Performative and Constative in Culler

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory (1997)

Chapter 7: Performative Language

Culler reviews J. L. Austin's distinction between constative language ("The cat is on the mat") and performative language ("I promise!"); "performative utterances do not describe but perform the action they designate." (152) But when we say "The cat is on the mat," we are saying "I hereby affirm: the cat is on the mat" and so every constative is also performative.

There is a notion that all literature is performative language -- Joyce describes Buck Mulligan, and thereby creates Buck Mulligan. Romance stories describe love, and so create love. Literature thus changes the world. But if literature is performative, then literary statements are never true or false, but, like promises, may be "felicitous" or "infelicitous." Having said to one person, "I promise not to do so," then saying "I promise to do so" to another person is not making a false statement, but rather an infelicitous one. What makes literary statements felicitous? This question is tantamount to asking what makes statements literary in the first place -- Culler: what is it "for a literary sequence to work." (side note: Culler clearly means by "sequence" any sequence of literary statements)

Derrida appeals for Austin to consider not just "serious" performative and constative utterances, but also a more comprehensive look at statements in all situations, for the criteria of "general iterability." Looking at political statements, for example, Derrida finds that a constative statement lurks behind the performative statement:

We therefore...do solemnly publish and declare that these United colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.

The verb "are" contains the performative element; the "ought," constative.

So performative utterances are defended by constative utterances, and constative utterances all contain within them performative utterances; for Culler, this undecidable oscillation, this impasse, this aporia, is reflected in Robert Frost's poem "The Secret Sits:"

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Religion: Francis Schaefer

A blog post in the recent LA Times Arts section probably hoped I would laugh at Rev. Schaefer's video and dismiss it without even finishing the series. But I see a bit more here than "art-junk," though it is visibly poisoned by Schaefer's sympathy for destruction and -- perhaps even oppression -- in the name of pure salvation, symbolized and reducible to Christ. The view that Christ is crucial to any rational discussion is called "presuppositionalism:"

In Christian theology, presuppositionalism is a school of apologetics that presumes Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and claims to expose flaws in other worldviews. ... Presuppositionalism itself contrasts with classical apologetics and evidential apologetics. --Wikipedia

Sentence: Gloominess

A certain gloominess -- that is to say, a general pessimism regarding literary distinction -- could be called an occupational disease of literary scholars if it were not their primary occupation. With literary form always in flux, and literary publics always on the move, the scholar's sacred duty is to identify the crises of the literary, and to extrapolate from these certain explanations and elaborations of the cultural crises to which we all, as a human race, face in unending sequence. Little wonder, then, that gloom accompanies the analysis of the literary, and even less wonder that in attending to the literary in Chinese, and so faced with the ravaging cultural crises that have wrenched Chinese reading publics in their experience of the twentieth century, the scholar of Chinese literature is occupied with gloom as a matter of course.

What is a sequence (2)

I'm mulling over what the term "sequence" means once again, and this time approaching it from what I've read of Patrick Hanan's most general "scheme of narrative analysis." What I was trying to do was to divide the text into sections that identify the "characteristic means of transition from one section of the text to another." Two means that I already had in mind were the breaks between description into scene (which is common at the beginning of the story); Hanan has it that these are changes at the modal level. The shift between description into scene is that between static elements and the mimesis of action.

I also had in mind changes to the focal level, or "point of view." (18) When we pass from description to scene in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," for example, the focus changes from the setting of Tarry Town, its environs and its history, to Ichabod Crane, his physical features and personal history. Isn't this characteristic shift between sections of the text an example of changes at the focal level as much as or more than the modal level? I suppose that what I am approaching here is the idea that scene sequences begin and end with changes to the text on multiple levels. The identification of these levels and their changes will help students summarize the story, build up the sense of configurative meaning, and, eventually, begin to construct the interpretive meaning of the story.

Book: The Chinese Vernacular Story (2)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

Chapter 1: Language and Narrative Model
Section 2/3 : A Scheme of Narrative Analysis (16-20)

A level is linear, sequential, extending in space to represent the sequential nature of speech and literature...no fixed hierarchy is postulated...one requirement of a level...is universality; it must consist of elements that are both discernible in the text and that run throughout any and all texts in the same manner as linguistic levels. Such intermittent features as character, image, and symbol therefore do not exist as levels but merely as constituents of one level or another. (16-17)

Every text (and so every story) has six major levels. There is the speaker; in the case of the story, this is the narrator. Another level is the focus, out of which we may determine scenes and sequences because the focus is both what the speaker is seeing and the speaker's perspective, the object and the subject as a common textual artifact. On the level of mode, we have scenes, close-up beats of action, and summaries, which combine beats, or else delve into commentary or description. As we read along switching modes here and there, the reader begins to put together the story at the level of meaning, first constructing a real-time, or serial, meaning, and then linking the serial meanings into a greater configurative meaning, which can both be the basis of an interpretive meaning. Finally there is the sound and/or graphic level, about which Hanan comments little here.

Among the four literary kinds, narrative belongs together with the drama as kinds that narrative events, which is to say they tell of events in time, and so remain close to time and experience, whereas the lyric and the exposition may leave behind the dimension of time to approach more closely the focus, either the lyrical subject or the theme. The idea of theme is abstract, and Hanan also likes Saintsbury's term "stuff-material," though he does not tell us why yet.

Reading list derived from these four pages alone (many, many more in the endnotes):

• Paul Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
• Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) 
• Genette, "Discours du Récit," Figures III, (1972) 65-282, 203-11, On the "focus"
• Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1973) ; look for "stratum of created objects" to help understand configurative meaning
• Roland Barthes, S/Z (1974)

Graphic: How Big a Backyard to Live off the Land

I saw two or three great graphics this summer but did not save them here, and now can't remember what they were of. Resolved: save interesting graphics if at all possible.


Home Solar Power Discounts - One Block Off the Grid

What is a "Sequence"

I'm interested in the term sequence as used by Patrick Hanan, for example on p. 31 of The Chinese Vernacular Story: "...the story is realized in six major scene sequences." "Sequence" as a term in narrative theory is defined neither in Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, nor Kellog and Scholes, The Nature of Narrative. It does appear, though in Robert McKee's Story: Style, Substance and the Principles of Screenwriting, where we see a definition perhaps peculiar to the screenplay:

A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes -- generally two to five -- that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene. 

*  *  *

There is also the term "literary sequence," as in:

'Characters' are by definition in determined contexts (i.e. they are parts of a literary sequence involved in a plot)...

--The Routledge dictionary of literary terms

We can see here that plot can be defined as the set of all sequences in a short story. I think "sequence" is even more useful than "plot," because sequences are the units of the short story that the author must have seen. They are the equivalents of scene changes in drama, but in fiction we can have shifts in object of description (update: Hanan's focus) other than changes of scene, such as in Xizao chapter 4, which has Yun Nan shifting his gaze towards different characters in a big meeting. I would say that the entire scene is made up of short sequences that take as their objects the different characters, their physical appearances and hints about their role in the upcoming story. UPDATE: Nope, that's not what Hanan had in mind (return to p. 31-2), so I was off the mark in this initial analysis. (I preserve it show wrong I can be!) The scene sequence is represented by the entire chapter, with Yun Nan's tardiness illustrated, then explained, then resolved.

*  *  *

Another useful clue pointing the way towards my definition is from a book on "lyric writing," which gives "sequence" as

"a series of similar constructions that begin with the same kind of word -- a verb, adverb, adjective and so on..."
--Sheila Davis, The craft of lyric writing

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 4/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 4

In October, 1949 the "Beiping Institute of National Learning" 北平國學專修社 is to be re-christened as "the Literature Research Institute" 文學研究社. Ma Renzhi serves as director, and the number of students and faculty both increase.

Yun Nan is late to the official establishment ceremony because he changed his entire costume; at first he wore a blue uniform, but at the last minute decided to wear a Western suit. As the last person to arrive at the big meeting, he looks around anxiously. He observes his fellow faculty members and thinks briefly of what he knows of them.

One professor who had been around since Yao Jian's time, Ding Baojia, knows that he might face conflict with the new director, Ma Renzhi, because he made anti-Communist remarks to Ma before the war ended. Ever since Ma had been Yao Jian's assistant, he must have been an underground CCP member.

Yun Nan also spots Yao Mi, noting her delicate disposition and dark, intelligent eyes.

The meeting concludes, and new institute is established.

Poetry Magazine: The Manhattan Project by Spencer Reece : Poetry Magazine

James Franco in his next role as a lonely gay man with intimacy issues (practice makes perfect!)

My favorite poem in the July/August 2011 Poetry was :
The Manhattan Project by Spencer Reece

First, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote his paper on dwarf stars—“What happens to a massive star that burns out?” he asked. His calculations suggested that instead of collapsing it would contract indefinitely, under the force of its own gravity. The bright star would disappear but it would still be there, where there had been brilliance there would be a blank. Soon after, workers built Oak Ridge, the accumulation of Cemesto hutments not placed on any map. They built a church, a school, a bowling alley. From all over, families drove through the muddy ruts. The ground swelled about the ruts like flesh stitched by sutures. My father, a child, watched the loads on the tops of their cars tip. Gates let everyone in and out with a pass. Forbidden to tell anyone they were there, my father’s family moved in, quietly, behind the chain-link fence. Niels Bohr said, “This bomb might be our great hope.” My father watched his parents eat breakfast: his father opened his newspaper across the plate of bacon and eggs, his mother smoked Camel straights, the ash from her cigarette cometing across the back of the obituaries. They spoke little. Increasingly the mother drank Wild Turkey with her women friends from the bowling league. Generators from the Y-12 plant droned their ambition. There were no birds. General Leslie Groves marched the boardwalks, yelled, his boots pressed the slates and the mud bubbled up like viscera. My father watched his father enter the plant. My shy father went to the library, which was a trailer with a circus tent painted on the side. There he read the definition of “uranium” which was worn to a blur. My father read one Hardy Boys mystery after another. It was August 1945. The librarian smiled sympathetically at the 12-year-old boy. “Time to go home,” the librarian said. They named the bomb Little Boy. It weighed 9,700 pounds. It was the size of a go-kart. On the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, “This is the greatest thing in history.” That evening, my father’s parents mentioned Japanese cities. Everyone was quiet. It was the quiet of the exhausted and the innocent. The quietness inside my father was building and would come to define him. I was wrong to judge it. Speak, Father, and I will listen. And if you do not wish to speak, then I will listen to that.

Prose poetry is poetic language that comes in blocks justified on both the left and the right. If there is any deeper difference from poems not labeled "prose poem" ("poem poem?"), then I suppose it is in the subordinate position of metre. But that does not mean that other elements of prosody are not fully present; it doesn't even mean metre is not important. More thoughts on this, I hope, to come.

Side Note: Funny, I just saw Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsburg, and now I learn one of Spencer Reece's other poems, "The Clerk's Tale," "is currently being made into a short film by actor, James Franco." So Franco intends for the elevation of poets and poetry to proper cinematic subjects to be a continuing project. Bless him!

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 3/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 3

We learn the history of the "Beiping Institute of National Learning" 北平國學專修社 and how it has entered a new era of transition. The "Institute" started up and established, more or less, by Yao Jian 姚謇, a literature professor who failed to flee Beijing as the Japanese invaded. He, his wife, his assistant Ma Renzhong, Ma's wife, a few other teachers and three students occupied a few rooms on Yao's old family property, which by wartime had mostly been sold or leased away. The Institute is a secluded community that collectively spends its time punctuating the Historical Records of Sima Qian. Or rather pretending to, as most folks prefer to sit around chatting and drinking tea.

Yao Jian has one daughter, Yao Mi 姚宓. She is 19 years old in 1945. Her father unexpectedly passes away, and her mother, already unstable, is plunged into deep melancholy. Yao Mi drops out of college, uses her small inheritance to send her mother to a German sanitarium, and takes up a low-paid position as librarian at the Institute.

In 1949, Yao Jian's former assistant, Ma Renzhi, takes over as director and prepares to re-establish the institute under Communist control. Yun Nan joins the faculty.

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 2/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 2

Remembering advice and money given her by her mother-in-law, Wan Ying prepares for separation from Yu Nan, but Miss Hu unexpectedly finds a better male consort, and so Yu Nan is left behind as the Communists take control of China. Thanks to Wan Ying's good memory, Yu Nan is able to accept a job offer at a literary institute in Beijing.

Book: 洗澡 Part 1/3, chapter 1/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

With consolidation of basic military and political control of the China mainland the Communist Party leadership faced a problem...a small political elite committed to social and economic change saw its revolution threatened from both peasant conservatives and the life style of a small urban skill group. As Mao Tse-tung and his supporters phrased it in the mid-1950s, "Rightist conservative ideology...presents a most serious threat to our Party." (268-269)

--Richard H. Solomon, Mao's revolution and the Chinese political culture

Yang Jiang's only novel is divided into three parts, each with many short chapters; part 1 is called 采葑采菲 : "collect the chaff to collect the wheat."

The year is 1949, and educated Shanghai dwellers watch anxiously as the Chinese Communist Party consolidates control over the region and forces the Nationalists out. Anti-Communist teachers and writers all try to leave if they can.

We meet Wan Ying, who is facing hard times in these circumstances. Her husband, the rather dastardly and deceitful Yu Nan, is carrying on an affair with the eminently practical, if conniving and manipulative, Miss Hu. Yu Nan hopes to abandon his wife in Shanghai and leave China for a job obtained by Miss Hu.

Film: Two Strikes and a Hit

Trawling Netflix instant on packing days, resulting in

Strike 1:



Strike 2:



Actually, that one seemed to work well enough for me. But Adam voted it down. And then a hit!



Winner, best film about a poet I've ever seen. Now to see a second one...

Books: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters"

Theodore Huters, Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters, (PhD dissertation, Stanford, 1977)

Crisis after crisis afflicts the minds of men aiming to build and preserve cultural unity, moral unity, linguistic unity; the search for unity plagues Chinese history. Such is Huters's gloomy theme in the first section of his doctoral dissertation (Chapter 1, part I, pp. 1-38). A few of the major propositions involved in this perspective on shifts in literary value:

The most ancient gesture of breaking cultural unity is the emergence of literary language out of epic. The world of the epic is unitary, while the world of the literary is one author's view of things, and so in the moment of transition culture faces a crisis.

In China, this crisis occurs when the system of the rites 禮 yields to the system of the written word, but Chinese masters do not admit of transformation between epic and literary, between constative and performative. Rather the very choice of what to canonize -- laws and miscellany, rather than myth -- reveals the effort to make the Chinese literary 文 "produce what is meant," though it does not.

And yet, strands of subjective perspectives exist, as we can trace from Wang Yangming. It's just that there is always a conservative reaction, such as the Qing empiricists, who take objective perspectives to "paper over" the gaps between the constative and the performative. (14)

Confucian humanism decided that man created civilization and language, but can't quite explain why they don't work. The effort to explain is an obstructionist historicism, the well-known Chinese tendency towards archaism. Chinese literature always, always was cornered into commentary; pure literature ever remained "a light residue in a didactic mass." (18)

And yet, private forms did develop; most notable is the lyric poem 詩. Zhuangzi privileged privacy too, or at least the sense of intuition. But again the Chinese subjective is vulnerable to attack by thinkers who say all language should be right and true and belong to no one. 言公 (22)

In the West, the early gesture of severance sheared the literary from other things, eventually resulting in our genre concept. The Chinese "mechanical sense of genre" gives one form per age, and treats the novel as "non-entity." (26) The Chinese novel languished in the form of "the masque:" procedural, essentially conservative.

Wang Yangming's "left wing" subjectivity was developed by his follower Wang Ji in the concept of innate knowledge 良知. Li Zhi went to prison for his own elaborations on innate knowledge. In the wake of this, the three Yuan brothers cultivated a marketable sensibility of "primitivism." It was shallow, though. (30)

The Tongcheng thinkers faced the dilemma of approaching literary affect severed from constative statements once again. And failed again.

The dream of writing like the Wenxuan, like the Han -- like the most ancient of ancients -- is a final, poignant attempt to keep written language 文 performative.

The central crisis of Chinese literature arrived before the Westerners. (36-7)

Selected reading list:

• Lin Yutang, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1930)
• Zhou Zuoren, 中國文學的源流  (1934)中國文學的要求 (1930s?)
• Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, 1953)
• Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957)
• Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford, 1966)
• Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971)
• Iser, "The Reality of Fiction" (1975)

Cooking: Search for a Cabbage Recipe

Rhonda Lauret Parkinson, The everything college cookbook: 300 hassle-free recipes for students on the go. (Adams Media, 2005)

These days I'm looking at a lot of books like this so that Adam and I can eat home-cooked food even though we are busy now and will shortly become very, very busy.

So far I've only seen p. 78 of the Google eBook, but I'm not impressed with a page that suggests a) to back the hell out of cabbage and b) it's better if we eat the cabbage raw. Isn't Rhonda suggesting we not cook the recipe she has printed, but instead look somewhere else?

Books: "Polygamy and Sublime Passion" (2)

Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii, 2009)

To begin, McMahon introduces us to Chinese literature as a story about the evolution of polygamy, though perhaps it's better to say that it's not polygamy or even sexuality that he is interested in so much as what the characters in love stories -- especially male consorts and remarkable women -- represent in terms of social and philosophical value.

Chapter 1, "Sublime Passion and the Remarkable Woman" begins with the general proposition that the rhetoric of qing in late Ming and Qing fiction is the rhetoric of a "radical subjectivity," as we can see from the "evanescence" of the female characters, all of whom are remarkable women. The proposition is similar to one in Lee Haiyin's Revolution of the Heart (Stanford, 2007), but McMahon focuses on the egalitarian streak that, in his interpretation drives, male consorts to toward femininity and receptiveness and remarkable women towards agency and service as ontological focal points for anxious males.

He proposes that the figure of the "wanton woman" (yinfu), best exemplified in Jin ping mei's Pan Jinlian, is a type of remarkable woman as much as any of the honorable courtesans or women warriors, because wanton women steal male energy. The point is that the remarkable woman as a narrative unit symbolizes men's ontological crisis. Courtesans, for example, help contain the nostalgia and longing of fallen dynasties. (In women's hands, though, (as we see in tanci) courtesans supply complaint and resistance, which shows that more than the male perspective is at work. How does this fit in McMahon's larger argument?)

McMahon's readings from Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi illustrate his interest in the representation of ontology in the appearance of the woman, which is always liminal (cf. evanescent), rich in "visible affects," and contains at least one scene of the "frame" of sexual possibility into which she enters, crossing over (as Zeitlin has described) boundaries. The effect of the ontology is on the man, who transforms, as from a blank man to one with sexual knowledge, or the spineless man destroyed by the shrew. According to McMahon, there is a "gesture of severance" common to many types of Pu Songling story that illustrate the close relationship between qing and...nothingness. There is a profound proposition at work in the stories about the "empty core" at the bottom of any individual self. (This implies a Lacanian reading, which he will introduce in time, and to which I frankly have to play catch-up. Skeptical catch-up.)

I'm eager to play with many of these ideas, both to continue setting up my own reading list and to understand how the actions and appearances of remarkable women and male consorts work in modern Chinese writing. Two basic ideas to consider further:

• Yang Jiang self-fashions as a "remarkable woman." How does she transform and adapt "gestures of severance" to yield agency for herself? (Is that even a good question?)
• Yang Jiang sketches Qian Zhongshu as imbued with "foolishness," a plain fact that connects with McMahon's discussion of foolishness which Paul Rouzer alluded might exist in a conversation last year: "Marriage or love only work in Liaozhai if the man is in some way foolish and blank, the best example of which occurs when a woman literally bestows sexual capacity upon the man." (29)

Reading list from chapter 1: 

• Comments on qing by Wang Yangming, Li Zhi, and Feng Menglong
• Selected Liaozhai stories
• Jinü, "The Weaving Girl," for the luminescent erotic image, framed, its entry, and the mistake the male makes to lose her. (Also there's a horny homosexual old lady -- a new motif of interest!)
•  "A Bao" and other stories which feature "foolish" men
• "Le Zhong" for its non-sexual sublime passion which McMahon leaves us as a teaser

Chinese: dried meat for teachers

Idea: sublime passion and nationalism

Posting soon

Books: "Polygamy and Sublime Passion"

Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii, 2009)

What could be more fun than a tour through the world of "polygamist-philanders," Chinese men of prestige who both maintained multiple spouses and visited courtesans and prostitutes? Surely only a volume that would not only indulge any healthy reader's fascination with sexuality and desire, but affirmed that the cultural extinction of Chinese polygamy both figures modernity and leaves its psychic traces on the present.

In the introduction, we meet the antagonists of the polygamist-philanders (with their fantasy of themselves as "male masters") in the form of the "remarkable women," who sought and attained agency (of a sort: they could be scheming only in the name of "passive polygyny," i.e. picking out their husband's wives and mistresses). And this despite birth in a deeply polygynous world (in Chinese, the regime of 一夫多妻, the 妻妾制度). Moreover, "male consorts" were allies to the remarkable women. For both, greater virtues lay in the utmost loyalty between two persons, a love McMahon will call "the sublime passion."

All this by way of meta-narratological pondering after reading a great many Ming and Qing love stories, including Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑑 (The Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses, 1849; suddenly this book leaps back onto my mind's desktop again as a possible first novel to translate). Halfway, through, though, McMahon reveals that his master readings are undergirded with Lacanian propositions about sexuality, that sex antagonizes sense, that the subject is split and that the adulterous woman is a symbol of the fear that the man's totality is only a concept never graspable in reality, and so man must fantasize of himself as master, as a universal exception. (10-11). Lacan's terms "master," "university," "analyst" and "hysteric" draw and color the roles polygamist-philanderer, remarkable woman, and male consort, even when they don't appear, or so says McMahon of his coming chapters.

Reading: The President's List

Just as I was wondering what a year of books would look like (10? Do people read 10 full books these days?), Newsweek puts out a gorgeous graphic of the President's reading list for the last year. I am genuinely impressed! Still, it's as revealing for what it lacks (social progressive politics, wisdom from effective organizers other than Abraham Lincoln) as for it pushes (pro-globalization capitalists -- ever-so-slightly green, as Friedman and Zakaria, Harvard, Harvard and more Harvard).

Story: "Reunion"

"Reunion" by John Cheever is one man's memory of his last meeting with his father, in New York, at the train station and then in a series of restaurants. The narrator's father wants to have a few drinks, respectfully, with his son in a restaurant, but waiters at four different places don't welcome his father's patronage.

The story is expertly read by Richard Ford on The New Yorker Fiction podcast (12 min); Ford also penned his own story called "Reunion" inspired by Cheever's original. 

I plan to play the podcast for my students as an audio exercise, and to tell them to, as they listen, write down any words that strike them. As an example, in my last listen, I noted: 

"My father," "ripeness," "whiskey,"  "hailed," "garçon," "waiter," "Kellner," "you!" 

(These imply that the father demands respect, but does he ever get any, does he? Why not?) ; 

"New York," "restaurants"

 (These are public spaces which are kind of cold and contrast with the attempt at intimate contact. The father is struggling for a foothold in a world whose lowest rungs, the waiters, look down on him) ;  

"Gibson Beefeater, 'Bibson Geefeater.' “I’m terribly sorry” 

(The last sentence is moving; the story is about the impression the father left, which is all there really is of a relationship. It implies that the narrator worries about becoming an alcoholic or other unrespected member of society. It also implies the fear of being alone, with no family or other intimates.

Sequences: there are four internal scenes with four different waiters, each with a characteristic line of dialogue: "I don’t like being clapped at;" "I won’t serve another drink to the boy;" “This isn’t England;”  “I’m sorry sir, but this table is reserved.”

Story: "Hsü Yen’s Strange Encounter or Lovers within a Lover"

In the first story in Traditional Chinese Tales, a merchant on the way to market to sell his geese encounters a mysterious stranger, who goes for a ride in the merchant's goose cage; soon we discover that not only is the man able to fit into small spaces, he also has fitted many other objects and people into his body.

Who is the man, and how has he attained his special abilities? The story leaves this question unanswered, and seems, based on its narrating style, aimed mainly to amaze, and to amuse. There is not really a moral to the story.

UPDATE: The text of the story is available on a Wikisource version of Wu Jun's 吳均 Xu Qi xie ji 續齊諧記, a work that Prof. Wang writes in 1943 as being lost except for passages preserved in the Song dynasty collection Taiping guangji.

陽羨許彥，於綏安山行，遇一書生，年十七八，臥路側，雲腳痛，求寄鵝籠中。彥以為戲言。書生便入籠，籠亦不更廣，書生亦不更小，宛然與雙鵝並坐，鵝亦不驚。彥負籠而去，都不覺重。前行息樹下，書生乃出籠，謂彥曰：「欲為君薄設。」彥曰：「善。」乃口中吐出一銅奩子，奩子中具諸餚饌，珍饈方丈。其器皿皆銅物，氣味香旨，世所罕見。酒數行，謂彥曰：「向將一婦人自隨，今欲暫邀之。」彥曰：「善。」又於口中吐一女子，年可十五六，衣服綺麗，容貌殊絕，共坐宴。俄而書生醉臥，此女謂彥曰：「雖與書生結妻，而實懷怨。向亦竊得一男子同行，書生既眠，暫喚之，君幸勿言。」彥曰：「善。」女子於口中吐出一男子，年可二十三四，亦穎悟可愛，乃與彥敘寒溫。書生臥欲覺，女子口吐一錦行障，遮書生。書生乃留女子共臥。男子謂彥曰：「此女子雖有心，情亦不甚，向復竊得一女人同行，今欲暫見之，願君勿洩。」彥曰：「善。」男子又於口中吐一婦人，年可二十許，共酌，戲談甚久。聞書生動聲，男子曰：「二人眠已覺。」因取所吐女人，還內口中。須臾，書生處女乃出，謂彥曰：「書生欲起。」乃吞向男子，獨對彥坐。然後書生起，謂彥曰：「暫眠遂久，君獨坐，當悒悒邪？日又晚，當與君別。」遂吞其女子，諸器皿悉內口中。留大銅盤，可二尺廣，與彥別曰：「無以藉君，與君相憶也。」彥大元中為蘭台令史，以盤餉侍中張散。散看其銘題，雲是永平三年作。

Art: Baby Marx

A white board in the Pedro Reyes et. al. Baby Marx exhibit shows the shooting schedule; it's also an outline of an improv theatrical project. Sample videos playing in the exhibit as they come out were not particularly good -- perhaps this is a cheese that ages well in the cave?

China: Ai Weiwei

Interview excerpts

Food: flavor

A post for later

Reading: A List for the Upcoming Year

Nice to see some of my reading from last winter on display at the Walker. On my bike ride, I was thinking: set a goal of 10 works of criticism this coming school year.

Poetry: Michael Palmer

Cf. Poetry magazine july-august podcast.

Critical Voices

Nice to see some of my reading from last winter on display at the Walker. On my bike ride, I was thinking: set a goal of 10 works of criticism this coming school year.

Scholar: Patrick Hanan's "Language and Narrative Model" (1/3)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

Chapter 1: Language and Narrative Model
Section 1/3 : Classical and Vernacular ; Language and Style

Hanan's first chapter compares literary and vernacular languages in the complex case of Chinese to outline the history of a vernacular literary public from its earliest inception in the Tang, through major shifts and additions during the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and rise to a prominence we see through the life of the great vernacular writer Feng Menglong in the Ming dynasty.

Behind Hanan's intimidating tour through centuries of stories, one senses the wonder of publics, groups of people with shared language and practice. Throughout Chinese history, all those who could write revered the Chinese tradition, and this reverence is expressed not only in the deep conservatism of the literary language, but in the incessant humming activity of it, which for Hanan makes classical Chinese very different from the medieval Latin to which it is too often compared. Buddhism, with its brand new communities of believers centered on masters from a new tradition, is one major force driving the new vernacular publics of the Tang dynasty. And the tremendous popularity of the drama was what drove the gradual standardization of Northern dialects into a vernacular for composition -- stories were probably a huge part of this drive, too, but more examples of the drama survive and hold influence today, making Yuan drama a vivid demonstration of "the normative power of the genre concept." (9)

The vernacular established by the known publics for drama must have corresponded with a reading public for vernacular fiction -- but how many people read fiction, and who were they? The question is more difficult to answer in the Chinese case than in European cases because very little attention was paid to fiction. Drama was a minor genre, necessarily in vernacular to represent speech, and all other legitimate literary genres were in classical Chinese. Vernacular Chinese was used for teaching students to read, and we know that women learned to read in the vernacular, but in most times and places of pre-modern China, fiction held a position subordinate even to drama.

Writers of fiction could be "amateurs" such as Li Yu, the great Qing playwright who also wrote fiction; his fiction is collected in his complete works only because of his accomplishments in drama and classical Chinese writing. The could also be "anonymous professionals" like the authors of the many chapter novels of the late Ming and Qing. Perhaps they worked as clerks or editors in publishing houses. They did not associate their names with their work. In many cases (as in Jin ping mei), their manuscripts were not even published in their lifetime. In this period, there was simply no way to live the life of the professional fiction writer that we take for granted today.

The use of vernacular to learn Chinese, even classical Chinese, hints at the complexity of the relationship between classical and vernacular. In fact, they are linked by a common grammar (Hanan is vague here, but says it is based on word order, 13-4). This linkage by grammar made it entirely possible for a writer to employ a mixture of classical and vernacular language. In fact, vernacular fiction is a diverse proliferation of mixing, which can be done with specific styles in mind. Using classical adds refinement, as we see in the poems and aphorisms; using vernacular makes the scene more evocative -- it's much better for dialogue and action sequences.

Reading list derived from pp. 1-16:

• Xu Nanci's 1907 impressions of readers in the shops (11-2, translation candidate)
• Aina, Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua) (13)
• 1494 preface to Sanguo (15)
• try comparing fight scenes from Sanguo and Shuihu

A few quotes:

The general characteristics of literary languages have been summarized as selectivity, homogeneity, and conservatism. (3)

The vernacular is first used in place of the literary language when it is important to record the actual words spoken or when rendering oral literature in written form or when composing a piece to be performed orally. (5)

Politics: Daily Show Explains the Iowa Straw Poll

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ames Entertainment Preview
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show for August 11 was on fire, including a notable interview with David Wallace on David Crockett (Congress could use more legislators like him), a beautiful expose of the hypocrisy of FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly, and, as shown above, a frank explanation of the Ames Straw Poll. Contrast this to the reports on NPR this morning, which proposed that Bachmann's win indicates major transformations to political discourse in Minnesota. No, NPR, it only indicates that the Ames, Iowa Straw Poll is an old-fashioned political machination that has excessive significance.

Politics: Political Division in the Harvard Magazine

Peter McKinney, '56 catalyzed an interesting discussion in the Harvard Magazine with a brief letter published in the March-April issue. The entire text is as follows.

IN REFERENCE to “Crimson in Congress”  (January-February, page 60; and see page 55), I observe that there will be some 32 members with Harvard degrees in Congress, and that 29 are Democrats. If the reader counts only the members with College degrees, there will be 13 members of Congress, 12 Democrats. The development of independent and critical thinking in undergraduates should be a major goal of an education, otherwise the process is indoctrination. The statistics on the political affiliations of the incoming Congress suggest that this is not happening at Harvard College. Could this be a reflection of the ideological imbalance of the faculty?

PETER MCKINNEY ’56, Chicago 

The June issue included responses I haven't seen yet; one reader summarized:

Seven letters responded to McKinney on the unthinking political conformity at Harvard. Two disagreed politely. Five disagreed smugly, asserting the self-flattery that alumni are Democrats because Republicans are stupid, bigoted, evil nitwits. Congratulations for making McKinney's point." -- Eugene Kusmiak, '81, Orinda, CA (Harvard Magazine, July-August 2011)

The recent letter chain illustrates the political divisions in America in the current moment; it also provides the basis for a collection of sentences and propositions to evaluate for prejudice and bigotry. One response from the July-August issue outlines this potential:

"The opinions expressed by certain writers in the May-June issues about Republicans could very easily be those of segregationists concerning blacks in the 1940s, eugenicists concerning Eastern Europeans in the 1920s, Muslim Egyptians concerning Copts -- or Cavaliers concerning Puritans when Harvard was founded." -- Bruce P. Shields, '61, Wolcott, VT

Ethics: China Bans US Professors

A friend of mine forwarded along a collection of accounts about how China has banned certain US and Canadian professors from coming to China because the work of the professors states or implies political content that doesn't agree with China's leaders:

• The 13 authors of “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland”
• "Perry Link, a professor emeritus at Princeton University who teaches at the University of California, Riverside, hasn’t been able to enter China since 1995, he said. Link smuggled a dissident astrophysicist into the U.S. embassy in Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and helped edit the “Tiananmen Papers,” a 2002 collection of leaked internal documents.
• Link’s co-editor on the “Tiananmen Papers,” Columbia University Professor Andrew Nathan, said he is also blacklisted.

Dru Gladney, one of the "Xinjiang 13," claims, "Colleges are 'so eager to jump on the China bandwagon, they put financial interests ahead of academic freedom.'" This merits continued attention...

Archive: "What is a Professor?"

My Aunt Martha digitized one of my Grandpa's college compositions. I was very close with him, but never saw this before. I find it fascinating, both as a remnant of the man who had such an influence on me, and also as evidence of a higher level of English writing than we expect from college freshman today.

But should it stop there? No, surely it should branch out even to the problems of his friends and buddies. [diction!]

Story: "The Gift of the Magi"

A young wife, alone most days in her apartment in New York City, worries and worries about giving her struggling husband a loving and helpful and luxurious Christmas gift, because she only has $1.87 saved by scrimping. She finds a way to raise more funds, and presents a luxury item to her husband. The final sequence is the classic O. Henry "twist ending" -- an unexpected occurrence intensifies the moral of the story.

Digital Humanities: COCA

Ben Zimmer introduces the COCA project:

...the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, which brings together 425 million words of text from the past two decades, with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English. The fiction samples cover short stories and plays in literary magazines, along with the first chapters of hundreds of novels from major publishers. The compiler of COCA, Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, has designed a freely available online interface that can respond to queries about how contemporary language is used. Even grammatical questions are fair game, since every word in the corpus has been tagged with a part of speech.

Just for fun, I searched "problematic," and note a few examples:

The debates that continue over pornography and open relationships are driven less by positive or negative attitudes toward sexual satisfaction per se than by differing views of how sexual satisfaction relates to everything else in life. And this is where Savage's ethics make their most problematic claims - by separating and elevating sexual satisfaction above other things people value. "Rules of Misbehavior," Washington Monthly, March/April, 2011

LOVE: Your impulsive behavior is okay for now, but may be problematic over the long term. Start talking it out. Horoscope, March 2011

nd now reactor number four seems to be going in the direction of number one. It looks like, you know that every reactor now four of the six are very problematic. SMITH: Well, they are very problematic. -- Hannity, March 15, 2011

Success was less important than resolve. Success was transient and problematic, resolve was a way of existing. Richard Stern, "In a Word, Trowbridge," Antioch Review, 1990

She didn't mind being alone, and she kept thinking fondly of her suddenly widowed aunt Helen, who had jaunted off to Europe alone when getting a refund on the trip she'd planned with her husband proved to be problematic. Aunt Helen had the adventure of her life.

MR-LEHRER: How do you come down on this current controversy that exists on some college campuses about racial slurs and that kind of thing, anti-semitic statements, et cetera? MR-PERKINS: That's a very problematic area in my mind.

The number of patrols, by foot or vehicle, was increased in general, the IDF preferred to operate in larger formations, particularly in populated areas, in order to deter disturbances. Problematic villages were subjected to large-scale raids.

Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition examines the historical and political contexts of composition and its problematic relationship to literature.

Digital Humanities

Computer count of many instances shows that descriptions of physical action occur more than 10 times more often in fiction than in other types of writing

The New York Times has a new column called "Mechanical Muse;" I heard linguist Ben Zimmer describe his recent contribution on the book review's podcast:

Creative writers are clearly drawn to descriptive idioms that allow their characters to register emotional responses through telling bits of physical action — “business,” as they say in theater. The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions. 

Ok, that much was obvious to me in the last few years just because I was thinking about that as I read -- no computer needed. But, there's more: 

For David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with Tufts University’s Perseus Project, analyzing collocations can help unwrap the way a writer “indexes” a literary style by lifting phrases from the past. Often this can consist of conscious allusions — Bamman and his colleagues used computational methods to zero in on the places in “Paradise Lost” where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Though traditional literary scholarship has long sought to track these echoes, the work can now be done automatically, transcending any single analyst’s selective attention. The same methods can also ferret out how intertextuality can work on a more unconscious level, silently directing a writer to select particular word combinations to match the expectations of the appropriate genre.

Now THAT is worth following up on -- and extending to Chinese literature. 

Lecture: Let's give it up for Adam and Karl!

Pedro Reyes, creator of Palas por Pistolas, has come to the Walker Art Center to present Baby Marx, "a puppet show for television that lightheartedly but effectively addresses capitalist, socialist-economic and cultural systems through the eyes of children, Karl Marx and Adam Smith."





Aiding, interpreting, intervening, questioning and perhaps at times obscuring Reyes were academics Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlant.

Hardt, a "Marxologist," points out that Marx most often appears in popular political discourse under a "shroud of ridicule," and Reyes replied that this fact directs us toward the use of comedy; as Berlant clarified later, we mock him to take him seriously. And even though we mock him in a comedy, still, in the show, we see a world in which he has a role. (Coming soon to the show: Lenin, Lukacs, and moral sentiments.)

Hardt comes up with a fun heuristic for the "ontology of the puppet:" puppets are manipulated by masters, and so play a victim's role; puppet's are little fetishes, substitutes for people, and so symbolize commodification; in this villain's role, they still play in a victim narrative as much as when they are victims themselves. Better, Hardt, finds, to see the puppet as "concepts in action," symbolizing the categorical considerations like "workers" that characterize Marx's thought in the larger sense. Berlant jumped in to say that this understanding of the puppets is further revealed by the fact that we see the puppets as puppets, and the puppets see themselves as puppets, which lends puppets freedom and spontaneity.

This is contrast to "the laboring puppets" we have all become; we take Sudafed, for example, to convince our bodies we are well, which means these days that we are able to work. Improvisation has an important role here in allowing "collaborative and relational sovereignty," which I suppose all adds up to saying it breaks down the victim narrative, the narrative of master-slave, the narrative of we are our work.

There was much discussion and interest in how comedy can aid teaching. "Academics are not funny...well, you are funny, but academics are not," said Reyes, referring in his "you" to Hardt and to Berlant, but really only to Berlant, which illustrates his point (and seems to me funny). He mentioned that his model of Frederick Winslow Taylor, pioneer of "the efficiency movement," is based on the sand-clock, the metronome, indicating Taylor's deep interest in time, but also mocking his worldview and pulling up his bias.

On a darker note, Berlant, whose own work so often returns to "political depression," reminds us that it is a dark and complex thing to entertain with stories of exploitation and pain, but that this is just what she tries to do in her work. Hardt adds that so often we fall victim to a "fatality of the present," that is, the feeling that as large as the world's problems are, it is impossible to change any of them. Humor and irony, in the best cases, help us breathe through this dread, this depression. Old-style Rabelasian comedy, as Berlant explains, drew Gargantua in all its grotesqueness to make it small; today's John Stewart routines create shared worlds of alienation ("Wtf?" Berlant calls it.)

Riots in London reflect a jobs problem, a problem of youth having nothing to do. Meanwhile governments effect "regimes of solidarity" and reject any notion of socializing wealth -- though they are happy to "socialize the pain." What the new comedy like "Baby Marx" can do seems related, Berlant finds, to "the situation tragedy," which presents selves always on the edge of the abyss (Berlant mentions "The Office" ; I think of "Weeds"). Comedy can also be the strategic nonsense, the unsense (Marcuse) that opens up new pathways of thought. Just think, as Mingus did, of “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother.”

Review: Brain Fighters :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

Brain Fighters :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul


Blew my face off
by Jesse Field Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties

"The journey to become a hero," the power of the imagination, and the fun of word play (diorama!) all in one deceptively modest little story by Joseph Scrimshaw. JS, Mo Perry and Randy Reyes are each big personalities with great energy; all three at once really is a bit like an explosion. I think what I liked most was seeing all the children's faces in the audience, lit up with amusement and interest, and perhaps laying in a positive feeling for the theater that will last a lifetime.

Review: Detached: The Return of the Pastor Brothers :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

Detached: The Return of the Pastor Brothers :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul


Samuel Beckett meets... Judd Apatow?
by Jesse Field Follow
Rating 5 kitties

Two brothers stranded on a desert island do what they can to fend off missing stuff and not getting laid in a long time. Until one day...

Bob Galligan is particularly wonderful doing a Jack Black, only with more hugs, sort of thing. Matt Riehle is hilariously normal-in-a-creepy-way. "Timmer O'Phelan" (if that is his real name) actually adds a lot to the performance by just sitting there, detached.

If you haven't yet, you should slide back over to the "description" tab and watch their Youtube videos. Hilarity and bizarrity ensue.

Review Abyss :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

Abyss :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul


From the well drink the breath
by Jesse Field
Rating: 3 kitties

A new age music track, at times piercing the ear with long bending cries and bows, accompanies a group of five performers as they sweep and swoop with big desperate Yoga-like gestures. The atmosphere felt sacred in a primitive way (I was reminded of the monkeys sequence from the film "2001"). Repeated gestures of isolation, even rejection, managed to seize me and meet many of the anxieties I have brewing just beneath the surface (uhm, thanks?). Kim Neal Nofsinger is a striking figure, with his long arms, rippling back muscles, and solemn, priestly demeanor. I'm a story person who attended such an abstract dance performance only at the suggestion of friends, but hours later I'm surprised how deep an impression it made.

Review: William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

I was amazed to discover "Lucrece," one of those texts that comes in every complete edition of Shakespeare, but which I personally never read. The cast takes up the huge challenge of conveying all the action and feeling of the poem at what seems a natural pace, finishing in just about 1 hour.

Test yourself; read aloud:

And they, like straggling slaves for pillage fighting,
Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting,
In bloody death and ravishment delighting,
Nor children's tears nor mothers' groans respecting,
Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting:
Anon his beating heart, alarum striking,
Gives the hot charge and bids them do their liking.

Are you thrilled to the core? Horrified by war? Then go see this. Bored already? Don't go!

Story: "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg"

Mark Twain's story "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" investigates the basic character of the American town, finding that pride and vanity can combine to create a false sense of honesty which masks and rationalizes lies. Even when the citizenry trains and trains and trains for honesty, their habit of avoiding temptation utterly makes the virtue weak and eminently corruptible when temptation finally arises.

The story is long and I find it tedious in parts, but it exhibits a wonderful technique for expressing the private thoughts of men, of private conversations of husbands and wives, and how private thoughts and conversations link in towns to create common concerns -- the town becomes an "it" with its own rough identity. And Twain -- ever the newspaperman, as we should never forget -- understands what is fashionably called "publics" today, which is to say he understands that the identity of people in collectives like towns is based on what they read in the papers, or think of to put in the papers; it is the public image of a community and the image of the public image in the minds of the community members that come together in tandem to create a sense of town, and of moral evaluation, and so of moral conviction of the self. The most terrible temptation of town living, Twain seems to say, is that one begins to think not of what is right and wrong absolutely, but what can be justified or well-presented to the neighbors and the papers.

Story: "Young Goodman Brown"

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown" is set in the forest outside of an early American town, late at night. Young Goodman Brown has come from the town for reasons left unsaid to meet with a man whose identity is only implied so that he can be welcomed into a community that is somehow, it is implied, evil. Brown is torn by the conflict between his unexplained reasons for damning himself in communion with Satan on the one hand, and, on the other, thoughts of Faith, his loving and good companion (and who favors pink ribbons). Seeing so many members of his town assembled at the communion ceremony, though, and seeming to catch a glimpse of even his beloved Faith at the wicked gathering, Goodman Brown cries out, "Not Faith!" He awakes the next day full of a deep pessimism and even paranoia that all of his fellow townsmen, and even his wife Faith, are damned hypocrites -- to the end of his days, his disappointment and bitterness are his only signs of salvation.

Education: Harvard Egyptologist

Peter Der Manuelian, "Harvard's first full-time Egyptologist since 1942," (Harvard Magazine), says the new Egyptian government will take care of its cultural heritage.

Education: "Colleges in Crisis" (Harvard Magazine)

Harvard magazine's "Colleges in Crisis" offers yet another chance to practice crafting sentences for a teaching philosophy statement:

I need to participate in making "quality postsecondary education affordable." That means I need to think about education from the point of view of the students, ensuring that education is valuable to them. For me, part of this means teaching students to read well, and even to see the joys of reading. 

As the article goes on, though, I can't help but suspect that the tale of "disruptive innovation," i.e. online learning, is far from complete or even one that other readers would agree with. The "business model" of the research university may actually be in trouble, but I need more evidence than the authors muster to believe it, namely: 1) in the past year absolute spending on education has gone down for the first time. (It was the 2008 financial collapse, for pete's sake.) and 2) It's a mixed business model, with both structured and unstructured problems to solved, and these models are "fundamentally different and incompatible." Says who? Why? I'm calling B.S.

Art: Sculpture Deserves More AttentionN

Note to self: actually notice sculpture.

Scholar: Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (1)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

In chapter 2, "The Early Period," Hanan proposes to ask about three things: the origins of the "stuff-material" of the stories, the medium in which they were intended, and what we can learn of the author. However, his initial set of readings, on three examples of "early" stories found in the Feng Menglong collections, are much more useful as tools to the basic analysis of the stories. We learn about scene sequences, and how early stories could skip the prologue that was inevitable later on. We learn to look for breaks in the narrative. We learn about "set pieces," such as descriptions of female characters' beauty and talents. We learn to examine the narrator comments, how the narrator seems more detached in early stories. We learn that the authors of the stories (in all likelihood members of the merchant class just like their characters) like to please us, mystify us, and to show off -- hence, for example, the "poem chais" of the early stories, which later died away because they are so ostentatiously secondary to the plot. "The Jade Kuanyin" (TY 8) has a good example of a poem chain.

Film: My Neighbor Totoro

Happened to watch this again because it was in my Netflix queue. On this viewing, most of my reservations with the film ("Nature is not all fluffy toys, dear") fade away as I begin to understand that the very best children's art, rather than playing to the interests of children, shows us the interests of children, and so makes us feel like children.

Story: "The Pearl Shirt Reencountered" (aka "The Pearl-Sewn Shirt") 蒋兴哥重会珍珠衫

In the early Ming dynasty, there was once a respectable merchant named Jiang Xingge who married a respectable wife named Wang Sanqiao. The match was such a happy one that Xingge put off traveling for his business for over two years, but alas, finally he did have to go south to trade. Despite the many precautions he took to preserve his wife's chastity, she is undone when a wealthy merchant named Chen Dalang catches sight of her. Unable to make her acquaintance directly because she stays indoors, cloistered by her servants, Chen obtains the services of an earthy old lady merchant, Granny Xue, who slyly befriends Sanqiao, arouses her to sexual fervor, and throws Chen into her bedroom stark naked, where they both make love the entire night. Sanqiao grows to love Chen, and Chen's feelings for Sanqiao are true even though he is married as well.

The following spring, Chen travels for business as well, so on their parting Sanqiao gives him a pearl-sewn shirt, which is an heirloom of the Jiang clan. Later, in the south, he meets Jiang Xingge, to whom he confesses his love affair, not knowing that all the while he is speaking to Sanqiao's husband. When Chen shows Xingge the pearl shirt, Xingge knows. Soon after Xingge returns home and sends his wife back to her parents along with a writ of divorce. Investigating the matter further, he also orders thugs to smash up Granny Xue's house, forcing her out of the county.

But the story does not end in simple divorce. Pivoting to follow Chen's estranged wife, Pingshi, we observe as Chen leaves her again after a fight over the pearl shirt, which she hides from him out of jealousy. On his journey he becomes ill, so Pingshi travels out to care for him, but she finds him already dead, and his body stranded in a different province. Following the advice of others, she decides to marry to be able to afford her husband's burial and provide for her own welfare. The man arranged is none other than Jiang Xingge. The two are well-matched, and when Xingge sees the pearl shirt that Pingshi has kept, he believes that fate has intervened to make the marriage happen.

But this is still not the end of the story! In a surprise fourth act, we follow Xingge again on his business travels to discover how, in a heated argument in a market, he accidentally caused the death of an old man, and has charges pressed against him. The judge presiding over his case is none other than -- Sanqiao's new husband! Sanqiao pleas for her new husband to save Xingge's life, and he does; when he hears the rest of the story, he himself is moved to tears by it, and seeing that the two are still obviously in love, he allows Sanqiao to leave him and be Xingge's second wife, or concubine. Of course, a second wife might find conflict with the first wife, but Sanqiao and Pingshi manage to get along well, and so Xingge's family is made whole again.

Notable sentences include:



Questions:

What can Granny Xue teach us about China?
What are the biggest differences between Ming dynasty ideas of marriage and our own? (Are the two institutions really that different?)

Review: Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung :: Minnesota Fringe 2011 :: August 4 - August 14 :: Minneapolis + St. Paul

"A playwright -- unless he is creating escapist romances (an honorable occupation of course) -- has two obligations; first, to make some statement about the condition of 'man' (as it is put) and, second, to make some statement about the nature of the art form with which he is working."

--Edward Albee

Albee's show here works for the second proposition, crafting music with words, voice and personality. The result is art with content that seems always about to be crucially important when they head towards craft, "and going further." Listen to the words as to music, but let them call forth letters, definitions, propositions and issues in a musical pattern -- I think this is how Albee intended the work. (Stunning performance by the entire tiny cast

Chinese: Gloss list and study sentences for "The Oil Peddlar" 1

年少爭夸風月，場中波浪偏多。

The "wind and clouds" is a sexual synecdoche.

這首詞名為《西江月》，是風月机關中撮要之論。

做得煙花寨內的大王

Warlord in a stockaded area?

太宗嗣位，歷傳真、仁、神、哲，共是七代帝王，都則偃武修文，民安國泰。

Ancient language, of course; cf. 《书·武成》：“王来自 商 ，至于 丰 ，乃偃武修文。”

夫妻兩口，開個六陳舖儿。

The six basic kinds of food: 指大米、大麦、小麦、大豆、小豆、芝麻六种粮食，以其可以久藏，故称“六陈”。

雖則糶米為生，一應麥豆茶酒油鹽雜貨，無所不備，家道頗頗得過。

糶 tiào, to sell grains

不幸遇了金虜猖獗，把汴梁城圍困，四方勤王之師雖多，宰相主了和議，不許廝殺，以致虜勢愈甚，打破了京城，劫遷了二帝。

The Prime Minister is at fault for bad strategy leading to "having to move because of defeat;" 虜勢愈甚 -- is that the captured and overpowered grew so much?

此乃天生令俐，非教習之所能也。

She had a certain quality of breeding which cannot be taught.

忙忙如喪家之犬，急急如漏网之魚。擔渴擔饑擔勞苦，此行誰是家鄉？叫天叫地叫祖宗，惟愿不逢韃虜。他看見許多逃難的百姓，多背得有包里，假意吶喊道：“韃子來了！”

Dálǔ was derogatory for northern "minority peoples."

此時天色將晚，嚇得眾百姓落荒亂竄，你我不相顧。

竄 cuàn, get the freak out of there.

又聞得康王即位，已在杭州駐蹕，改名臨安，遂趁船到潤州。

Zhùbì, temporary, as always.

過了蘇、常、嘉、湖，直到臨安地面，暫且飯店中居住，也虧卜喬，自汴京至臨安，三千余里，帶那莘瑤琴下來，身邊藏下些散碎銀兩，都用盡了，連身上外蓋衣服，脫下准了店錢，止剩得莘瑤琴一件活貨，欲行出脫。

Biàn jing is Kaifeng.

只說：“瑤琴是我親生之女，不幸到你門戶人家，須是款款的教訓，他自然從順，不要性急。”

別脾气急躁啦！

小娘中，誰似得王美儿的標致，又會寫，又會畫，又會做詩，吹彈歌舞都余事。

不過我只會注意男色標緻，不談女色標緻。

美娘夢中覺痛醒將轉來，已被金二員外耍得夠了，欲待掙扎，爭奈手足俱軟，繇他輕薄了一回。

Yáo, better look into this one more closely, I guess it is a preposition like 從.

五鼓時，美娘酒醒，已知鴇儿用計，破了身子。

躊躇數日，無計可施。

劉四媽知他害羞，便把椅儿掇上一步，將美娘的手儿牽著，叫聲：“我儿，做小娘的，不是個軟殼雞蛋，怎的這般嫩得緊？

Dūo

就是醉夢中，被你說得醒；就是聰明的，被你說得呆，好個烈性的姑姑，也被你說得他心地改。

我有烈性的老公！