies collecting in his open mouth, while he ought to be paying attention to goings on in the court) promptly fall in love and live happily ever. This is just one of the ways in which Gujin is an extremely disjointed collection, in that part of the time women are portrayed with great sympathy and nuance and the other part of the time (as here) they are essentially warm chess pieces with delicate eyebrows. (This is not even attributable to different authorship as GJ 6 and, for example, the much more sympathetic GJ 1 were evidently both written by Feng Menglong himself).

Sweet, Sweet Continuity

weilide — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:22:52 GMT

I could go on about the things that are different here, such as the proliferation of foreigners or the curious predilection for cosmetic, lensless glasses, but instead today I’d like to focus on something that’s stayed exactly the same since I was last here in Beijing: the ostentatious ubiquity of naked baby asses. I’m not the first person to mention this but, instead of wearing diapers, little kids who haven’t been potty trained yet simply wear pants with holes cut in the crotch so if nature ever comes calling the answer is immediate. As a result, you can’t take more than three steps without being assailed by custardy hemispheres of baby buttock just about everywhere you turn. I imagine this must be very liberating for a small child and indeed one finds that little kids toddle around with that look of proprietorial contentment that can only come from the knowledge that everything on this Earth, from the rolling, green hills to the forbidding arctic wastes, from the animals that creep along the land to the fishes that dart in the depths and to the birds grandly soaring in the airy dome of the sky –– essentially, the whole of God’s majestic creation –– is, at the end of the day, their personal toilet. Bless their little hearts.

Moving right along (doog-a-doon doog-a-doon)

weilide — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:22:09 GMT

It’s been almost nine years exactly since I was last in Beijing and many things (an Olympics, for example) can happen in that time. Funnily enough, much of this difference is visible from the road. In ’02 there were plenty of cars along with all the bicycles but they were domestic brands, mostly. Now I peer out from taxis and see the odd bike or tuktuk awash in Peugeots and Passats and Range Rovers. (What range is there to rove over on Chang’an Road exactly?)

Another change is that people use their turn signals now. I used to think that the motorists of Beijing (I cannot bear to call them Pekingese, which will never not sound silly to me, although I have actually seen the term in sober, academic prose) were constantly honking in expression of a kind of irrepressible automotive joie de vivre or possibly in the belief that they could navigate through echolocation. In time I realized that most of the honking announced a lane change, putting the rest of the road on notice. Well, no longer –– like the stegosaurus, trepanning, and the eight-track, the mighty honk has been left along the curbside on the march toward high civilization. I can’t say I’m sad to see it go.

An ancillary benefit of decreased honking is that people can hear one another while on the road and, surely, talking with Beijing cab drivers has to be one life’s great, under-advertised pleasures. They’re garrulous not quite to a fault and to a man (I haven’t run into any women yet –– not so in Taipei) they espouse a kind of universal small-s socialism –– “People are people no matter where they’re from so just nobody be an asshole and we’ll all be fine” –– which I find terribly endearing. One of the first of my visit was also the pithiest: “The problem with Beijing is that it’s too big, with too many people. I get by, though.”

A Brief Update from Beijing

weilide — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 01:26:31 GMT

I made it to Beijing, safe and sound. I get back to Taipei on Friday, the 22nd, but until then I'm behind the Great Firewall and won't have access to Google, Facebook, or Twitter. However, if this works, I should at least be able to mirror LJ posts to Twitter and FB. If you want to reach me then email with my school account or comment on one of these LJ entries.

99% True

weilide — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:16:49 GMT

This is a story I’ve been dining out on for close to ten years and I see no reason to stop now, especially as it’s topical.

My twenty-first birthday fell during the six months I spent in Beijing. During that time I had befriend Tara, a Lawrence alum who had been in China for a year or two at that point, teaching music during the day and playing jazz piano at Cui Jian’s nightclub in the evenings. She was set to return to the States in short order and so she invited me out to give me some birthday gift or other before she left. This meant a fairly long commute, as she was a good ways out from where I was living. Stupidly I neglected to bring any reading material with me to pass the time so I had to resort to stealing glances at the Chinese newspaper the fellow sitting next to me was reading. He was a typical looking fellow, I’d say: mid-twenties, dark slacks, a white button-up shirt, short hair, glasses. I think I might have been hard-pressed to pick him out of a police lineup of one. At any rate, I must have gotten sloppy with my glance pilfering because he noticed me and asked, in a perfectly friendly way, if I wouldn’t like some of his paper. Caught a little off guard, I demurred and we started what by then was a familiar sort of conversation.

“So, where are you from?”

“The States.”

“Oh, you speak Chinese very well.”

“Honestly, no.”

“No, you do…”

This part always went on for a while. I know it seems churlish –– “Just take the damn compliment” –– but I always was (and continue to be) annoyed at the suggestion that a foreigner speaking Chinese is worthy of comment. It feels like damning with faint praise, even though I’m certain that is almost never the intent (at least on a conscious level). Finally my interlocutor shifted gear.

“So, what do you think of Chinese women?”

This wasn’t the sort of conversation I generally have but I supposed he was drawing on some universal masculine fraternity thing, not realizing that I was an extremely Midwestern blushing and stammering type of guy, not given to frank sexual conversations with some random fellow on the subway. I punted.

“Chinese women? I guess I’d say they’re like women anywhere: some are nicer than others.”

This obviously wasn’t that answer he was looking for so he doubled down.

“No, I mean, how many Chinese girlfriends have you got?”

I got a sense of where this was going.

“Me? Oh I haven’t got any…”

“I could introduce you to some of my classmates if you like. They’re very fun.”

“No, thanks.”

“Very pretty…”

“You’re too kind, but no.”

“Very affordable…”

Well, I mean, jackpot. I decided some judicious lying might be appropriate here.

“Well, it’s just, you see, that I have this girlfriend at home and she’s, ah, Canadian, and I have no pictures or direct evidence of her, but I think things are getting serious and all that so I think I’d really probably better not. And stuff.”

“She wouldn’t need to know about it.”

Touche, sir. Touche.

“Yes, but I’d know about it.”

“You’re very thoughtful.”

“I try.”

“You’re sure I can’t change your mind?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You know,” he said with a hint of disappointment, “in the movies you Americans are all so open about this sort of thing.”

“Yes, and in the movies you Chinese all know kung-fu.”

Then he punched me through three consecutive brick walls and ran away across the surface of a nearby pond without so much as a ripple. He leapt into the air, was silhouetted against the full moon for just a moment, and then was gone.

I, FOB

weilide — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:12:26 GMT

I leave for Beijing on Friday and lately I’ve been thinking about the first time I was in China, some nine years ago, several months before the half year I did in Beijing through ACC. This first visit was a student trip (Japan, China) that Lawrence U arranged with a big parcel of cash (I imagine, as I always do, delivered in a scuffed leather briefcase full of loose bills) given to us by the noble bureaucrats at the Freeman Foundation. We spent our first evening in a hotel near Narita, having missed our intended connection, then flew into Shanghai Pudong the next day. Those were the days when I used a pocket watch (wristwatches messed up my viola bowing, or so I felt) and I quite vividly recall the customs fellow in his ill-fitting official uniform running one long fingernail (the pinkie) over the watch as though it were some small creature –– possibly poisonous –– that might attack if provoked. First thing we did was go the Shanghai Museum, where we spent the afternoon, then back to the airport for a flight to Xi’an that evening. As we rode our bus through the city I observed to my seatmate that the endless string of industrial cranes leaning angularly over the Yangtze look like metal version of water birds waiting for passing ships to gobble up.

The flight was enough to make you want to give up flying, at least for a few days, to allow the contents of your stomach to vacate your sinuses and trickle back down your throat. Nasty weather (turbulence, lightning) troubled us the whole way there. We arrived without incident, of course, and there wasn’t an air-bridge so we deplaned using a stair car and walked across the wide, flat tarmac to the terminal. It was after dark by then and the whole vista was illuminated with huge flood lights that painted the ground, the plane, and every one of us a kind of sickly, desiccated yellow, like sand and old bones. I looked around me, at a scene that resembled a moon landing, and asked myself a question that, I’ve since discovered, almost every foreigner asks him or her self upon washing up somewhere in China for the first time: “Boy, oh boy –– what have I gotten myself into?”

Carpe Diem!

weilide — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:57:51 GMT

Another week gone by. I looked at a promising apartment this morning, and will see another this evening. Ideally, Cathy and I will be moving into one of them. I realize that is a definite “knock on wood” statement but I’m seizing this opportunity to reclaim my life from the scurrying machinations of the unknown –– do your worst, wood sprites. (“Coincidence: the thinking man’s fate!” See also, “Murder –– the extrovert’s suicide!”)

The last few days I’ve been reading Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night, concerning the contretemps between Conan and Leno a year or so ago. The story is interesting and I’ve been enjoying the potted bios of O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and others, especially since I have a few friends who are at least tangentially connected to that world. Stylistically, though, Carter is beyond hyperbolic. He employs similes the way Michael Bay employs explosions. (Made-up example: “He seemed calm but inside his guts churned, like he had accidentally swallowed a hand grenade, mistaking it for an unusually tough avocado.”) I find I’m happier reading nonfiction on my iPad than I am reading fiction. This may be because I prefer to restrict my e-books to titles I would only like to read once, saving physical books for fiction that ostensibly has more staying power.

I’ll be flying to Beijing a week from today and staying there a further week or so. While I’ve been back to the Mainland several times over the last few years (mostly Shanghai and environs), I haven’t been to Beijing since I was a student there for six months in 2002. At the time I was going through my default response to a change of scenery, namely, hating most everything around me for most of the time. This was in large part due to my being seriously stressed-out by my program and its attendant language pledge, which forbade us to speak English, in class or out, for the length of the program. (One fun side effect was that for the first week or two everyone in the program went to bed with pounding headaches every knight. The first time I saw that scene toward the end of The Bourne Identity where Clive Owen, whom Matt Damon has moments earlier ventilated with a shotgun, complains about the terrible headaches that their super spy training gave him, I could totally relate.)

That was all a long time ago and I’m a lot more sanguine about life now. (I managed to revisit Japan last year with minimal psychic distress, for example.) So for the most part I’m quite excited to be heading back, to see what has changed, what has stayed the same, and so forth. Of course, it helps that I’ll be staying with friends, which always makes such ventures a lot more bearable. Additionally, I’ll be fully in international academic mode, polishing connections at Beishi da and, with any luck, maybe scoping out a first edition of Gujin xiaoshuo or Jin’gu xiaoshuo –– that would be a fun coup. Fingers crossed.

The Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse

weilide — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 08:47:24 GMT

Bah: various minor annoyances these days. I looked at a promising apartment on Friday afternoon and said I’d take it. The woman responsible for the ad said she’d just have to check with her roommates and get back to me the following day. Finally, just before midnight on Tuesday I heard back –– she’d checked in and apparently as the result some communications argle bargle (or is it a foofaraw I’m thinking of) the room had already been let to someone else, which puts me and Cathy back to square one. It has been suggested that the “checking with roommates” line was just a smokescreen of some sort but the woman wrote back today very apologetically and I’m inclined to take her at her word. Considering that it is now less than six months until I leave this probably means a stiff lowering of standards is order, which bums me out: most of the taofang in this city are pretty bleak. I just hate the thought of paying ten thousand (NT$) plus a month for a grubby room with a shower attached but if that seems to be the direction the wind is blowing then let it never be said I do not also blow.

Second in my list of trivial, white collar crosses to bear: my faithful iPod Touch seems to be on its last legs. That is to say, if not actually dead, then aggressively getting its affairs in order, calling up estranged relatives, etc. Considering it’s over four years old at this point and has spent most of the four years getting dropped in Forest Park as I gracefully faceplant I’d say that’s pretty good. A lot of the secondary functions seem fine but every time I try to play any audio it automatically reverts back to the menu screen without playing anything. I tried restarting, of course, and I’ve wiped it back to factory settings and restored to the last sync, but still no luck. Assuming the damage is irreparable, I may consider replacing it with a nice little 16 gig Nano, since most of the fancier stuff I can now do on my iPad.

Monday Monkey Lives for the Weekend, Sir

weilide — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:47:15 GMT

Up betimes-ish and did my morning flailing with my Pilates for Dummies DVD, which I’m trying to do three times a week. I dream of a day when my Taiwanese colleagues will not greet me by saying how fat I’ve become.

Then off to the library for story number four: 閒云年庵阮三冤債 (Ruan San Redeems His Debt in Leisurely Cloud Nunnery). It start with the usual tropes (well-intentioned parents fall short in their parenting, their kids give in to their throbbing biological urges, calamity results) but takes a nice turn into dreams and ghosts, something I’m always in favor of.

Whoa! Eh? Whoa! Whoa!

weilide — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:07:07 GMT

The internet connection around here has recently been pretty unreliable. It comes and goes, leaving us all shuffling around with sunken eyes and receding gums, salivating for just a taste of sweet, sweet Hypertext Markup Language.

I’ve been carrying on with my work in the library at Shijian University, although I haven’t much been able to focus the last few days. I think the long commute to the library is part of the problem there –– hopefully things should improve on that score once we get a new place. There’s reason for optimism on that front but I’m going to keep quiet for now, so as not to jinx it.

Cathy has been away all weekend on an extended Girls’ Night Out type thing with her friend Celine, leaving me to tend the fort in Taipei and ensure the city doesn’t burn down. (So far, so good). I went to the National Palace Museum yesterday afternoon where I met up with Yunjing to see the Huang Gongwang 黃共望 exhibit. On the bus ride over I rescued a nice girl named Wendy who was caught up in a mild contretemps resulting from her use of the wrong kind of metro pass. I invited her to walk around the museum with us and she was good company.

Afterward I bused and MRTed and walked my way over to Guting and environs for a rooftop barbecue at Jess and Jen’s place. The guests included Bryan, Canadian Brian, Kevin, Yen, Council, and the dogs Foxy and Ani. There were burgers, hotdogs, salad, banana bread, and Heisong Sarsaparilla (and who doesn’t love that?). It was cool and breezy on the roof and I didn’t even feel vertiginous and queasy near the edge (yes, mom, there is a wall there).

Up this morning and not much to do. I mostly puttered around the apartment all morning, had dumplings and doujiang at a nearby Bafang for lunch while listening to the Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review (excellent rant there condemning Transformers 3 as pornographic in the nastiest, stickiest sense of the word) then back to the apartment for a nap while listening to a thunder storm (now passed by, I think).

Forward Motion

weilide — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:01:01 GMT

I’ve had a somewhat difficult time focusing on my work this week but that’s Ok. This week’s story is “Censor Chen Ingeniously Solves the Case of the Gold Hairpins and Brooches” (陳御史巧勘金釵鈿), which I vaguely recall reading in the fall. It’s making a stronger impression on me this time around. I’m certain this is in large part due to my reading it in Chinese, which requires a slower pace and closer gaze; I’ve been reading like a squinty old man in an art museum with his nose six inches from a Monet.

It is encouraging to see my reading level gradually improving. Say what you will about my spoken (actually, please don’t), you will soon enough not be able to fault me for my grasp of the vernacular of the 17th century Jiangnan region –– in practice, what this means is that I’ll be unconsciously larding my conversation with four hundred year old slang and such (“How now, 7-11 wench –– what cheer? Prithee gather up a flagon of sarsaparilla and a loaf of melon bread most sweet and toothsome, for I would break my fast like ye kings of old…Why do you tarry so? Do you not mark me?”), which is both kind of awesome and kind of pathetic. At any rate that world is very slowly coming into focus for me and it’s a fascinating place, all merchants and maidens and rogues and ghost and demons and what-have-you. It’s a setting I’d like to explore creatively, through some kind of fiction project, as well as academically. If I get anything written you’ll hear about it here first.

"For your comfort and convenience you will be sharply kneed in the groin."

weilide — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:41:23 GMT

When I graduated from my language program some four years ago I was told that the facilities are still open for alums, that we should come on by whenever we need to use the computer lab, the reading room, etc. It was a cool offer and in the time since then I’ve happily taken advantage of it when I’m in town. In fact, the reading room is where I spent most of my productive time last summer. It’s clean, free of the distraction of Wi-Fi, and generally ignored by the students. Another nice thing is that the teachers and even the janitors tend to remember and say hi.

So it came as a bit of surprise when I was peremptorily evicted by the director of the program this afternoon. She (yes, the same one from he good old days) barreled up to me in the reading room with a big smile on her face (in hindsight, an obvious red flag) and said hi, where have I been, and so on. I gave her the precis of my current visit to Taiwan (doctor research, etc) and she said that’s all lovely and would I mind joining her in the hallway to talk, lest we disturb the one other fellow in the room.

As we continued to talk it gradually dawned on me that she was effectively telling me to leave without ever coming right out and saying so: isn’t mafan (a bother) to commute all the way from Banqiao; surely there must be other places more convenient for you to study, and so on. My favorite: “You know, since none of the students know you, they’ll want to ask you who you are and what you’re up to –– don’t you think that’ll be terribly mafan?” Me: “I see, so you’re really trying to save me a lot of mafan, is that it?” Director: “Yes, exactly. Of course, if you wanted to sit in the study room occasionally that would probably fine, so long as you notified me in advance of every visit. And we’d need to set an event for you to be formally introduced to all the current students if you were ever going to do that…”

The thing that pisses me off so much about this is not that I was asked to hit the road. There are all sorts of more or less legitimate reasons she might have –– insurance liability, my distracting good looks and pleasant smell, etc. If she had given me an honest answer, that would be just dandy. No, the thing that really burns me is that she had the unmitigated gall to give me a transparently bogus rationale, smiling all the while, and try to present it as though she were doing me a favor. Because god forbid I should have a commute of my choosing or suffer a conversation with someone about my work.

Well, guess what, little miss petty water cooler dictator, I don’t need you or your overpriced, parochial, one horse, small beer fiefdom. From what I hear, the grape soda in the vending machines was sour anyway. Bah.

光陰似箭

weilide — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:00:38 GMT

And so ends my first week of productivity for the summer. I’m a little behind where I had hoped to be but I think that’s mostly because of the Monday holiday and also the text I worked on for this week is about twice as long as they typically will be in weeks to come. After working through the vernacular Jiang Xingge story on Tuesday and Wednesday I got started on its classical Chinese source material yesterday. It’s interesting, this is the third version of the story I’ve read (if you also count the English translation) and even though the language is so terse, it’s very impactful. (婦人內慙欲死 “His wife was ashamed at heart and wanted to die.”) There’s something about the blunt character of the prose that makes it very affecting at times.

I think this must be registration week at ICLP (my old language program) and it’s been interesting to see a few more 書呆子 taking up residence in the reading room. Naturally I’m curious about them, since I’ll be spending so much time there, but I find myself hesitant to approach them. I guess it’s just that as an alumnus I’m not sure what my role is there –– I don’t want to be the ICLP version of the random older dude who shows up at college frat parties even though he graduated years earlier and everyone tries to figure out whether he’s an undercover cop or just some townie who wants to party. This hint of uneasy alienness is exacerbated by the fact that the default ICLP restaurant, which was almost universally known as “The Classic,” (as in, “Where shall we go?” “Well, the classic option would be…”) is suddenly, shockingly gone, having been replaced by a pretty good pizzeria. Change equals alarm.

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage"

weilide — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:21:32 GMT

I got down to work today, reading the first half of the first story in Gujin xiaoshuo (for those of you playing along at home, that would be “Jiang Xingge reencounters the pearl shirt”). As I often do when I’m back in Taipei for the summer, I was working from the ICLP reading room. It’s clean and comfortable and affords me plenty of desk space. The only major problem is that I keep expecting to see classmates who haven’t haunted those quarters for going on four or five years now. Also it turns out there are more subtle dangers –– for example, along with the usual mechanical lock on the door to the room, there is an electronic lock, meaning it is quite easy to step out for a drink of water, return, and let the door swing shut behind you. From there you can enjoy the sinking sense of your own immense stupidity as you discover that the electronic lock has engaged, imprisoning you alone in the room with no obvious way to get out. In the end, by way of a series of pathetic hand gestures I was able to catch the attention of one of the teachers in the nearby office and arrange for my liberation.

weilide — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:30:06 GMT

One of the indices of my misspent youth is the number of fortune cookie fortunes I’ve managed to collect over the years. Probably the best of these is one I collected in college that just says, “Life is a dark tunnel.” (Drôle). I was reminded of this at about 11 last night when the bus I was on took literally forty minutes to pass through an impossibly long tunnel. After a while it became a joke. The scene outside the windows kept repeating like a Hannah Barbara cartoon: concrete wall, mosaic, emergency exit, concrete wall, mosaic, emergency exit….

Please don’t conclude from this that I was having a bad time, though, because I had a marvelous day. Cathy and I had reconnected with a group of very good friends (Jess, Bryan, Jen, Jenny, Yen) and together we rode out to Yilan 宜蘭 for a housewarming barbecue. The host (one of Jess’s friends) had just moved into an apartment a five minute walk from a totally bucolic stretch of beach on the ocean and so we brought our swimsuits and bobbed up and down in the water, tossed a Frisbee around, and just generally indulged in the kind of aquatic horseplay that lifeguards are always warning about.

Afterward we went back to the apartment, showered off, and had a really delightful meal that had been organized by the host, apparently a professional chef at an earlier stage in his life. There were probably twenty or twenty-five people floating around, both foreign (American, mostly) and Taiwanese, and it was deeply awesome to be at a get together with foreigners speaking Chinese (in many cases way better than mine –– better get to work), Taiwanese speaking English, and everybody getting along in a totally cosmopolitan way.

Cat Scratch Fever

weilide — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:38:28 GMT

I’m writing in the Cat’s Cafe, a place my friend Lingling showed me last year. It’s the quintessential college coffee shop: mismatched secondhand furniture, old paper backs on every surface (including Gulliveriana, the erotic adventures of Lemule Gulliver’s female double), the menu written out in chalk on a blackboard, Chinese-language shoe-gazer indie rock, folks sitting around for hours nursing a single drink, and so on. It’s a very familiar seeming environment, and I could almost forgot I’m in Taipei –– not that I feel the need to forget I’m here.

Someone recently asked me about culture shock but that’s not something I’ve ever really had a problem with in Taiwan (unlike Japan and the Mainland). I would say the biggest contrast is seat-belts, of all things. I’ve been so thoroughly programed to put on my seat-belt in all vehicles that I get the strangest looks from cabbies and other locals. I think many folks see it as a little insulting –– “You really think my driving’s that bad?” It probably looks like a foreigner climbing into a New York cab and putting on a helmet and mouthguard but I truly can’t help it at this stage.

Still Alive

weilide — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:28:15 GMT

I left St Louis Thursday morning and since then this trip has been a parade of the delightfully eccentric. It started on the quick flight from St Louis to Detroit when a well put together older woman with a slight tremor who was sitting across the aisle from me leaned over and started talking after she overheard me mention to the fellow on my right that I’m a PhD student. It turns out that she’s a retired academic, an English professor who studies female science fiction writers and has worked a lot with Ursula Le Guin. We discussed academia and, to my surprise, euthanasia –– she thinks that nobody should be forced to live beyond eighty. Our plane landed and we parted ways at Detroit.

Then (or, rather, several hours earlier, but I just now thought of the other lady first) while waiting for my boarding section to be called I found myself sitting across from a man apparently in his mid-thirties, in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting tiger-orange hair and stubble. We made eye-contact and started chatting. I discovered he had so thick a New England accent that you could use it to Spackle over holes in your plaster. He asked what I do and I asked him the same. He explained that he’s a farrier, quickly adding that farriers make and fit horseshoes. (I had remembered this, actually, but just barely). He went on to explain that he had studied farriery at the Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine, one of very few universities in the country where it is possible to do so. I think I could have talked to him for hours but after just minutes boarding started and he too went on his way.

I arrived in Taipei late Friday night and was happily reunited with Cathy, who was waiting for me in the airport as always. We had the usual discussion about how impossibly heavy my luggage was and we held hands on the cab ride home.

On Monday Cathy and I had lunch with a mess of current and former Wash U students (Chun-yu, Chuan-wen, Fang-yu, Tadashi, and Yunjing). Afterward Cathy went off to conduct an interview for school and Chuan-wen and I went off to a nearby Starbucks to pass the time until she was free (the others went on to spend a few days in Kaohsiung). After maybe an hour Cathy called and suggested we walk over to a nondescript apartment on an unregarded side-street quite near to the Da’an MRT station. We buzzed our ways in (after one or two false starts) and rode the elevator up to what turned out to be a kind of Buddhist charitable center. There we met a blind concert violinist with wispy, Dickensian muttonchops, a Buddhist nun (known only as shifu 師傅) with just a suggestion of a mustache and infinitely knowledgable about all things Chinese literature, an art college graduate with Cleopatra mascara, wrapped in a diaphanous, silky, appronly, smockish thing, a dog who knows sign language, and a cat who doesn’t really have any special skills other than being a cat. They (the humans) fed us tea cakes and coffee and starfruit while setting the dog to doing tricks and describing shifu’s upcoming lecture tour in Europe. All the while I was quietly boggling at the notion that these people all somehow exist in the same universe as I do. I will say this: if there were a show where they drove around in a van, each applying their special skills toward solving mysteries, I’d watch it in a second.

So say we all

weilide — Tue, 17 May 2011 22:13:31 GMT

Up seven-ish and read the news in bed for about an hour and a half. Made oatmeal for breakfast (consumed while watching last night’s Daily Show) and then once around the park while listening to an hour-long interview with Lost’s Damon Lindelof. I felt at the time, and still think, that the Lost finale got an unfairly bad rap. Like most people I didn’t find it wholly satisfying qua mythology wrap up but it had some nice character moments and it gave the impression that the creators knew more but were choosing not to reveal it, unlike in, say, the relaunched Battlestar Galactica, wherein the creators showed their hand and it was all bad cards (SPOILER ALERT: turns out angels did it). Throwing a temper tantrum and crying that the two hour finale invalidated the previous five seasons of the show –– it was stupid the whole time but we just didn’t know it yet –– is just preposterous. Likewise, if you spent five seasons slogging through the series, hating it all the while but counting on a mystical finale to redeem it all, well, that’s equally preposterous.

Pterror of Psaint Louis

weilide — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:55:38 GMT

I successfully defended my dissertation prospectus on Friday, making me ABD (“All but dissertation” –– officially, I am now a “doctoral candidate”). The defense itself lasted about an hour or so. I did some waffling around and was quite upfront in admitting that I’m in the earliest stages of a long project, which my examiners were good sports about. Then my parents came in for the weekend, to help out with shopping and whatnot but mostly just to spend some time with me before I leave the country. It was good to see them, as usual, and they weren’t really around long enough for us to start getting on one another’s nerves, as sometimes can happen. After they left on Sunday Kelsi and I walked down the street to help our friends Colin and Liza move combine their possessions and move into their new (lovely) apartment. There were enough of us helping that the move, from start to finish, took about two and a half hours, which has to be a record of some sort. Afterward the gaming group got together but none of us had the energy to game so instead we watched Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. (Think steampunk Fifth Element with pterodactyls. Fun, not amazing).

Birdi Beardson

weilide — Tue, 10 May 2011 02:24:41 GMT

Out in the park this morning for sticky, humid run. There’s no question –– summer is here. So sweaty and gross was I that I decided the beard would have to go, so I shaved the whole thing off once I got home. As usual when I shave off facial hair I’ve had for a while I’ve been having hard time recognizing my own face in the mirror. (Roommate: “The aspect ratio is all wrong!”) It’s as though the face I’d come to know had been replaced with a soft, pink blob, like an irregular globe of suet with tiny eyes and a mouth set in it and a ridiculous twist of hair sticking out on top. The feeling always passes, of course, but it’s strange. It’s a quite a bit less than three weeks until I leave for Taiwan and I’m very happy and excited. It makes me so sad to leave my friends in the States but at the same time life is so lovely in Taipei that it’s hard to resist the pull. I’m even hopeful that with the assistance of my new toys I’ll be able to survive the flights a little more pleasurably than usual.

Onward

weilide — Fri, 06 May 2011 02:28:51 GMT

Up early again and walked to the Walgreens on Clayton to buy Dayquil, Nyquil, Twilightquil, and what have you. Not a terribly exciting day all in all. Worked in the EA library for several hours this afternoon and got a few more prospectus pages down. I meet with the triumvirate next week Friday and I think I can have some half-baked thing cobbled together by then. Actually, as I bang around this early draft I find it’s sparking a lot of ideas that I hope I can return to over the coming months and years.