Month: April 2015

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. John Ashbery, “As one put drunk into the packet boat”

The Law of the Feminine, 媽祖, and the Virgin

As the annual Dajia Mazu Holy Pilgrimage (大甲媽祖繞境活動) comes to an end I think of those key passages in Henry Adams’ great work “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (1900) where the author interrogates the American’s prudish disdain for the feminine: The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as…

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