And now Yu Yingshi 余英時 is gone. Nobody wrote more broadly, more searchingly or more wisely than he about the intellectual class of China, from ancient times to now. Though you might think of him as a pillar of the establishment, with his teaching posts at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, his membership in august learned societies and his distinguished prizes, he was remarkable to me for his skepticism about the worldly rewards that are sometimes extended to writers and thinkers. He was not easily impressed and certainly not intimidated. He left Yale for Princeton because he liked the East Asia library there. When people around him got excited, he had the calm tone, the command of counter-examples and the long view. He was careful to know what he was talking about. Push-button solutions did not enchant him.

I was lucky to be his student, in a peripheral sort of way, when I was young, curious and confused. I knew I wanted to do something about ideas and language in China. Armed with not much beyond the Chinese-philosophy manuals of Feng You-lan and Alfred Forke, and a couple of neophyte observations about Chinese grammar which, like all early-stage language-learners, I thought explained big things about Chinese thought, I sat in on his “Song Dynasty Classicism and Philosophy” seminar at Yale. I didn’t always grasp what the classroom discussions were about and floundered through the readings, mostly in Chinese. But being there was like being a child at the opera: no idea what was going on, but such a lot of goings-on! I turned in a rather cookie-cutter paper about Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao’s interpretations of the Yi jing, processed through a simplistic understanding of John Austin’s performative/constative distinction. He read it, didn’t leave many comments, yet was always friendly and open to conversations thereafter. I suspect my paper wasn’t even wrong, but he took a long and charitable view of this awkward student who might do something someday, or might not.

He left Yale soon thereafter for Princeton, trained up many fine students, ran a kind of salon in his and Monica’s house, was a prominent voice for decency and democracy against chauvinism and oppression, and had the honor of seeing his books banned in the PRC. He had a long and admirable life and leaves behind the gratitude of those who encountered him. Even the contingent and confused, like me.

Another elephant gone. The forest is poorer.

We’ve been in our Chicago house for ten years now. Ten eventful years. This morning, out on my dog walk, I confronted this Benjaminian allegory:

Je me méfie en général des gens aux opinions carrées et qui s’expriment sans ambages. Je me dis que le monde est trop compliqué pour être saisi dans des formules à l’emporte-pièce. Mais le Père Lafontant qui ne s’embarrassait pas de nuances quand il s’agissait d’exprimer la condition des pauvres d’Haïti a eu très tôt mon adhésion complète. Pourquoi? Parce que, en premier lieu, il avait toujours devant lui un cas d’inégalité scandaleuse. Les paysans du village de Cange, aux côtés de qui il a lutté pendant plus d’un demi-siècle, s’étaient réfugiés sur la crète aride de l’Artibonite après avoir été chassés de leurs terres par un barrage hydro-électrique. L’eau, l’un des besoins primaires de l’espèce humaine, avait saturé leurs vallées et elle leur était déniée. Et à quelle fin? Pour un projet dit “de développement,” une usine qui avait bientôt cessé de fournir le pays en courant électrique et qui en tout cas n’avait jamais livré un seul watt aux habitants de Cange. Pour qui voulait comprendre les ironies, les hypocrisies, les corruptions du développement “par le haut,” l’exemple était assez parlant.

Des étrangers bien intentionnés, aux solutions préfabriquées, il en avait vus. Je me souviens de sa formule cinglante: “Ceux qui nous parlent de ‘technologies appropriées,’ de ‘développement doux,’ veulent imposer de la merde aux gens pauvres.” Mais ce n’est pas seulement la force de son verbe qui a marqué tous ceux qui l’ont connu. Il donnait la preuve par l’action des principes qui l’animaient. C’est en se formant sur son exemple que les jeunes étudiants en médecine et autres partenaires qui se sont réunis dans l’association Zanmi Lasante ont résolu de rester au plus près des gens dans le besoin; de solliciter leurs initiatives, de les écouter et sans cesse de les incorporer aux suites de l’action; de s’engager pour le long terme, de ne jamais accepter qu’on eût fait “assez.” Plus et mieux, c’est ce que demandent les gens de Cange, et ce n’est que justice. L’injustice, c’est qu’on leur propose d’accepter moins et moins bien, au nom d’une répartition irrévocable des biens de ce monde.

L’amour, le respect, la bonté envers le prochain s’alliaient chez lui avec un humour taquin et une loyauté sans faille. Je suis convaincu d’avoir connu en lui l’un de ceux en qui “Le vent souffle où il veut, et tu en entends le bruit; mais tu ne sais d’où il vient, ni où il va. Il en est ainsi de tout homme qui est né de l’Esprit” (Jean 3:8). 

The first and fifteenth of every month in our studenty neighborhood see a flowering of particle-board bookshelves, dressers, and chairs, plastic storage tubs, and chunky mattresses. People are moving out– moving back home, moving to another city, moving to a job or a grad school or the Army– and leaving their Ikea stuff behind.

The economic-rationality argument is double. This type of furniture is cheap enough that it makes sense to buy another suite (pronounced “suit,” at least by people on the radio when I was a kid) of the same stuff in Austin, Cleveland, Walla Walla or wherever you’re going. Cheap in the sense of price. And it’s cheap enough (cheap in the sense of quality) that you can’t give it away. The piles of Ikea furniture left in the alleyway will not, I warrant, be gathered by other students looking to fill a room. Especially if the rain has deformed the fiberboard.

And I’m sorry to say that it’s doubled by a social rationality. It used to be that when you moved, you took some furniture with you and you gave some to other members of your grad-school cohort, or whatever pod you swam with. I still have the odd pot that belonged to X, a bookshelf that once housed Y’s Hegel Gesamtausgabe, a pair of record crates from Z. Buying furniture was inconvenient and expensive enough that we kept it circulating in the gang. Some of my old junk may still be enjoying this form of distributed immortality. When I moved cross-country, my only regret was that I hadn’t given away more stuff.

Now when I see these heaps of Ikea detritus left on the street, I also see the intersecting curves of devaluation and social desolidarization. The “Bowling Alone” ethos leaves people with no one to give the stuff to, as the price/quality ratio gives no reason to take it. Recycling has devolved into decycling. “Bad for the planet!” you may say. Yes, and bad for the global villagers too.

Today, I read an article about Schuppanzigh, the leader of the string quartet that premiered most of Beethoven’s efforts in that genre. It was quite interesting to read about the cut-and-thrust of the various players and their tenure. But it reminded me of an old Beethoven story, which I believe I got from Maynard Solomon’s book. Schuppanzigh was complaining to Beethoven that the parts in String Quartet #12, Op. 127, were too hard for anyone to play. Beethoven responded with his usual acerbity: “I am communing with the Almighty, and you expect me to care about your damned fiddle?”

I could go on for years about the deracination and degeneracy of my local LA classical station KUSC, which now also runs KDFC in San Francisco. I can reduce it to a T-shirt slogan: Classical Music Is Not A Pacifier For Grown-Ups. Beethoven would surely have agreed with me. You will not find the quartets on any playlists except in the late evening. So many of its slots are now devoted to listener requests! The entire point of classical music broadcasting is to use the superior taste of the host to educate the public via his or her choices, not to propagate Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because Jane in Rancho Cucamonga says it’s her favorite piece every morning because her puppy Tiddles licks her when it is played. Pandering leads to a continually shrinking repertoire, which they have codified at 250 pieces. Add to that the latest crossover sensations, movie music, and, so help me, video game music.

I have a solution underway. I can now broadcast music to my stereo via Bluetooth. If I can rip 4,000 CDs to a very large hard drive — a Synology NAS is out of my budget — I can create playlists that will scramble 3-4 years of continuous music and still do a better job than the drive-time people. The only question is whether Apple will end-of-life Windows iTunes, and when. But it would be better to have those mysterious people called announcers do the work for me, as they are supposed to do.

Langston Hughes interrogated by the Committee on Un-American Activities, 1953: “That is a poem. One can not state one believes every word of a poem.”

See

https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/may/mccarthy/hughes.html

see it to believe it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/03/china-launches-musical-in-bid-to-counter-uyghur-abuse-allegations

Today I saw a very odd listing from the University of California, Irvine, my former graduate school. It was a list of graduate programs that had fared well in national rankings.

Has UCI completely disentangled its English program from its Literary Criticism and Theory program? Terrific news! I can go back to English and work on belles lettres or else collate for the fourteenth time the existing editions of Shakespeare’s history plays. The late Hillis Miller once notoriously said that it would not be a tragedy if the libraries burned down, for then scholars would be free to write historical and biographical criticism all over again. I can testify that the books of that sort are not being read, so why not rewrite them? Brave move, UCI!

I’m reluctant to treat people as exemplars of a category, but here goes: did anyone else notice that the two mass murderers in this week’s headlines were both guys aged 21?

I was pretty ignorant at 21. I mean, I had learned several languages and read a lot of hard books, including the Phenomenology of Mind and The Interpretation of Dreams, but my understanding of the world was minimal. And egocentric.

The sort of weapons those young men used should be forbidden to anyone under the age of, say, 45. That might slow things down a bit. In a good way.

(Actually I would prefer to reserve them for people over the age of 102, but if it involves legislation, you have to water down your ideals.)

A continuation of this thought. It makes me wretched to think that these murderers were only 21. To have given up on life and other people to that degree, at only 21: how does that happen?

Aside from what we call mental-health issues. This is a seriously screwed-up place and time.

And then I thought some more. The “normal America” I refer to tacitly is the one where we have learned from some of our mistakes, repudiated Thurmond, Goldwater and Wallace, and started to figure out how to live together with and despite our differences. Everything since Reagan is for me a distortion and a lie: plutocracy, leukocracy, kleptocracy. But kids born in 2000 have known only this distorted country. And, for the record, the Summer of Love, 1968, is farther in the past to them than the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was for me, born in 1960.

I didn’t like having my country’s character be identified with an illiterate, criminal loudmouth for the last four years. Nor do I like seeing it today identified with a drug-addled, 21-year-old racist mass murderer.

“He doesn’t speak for me” worked then as now.

Since I still choose to live and work here, I don’t have the luxury of seeing those lunkheads as anything other than aberrations. It’s the responsibility of every person with a shred of decency to abhor, abjure and execrate such schmucks. Get them off the air and into jail. Then let the rest of us repair the damage they’ve done.

When attention spans are short and analytical abilities are frayed, the loudest, most emotionally wracking spectacles take the place of historical perspective, judgment, comparison, and constructive courses of action. I can see the community of interest between Covid and schlocky journalism. If we are just eyeballs for sale, captive animals scrolling all day long, we bounce from scandal to scandal because nothing else is attention-worthy.

I don’t think it’s good. Which is not to say that I think the people who are having emotional reactions are wrong. I just am wary of the actions of keyed-up and suggestible people. All of them.

Then again, somebody I know (Asianist, not Asian) thought this was the designated moment to harangue his Facebook audience about the lack of MLA sessions devoted to Asian literature.* Academic self-promotion disguised as concern: classic opportunism. I guess every murder has a bright side for somebody.

* For those unfamiliar with the organization, the Modern Language Association began to take an interest in Asian literatures– and then only a small number of them– about ten years ago. The Association for Asian Studies is still the main forum for Asianists. Both are perfectly ok professional organizations. The latter includes anthropologists, economists, historians, and even a few soldiers, diplomats, and spies, making it quite a bit more interdisciplinary than the MLA. I have belonged to both organizations for about thirty years.

After the horrifying string of murders around Atlanta, we’ve seen demonstrations and statements against “Asian hate.” With reported hate crimes, large and small, against people of Asian appearance, on the rise in the last year and a half, no decent person can fail to join the “Stop Asian hate” campaign. I hope I may be excused for taking a closer interest in it.

“Stop Asian Hate.” Of course. (However, I don’t like the phrase “Asian Hate” because it is syntactically ambiguous and inert.) If taken as meaning “oppose the violence done to people just because they are Asian,” the slogan is compelling but it undercounts a lot of factors. It’s a tempting explanation in some ways, because it says to the pharmacist, the hedge-fund manager, the architect, the cowgirl, the life coach, the florist, who are of Asian descent, that whoever they are, recent immigrant or sixth-generation American, white-collar professional or minimum-wage laborer, they are liable to be attacked in public on grounds of appearance alone, that they are all equal in the face of this violence and that they must band together. That’s a powerful adhesive. But in its admirable universality it disregards a lot of things that I think are more significant actuators of the violence and so blocks us from figuring out what is going on (and thus, what to do about it).

Statisticians, start counting: when and where are incidents of aggression against Asian people committed? Who perpetrates them? If state databases don’t recognize the category of anti-Asian hate crime, then reconstruct it on whatever basis you can. And then, analysts of narratives and concepts, it’s your turn to examine each case and figure out what are the stakes and the apparent motives.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki writing in the Asia-Pacific Journal has drawn most of the possible educational value from J. Mark Ramseyer’s article on contracts signed by wartime “comfort women.” As Ramseyer’s article contends that the women entered into these contracts of their own free will, the implication is that there is nothing to get excited about, no harm done and nothing for successive Japanese governments to apologize for. Most of the response to Ramseyer’s article, now withdrawn, has dwelt on the obvious causes of outrage: the insult to the women’s memory, the minimizing of the harm done to vulnerable people, the reiteration, by the analysis, of an imperial bureaucracy’s devaluing of the lives of women deemed inferior (by class or nationality) to those to be “comforted.” It’s the kind of thing that attracts immediate emotional investment. And Ramseyer has gone this way before, so he obviously could have anticipated, maybe welcomed, the reaction. (A working paper on the same subject dwells on the cabal of “activist historians” and “leftists” whom he sees as having precipitated a “pile-on” and “censorship” of contrary views.) Some have suspected him of doing the bidding of nefarious and shadowy nationalists who resent Koreans, feminists, historians, and the like. Rather than raging at the scholar on moral grounds, Morris-Suzuki examines the scholarship and finds it flawed. This sets up Ramseyer to be critiqued, not for having the wrong opinion about comfort women (he’s entitled to his opinion however dismal it may be), but for ignoring, cherry-picking, and cooking the evidence in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. Why, I wonder, is that conclusion so valuable to him that he would undermine his own good name for it?

I suspect it’s an error to assume that Ramseyer’s aim is to curry favor with irredentist or revanchist elements of the Japanese political spectrum. Maybe it was; but that’s small potatoes and impugns only himself. More consequentially, I think, we can seek a motive in the desire to demonstrate, through this unpromising example, “basic game theoretic principles of credible commitments” (“Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” p. 7). For rational-choice theorists, every person is a free agent making bargains based on the best available information. Thus, if you’re a country girl from a family deep in debt, and someone comes along offering you a vaguely-worded contract for three years’ service as a “hostess” with payment up front, it’s your own problem if you find yourself a few weeks later in Rangoon or Shanghai receiving “visits” from twenty-five or thirty soldiers every day with no option of calling it quits. For rational-choice theorists, “whatever is, is right.” I wonder if Ramseyer has similar views on deceptive contracts in our own time and place — is the mere fact of a signature on a piece of paper adequate proof of legality? There are a lot of historical injustices out there that could be papered over in this way, sir; when you’re done squeezing all human history through the sieve of rational choice, there won’t be anything to get mad at.

Mindful of the gallery, Ramseyer even throws in a nod to “the intelligence and resourcefulness of the women involved” (p. 2). Oh yes, agency! We love that stuff. Especially when it puts the victims on the hook for their own troubles.

The pandemic continues gnawing at the flesh of our society. In recent weeks it’s claimed a number of people who had little in common apart from being (for me, First-Person Narrator of this piece) adults and guides, people I was close to in the generation above mine. Just as when you lose your parents (Oscar Wilde reference please, to lighten the tone!*), the disappearance of these people makes it seem that part of the fence holding you back from the cliff’s edge has collapsed. I mentioned Hillis Miller the other day; now for two more I knew much better.

Peter Esty was my English teacher in my first year at Deerfield. I must have been a cranky subject. Mouth full of provincial accent, obsessive with a few literary references bigger than my britches (Dante, Milton, Yeats, Faulkner), ready to argue with, or rather monologue at, all and sundry, I needed taking down a peg. And Peter did that with such humor and grace that I didn’t notice it happening. My papers (typed; teachers had complained about my handwriting and I liked taking on the air of a pro) on Macbeth, Portrait of a Lady, and Ambrose Bierce stories came back with marginal notes that were masterpieces of the art of deflection–of deflecting a kid who was taking himself too seriously. A joke here, a ?! there, a “did you notice…” in another place, were Peter’s way of reminding me to take the time to listen to what the author and the characters had to say, as we should all listen to what other people have to say and, if we can, give them back something they weren’t expecting and possibly didn’t deserve. Unlike many in the teaching profession, Peter had spent ten years outside in the fresh air, working for Proctor & Gamble, and came back to the classroom with the certainty that that is where he wanted to be. He liked kids and he liked books. When I showed him my poems and stories, he pretended to appreciate them as a book-liker but I think he mainly saw them as a piece of the development of a kid he was determined to like. This was charitable of him in a way I couldn’t have seen rightly then.

I was determined not to get along with people (already something of a habit with me) and Peter’s diplomacy was essential to my having a successful second year, when I and a dozen other boys occupied the dorm part of a house with the Esty family on the ground floor. And when I had the lucky break of getting accepted to School Year Abroad (thus avoiding the third year of Deerfield), a further piece of luck was that the Estys were going too, Peter having been chosen as that year’s English teacher for the thirty or so American kids on the voyage. I remember hanging out in Normandy, poking around the Paris flea markets, and walking over the Cathar strongholds in the south, with Peter and various of his brood. Being in France was good for me. I had a chance to start over again. The things that made me hard to get along with didn’t matter so much there, or could be put down to general cultural difference. And French kids didn’t mind arguing about poetry and ethics and culture, however bizarre my starting assumptions must have seemed to them. I decided to petition to skip senior year, and I suspect Peter had a role in my petition being granted. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to try to fit me back in the old bottle for a year anyway, after being in France. Forty years of subsequent experience have given me some insight into the subtle, behind-the-scenes ways capable adults can influence a kid’s path.

Xavier was one of the people I got to know that year in France (it was 1976-77, for the paleontologists in the audience). The Desgrées du Loû family had an admirable tradition of hospitality, shown for example by hiding an American parachutist who’d landed on somebody’s potato field a few months before D-Day. Or there was the Polish teenager, Stachek, whose arm had been shot off in a battle, and who somehow found himself in rural Brittany and stayed with them for the duration of the war. As their numerous children grew up and moved away (most often to Paris, as Bretons must do) François and Anne Desgrées du Loû invited students into the empty bedrooms, which is how I, a fumbling, easily embarrassed stranger who understood three words out of ten of what was being said, came to be part of their family dinners. My first night there, a long and passionate discussion took place about who was greater, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. I couldn’t really join in but I knew these were the people for me.

Tynane (Anne-Françoise), the eldest daughter, lived around the corner with her husband, Xavier, and their three small children. Xavier had been working for Citroën and was just about to strike out on his own as a designer of electricity-generating windmills. His Aéroturbine was about the size and shape of a well-fed dolphin with a propeller on its nose and swiveled at the top of a steel stanchion about as long as a telephone pole. It could be swung down for repairs and was meant to be self-contained. It was ahead of its time and, I believe, rubbed the French electricity-generating monopoly the wrong way. The drawings for it were elegant, a mode of persuasion in their own right. Xavier traveled in France and abroad trying to get his invention installed. I thought I had found an ideal location, a hilltop medical center in Haiti without, at the time, a connection to the national grid. For various insurmountable reasons that installation never came to pass, but I think Xavier would have loved the Haitians, with their matter-of-fact piety, their creative exuberance, their love of rhetorical precision.

For Xavier was an engineer with an artist’s eye. He loved Italy for the way industrial objects there were never allowed to be ugly, as if ugliness would proclaim their adherence to mere function: it cost nothing more to make a Ducati Mach 1 or an Olivetti typewriter elegant, so why not do it? Design should never punish people for buying at the bottom of the scale, if they had to. His shed was full of machines in various stages of assembly and disassembly, including a couple of Citroën “spacecraft” cars, the DS and ID models that Roland Barthes commented on disparagingly for their exquisitely organic-seeming smoothness. For Xavier they represented a bygone era of French design, when designers weren’t afraid to defy the consensus and test out new solutions (like the DS’s central hydraulic system that replaced springs and shocks). He felt himself, I think, increasingly locked out of the mainstream of engineering and industrial production as economies of scale came to dominate all design choices. The Aéroturbine was his struggle to prove schlocky averageness wrong.

With Bob Lange, Bryan Simmons and other friends, I experienced a hospitality like no other among these people. Tynane, her parents, and many members of the family have been the readers I think about when I write, in whatever language (even Chinese), and the friends I seek out on the slightest pretext. They are good to be with, to talk with, to think with. Xavier’s hospitality extended to loaning me his beautiful red Olivetti manual typewriter in the summer of 1981 when I was banging out the first drafts of what became The Ethnography of Rhythm. I stupidly tried to clean it with “white spirit” (i.e., turpentine; if it had been labelled in English I would have known better than to use it) and marred the paint. This did not deter Xavier, a few months later, from contributing his welding talents to the fashioning of a long-distance touring bike out of a second-hand maybe-Peugeot. I needed a baggage rack and couldn’t find a solid enough one in the stores. Xavier, the champion bricoleur, liberated some steel tubing from a harvester, I think, and spot-welded it onto the seat stays. It lasted me all the way to Athens.

Courtly, inflexible on certain things, he saw himself in the role of Cyrano, that nostalgic swashbuckler. Tynane (on whom more pages must and shall be written) saved him from Engineer’s Disease as well as from the Antimodernism so well described by Antoine Compagnon. Tynane’s sense of faith and morals was more accommodating, less black-and-white, and her trust in the people she loved preserved their circle of international friends from sectarianism. For example, it was impossible for many years for Xavier to accept the existence of Bryan and Ralph as a couple, and I praise Bryan for never giving up. Tynane and Xavier enlarged the world of us foreigners with their unquestioning welcome, and I’d like to think that we made their world a little bigger too, kept them from sliding into Vieille-France nostalgia and pre-Vatican-II rigor.

At any rate, these are some of the people who educated me, or made me the sort of person who can be educated. Praise to them. And deep curses on Covid, the taker-away of good things.

• Lady Bracknell: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” The Importance of Being Earnest, act I.

I just learned that Hillis Miller has died from Covid-19, at upwards of 90 years of age. He taught practically everybody in one way or another. And among his many life-changing deeds (life-changing for me anyway), he kept me in graduate school.

I was one of a too-big litter of young deconstructors in the Comparative Literature department at Yale in 1982. I had done all right, I think, in my first year, though I never heard much from faculty one way or the other. In winter of that first year I learned I had a fellowship to study in Taiwan. I told the dean, who promptly urged the department to terminate me on the grounds that “Chinese is not a Comp Lit language.” Hillis was Director of Graduate Studies and walked with me over to the dean’s office. I remember the red and blue oriental rug and Hillis’s folksy, joshing way with the dean: “It’s true, we don’t know what will come of this, but let’s give him a chance; he may never come back, but at least he’ll have tried something other people aren’t doing.” He succeeded, at least conditionally. That dean stepped down while I was away and no one ever contested my right to come back and finish my degree.

Hillis plucked me out of the discard pile. I will always be grateful. He was also one of the most graceful, attentive, constructive people who ever attended an academic conference. He wielded power, in the sense that scholars have power to make decisions about others’ careers, but wisely and gently.

Here at the Nitpicker Grammarians and Style Sheet Hardliners (Amalgamated) Union, we had been thinking of “Mistakes were made” as the classic expression of the type, but that traditional favorite now has to move over for the cognitive-epistemic variety enunciated recently by Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I was allowed to believe lies.” Allowed by whom? — not by yourself, surely, for that would be admitting agency and responsibility… But hold on: aren’t you the gatekeeper of your own brain? (In whatever sense a “you” exists.) Or did the Rothschild lasers get in there and start fooling with your neurons? The progress of human discourse toward its final state of grayish slush has taken a great step. Or should I say, a great step has been taken?

Dreamt last night that I received a package from my erstwhile neighbor Jeannie Bloom. In it were hundreds of sheets of foolscap covered with intricate sketches in fine-point black ink: characters from Shakespeare, the Bible, Dostoevsky, and so forth, linked in an unending procession of conversation. They were beautifully free and loose in their execution, characters individuated by gesture though not by face. I somehow understood that these were to have been a fresco painted on miles of wall, Harold’s unfinished life work. Rest well, Harold.

We just spent 312 minutes, or five hours over three days, watching Heinrich Breloer’s TV series “Die Manns — ein Jahrhundertroman.” I don’t know what parenting manual Thomas and Katia Mann were using, but it should definitely not be reprinted.

The other day I was asked to review a manuscript that cited (as an authority) Hajime Nakamura’s Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples–a book I hadn’t thought about for forty years or so. From it you learn that Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Tibetans, etc., can’t think logically or metaphysically the way Europeans can. Already as a curious twenty-year-old, I recoiled from it as from a bad smell.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been called Ways of Speaking of Eastern Peoples.

“You’re not a fish, so how do you know how the fish feel?”

“You’re not me, so how do you know I’m not a fish?”

… vertreiben die Nacht. Everyone who’s read Freud knows how precarious “Vertreibung” is. But here we are, at last.

You’ll have to supply the green helicopter and Javanka from your imagination. The potbellied liar and the Ice Queen are provided, though.

My favorite hangout in Paris and an observation about politics that Jean-Pierre Faye made long ago have the same name: “horseshoe.”

I haven’t taken surveys but I’m not convinced the seating of clients in this hemicycle reflects any particular ideological landscape.

But I would add in supplement to Faye’s observation that an appetite for violent overthrow may be the main thing that unites the supposedly opposite ends of the horseshoe.