x_los | Entries tagged with uni is bullshit

Merry Christmas to a Friend: Du Mu Poetry and Baby Names

On a late-Tang poem about the passage of time, growing older, and refinding an old friend or early love.

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“On the late imperial novel Guzhang Juechen”. Sort of an expanded huaben—a transitional moment between the short stories and the era of great novels.

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Pu Songling, Part 1: Lian Xiang

The poly adventures of a ghost, a fox spirit and a lonely scholar who all hook up. The guys don’t mention an f/f side tension, which is odd because it sounds quite present.

They were chiller about sex this time; maybe I’m off-based with the Christianity Bros theory.

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Stephen Durrant and the Zuo Commentary

An interview with the translator of this Confucian classic, where he explains the shape of the text and the pedagogic social use he believes it may have had.

A really neat observation: in both huaben and this far earlier commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, if someone is described by the narrative as mei, beautiful, that's almost always the sign a good thing will happen, a positive value judgement. If a man sees a woman as mei, beautiful, it's a sign the narrative is headed somewhere terrible. This is about the mechanics of being seen by someone, being perceived to be ‘mei’: the failure of containment on the woman’s part and of his restraint, or containment of his gaze and appreciation, on the man’s. (Because huaben are all like, What happens if Containment fails? Nothing good.)

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Marriage Manga with Nick Stember

I’m sorry, the CLP boys are only going to bring up now, after how many hours of Moaning about the mid-century’s ‘degraded’ literature, the Maoist hatred of complex allusion, and the huge Disruption of the Cultural Revolution, that before 1950, most women in China could not read? That’s such a fucking PERTINENT POINT, IN YOUR CONVERSATION ABOUT OVERLY SIMPLISTIC AND STRAIGHTFORWARD ART IN THIS PERIOD. It seems as though within a generation or so, the franchise of literacy, at minimum, doubled. Did they think that would have zero impact, or adjustment period? They’re sitting here like ‘ :( it got less elite man what changed—’ Well I don’t know chaps, maybe dense baroque intertextuality is indeed alienating when most people cannot even, or have only just learned to: read?

For a Western analogy, by 1950s the mid century Victorian literacy acts had absolutely creamed the UK’s previously terrible literacy rates. This process was imperfect, and in historical terms the change was still relatively recent. But this was still a wildly different situation for public education to be in, compared to China in the same decade; I was outright bitch-slapped by this information.

Just. If you’re having a WHOLE ASS long-standing grudge about ‘simplistic art’ and never once telling me, or seeming to consider, ‘by the way, this is when literacy actually became widespread’: what the fuck? ‘The Cultural Revolution was a massive disruption!’ Well how much ‘culture’ is a bitch who cannot read receiving and transmitting there, Sebastian? Not ‘none’, but there’s a fuckin impact, innit. Whose culture was disrupted, and who was enfranchised?

I’m not trying to be Tankie about this, but the guys keep asking shit like, ‘is the crudity of this pamphlet telling women they can divorce husbands who abuse them a sign that the country’s artistic production is crippled under Mao? That was rhetorical; it definitely was.’

The key thing, I think, is whether women know they can divorce their abusive husbands? I feel that is—the most pertinent aspect of this, rather than the artistic virtue of the prose employed (and they keep using propaganda here in a way I feel they would not for a comparative informational text in a Western setting: ah, yes, the Propaganda of federal pamphlets advising black American southerners they are indeed entitled to vote, no matter what the local government claims to the contrary). Like, gov.uk isn’t winning the Nobel for literature right now either, so what even is their basis for comparison?

If more people can read and write than previously could, and more (largely marginalised) people are enabled to make art, you will struggle to convince me that is not a net win, especially long term, regardless of whether the constructed structures of craft valuation established by elite artists and patrons are disrupted by that rush of fresh blood. The podcast’s guest pushes back somewhat, making much the point I would about the breadth of enfranchisement, but the hosts swing right back around to reinforce a straight up White Russian style reading.

Just a real clown-shoes framing these lads bring to the table. The dulcet tone of the honked nose, like the ‘guan guan’ cry of the circling ospreys, is never far-off.

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The Appeal of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Late Qing China

In this one, the CLP bros casually mention that they record all these in a church one of them is a member of. Is this part of their hyper-conservative (for almost anywhere but America) view of 20^th century and contemporary politics? I don't want to say that every Christian is a bit right wing—that's not the way of it. Nevertheless, I wonder whether connections with diaspora and mainland Chinese Christendom are shaping these guys’ PoVs, their contacts and priorities. This might also partly explain why they're such babies about Ming dynasty porn. (I did think, ‘man they're Clean Cut in these, and also young to be married with kids.’) If this is what’s up, then honestly I kind of wish they'd clarified their position early on rather than leaving me to work out their entire epistemological-experiential framework like it’s some kind of easter egg.

In this episode, they also also offer a rather uncritical presentation of Taiwan as more authentically Chinese than the mainland (an argument they’re making essentially because in Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution didn’t disrupt the continuity of tradition). So what or who is Authentically Chinese in this figuration? I think the implication is ‘Han and upper class’, in the way a plantation or colonial manor reconstruction is sometimes spoken of as The Real America. But England ain’t ‘stately homes’, come on bruv.

The podcasters slightly lampshade this, because I think they know this is academically pretty dodgy to say. Yet they don’t instead engage with the elements of design, theme parkiness, artificial construction, constrained development and scale that are all necessary to a formulation of Taiwan as heritage industry Authentic. Not for the first time in this podcast, their Taiwan is innocent of history, unshaped by contrary ideological projects and material, international involvements. I feel their analysis would benefit from a comparative perspective on constructions of heritage in other contexts and how these intersect with class. The team announces that they’re aware of imagined or willed continuities, but for me, this serves as more of a protective disclaimer than signposting for an argument they go on to make. Ultimately, the CLP’s analysis comes off as wilfully naive on this point. Fundamentally, I can’t take seriously a claim that nearly the whole previous century of Chinese development is somehow illegitimate, because Reasons. These guys are always pulling this same shit, but they are the only people doing any kind of Chinese literature survey in English, so I have to keep eating this mess and hoping I get more vitamins out of it than mercury.

As for the nominal subject of this podcast, there’s an interesting section on tandem translation in Malaysian Chinese circles and the re-writing (or wildly loose translation) of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Chinese audiences. The translator in question was evidently producing some almost-contemporary Dickens translations, as well.

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Supplement #1: Lin Shu, Inc.

This seems important for understanding how western literature (the aforementioned important Uncle Tom’s Cabin translation, and Dickens) entered Chinese cultural spaces, and that translation process.

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Supplement #2: Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China

I appreciate that these supplements handle academic texts, that’s incredibly useful. At this point though, if these guys rec a modern historian I kind of have to take it as an anti-rec. I just find the podcast team thoroughly untrustworthy on this subject, so what led them to their patently politically-shaped takes is only useful in a diagnostic sense. Good to know! But.

This is also the second time at least they’ve talked about historians and literary scholars being very bad at one another’s disciplines. While that’s sometimes an issue, by and large I think they’re extremely conversant disciplines, and that there’s an abundance of genuinely engaging cross-field work? I don’t know, maybe this is a subfield issue.

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Pu Songling, Part 3: Painted Skin

The CLP guys seem very confused that a Daoist thinks a fly-swatter whisk will protect a man from further attacks by a succubus, and call this totally unexplained. Even I know the whisk is a classic Daoist spiritual tool for brushing away evil? You don’t explain crosses and garlic in every vampire story, either, because you don’t have to?

One of the CLP guys then goes, “In one of my favourite fantasy series, Garth Nix’s Sabriel, they have to force a demon into a bottle, which is very weird and inexplicable, much like this.” That’s just a witch bottle. It’s an incredibly common Western European magical tool, with a whole logic behind how it ‘works’. Their lack of knowledge here is strange. This is the podcasters’ own linguistic and cultural tradition, a book one of them claims to really like, and a literary subject on which their authority derives from engagement with purportedly-rigorous academic frameworks (in which context this podcast is a CV boost for them—it’s also monetised). Sometimes this podcast makes me see a case for a much more solid cross-subfield comp-lit education than even the US (relative to the UK) gives its undergrad and graduate students.

Some of the friction I feel with the speakers’ claims would be ameliorated simply by their taking the conversational attitude that they are presenting a very partial, incomplete knowledge of literature. While they sometimes lampshade their position with self-deprecating comments, they do tend to act as though they’re telling you everything about a subject rather than offering fragmentary reflections. It reminded me strongly of seeing, on Twitter yesterday, a guy offer up an entire piece on Labyrinth that insisted the baby theft was a plot hole of some kind, because he’d never heard of changeling children, somehow: I am begging white guys to learn like 3 things about their own folklore before publishing on it for money. In this case, I feel it would be more appropriate for the CLP guys to simply suggest that they themselves don’t understand the whisk’s presence rather than to insist that it’s a baffling inclusion, and that this inexplicability is specifically an authorial choice. They may well be as wrong about the whisk as they are about the entire concept of the witch bottle being ‘unfathomable’.

(If you want to know more about the witch bottle, the Pitt Rivers has some excellent examples, and should have more information on their site. Also the proceedings notes for the second (I believe?) Hidden Charms conference are free on academia.edu, and will give you a quite deep picture of ritual deposits in Western domestic magic. That, however, is moving from fairly general knowledge to something I wouldn’t necessarily expect non-specialists to fuck with.)

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Pu Songling, Part 2: The Painted Wall

The assertion this podcast makes that people would have needed to travel to far-off temple complexes to experience the technology of painting starts to ring a comp-lit klaxon in my ear. In Western medieval history, religious painting is highly parochial in most instantiations. There’s a lot of excellent writing on the medieval phenomenology of small churches and the liturgical experience; it would really surprise me if urban and rural Chinese religious practice did not include similar strategies. Such strategies would make visual art highly accessible throughout the land, even to non-literate people. That is one of the key communicative functions of painting, after all. I’d really like to see the speakers engage with this point of comparison, or simply local religious history, rather than building quite an extensive and slenderly-substantiated argument on the ‘novelty’ of visual experience in the 1600s.

The Edge of Knowing: by Roy Bing Chan

I can’t believe the Chinese Literature Podcast American Sinology Bros have levelled up from bad takes on the Mao era to bad readings of Star Trek. These men were designed in a lab to hurt me.

Roughly transcribed: ‘one of the biggest barriers to understanding China today is the inability to take the mid-century period and propaganda seriously and see connections [between it and what came before and after]’.

Gentlemen, THIS IS YOU. THIS IS YOU EVERY DAY?? I NEED YOU TO GO TO YOUR BATHROOM. THERE SHOULD BE A REFLECTIVE SURFACE ABOVE THE SINK. NOW, I KNOW YOU HAVE AVOIDED IT YOUR ENTIRE LIFE OUT OF TERROR LIKE THE LADY OF SHALOTT FEARED TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, BUT SIRS—

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That's One Weird Utopia: Kang Youwei's “Book of Great Unity”

A utopian work by Kang Youwei, one of the thinkers behind the self-strengthening movement, who’s no longer as influential as his martyred disciple.

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Ling Mengzhu's “The Tangerines and the Tortoise Shell”

A huaben about a nice and intelligent but terminally unlucky merchant who accidentally becomes a great (and arguably ethical) capitalist through a series of good bargains.

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Shi Zhecun's Weird and Wonderful “The General's Head”

A ‘magic realist’ 1932 short story set in the Tang dynasty about national and personal identity.

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Song Dynasty Ci and Liu Yong

I felt this treatment of lyric poetry in the Song might have benefitted from a little more engagement with the highly music basis of very early Chinese poetry (I’m thinking about the shi jing), changing standards in genre over time (a lot of what we now think of as high culture was decidedly not constructed that way, when it was ‘live’), the prestige-based and cultural construction reasons people may well favour Tang work now (if indeed they do), and/or the lyric in English poetic contexts, as a point of comparison. Then-contemporary issues of class and accessibility also in this picture. I don’t know how fruitfully we can have a conversation about the lyric vs written poetry without these frames of reference.

Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase:

Sick of the Chinese Literature Podcast’s shit. ‘Hi, I’m an American boy academic! I can’t talk about Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase without making a jillion excuses for the porn, like I’m teaching junior high; I absolutely cannot entertain for the sake of argument any discussion of how the porn operates as porn. US Puritanism has fucked my brain harder than this protagonist fucks, and he dies of yang poisoning/exploding dick’.

Why are they the only game in town? Why is the only game like, Monopoly? Do we get this level of teehee clown shoes with like, Fanny Hill, or is it reserved for PoC lit? It’s weird that they frantically DIY distance themselves, as though Ming Dynasty porn really stands to implicate them. It’s their own podcast aimed at a para-aca audience: who is asking them to tediously and actively unhelpfully self-censor? No kids are listening to this shit, who cares?

This lens also elides quite interesting questions about the novel’s strategies. If you do believe this is ultimately a Buddhist text about the meaninglessness of the endless acquisition and consumption depicted herein, does that frame serve to legitimise the porn for its audience? Is the philosophy a fig leaf? Is the porn well-written to draw audiences in, for commercial reasons, or to better hook them via the workings of the attention economy, and draw them along to work’s eventual self-repudiation? Is Jin Ping Mei supposed to offer up a healthy relationship with sexuality that sours when the lead goes over the top? Or is it more like the Victorian My Secret Life et al, where the tedium is just a product of the masturbatory material itself’s being repetitious?

Perhaps it’s like how, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky sticks on a whole coda—almost a written out trauma reaction—that’s really moralist. Yet beforehand, the novel has a whole internal logic that bucks the coda’s attempts to contain and smother its chaotic vivacity. This occurs because Dostoevsky deeply really internally divided (due to having been deliberately traumatised by the tsarist state, which sentenced him to execution, hauled him before the firing squad and then let him go on the promise he’d be a good boy from here on out). The Real Slim Shady is the bulk of the book, which even Dostoevsky’s ambivalence can’t wrest into seemliness. (Nabakov has some dumbass commentary on this, in that he believes the coda invalidates the rest of the book by cheapening out on it. Which is curious given that he’s asking us to listen to him even though he’s a White Russian. I just would not be so quick to say a kind of weaselly self-pitying political streak wipes out the rest of someone’s work, if I were Nabokov.)

Where is the original audience reception in this sex-phobic, highly localising legitimising push? I think this analysis could truly benefit from some cross cultural comparisons, because a lot of even Victorian English porn has no idea whatever what you do when you get to Jerusalem. The stakes just melt away in a fugue of more x-treme taboo sex acts. The books stop being detailed, emotionally connotative or load-bearing for any kind of investment: the whole energy just peters out after the Bad Education of whoever. There’s a craft-level sense in which writers really seem to struggle with narrative structure in early pornographic novels in various traditions: I wonder whether Volume Five or whatever of Plum Blossom in a Golden Vase is just staring down exactly what all of the ‘Aubrey Beardsley doing the John Travolta Pulp Fiction idunno gif’ endings are also stuck on.

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring

Lads, Tao Yuanming’s “Peach Blossom Spring”, with its cave entrance and utopia and even the golden hair of the people therein, follows the pattern of a medieval Romance otherworld encounter in a way comp lit has not engaged with (to my knowledge). It is, WOW, just right there.

These podcast boys did my nut in talking about how the lack of geographic specificity is a product of this specific language. It’s about narrative technologies and strategies, you can find just crystalline analogues in extra-Asian contemporary literary traditions. Buddy, I have some faerie realms to show your ass. I have Byrne’s theory of incomprehensibility as a means of evocation to reveal to you: into my arms.

Confucius

For me the most valuable part of this treatment was the central discussion of the operation of constructs of authority in Chinese literature, expressed via the maxim 'I transmit, I don't create. I trust and value the ancients’.

Shen Xiu’s Little Bird Causes Seven Deaths

A huaben (vernacular Ming or Qing short story) about the occluded but inevitable operation of cosmic justice.

Journey to the West

A picaresque. One of the four great novels of the Ming.

Journey Even MORE to the West: The Xi You Bu

A just-post Qing spin-off of Journey to the West involving dreams, featuring the titular Xi You Bu, the tower of myriad mirrors. About tons of parallel universes—like the Narnia forest of pools.

Supplement #3: A Little Primer of Tu-Fu, by David Hawkes

Goes through and offers some of that sweet, sweet exegesis we’ve been hungry for in our other approaches to poetry (I see you, shi jing). Well-regarded. Might be a good shout for our post short things.

https://be1lib.org/book/5933630/58e5a2

If you're hungry for the collected Du Fu, that’s here: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/26b715cf-49f7-479f-9fd5-eaa7fd07f197/9781501501890.pdf .

At 35 poems with exegesis, if we slowed down for that, it could be like five weeks? Douqi says: Looks like a good selection as well, a good mix of the longer poems and the eight-line ones (idk what the technical terms are in english). I guess Du Fu didn't do as many four-line ones. I recognise at least a third from the 300 poems collection.

It's interesting because to grasp the conversation he's opening, I want to read the poem translated, then look at the commentary, then maybe flip back to the poem. Putting the translation at the end/bottom feels cramped to me? A minor issue, though. Also, why does he hate the line breaks?

Ren the Filial Son

A cuckholding revenger’s tragedy.

The Water Margin

One of the four great novels of the Ming: a picaresque about Bros Being Criminals. All very manly. The source text for Plum Blossom, and also the play Katy and Molly and I saw at the Fringe.

Mencius and King Hui

About Mencius’s Dialogues with rulers, and about the interesting abilities and slippages into philosophy we’d traditionally conceptualise, in a binary fashion, as Daoism they sometimes present us with.

When Death is an Improvement: Pu Songling’s “Judge Lu” (陆判)

A weird entry from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio involving head-swapping, jobs in the underworld and taking unwise bets to defile temples (but actually, the god involved is fairly chill about his fuck up).

Ouyang Xiu

About antiquarianism in the Song dynasty. Apparently there’s a mythic contention that Chinese characters derive from the impressions left by birds on the ground.

Li Qingzhao

The major female poet of the Song. Some very good, Daoist-inflected stuff here about her reflections on her husband and their changing relationship.

A Male Mencius’ Mother

An odd queer/trans story that was probably intended to titillate the original readership, and/or do some ‘or did I just blow your mind?’ shit re: the idea that this Ideal Wife could be a man.

Su Dongpo, Part 2

Su Dongpo, the weird conservative these podcast bros have a crush on because he’s good at poems (one can like his poetry and find his politics uninspiring, you truly do not have to hand it to him), expresses disingenuous Gotcha concern for the elderly regarding the salt monopoly. Because of this poem he gets exiled for fucking with then-empowered Wang Anshi, who was executing reforms regarding the lucrative Song salt monopoly.

Stunning how tin-eared these podcast guys are re a political gesture that’s absolutely resonant with the discursive turns of a twitter argument. Like I’m not saying Su Dongpo didn’t believe himself to be authentically interested in The Good State, but the shape of this contention is immediately recognisable as point-scoring ‘but what of the squeezed middle?’ bullshit. This isn’t even projection, it’s just—there’s a thing in scholarship where commenters pretend they, people in the past or both are very Naive, and that’s ludicrous and unnecessary.

Wang Anshi – Part 2

“The pleasures of an ordinary life,

I am bitter we will not be able to spend it all together.

My true wish was that we would grow old,

relying on each other.”

These two wanna talk a lot of shit about how Wang Anshi’s simplistic, Buddhist-inflected poetry isn’t a match for Su Dongpo’s. While I can see an argument that in the Song, poetry and statecraft are commingled in a deep-structure way and can’t be neatly bifurcated by genre of thought and impact in the world as we might today, it’s hardly a new question, is it? Disraeli was more fun than Gladstone, he still sucked ass and was a big racist whose neo-Feudal imaginary, even if we could consider it well-intentioned, stood in blistering defiance of the observable social and economic conditions of the people he was nominally serving. They kind of wanna play it like Su Dongpo’s poetic success, if it exists, is de facto a political triumph, and I find that naive.

Further they aren’t really giving much air to the contention that Su Dongpo’s insistent referentiality, which requires people have a lot of expensive training to appreciate it, is itself politicised, classed. For all I myself am a bit nerd who loves referentiality, in such a highly allusive literary tradition, you don’t have to agree for Mao’s later call to walk away from these dependencies or strategies in art to see his point. Wang Anshi’s less allusive craft kind of can’t fail to operate on a politicised register: it is more inclusive. That’s probably deliberate. So like, how does the judgement of these grad students (which prestiges complexity) fit in these schemas of class and education?

The Book of Swindles

A late-Ming vernacular collection of humorous heist tales.

Lao She: Cat Country

A 1939 SF novel about China’s contemporary political crisis, if everyone was a cat.

I was wondering about China’s relationship with Dickens—apparently Lao She was at SOAS in London, and was hugely into him. Lao She is considered a top ten 20th century mainland writer, so ought to be fairly influential, which makes this a relevant data point. It’s interesting as Dickensian prose feels like about as far from classical Chinese prose as you can possibly get, in terms of structure and aesthetic values.

The podcast really wants to pin Lao She’s death (a suicide after a struggle session that shamed Lao She) specifically on communism in a way I’ve never seen a western thinker talk about deaths from poverty, medical care or racism as precipitates of (racial) capitalism. Again, I’m not really interested in exonerating Maoism, I just keep getting awkwardly shoved in this position by honestly disingenuous takes? Like you’re going to treat this as an extrajudicial state murder, but you’re going to act like that’s never a position Western states also put subjects in? Like what do you think the Turing suicide was?

I don’t think it holds to suggest that they just don’t happen to get around to providing comparative points regarding other regimes: there’s huge Othering work being executed again and again in this. Is it because they’re spent a lot of time in Taiwan, that they’re here functioning kind of as unpaid executors of imagined Taiwanese political will without ever, ever calling out comparable bullshit? They’ve made literally one slightly negative comment ever about Chiang Kai-shek, and there is—stuff one could say.

Huainanzi

A “story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate.”

Laozi

An overview of the core text of Daoism.

Zuangzi and his fish

Introduces the Boswell and Dr Johnson team of ‘Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi.’

Du Fu:

A discussion of his poem, “Thinking of My Brothers on a Moonlit Night”.

This doesn't have the latest things I've listened to and comments thereon, but if people want to track any Chinese Literature Podcast stuff they're listening to, I made a spreadsheet that links to all the episodes so that's easier to do.

Some more episodes (taking us to 20/100):

Su Dongpo

An interesting look at poet-statesmen in the Song, the tensions around political reform in the period, and the poem "Waking up on a Boat at Night" in particular. The link will take you to their translation.

Jing Tsu's Sound and Script in the Chinese Diaspora

The book sounds interesting, and though I wouldn't really like to judge their discussion of whether its theoretical framework holds up without having read it, the problems they were raising didn't sound like huge issues to me. I don't think it's bad for Jing Tsu to stake out a fairly complicated or ambivalent position, if she believes that's where the truth sits.

Wang Anshi

Related to the Su Dongpo podcast. These guys could stand to set the stage a bit better, the interrelation of these figures and their setting isn't very clear to relative newbies like myself. "Hymn" is particularly compelling.

Nie Zheng, Assassin

Some more Grand Historian beats, and a neat contention that this is essentially the first recorded instance of a wuxia vibe.

Chloe Zhao and the Three-Character Classic

Just their previous episode on the same, with a new preface. No shade on re-upping, but if you're gonna, consider idk, taking the previous post down, or otherwise streamlining the content so the whole exact same thing doesn't just show up twice?

Haggadah of Kaifeng Jews

Somewhat painful goy self-positioning.

I'm really ambivalent about this podcast. Where it's informative, it's hugely so. I am constantly impressed by their conversational assurance. Specialising in this form of literature has given them a good, broad knowledge base. This is enviable, I do not have it myself! But for me, the programme has two huge baked-in issues:

1. Politics: God, grant me the brass balls of American Sinologist bois recording in the middle of the Trump coup, talking about how Beijing is authoritarian and has no ideological legitimacy. That is not a contention I wanna hear if you’re de facto assuming that authoritarianism and ideological incoherence are not American problems as well? ‘Their government is pure nationalism.’ Ok and? Ours? Isn't?

I’m not even a tankie, this is just weird?? I’m sorry, if you're going to broach this vague topic, then you do have to contend with the materialist question of whether the regime has provided real economic succour to the proletariat over the past century--whether it has succeeded in those terms. You don’t have to like all the CCP's decisions, but you can’t wholesale dismiss the idea that there was ever any meaningful good-faith engagement with and benefit from communism? This is such a hardline ideological argument, tossed off in the most naturalised way possible without the people espousing it even bothering to make said argument, or identify any external or material counterpoint. Just ‘I saw a bossy COVID propaganda poster; I’ve come to Conclusions’. What is in the water in US universities? This whole thing is embarrassing to me, as an academic. I feel shanda fur die goyim.

If I were going to make any pronouncement about whether the British state has succeeded in the past 100 years, I’d have to begin by carefully defining terms, and then engage with comparison points and data. This is just so glib? They recorded this one episode in France during the yellow jacket protests and cwyyyed about the dodgy poor areas of Paris where it’s scary!! I think the French term for these experiences is 'les little bitches abroad'.

2. Analytic rigour: Speaking of a shameful lack of rigour, when it comes to analysis time these boys are out to lunch. Their takes are so mediocre sometimes? They wanna have some big DISCUSSION of whether the Ballad of Mulan 'counts' as feminist. The question is dumb, and the whole framework is weak. Then they're talking about some major piece of political satire that's pornographic, and whiiiiiiining about it being porn and constantly distancing themselves from the material. Are you 14? It's Ming Dynasty content, you cannot feel this implicated. Their entire review of this arguably? genderfluid story regarding castration didn't mention eunuchs at all as a comparative point. I was like... are you new. here?

Also, if you're having a big discussion of 'whether the Ballad of Mulan is feminist' and this potentially dicey Ming porn: call a woman. You truly can just ask a femme colleague to weigh in, you don't need to invent this wheel. Have you got? a trans friend? because that could really make this whole reading experience both richer and easier!! I don't get it, like. How do you avoid--70% of people I know are women, 80% of people I know are queer, 40% some kind of transperson, with some overlaps therein--HOw do you avoid? having ppl to call?

It does feel like their training was balanced towards information rather than analysis (and like a lot of their Chinese contacts are the equivalent of White Russians with vested interest in not taking a broad view of political issues), and that's been lastingly detrimental. Ideally their scholarship wouldn't just be 'x for white people', but 'competitive' with mainland literature scholarship, offering fresh insights due to their different perspectives. And I just don't see how that can be the case, from these offerings?

Their content, across the platforms and even on their own site, is also not very well-organised, which can be frustrating. The episodes' titles aren't even necessarily consistent.

Their work is immensely valuable as an introduction to new material, but in the aforementioned capacities, I trust it not at all.

What I've listened to so far (14 out of 100):

Three Character Classic
China’s Covid-19 Three Character Classic Propaganda

Two episodes on the san zi jing, tracking some moments in the historical arc of 'Dick and Jane: Confucian Philosophy for Babies'.

Yu Dafu’s Sinking

About a somewhat unexpected 1920s novella, wherein a guy can't get maintain an errection because China's geopolitical position is unsatisfying. Yes.

So basically, I would like to put an end, to Literature. I think it's a bad idea, taken too far.

Buddhist Rescues Mom from Hell

About an interesting 'Buddhists can be filial too!' propaganda epic I'd heard of before, but not really had context for.

Zhuangzi’s Butterfly

Big Daoist classic beat.

Wait, Wait…Where’s Eddie Murphy?: The REAL Story of Mulan

On the ballad.

The Ugly Stone: A Conversation with Nick Stember

On a contemporary Chinese writer.

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Did you know Octavio Paz and another dude wrote a whole short book on 19 translations of the Tang poem Deer Park&what they DO? Amazing?

Also the guys point out—and this is obvious but I NEVER saw it—that the reason Edwardian and earlier translators render stuff as sonnets is bc their readers were simply more poetry literate than us in most cases and thus accustomed to the shape of poetic forms so actually it’s like—freer ‘authentic’ translation is now more appreciable bc we LOST our own tradition to such a degree. It’s not just that we’re Cooler Now!! Honestly, that's such an interesting shake-up of my snobbery about the Edwardian translation and its aims.

Professor Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone

This seems like a really interesting book, aimed at teaching people who don't necessarily already speak contemporary Chinese.

Ancient Chinese Porn Literature

'this giant penis is symbolic of his lack of status, in some ways' thanks guys.

Liang Qichao

Chinese Modernism.

Tao Yuanming’s Return to the Fields and Gardens

On the pastoral. 'A humble thatched cabin, with 8-9 rooms--' oh my god, fuck off.

There Can Be Only One: The Biography of Xiang Yu

This actually made me want to read Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian.

'How I Mutilated a Trannie, then Fell in Love'

A somewhat awkward, if decently well-meaning, treatment of a Pu Songling short story.

The University of Washington Press's Asian Studies Division has a 40% off sale, and I combed through all 700ish titles on offer to make a list of some of the fun Chinese history offerings:

- a really interesting response-novel to JttW: Further Adventures on the Journey to the West (if I were a dumbass guy academic I'd call it fanfic, but as I'm not, I'll suggest it interestingly shares some strategies)
- Some very interesting-looking titles in women's history: Arranged Companions
- Empress in the Pepper Chamber: this is the FIRST I've heard of this famous figure being controversial for her class status, bit embarrassed to have failed to question the Catherine the Great of it all.
- Healing with Poisons: this could be useful to academics working on Western medieval magical theory re the body, as a counterpoint.
- The Edge of Knowing: This could be useful to people wanting to work on danmei/isekai-derived titles like SVSSS, which features both layered realities and important dreams: what is the wider body of c-lit doing with dreams outside of this corpus of examples?
- And these are the two I'd want to read if I had the energy: The Social Life of Inkstones
- The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel
- Transforming Monkey: This seems super neat, on presentations of Sun Wukong over 1000 years
- Many Faces of Muilan: this is doing something similar for Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell
- Women Playing Men: *steepling fingers* whatever happened here is going to be very gay
- Sexuality in China
- The Scholar and the State: every time some book tries to make me read about this period/phenomenon I'm just like no thanks lol I have to live my life already i don't want any echoes across time get that outta here. I don't want reminders other people in the past had similar causes for depression eughhh.
- "This book explores in detail the little-known system of ancient bird-shaped weights from Northern Thailand and Burma." I don't need a whole book, but that's cute
- 'Earth to Heaven: The Royal Animal-Shaped Weights of the Burmese Empires' this was some kinda whole thing, I see
- 'A Siamese Embassy Lost in Africa: This long-forgotten tale of the shipwreck off the coast of Africa of a Siamese embassy to Lisbon in 1686 lay buried in the text of a French book printed 300 years ago.' this is Gilligan's Isle shit. Like 'i guess we'll just set up the embassy--where we're stuck? *clears throat* anyone want to do some--trade with Siam, or--'
- "Aspects of the Embassy to Siam: The Chevalier de Chaumont was the devout and unbending ambassador of Louis XIV to King Narai of Siam in 1685, and the Abbé de Choisy, famous for his gambling debts and transvestite exploits, was his unlikely coadjutant."

...walk me through why YOU thought this was a good idea, Louie.

- Shanghai Love: "Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public--"

There was this thing in early Victorian London where people paid to play *in* a famous play for a scene, like karaoke? So it's not without any contemporary analogue. But this is so interesting.

- Meng Jiangnu Brings Down the Great Wall: another really neat complit project, 10 versions over 2000 years of this legend, and how the versions serve different moral/political projects.
- The Story of Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal
- Chinese Painting Style: Media, Methods, and Principles of Form

And now, having finished, have exorcised the weird compulsion to read through their whole list. x_x I often do that to get a sense of like, the shape of the field atm tho, when one of these big sales/conferences happens.

I am having... a pretty big problem with my PhD uni, in that it's taking them around three weeks to respond to basic questions like 'when should we start'. Also they seem to have zero sense of financial need. I explained, as per our earlier, interview conversations, that I'd like to start early because of student loan stuff. They really blanked me, basically saying 'even though we said any old time? Now we think September. No stated reason, we just do.' It's SUCH a turn around from how nice and reasonable they were pre-acceptance. And they seem to think my voicing financial concerns is me being unreasonably panicky? Rather than an acknowledgment of the fact that I need money to live, let alone study?

It's so undesirable that I'd not go there if any other decent-ranked school would take me. Other nice people wanted me, but their schools weren't well-ranked. Also, I have no proof that anywhere else is better.

I said I'd give it another month to find enough work to live on, but if I can't, going to demand we start in May. I now no longer really trust their 'we'll absolutely help get your funding in order and we promise you a job all first year and teaching all second and third year' claims.

If they feel it'd be better for me to go through some foundation research courses with other PhD students, and that funding might be better in September, and that I'd have a better/healthy/useful relationship w/ other PhD kids if we all came in simultaneously. That makes sense? But why not say that at the start?

I don't REALLY imagine that'd be thrown off TERRIBLY by my starting a few months earlier? I mean what's the worst I'll do, read a lot and make sub-optimal notes?

But there's really... nowhere else to go, where a PhD will probably get me a job after, among the people I've spoken to who'd have me. I'm sort of stuck with something I think is a bad idea going in, but I'm not at all sure that's not just--true across the board.

How to Make Grenadine and Why You Should Bother
Clotted Cream Recipe - Making Clotted Cream at Home is Much Easier Than You Think
Cupcake Project Blog's Recipe Index
Single Women Are Quickly Becoming the ‘Evangelicals’ of the Democratic Party
NICHOLAS BLAKE: a Rob Shearman short story
Texts From Cephalopods
An agent's manifesto
Terrible Doctor Insists Woman Is Pregnant When She Actually Has a Giant Tumor
The Shoe That Politely Says ‘I Don’t Want to Fuck You’
Katy's Index of BFA Seven Stories
Major ISPs to turn into copyright police by July, says RIAA: This seems REALLY fishy. First, major business-choking move for the ISPs, if people leave them, and in that they'd be 'volunteering' to do a TON more work for no monies. Also no names named, no one preventing you from going with smaller competing or off-shore ISPs. Seems like RIAA propaganda? EVERYONE WILL BE DOING IT GUYS!!
Serviceable but low-key pad thai I shoped for and Katy made tonight
Charlize Theron Raises Her Glass to Michael Fassbender’s Monster Cock
Ann Romney Begs Women to Support Her Husband
Anna Wintour Reuses Outfits All The Damn Time
Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia: Exclusive: In joint interview, Tony Blair refuses to comment on Liberian president's remarks supporting anti-gay laws
Not Crazy Just Resentful: On Being Car Free by Choice in Cleveland
How To Ditch Your Boring Throw Pillows For Something Cooler
Jon Hamm Won’t Back Down on His Kardashian Problem
How To Unclog Your Drain Without Barfing
The 10 Funniest Celeb Twitter Bios
Gender Bend Avengers: I would assemble for that.
John McCain Thinks It’s Time for Republicans to Stop Acting Like Lady-Hating Jerks
Otters holding hands while they sleep so they do not drift away from each other
Syria’s Charming First Lady Says She’s the ‘Real’ Dictator
'Sexist trousers' are below the belt
Rabbi, three children shot dead outside Jewish school in France

"People seem to imagine that talking about sex means talking in the dorkiest possible way, and I honestly don't know why. Personally, I've never seen the romance in no-talking sex. I know it's supposed to be all "swept off your feet by the heat of the moment" and shit, but in practice it always seems more clumsy and oafish, like trying to convey the concept of "Deleuze's Plane of Immanence" in Pictionary. With your feet. There's shit you can't just convey, you know? Even in long-standing relationships, it's pretty goddamn hard to say "I want to gently pull your hair while we fuck and whisper sweet dirty things in your ear" with raised eyebrows and meaningful looks."

Ahahah fucking Deluze.

(from http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-10T12:27:00-05:00&max-results=20)

* Oh my god, my piña colada macaroons with pineapple cream filling are perfect! Rejoice! (Photo not of mine, but of what they'd have looked like if I had a somewhat better piping nozzle x_x) This is my third attempt making French-style macaroons, and while the first time was okay, I believe this was both the easiest time I've had of it and the most successful batch (#2 Friday night was, though not really my fault, an utter disaster). Really not that bad once I got the hang of it! Will have to practice more, but feeling good about this. I guess the next classic culinary challenge would be the croquembouche or something... Idk, what else is notoriously a bitch?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/food/jason_macaroon.jpg

* It's looking like I may have to learn French if I do the Charm PhD (which is quite likely). And not just 'a little', over the next years I need to get to like, Proust-reading levels. Any tips? Anyone else doing that, or want to do that?

* http://husbandstheseries.com/ : This is decently cute.

* No one in London is interested in going to the Lambeth Graphic Novel Readers Group Meet, are they? They always have well planned sessions organized around stuff like big name authors and Arabic Comic Culture, which I know little about. I'm intrigued, but I don't know people in the UK who like graphic novels (the format annoys my gf).

If you would prefer for Iowa City to have independent local businesses, rather than for huge, characterless development projects to muscle out the established and much-loved places that give the city its identity, you should probably sign http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-overdevelopment-on-the-north-side and http://www.change.org/petitions/save-the-red-avocado to support the North Side and the area around New Pi co-op. I don't **zomgadore** every shop in question, but there's no denying that IC is better with this sort of stuff, and the business side of this seems pretty fucking shady. (I'm not sure that sudden lease alteration with this little notice is legal?)

In the next week I have to apply for an Post-Study Work Visa I don't actually need, just for permission to sit around until schools get back to me. It's EXPENSIVE, but not as bad as going home and/or being unable to work for however long UCL and Cambridge take. This time I've read the entire manual of reasons for refusal, researched all possible visa categories and circumstances that might apply to me, gone through the whole application and all associated materials, and consulted many legal aid people ahead of time, but I'm still irked that this works so stupidly. At least I may be able to study while on the Post-Study. :/ I'm still waiting to hear back from Unis and two other legal aid people, who will probably get back to me the third or forth. Potentially the immigration aid people could tell me a secret loop-hole for a sittuation like mine, if one exists.

If both the Unis could give me a time frame of 'letting me know inside the next week', I could just about properly apply for a student visa, narrowly squeaking in/flailing to obtain student loans and a CAS number in time. But I doubt they can do that, and it'd be HIGH PRESSURE for me to try and get everything done within those weeks, given that both components can be time-sensitive and tricky. I need to have the application in to the UKBA by the 6th, for my bank statements (which I have to include, which have to be from within the last month, and which have to show a certain magical balance held for 90 days--a balance I've now dropped below, so I can't just get new ones) to be applicable. I'll fill it out on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd and, if the other guys don't give me a better alternative before then, turn it in the fourth or fifth (just in case something goes wrong and I NEED that extra day or two).

Anyway. Enjoy a picture of our cat.

Had a pretty good day out w/ Katy, after a rough start. Got woken up after little sleep at 8:30 by hungry/thirsty cat who'd consumed his foodstuffs (and, I suspect, was also just bored/lonely), never really got back to sleep despite trying for several hours.

Katy and I have two anniversaries due to differing opinions as to what marks the official beginning of going out, and this one, Hers, thus my gifts, is split into spending today together out doing fun stuff and then going for Japanese some other evening (since she had to record a Shalka read-through tonight). We began by visiting a Christmas Market at The Water Poet in Spitalfields (something of a fail as there were few merchants and Katy didn't really want to watch the free Christmas films, be bought food, or stick around for the caroling later on (I'd sort of banked on her wanting to do these, as they're Her Sort of Thing). Then we dodged disaster by going to Portabello Market, which, over-populated and over-popular though it is, was v. nice, with a lot of Christmas greenery vendors with actual boughs of holly (NOT IN A SONG! LEGIT-ASS BOUGHS OF HOLLY!!) and mistletoe (I SHIT YOU NOT!). Katy was not nearly as shocked/interested as I was. I mean I'd seen these things like, once. In sad little dry bunches, not in riotous profusion. My mom bought boughs of greenery some years, but like, that was just some fir-strands w/ pine-cones stuck in. And I liked that too! But this was cooler.

Also there were some nice pop-up shops, some decent vendors, and I successfully remembered/spotted... I think it was Lefton? anyway, some mid-century floral cat figurine of a sort that is sometimes valuable and which Katy rather likes. She suspected this particular one of being v. new, though (and thus worth bupkis), and also it lacked an intelligent/curious expression, and I suspected our cat could try to fuck or kill it, either resulting in the loss of a porcelain figurine potentially worth thousands. Needless to say we did not get Sasa a new 'friend.' Still, I'm happy to have remembered it from a conversation last Autumn in Edinburgh.

Some interesting walking around and looking at stuff and buying people presents and NOT buying an AMAZING fuzzy wolf-hat with connected paw-gloves (which Katy may deeply regret some day, I feel), and then we started back. I felt it'd been a nice date thing. Then I had to use the bathroom at McDonalds before we caught the bus. I got stuck behind a looooong queue, and, I eventually realized, specifically behind some clueless tourists who had no idea they were IN said queue, much less holding it up. Eventually bypassed them, after having been queue-jumped by half the known female bathroom-needing world, only for a McDonalds employee to ROAR IN shrieking 'this toilet is broken!!' and slamming the door in my face. Whatever was broken she fixed, and then in the same unfortunately URGENT poor English she demanded I go in and use the thing RIGHT NOW!! I did so, and not fifteen seconds had I been in before an old angry and pretty drunk homeless woman started banging on the door, cursing, saying she was 'about to fucking bust'again and again. So I had to finish as quickly as possible and stumble out still trying to pull up my layers of tights (it was nasty and cold today). I washed my hands veeeery quickly because said woman didn't see a need to close the door as she did her biz. Magical. I fucking hate tourist!London sometimes. Nothing was the speicifically poor homeless woman, the situationally-stupid tourists, or the harried employee's fault, but I felt incredibly frustrated.

Then we got on the bus an hour and 40 min before we HAD to be home (for a 40 min max ride), and due to the police cracking down and arresting a ton of protesters outside parliament (Londoners of African descent who were suggesting, with strongly worded signs and other WMDs, that perhaps it wasn't cool for the UK and associated governments to continue supporting a hideously oppressive, rape-happy and illegitimate regime because they thought said regime could get them a good deal on cheapo laptop components--so obviously people who needed arrested en masse, and violently too!), we were stuck in a traffic jam about 40 min. We got home like 15 min late.

Pretty much pretending the day ended riiiight before I went into McDonalds. Anyway, then Katy did her readthrough, and I made chorizo chicken with potatoes, did loads of laundry, put away dishes, entertained the cat so it didn't yowl much/audibly during the recording, etc. Also watched a chunk of "A Damsel in Distress" while doing this, because the BBC iPlayer almost always has a classic film on dock, and I like to watch them while doing chores so I feel less like I've missed out on an entire era of largely decent-to-excellent film-making (well, at least that's what's come down to me--there very probably were clunkers aplenty, as ever, now mercifully lost to time). Aired out the rooms, which smelled of cat. This necessitated chasing Sasa out of them, opening the windows, hoping no one came in to steal shit for an hour, shutting the door without letting him sneak back in, and putting anti-Sasa notices on all the doors. He sulked in the hall way, pissed at my effrontery. Literally, he did a number on his litter box. His rage!!!waste is prodigious, and fearful to behold. Did a veeeery little Shalka stuff, and talked to flatmate Kasia about Christmas plans.

I need to type up my to-do list for Kasia, who seemed to think I'd be making a few things, and she'd make a few things, and we'd muddle through--she's welcome to contribute anything she likes, but I have a full big ass menu planned out which I'm comfy cooking, and I don't want to be rude, but altering it to do less, when I've so carefully planned that, seems annoying--I'll try to be very out of the kitchen on the Eve and the Day, due to pre-prep, but I'm pretty ready to roll here. Also have to type this up so Katy's mom can do some things, which is both nice and a bit annoying, as I've pretty much spent a ton of time figuring out how to manage this, and well-intentioned offers of help may well throw off my carefully timing, budget and ingredients plans. Also I specifically asked if she wanted anything special, or to make anything at home or at ours, because I didn't want her to feel that her decision to come here meant me taking over or undermined her/striped her of agency/ruined her Christmas, and she said no, so I went with that? Idk.

I'm not good at delegation, but esp. not re: cooking. I know how to get a lot done myself, but not how to relinquish control over steps or whole processes, or how to share space and resources seamlessly. I think maybe I used to be better at that as a kid, but I haven't really had to share kitchen duties for a long time, and the freedom's made me snotty about it. It's a bad trait, but when I'm working I mostly want people who aren't people I specifically REALLY know how to work with, like Katy, to fuck off and stop watching me chop vegetables and remarking on the speed. (Re: that, It's a bit silly to say 'gosh, you're sooooo faaaaast' (a la the other day) when I know my knife-technique is juvenile. I was just pathetic at this in basic high-school culinary arts chef-training, and my dicing's never been sufficiently speedy or uniform, and the mince knife technique, sort of a swivel hand gesture? fanning the knife around VERY QUICKLY rather than lifting and chopping?, is just beyond my skill. I cringe whenever anything asks for minced garlic. I can't even keep the French terms straight. It's this huge, fundamental technical skill that marks an important distinction in the highly sexually segregated world of 'chefs' and 'cooks', and I just do. not. have. it.)

So yeah: maybe typing up the list and displaying it will sort of nicely tell Kasia that while she's welcome to also do stuff, this is the stuff I will be doing, and emailing it to Katy's mom with some nice indicators of thing she could helpfully prep at home and finish here, or make at home and heat here, or make here, time/space/logistics permitting, would be okay. I'm just eager not to insult anyone/ruin anyone's holiday, nervous about doing Christmas at my house/with my food (never done that before), and anxious to please gf and gay!in-laws.

Also I helped edit Mez's uni!personal statement and feel v. virtuous/proud of her.

Apparently Joy of Cooking's 'lowfat' gingerbread men cannot be trusted, as I suspected. Low-fat is the devil's recipe designation, second only to 'atkins/south-beach friendly' in its foul degradation.* Also that's weird b/c I typically trust Joy of Cooking with my life. Also I need to make their cranberry relish soon, having discovered it freezes well. And the chicken broth and lard too. AND SOME BLOODY CHRISTMAS CRAFTS THAT ARE CLASSY AND ATTRACTIVE AND CHEAP. Anyone know any? :/ May have to hunt Tumblr. Ew. Tumblr.

So, gingerbread:

May try this: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/gingerbread_man_cookies/ without pepper, b/c wtf, pepper?
or http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/9761/gingerbread+men#null , but the lack of molasses concerns me.

These: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/sugar_cookies/ may well be the antidote to the oddly thin, too-formal sugar cookies I produced in Batch 1. Think I'll try the first.

Hrm, Groupon. This accredited TEFL course for 49 pounds might not be too bad. Idk what that regularly costs, though. All I know is I could use sweet sweet tutoring/teaching monies... Will check it out.

* Speaking of, have you seen Morgana and Brax in 'look, I need to eat to live like everyone, okay?' Please view this trailer for "A Princess for Christmas." And laugh. Until you cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0b8t6qXm0w

Buttle hard, Brax.

* What are your favorite/essential Christmas season foods/drinks/recipes? I am planning for the Christmas party (and Katy's brother, mom and mom's manfriend are coming over for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day). Also I am just curious.
* List of International Christmas Dishes by Country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christmas_dishes
* http://www.uncollege.org/archives/1441 : I'd take CS101, Machine Learning, and/or Human-Computer Interaction (I lack the probability, calculus and programing language capabilities for the others) if anyone wanted to do then with me so we could chat about it (I do better when not learning totally alone).

Today I:

- dealt with the contractors/trowing the cat in my room and out of their way
- dishes
- laundry
- tidying br
- tidying kitchen
- shopping for Katy's mini supper party
- made sour cream and cheese mashes potatoes
- made mushroom gravy with home-made lamb stock
- made roast vegetable casserole thing
- made chicken cordon bleu (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/chicken-cordon-bleu-i/detail.aspx)
- made dark chocolate loaf cake (http://www.food.com/recipe/dense-chocolate-loaf-cake-nigella-lawson-137303)
- recorded long podcast interview w/ Jon
- helped give party
- cleaned kitchen again
- emailed Cambridge Interfolio letters, at last
- updated housing spreadsheet
- started on readings for my PhD genre writing seminar on classic detective novels (http://letsenhance.blogspot.com/) on Monday
- got Phillippa's availability
- emailed all strong potential room candidates to set up viewings
- took out cat waste
- did a little bit of shalka stuff

MUST:

- read book
- do book review
- do reading for Let's Enhance!
- job aps
- clean up and mail Elodie my notes on her dissertation
- crack on w/ own ep

God fucking dammit. After all their utter bullshit with the 'type in this box and only in this box do not c/p your essays!!' LINE AND CHARACTER LIMIT!! thing, and the ONLY UPLOAD DOCUMENTS AS PDFS!! and the rejecting the Required Photo without giving any reason so that you just had to Keep Trying different ones until the gods were inexplicably satisfied, and their EIGHT PAGES of stuff to do to apply without even counting documents--FAR worse than anyone else, Cambridge is refusing to accept letters of rec in THE ONLY FORM UIOWA DOES THEM. What do I have to DO to even apply to these people, jump through hoops of fire while being taunted by secretaries?!

Cambridge wants people to enter text in a box on their website after making a little password/saying they are who they say they are. Iowa wants professors NOT to send individual letters of rec, but to log one per student with Interfolio, which will then send your confidential letters anywhere you ask at $6 for a batch of sending and $19 a year. It's annoying b/c why is that automated service not free? But I see Iowa's point. It's a one-off, so their profs can spend time teaching, it's safer than everyone trying to Send Shit, theoretically it's a HUGE time-saver, on their end. It's getting other people to say 'sure, that's absolutely fine' that's an issue

All the other unis grumped but were like 'sure, fine, send it here'. But did you know Cambridge is ***!!***special?***!!***

I said:

Thanks very much [for your earlier help clarifying a point]. I have now completed my application and sent in all the documentation required of me.

I have a problem, however, regarding letters of recommendation. My
undergraduate university uses a popular American service called
Interfolio to hold and send confidential letters of recommendation,
and does not allow their professors to send out letters to individual
services such as your electronic referencing system. Is there an email
address I can advise Interfolio to send these letters to? I'm sorry to
be difficult, but it's really the only way the university will handle
this.

Erin

Then Cambridge was like:

Dear Erin

I'm afraid that the University of Cambridge does not accept references from services such as Interfolio. Under the circumstances I would advise that you request your referees to submit your references to us on paper and we will upload them on receipt.

For information regarding paper references please see the following webpage http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/gradstud/prospec/faq/
My referee is having difficulty accessing the electronic referencing system. What can I advise them?

Best Regards

Some Lady
Graduate Admissions

That... does not really respond to my email. This person has clearly not quite understood what I'm saying/is not helpful. It's not a problem that paper references could possibly solve. Fucking fuck, Cambridge. It seems like a Bad Sign that I'm INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATED with this uni and I haven't even been accepted yet.

The thing is, though, it's about Actually being okay with how international programs are different. They make a HUGE deal of saying they are, but the INSTANT they run into 'actually here's a slight accommodation you might need to make for that difference', they get all OH HELL NO. CAMBRIDGE IS FOR PEOPLE FROM UK EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUNDS, THX.

*

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Entries tagged with uni is bullshit

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University of Washington Press's Asian Studies Catalogue

Always with the whining, never with the winning

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and getting caught in the rain: Facebook digest

Iowa Shitty (in its defense, it looks a LOT better post-Goldsmiths)

Bah, Humbug

Just skip to the end bit about Morgana and Brax, the latter playing Paisley Winterbottom, butler

Computer Science and Christmas

NOTHING worked right for me in the kitchen today, I swear

I am frustrated as shit with Cambridge and I haven't even gotten in yet