Insomnia sets you up for some funny discoveries. A few weeks ago I was reading through a literary history of China (not entirely off my own bat; it was a commissioned review) and came across this quaint piece of type-casting:

“Chinese civilization resulted from the gradual fusion of multiple sources . . .  however, the Yellow River Valley culture obviously played a dominant role” (pp. 1–2). “Harsh living conditions” in the north compelled the members of that culture to “gather their dispersed people together into large and powerful communities”; thus “the ideology of the state reached maturity there far earlier than in other regions” (p. 2). 

“In the Yangtze valley, the climate was hot and humid . . . it was relatively easy to lead a simple existence there. Consequently, even though there was a similar need to form large, powerful communities, it was . . . by no means as pressing as that in the north. Thus, in the Yangtze valley . . . the ideology to preserve social order and strengthen community power through restraining the individual was not as well developed as that in the north” (pp. 4–5). In the culture of the North, “music, dance and singing were regarded as the means to regulate community life and to carry out an ethical purpose. . . . The main functions of the arts of Chu are represented, however, in providing the satisfaction of aesthetic pleasure, and in this way fully display the dynamism of human emotions” (p. 33).

I’m quoting from A Concise History of Chinese Literature by Luo Yuming, translated by Ye Yang (2 vols., Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011).

I already sent in my review, but insomnia led me to read Yen Hsiao-pei’s dissertation on paleontology in China. Splendid dissertation, by the way. And in it one finds this:

In his famous article, “Why Central Asia?” of 1926, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn presented a full picture of his idea of human evolution. Developed on Matthew’s framework, Osborn argued that “in lowlands in tropical and semi-tropical regions, where natural resources were abundant, the process of evolution was hindered and even retrogressive; only dry and open regions could stimulate the development of intelligence. The dry uplands of Mongolia and Tibet in Central Asia offered the perfect invigorating environment for the evolution of our ancestors.”

So now you see the measure of academic progress. A theory propounded on racist grounds (for Osborn was eager to refute the out-of-Africa hypothesis about human origins, hence he preferred the dry uplands of Asia as our original homeland) in the 1920s survives as the armature of a literary history in the 2010s. There must be a higher standard.

Philip Larkin was a nasty man. Sylvia Plath was ambitious. Robert Frost could be a jerk. Ezra Pound… well, no need to state the obvious. Robert Lowell, nuts. Sam Johnson was a sweet and kind guy, but we wouldn’t know that were it not for Boswell, who drank too much and was lecherous. Literary biography leaves few looking good, and the funny thing is, in the case of poets a nicely scandal-ridden volume can outsell the complete works of the poet by a factor of a thousand or so. How many who know about Larkin’s racism and misogyny from the bios also own a book of his poems?

Iggy Pop said it well. Iggy Pop doesn’t have a lot to hide.

Pop has never imagined a traditional domestic life for himself. (In 1969, when Pop was twenty-one and living in Ann Arbor, he had a son, Eric, with Paulette Benson. Eric was brought up by his mother, in California, and lives in Berlin now.) In part, this is why it matters so much to him that his work remain vital. “It’s gotta be fucking good,” he said. “This is what you’ve sacrificed a lot of things for, dude, and this is what you were doing when you weren’t always there for other people, so it’d better be good.”

As with the famous question posed by Freud (“What does Woman want?”), the best answer is always “Ask one.”

光復香港 is one of the things they want. The Guardian translates it as “Reclaim Hong Kong,” which at least has the advantage of not being particularly inflammatory, but misses the point, the flavor and the jibe.

I should mention that some 1.7 million people, about a quarter of the population of Hong Kong, were out in the street peacefully supporting this and a few other slogans this past weekend. That’s quite a turnout.

Various persons who seemingly have an interest in making the protesters’ demands unacceptable have been turning the slogan into something it’s not. “Secession,” they make it say, and mutter darkly about how an independent nation of Hong Kong would be easy prey for the capitalists to recolonize, and so on.

That way of putting things makes China the protector of helpless little Hong Kong, unable to detect where its true interests lie, and the bulwark against the opium-peddling gweilo. But a closer acquaintance with Chinese and Hong Kong history marks that fantasy as dishonest. Even if the alternatives are imperfect, Hong Kong people know enough to choose.

And that’s exactly the point of using guangfu 光復 in a slogan. Go to your dictionary. It means “recover [as in lost territory or lost reputation], restore.” Ever since 1949, one of the mottoes of the Guomindang on Taiwan was guangfu dalu 光復大陸, “recover the mainland,” a prospect that became less and less likely as the years went on. One of the stated policy aims of the People’s Republic since the same time has been to guangfu Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, seen as colonies violently severed from the motherland. Reportedly in 1997, owing to a handover agreement, the PRC did just that. There was rejoicing in Beijing and a much more measured response in Hong Kong.

It’s not that Hong Kongers have gloried in the title of “Crown Colony” or sought to be dominated from afar. They are sick and tired of being a pawn in someone else’s game. What they are asking is to be let alone: to keep the system of relatively accountable government under law, fairly large freedoms of speech and association, and pluralism in other sectors of life, that they have become accustomed to. They are not eager to join such aspects of the “China Dream” as one-party rule, non-reviewable judicial decisions, broad definitions of sedition and subversion, and integration into the pending system of “social credit.” They would like to elect their own representatives from a genuinely diverse spectrum of opinion and manage their own affairs to a greater degree than either Great Britain or China has ever conceded them.

Guangfu Xianggang turns the Chinese-patriotic slogan around in precisely this way. It means “Let Hongkongers recover Hong Kong for themselves.” A high degree of regional autonomy is absolutely possible under the Basic Law of 1997. It’s even guaranteed by it. Beijing, on the other hand, has an interest in portraying differences of opinion as disloyalty and making them punishable. For if Hong Kong got to expand its envelope of democratic rights, what would happen to the rest of China? Isn’t it unthinkable that Shanghai, Chongqing or Urumqi would enjoy such basic rights?

It’s not unthinkable. But it takes a lot of imagination.

I’m still living with the inverted timezones that you get after a couple of weeks in Hong Kong: sleepy in the afternoon, unstoppable at 3 am. And my fondness for that place, its umbrellas and fearless kids in black, is unaffected one way or the other by distance. Here’s a little homage by Hong Kong to itself. Normal getting and spending suspended (sorry, Bally and Dior, you have prices but no value), the tacky Muzak aufgehoben, even the air conditioning, I imagine, overcome by gasps of astonishment. Seid umschlungen, 7.2 Millionen!

An essay of Nima Bassiri’s calls me back to an episode of my past.

Still, Foucault’s real impact for historians of science has been mediated through the work of history-adjacent scholars like Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1990. The boom in housing prices was taking off steeply, and an assistant professor’s salary would get you a two-room house thirty miles away from my workplace by freeway. Having grown up as a relatively prosperous person in Nashville, with a few years of no-frills but comfortable existence in New Haven, I was unprepared for the demands that California would make on the pocketbook. It was then that I learned the construct [proper-noun]-adjacent, as used by real-estate people. “Beverly-Hills-adjacent” meant a house on an alleyway, facing the garbage cans of a luxurious restaurant, but separated by an imaginary line from the city of Beverly Hills, its glories and fleshpots (including the right of admission to BH High). You can always dream, from across the line!

So Nima’s construction makes me imagine Ian Hacking, who for forty years has been for me the guy I wish to be when I grow up, as a renter whose last pennies every month go to keeping up the appearances of being, almost, a resident of the realm called History, where the grass is green and the living is easy. Save your bottle caps, Ian! One day you will walk in Ferragamos.

(No shade cast on Nima. All in good fun, people.)

The South China Morning Post calls them “anti-government protestors.” Le Monde calls them “des militants prodémocratie.” These terms are not necessarily convertible, of course. But it matters how you frame a thing.

土爾扈特的回歸，普希金的流放: 詩人，帝國，遊牧民族的命運

(AILC/ICLA International Forum, Shenzhen, July 2019)

Pushkin’s self-epitaph “Exegi monumentum” imagines that his voice will live on in the many tongues of the Russian empire; post-mortem, he will be spoken anew by the Poles, the Finns, and by “the Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.” Pushkin knew a bit about the edges of empire, having been exiled to the Caucasus for irreverent speech. In his travels he had encountered members of the nomadic Mongol lineage known as the Kalmyks. Sixty years earlier, Ji Yun had been summoned by the Qianlong Emperor to compose an extempore ode on the return of the Torghuts, another branch of the same lineage that had wandered west, settled on the banks of the Volga, and eventually migrated back to China in order to resettle the frontier areas of Xinjiang depopulated by Qianlong’s campaign against the Zunghars. Taken together, these examples of “frontier poetry” stage a quasi-encounter in verse between the imaginations of the expanding Russian and Qing empires, at the expense of nomad groups that could hardly find recognition except as vehicles of that expansion.

I happened to be reading the Federal Register and came across this choice gem. The Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is poised to modify Obamacare in a curiously Trumpian way. It is withdrawing health care facilities’ mandate to serve people who speak little or no English. No more multilingual placards. No more mail in a patient’s native language. No more translators to tell staff what a patient is saying and vice versa. This will make it much harder for people who know little English to find appropriate and safe health care, to be informed about the care that they are getting, and to give informed consent to that care.

The draft legislation, which is about 400 pages, can be found here:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/14/2019-11512/nondiscrimination-in-health-and-health-education-programs-or-activities

At the top of the document is a big green button saying “SUBMIT FORMAL COMMENT.” Do it. Push that button, and write your heart out about about the inequity of treating people with limited English as pariahs, the false economies given as support for such treatment, and the consequences of letting someone into the ER who has Ebola who can’t tell you because he only speaks French and there’s no interpreter.

The closing date and time for comments is August 13th at 5:00 PM EDT. As of this writing, you have 16 days to submit a comment.

I sometimes think the Guardian exists to make us feel that voting is useless and there are no differences among candidates. Witness today’s article about Lori Lightfoot, the newly-elected major of Chicago. Lightfoot hasn’t been sworn in yet and won’t be for another six weeks, and Arwa Mahdawi is already trying to push her into the political graveyard.

Don’t let us catch you doing anything constructive, earthlings!

Is the Grauniad in a sulk? Or are they on a mission to teach us all learned helplessness?

Who will guard the Guardian?

People are jumping to conclusions about the Mueller report– which hasn’t been released yet. Trump supporters are, of course, spinning it their way, which is that the whole thing was a smokescreen and everyone who was expecting Trump to be indicted should go to jail instead. That’s what you’d expect from a bunch of people who have made no secret of their contempt for journalism, investigation, science, and rationality in general. But it’s more discouraging to see anti-Trump people turn bitter and pretend that they never expected it to be anything but a whitewash.

The crucial, the one crucial, fact is that the public has not yet seen the report in its entirety. Nothing less will do. Get on the phone right now, as I did, and call your Congressional representatives to demand that the report, the whole report, and no substitute in the form of a William Barr letter be put in the hands of every citizen with the patience to read it.

“Nullius in verba,” the Royal Society’s motto from the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, means “We don’t take anyone’s word for it.” A good word to go on.

see details of suppression of his latest film in the Tageszeitung, Le Monde.

Please allow me to say that I stand fully behind Professor Immanuel Kant in his conflict with the Russian Navy,

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/kant-in-kaliningrad-aerger-mit-einem-toten-philosophen/23715738.html

The shortest Yiddish curse I know, excluding epithets, is “Geh’ in drerd!” It’s the equivalent of “Drop dead!,” but if we expand it a little, it means “Go into the earth! Die and be buried!” And that is what I wish for George Herbert Walker Bush. “Go into the earth!” He will not get a week of mourning, a month of mourning, or eleven months of mourning. All he gets is this day, which is nearly over. Tomorrow, the mail comes.

I’ve been thinking about the Sokol² hoax, in which various conspirators sent improbable manuscripts to twenty journals of “ethnic/identity studies.” Seven journals went ahead and published the manuscripts even though the manuscripts’ contents were avowedly nonsense. This builds on the work of Alan Sokol, who tried the same thing with literary theory journals, “showing” that their discourse was likewise nonsensical. Both of these moves attempt to discredit an entire class of journals by targeted attacks on a small sample of journals; the intended principle is contamination. This principle may not be applicable; there are those of us who have taken a brown spot out of an apple and eaten the rest.

I am helping a faculty member with a paper in an ethnic studies journal; there are four pages of painstaking comments from the editor, along with the mostly positive comments from two reviewers. I disagree with the editor, but I don’t think anything got by him; he had the extraordinary virtue of finding everything that was wrong or could be construed as wrong. I find it completely impossible that a nonsense article could have gotten by him. He would have rejected it, period, and it probably wouldn’t have gotten through peer review, either. The peer reviewers were pretty sharp, and one pointed out a legitimate hole in the argument that needed patching.

What was lacking from the ethnic/identity studies journals that published the Sokol² papers? One guess is that they didn’t have enough money to hire a good editor with subject matter expertise and relied on an overtaxed board member to vet the article. But I have another guess.

Peter Elbow spoke of a reader who might play one of two games: the Doubting Game and the Believing Game. The editor whose commentary I was looking at was playing the Doubting Game at grandmaster scale – characterizing writing by what you can find wrong with it. This will induce fear and shame in the author, and the author will revise the paper ruing how bad it was. The faculty member whom I was working with had resubmitted the paper four times, and each time had gotten back pages and pages of withering “advice.” So, that’s one game. In the Believing Game, you focus on what’s right with someone’s writing. You err on the side of charity. You see what the author is getting at, and you help the author to get there. I am guessing that with some of these journals, one of the principles is to get the thoughts of underrepresented voices out in the world, and charitable principles mean a greater chance for the author to be heard. Sokol² exploited this charity and used it as a weapon to attack the credibility of the journals and the views they stood for.

So, do we have to worry about Sokol³ perpetrators gaming more journals to disparage them? Yes. Should the journals spend an extra $90K a year on a master editor? (There aren’t that many of them around.) Should they play the Doubting Game to make themselves impregnable? Do they want to strike fear and shame into their authors, so that the authors regret having written anything at all? Or do we simply say that the Sokol² perpetrators are like WWI German submarines: very effective at sinking ships, with very advanced torpedos, but sinking ships is in no one’s interest but theirs. No one is going to claim that the Lusitania was a legitimate target because she presented a very broad attack surface underwater.

Alas, there are no metaphorical depth charges that can be dropped on the perpetrators, and neither can the Humanities declare war against them. Probably the most solid defense against the perpetrators is PR — some kind of damage control operation, as used by rich people and corporations to mop up the consequences of their dirty business. Perhaps the MLA can put them on retainer. Nullify the PR explosion by investigating the perpetrators and publicly making clear what they have to gain. Explain the principles by which the journals stand. The perpetrators’ fraud will vanish into the dustbin of history. That is where fraudsters go; quick, without a Google search, who was Yi-Fen Chou?

Nous ne sommes pas, hélas! dans une époque d’ironie. Nous sommes encore dans le temps de l’indignation. Sachons seulement garder, quoi qu’il arrive, le sens du relatif et tout sera sauvé (Camus, Actuelles I, 1944, p. 40).

。。。。。。興

。。。。。。清

。。。。。。撞

。。。。。。丁

“Funny,” said my German teacher yesterday. “When you’re talking about eighteenth-century China, your vocabulary and syntax are perfect and I can follow everything you say. When you talk about daily life, I have to labor to figure out your meaning from the words you use and the sentence structures you begin but don’t complete.”

Said I, “That’s because eighteenth-century China doesn’t stress me out.”

Magic erasers! Also known as the “Brett Kavanaugh.” Will expunge all traces of many crimes including rape, treason, and fraud.

Caution: works only for members of a certain political party. May transform perfectly legal activities into crimes.