君子不器
It is my pleasure to teach Laurence Sterne’s brilliant and incomparable A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (only the early sections) next week, so I looked it up in Archive.org – turns out they do have this 1774 edition of the work, in excellent condition, and I think that is amazing. I will try to update…
Ages ago, trekking Neubiberg to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek every day to do dissertation research, I rubbed this feline nose (the shiny one at bottom) many times on the way home, since it’s supposed to bring luck and seemed like a nice ritual and all. Was thinking about him today because today, here in Covidia, we’re…
The article itself wasn’t much, but I found the historical reference to Taichung’s Central Books to be of interest. Basically the millionaire guy who founded pchome.com and who is from Taichung, Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志), wants to organize a reading group at the old Central Book Store (中央書局) building. According to him,「中央書局是1927年台灣中部仕紳們共同成立的一個帶有強烈浪漫文化色彩的書局。」Err, so I guess in…
American Po (林博文, 美國博仔), so called because he was the son of an American GI and a Taiwanese nightclub hostess, was a mixed-race Taichung gangster active in the 1980s (Heijin, Chpt 5, p 89). His deadbeat father was in the US Air Force, and his mom, who was 16 at the time, abandoned him or…
This week we read Sun Yisheng (孫一聖) in my Detective Fiction class using the Nicky Harman’s awesome (if incomplete) translation of “The Shades who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky.” The title is a reference to the Dylan Thomas poem “When once the twilight locks no longer” and succeeds in imitating the surreal power of…
A few days ago it struck me that too little is known about Achilles Fang, aka 方志浵, the man on the far left above, who wrote the introductions to several of Ezra Pound’s more important works, incl. Confucius, the Confucian Odes, and others. Turns out he was a brilliant, eccentric polyglot Chinese scholar at Harvard…