Shakespeare in the Cyberspace

With the exponential growth of digital formats, literature lives in many multilayered spaces on overlapping platforms for content delivery. Interestingly, many of the emerging forms could be described as hypermedia texts, or expanded books. Shakespeare, a free iPhone application featuring the complete works of Shakespeare (including Edward III and Sir Thomas More), uses the First Folio and the Globe Edition of 1866, and Quartos where applicable. Edited by the PlayShakespeare.com team and coproduced with Readdle, Shakespeare is available for free for iPhone users.

Shakespeare Pro is available for $ 2.99, and it includes a Shakespeare portrait gallery, a searchable glossary based on David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare's Words, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and other features. Shakespeare made it to Apple’s “App Store Pick of the Week” in July 2009—selected from among the then 65,000 iPhone applications. The app self-consciously mimics an artifact of the print era even as it incorporates a wider spectrum of digital artifacts.

As the new media gives the “airy nothing” of Shakespeare in performance a local and global habitation, the question has shifted from where literature lives to how meanings are formulated, shared, and contested, and to how we might use the new capacity of the Web to handle large video collections to find a new balance between text and performance. Read more ...

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, edited by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross (Purdue University Press, 2009). 297 pages. ISBN: 978-1557535290

Contributors include: David Bevington, Peter Holland, Richard Burt, Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and others.

Recent decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of Shakespeare on screen and stage. Hollywood films and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth are now conjoining in cyberspace, making a world of difference to how we experience Shakespeare. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace examines how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The Introduction and 22 papers in the volume examine how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures defined -- and continue to define -- themselves. Read more ...

Imagining China: The View from Europe, Folger Shakespeare Library

"Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550-1700" will be on view at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., through January 9, 2010. Curator: Timothy Billings; Video Curator: Alexander Huang. Free admission, Monday through Saturday (201 E Capitol St SE, Washington, DC 20003-1094; tel: 202 544 4600).

Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined China as a land of wonder, of riches, and of enormous opportunity. Since the nineteenth century, Chinese artists have also engaged Shakespeare in a wide range of contexts ranging from fiction to cinema and popular culture. Rare books and maps from the Folger collection, along with items from the Library of Congress and the Walters Arts Museum, and videos and stage photos (on a touch screen kiosk) capture four centuries of cultural exchange.

Matteo Ricci- founder of the Jesuit China mission, knowledgeable interpreter of Chinese culture for Europeans, collaborator in the creation of the first Chinese translations of European scientific works, and author of the first book written in Chinese by a European. Ricci's Jiaoyou lun or Essay on Friendship (1595) is a collection of the best European ideas about friendship culled from the classics and Church authors, all composed in Chinese with a beautiful classical style.

Before it was published, Ricci presented it as a gift to a cousin of the emperor who had befriended him; and the little work subsequently became so popular in China that it was officially incorporated into the first Qing imperial library in 1725. The original Latin commonplace book from which Ricci culled much of the material is on display with a facsimile of Ricci's Chinese manuscript.

The Folger Consort's opening concert of the 2009-10 season is a unique intercultural program combining Italian Renaissance music with classical Chinese music on traditional instruments to accompany readings of selected passages from Ricci's beloved essay. Read more ...

Parody of the Modern Language Association convention

The MLA: Modern Language Association is one of the oldest and biggest scholarly organizations for researchers and educators of languages and literatures.

Now, a new "grass-root" movement has cropped up. Members of the MLA have launched their own parody websites and twitters. Each time the MLA president twitters about her experience at the convention, they will twitter back, with a twist. Some are witty and funny, some are plain. Members of this small group even went around MLA sessions to hand out slips with their URLs on them. One of them actually came up to me and handed me one such slip after the roundtable I chaired. It was perhaps fitting, as the roundtable was on literary humor. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here are two such sites: http://www.mlade.org/ (compare to the official http://www.mla.org/), and http://twitter.com/mladeconvention (compare to the official http://twitter.com/mlaconvention).

For those who have no clue what all this is about: Each year right after Christmas (starting 2010/2011, the convention will be moved to early January to be more family-friendly), some ten thousand scholars descend upon one of the major north American cities to present papers, accept awards from the Association, meet with publishers, attend a mega book exhibit, promote their new books, buy new and discounted books, get free examination copies of textbooks, attend parties of all sorts (journal, publisher, book launching, author event, retirement, program launching), interview job candidates, be interviewed for jobs, and to bump into long-time-no-see friends, enemies, or frenemies (and yes the literary types love portmanteaux). Wherever they meet, the local papers of the town often run lampoons about the mega convention, organization, and/or bone-headed scholars who descend upon their town from the lofty ivory tower. Read more ...

An Othello for the Age of Obama by Peter Sellars

In the age of Obama, will racial identities and tensions be redefined? Probably not. At least in Peter Sellars's Othello at New York's Public Theattre in fall, 2009. The Sunday speaker series held in conjunction with the production seem more thought provoking. In Sellars' version, the stage is dominated by a bed made up of video screens, and other gadgets are called upon to deliver a modern punch. Othello's self defense before the Venetian senate is transformed to a conference call on a cell phone. Here is an interview with the director in Time Out New York.

Postracial Othello

Peter Sellars colors between lines.
By David Cote

Watch out, Shakespeare purists: Peter Sellars is back in town. The wildly conceptual director might be a Euro-American icon from decades of staging opera and theater, but he still deconstructs classics with the avant-garde glee of a postgrad. Now the ageless enfant terrible, 51, is applying his multicultural, free-interpretation approach to Othello. The Public Theater production (workshopped this summer in Austria and Germany) features actors from the LAByrinth Theater Company, as well as modern dress, video screens and—most surprising—a radical shuffling of the tragedy’s racial profile. Ticket buyers might think they’re getting to see Philip Seymour Hoffman play the deliciously evil Iago and John Ortiz take on the murderously jealous title character. But they’re getting much more: a roiling, postracial Othello. TONY sat down with the affectionate, loquacious and high-energy Sellars at the Public Theater’s offices.

Is this Othello as Obama? Knowing you, it’s going to be topical.
What was so cool about coming back from Germany was, you know, it was exquisitely produced there, but there was not a black person for miles about. For audiences there, it was slightly abstract. But then we come back to America to see posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache; the Sotomayor hearings, with these truly ignorant men talking to this Princeton graduate as if she had no idea; and the Skip Gates arrest provoking all this stuff—too many people don’t have the language!

To discuss race?
To talk about this stuff in a more sophisticated way than what is happening on talk radio. And Shakespeare does have the language. The last time I did Shakespeare was a Merchant of Venice coming off the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where the city I lived in was on fire; there were U.S. tanks going down the streets. John Ortiz and Phil Hoffman actually met in that production.

So do we have you to thank for the creation of LAByrinth—one of the hottest troupes in the city?
LAByrinth already existed, but later John invited Phil to join. In my Merchant, the Jews were African-Americans, Portia and all her friends were wealthy Latinos living in Bel Air, the Venetians were wealthy Asians, so you got this weird dynamic. And the really hard-core, low-life, working-class racist was Launcelot Gobbo, which Phil did really well. [Laughs]

So you’re typecasting him—now he’s the racist psycho Iago. But the Duke here is black?
In the middle of casting, I realized, Oh right, the President is black, and he’s the youngest guy in the world! So I had to cast the Duke as the youngest guy in the cast. Because now, power is working the opposite way, and that shifts all the power relationships. The Duke is the young black man.

You’re creating a new racial reality.
We’re in a different situation. As the play is usually shown, Othello is an isolated black man in a white world. And that’s just not the reality right now. Of the eight people onstage, three are Latino, three are African-American and two are white. When Othello is the only black man onstage, he symbolizes all these things. The minute his role isn’t symbolic, he’s human. You can’t say, “Oh, there’s the black guy.” It’s like, “What’s he saying? What’s he doing?” And you have to really listen to and look at the role differently.

You also decided to create a real affair between Othello and Iago’s wife, Amelia.
Yes! Suddenly, it’s totally human. It’s not abstract and celestial. And you see that Othello also mentions it, and that’s the shock. That’s Shakespeare’s point: Iago is not crazy, not paranoid, not insane. He’s human. And his best friend is having an affair with his wife. And so it creates this tension that is unbearable and finally, of course, explodes. Because violence is all about what can’t be talked about.

On to the physical production: modern dress, video screens, a highly militarized world.
Shakespeare puts it in this military context—with all these lieutenants and generals; everybody is somebody’s assistant. Everybody is a proxy. So he has this seething universe already going on, and the minute you take those relationships seriously, the play steps into this universe of sex and craving and power. You mix the race stuff in, and it’s popping.

And those LAByrinth actors know how to pop.
Watching them chew on Shakespeare is thrilling. They do the language in their own rhythms, with their own kind of warmth and musicality and danger. LAB actors are so used to danger. They turn the heat up, and you get to this place that burns. It is so hot in that kitchen! It’s a far cry from Laurence Olivier and a couple of other people who are stars—and then you can’t remember who anyone else was.

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Artistic Independence or Complicity?

PRC film director Zhang Yimou is controversial as ever, and his films enjoy virtually guaranteed box-office success in mainland China. Here is an interesting article: "Zhang Yimou on his creative independence" by Geoff Dyer, Financial Times, 12-13 December 2009.

In a taxi on the way to meet Zhang Yimou, his photo beams from the back of the driver’s seat. It is an advert for his production of Turandot at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, the same stadium where he put on the ravishing Olympics opening ceremony last year, and it is dominated by Zhang’s toothy smile and crew-cut hair. The 57-year-old film director is a constant presence in China, the most successful artist working there today.

Zhang uses a modest apartment in an anonymous Beijing suburb as his office – and there is a back-to-basics quality about the two films he is working on, one a remake of a Coen Brothers movie. Although he does not quite put it this way, it feels as if he is trying to re-establish himself as an independent filmmaker. When Zhang describes his work he takes a slightly defensive tone, a sign that fame and wealth have come at a critical cost.

“I am still an independent artist. I am not a member of the Chinese Communist Party or the Communist Youth League,” says Zhang. “I am still working hard to make one new film after another. My life has not changed at all.”

With the exception of a flourishing band of modern painters and sculptors, much of China’s cultural life still exists in a fairly narrow space, bound on one side by the threat of the commercially fatal tag of being a dissident and on the other by too cosy a relationship with the authorities.

Zhang knows the risks of both. His early films in the 1980s, unsparing epics about political misrule and poverty, won him global fame but put him on a collision course with the censors. Yet in the 20 years since the Tiananmen Square protests, he has been transformed into the regime’s favourite artistic son, creative director of the Olympics opening ceremony and the evening show at October’s 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Critics dub him the country’s “artist-in-residence”.

He smiles at the label and says he is not bothered. “I am not a person out of the official regime. I was engaged to do the Olympics and because the state leaders were very happy, they used me again for the national day celebrations. These were just assignments,” he says. “The more independent an artist is, the more special or unique his or her work is.”

That Zhang ever made a film is a small miracle, given the circumstances of his early life. Born in Shaanxi in northern China in 1952, he had a class background that was considered “bad” because his father had been an officer in the Kuomintang nationalist army. That sealed his fate when the cultural revolution started in the mid-1960s, and as a 17-year-old he was forced to undergo “re-education” for the next decade, first on a collective farm and then at the No 8 cotton mill in Xianyang in Shaanxi province.

But it was while working at the cotton mill that he developed a flair for photography and – fittingly for a director who has made deep shades of red one of his signatures – he sold blood to pay for his first camera. When the Beijing Film Academy re-opened in 1978, two years after Mao Zedong’s death, he managed to win a place.

A decade later, he was making powerful films that many thought of as allegories for authoritarian rule under the communists, including Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), a claustrophobic examination of the life of a concubine that meshed his talent for intimate detail with a luxuriant use of colour. He has also dabbled in grand theatrical events, staging Turandot in Beijing’s Forbidden City palace a decade ago. In recognition of his status, he has just been announced as Martin Scorsese’s successor in the Rolex mentoring scheme, which each year matches distinguished filmmakers and other artists with up-and-coming protégés.

Zhang’s gifts were put to their most remarkable use in the opening ceremony of the Olympics last year. He was instructed to demonstrate the richness of traditional Chinese culture – the sort of brief that has produced many a tired, bureaucratic stage show for foreigners. But, by using 15,000 immaculately drilled performers and luminous lighting to tell the story of paper, printing and the compass, he provided a vision of modernity China-style, with a powerful state rooted in Confucian wisdom yet also married to modern technology. Steven Spielberg, who had withdrawn as an adviser to the ceremony in protest at Chinese policies in Sudan, called it “the grandest spectacle of the new millennium”.

“I am very proud of myself,” Zhang says. “Everyone knew they were going to get a show about traditional Chinese culture, but ... I was able to find a way to use multimedia to demonstrate the new, modern China.”

Even before this, however, some detractors had complained that Zhang was too close for comfort to the Chinese authorities. The criticism dates back to his 2001 film Hero, the first of three action films he made that mixed kung-fu fighting on the top of bamboo trees with ancient Chinese history. The film was visually stunning but the surprise was Zhang’s choice of Emperor Qin Shi Huang as his subject. Though Qin established the first unified Chinese empire, he also slaughtered thousands of enemies and burned books. Indeed, Chinese intellectuals of Zhang’s generation remember how Qin was invoked during the cultural revolution as a tireless crusher of counter-revolutionaries.

Yet if some of Zhang’s fiercest critics are other Chinese artists, many of the same artists also reject the idea implicit in some western journalism that the only interesting art in China is dissident art. And Zhang tells a very different story about his journey that mirrors the shift in middle-class attitudes towards the communist party since Tiananmen.

When he and his film school colleagues started making movies in the 1980s, he says, they were still angry about their suffering during the cultural revolution. “At that time, lots of Chinese people were thinking about the tragedy of the cultural revolution. The work of most film directors reflected this,” he says. (“I never had a mentor,” he grumbles. “At that time, the biggest issue was whether you had enough to eat.”)

Not only has the country been economically transformed since then, but the young Chinese who make up the bulk of cinema audiences are also less interested in picking over these historical wounds. “They desire a different type of movie, more entertaining and fun, and they have an attitude to the past of ‘let bygones be bygones’,” he says, referring to the Mao years. Besides, the country’s still-pervasive censorship would reduce any story about contemporary China into a “shallow” film. “Only if we situate the stories in ancient China can we express ourselves more freely,” Zhang insists.

Against this backdrop, his next two films look like a return to the intricate and personal storytelling of his earlier works. The Stunning Case of the Three Gun Shots – which has just opened in China – is based loosely on the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, a tale of adultery and murder-gone-wrong recast in China’s past. Thirteen Girls in Jinling, which he hopes to begin filming next year, is about the experience of a group of prostitutes during the 1937 Japanese massacre in Nanjing.

“Apart from the action movies, all my other movies have paid a lot of attention to the lives and fates of ordinary people, that has never really changed,” he says. “No matter what the dynasty or what the age, stories about ordinary people are the most attractive and interesting.”

Geoff Dyer is the FT’s China bureau chief

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Explosive Artist in Philadelphia

Cai Guo-Qiang has built a career out of blowing things up. Friday just before sunset, he'll set off an explosion at one of America's biggest museums: Philadelphia Museum of Art. See "Opening With a Bang: Explosives artist Cai plans two Philadelphia blowups" by Candace Jackson, Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Cai, who orchestrated the opening fireworks at the Beijing Olympics, plans a 60-second explosion on a large, flower-shaped apparatus that's attached to a scaffolding on the façade of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An hour and a half later, at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop, he'll ignite a gunpowder-sprinkled drawing on silk lying in a narrow, winding metal bed that he describes as "like a river made of fire." The result will be visible for the duration of the show's run, and will fade over time under a bed of running water.

The explosions mark the opening of a two-venue show, "Fallen Blossoms," that runs through March. At the Fabric Workshop Chinese weavers will create 20 tapestries on old-fashioned looms, and at the Philadelphia Museum, there's a display of four of Mr. Cai's massive gunpowder drawings and an installation called "99 Golden Boats." The exhibition, which Mr. Cai says is meant to address the meaning of time and memory, also commemorates the museum's longtime director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, who died in 2008.

Mr. Cai grew up in Quanzhou City, China in an area home to many factories that made fireworks, he says. As an artist, he's been working with explosives since the 1980s, partly as a nod to his childhood home and as a response to the oppressive social climate he grew up in, he says. "I needed a material that would be liberating."

Mr. Cai, 52 years old, creates some of his gunpowder drawings by sprinkling a thin layer of explosives and weighted stencils onto large pieces of Japanese paper, then lights a fuse to create strategically charred and smoky areas. For the Philadelphia explosions, fire codes have to be met, and because gunpowder is a controlled substance, the pyrotechnic company he works with must transport the materials for the explosion in small plastic bags in metal suitcases to the museum in armored vehicles.

Over the past 20 years he has had exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pomidou in Paris. Last year, a traveling retrospective devoted to his work opened at the Guggenheim in New York.

For Friday night's outdoor explosion, Mr. Cai conducted several test runs to make sure everything will go off the way he's planned, though none of the tests were as large as the actual explosion will be. Mr. Cai has guaranteed the museum that no permanent damage will be done. Moistened wooden planks will cover the museum's famous Rocky Steps, so named for their appearance in the Sylvester Stallone movie, to protect them.

Timothy Rub, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's current director, says that the logistical obstacles to an installation have been significant, but "if you have to develop new organizational skills then it's worth it to do it… I think you follow the artist and you should have confidence in what the artist will do."

Because of the long parkway that stretches out from the front of the museum's steps, some Philadelphians may unexpectedly see the explosion on their commute home. For those who miss it, a slow-motion video loop of the event will be broadcast in the Fabric Workshop throughout the show's run.
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Jia Pingwa, a Chinese Writer Rooted in His Native Place

Jia Pingwa (1952– ) is a prolific contemporary Chinese writer who is deeply rooted in his native place, China's Shaanxi province. More interestingly, he not only sets his novels in Shaanxi but also constructs an imaginary hometown. Several of his works have been translated into English, French and other languages. What follows is an excerpt from Jia's "Happy" and an excerpt from a review.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Translated by Nicky Harman


Name?
Happy Liu.
On your ID card, it says your name's Hawa – how did Hawa turn into Happy?
I changed my name. Everyone calls me Happy Liu now.
"Happy" are you? Hawa Liu!
You've got to call me Happy Liu, comrade.
Happy Liu?!
Yes, sir!
You know why I'm handcuffing you?
Because of this dead body.
You'd better come clean then!
I shouldn't have been getting on the train carrying my friend's body.
Well, if you know that, why did you do it?
He had to go home.
Where's home?
Near Qingfeng Town in Shangzhou.
I'm asking about you!
Right here. I'm from Xi'an.
Uh?
I'm from Xi'an.
Really?!
Well, I should be from Xi'an.
Tell the truth!
I am telling the truth.
Then what do you mean by "should be"?
I really should be, comrade, because….

It was 13th October 2000, and we were outside the barriers at Xi'an Railway Station East. The policeman was taking a statement from me.
It was blowing hard, and leaves floated down from the gingkos, catalpa and plane trees at the edge of the station square, covering everything with brilliant reds and yellows. The thing I'll always regret about that day is not the bottle of Taibai liquor, it's the white cockerel. In Qingfeng, where my friend Wufu and I came from, it was always said that if people died away from home, their spirit might get lost on the way back. So you had to take care to tie a white cockerel to the body. The cock was supposed to help Wufu's spirit get home but in the end it wrecked everything.

The cock weighed two pounds, two and a half at most, but the woman selling it insisted it was three pounds. I lost my temper. "That's rubbish!" I said, "I can tell you the weight of anything just by holding it!" "Do you know what I'm doing?" I asked her. Of course, I didn't tell her what I was really up to. But the woman kept shouting: "Put it on the scales again, you can put it on the scales again!" so then the policeman stopped pacing up and down and came over.

He only came to stop the argument, but he saw the roll of bedding tied with rope. "What's that?" He jabbed it with his baton. Noisy Shi went as pale as if he'd had a bag of ash emptied over his head. Then the stupid fucker opened his big mouth, and went and said it was a side of pork. "Pork?" went the policeman, "You wrap pork up in a quilt?!" He carried on poking and the corner of the bedding roll began to come undone. That was when Noisy Shi dropped the liquor bottle and scarpered. What a coward! The policeman immediately pounced like a tiger on me, and handcuffed one of my wrists to the flag staff.

"Could you handcuff my left wrist?" I gave the policeman a smile. "I pulled a tendon in my right arm digging ditches."

This time, the baton jabbed me in the crotch, and when a man's jabbed in the crotch it goes numb. "Don't joke around!" So I didn't joke around.

My eyes felt sticky, as if a lot of goo had suddenly come out of them, and everything looked blurred. But I didn't panic. I had to stay calm whatever happened.

The ink wouldn't come out of the policeman's pen and he kept shaking it. The pimples on his neck had gone all red. I stretched out one foot towards the plane tree leaves that were floating down, but didn't step on them. I'd never seen a young man with so many teenage spots. He looked just like a young billy goat before it gets the snip, obviously far too young to be married!

Click, click. Someone was taking photographs.

That reporter was over 30 but she was dressed in little-girl clothes with a fringe to match. I took an instant dislike to her. I hadn't noticed when she took the first picture, but then I smoothed down my hair, and straightened my clothes, and presented my profile so she could take another. But the next day in the paper, they used the one with me half bent over, having my statement taken, with the flower-patterned bedding bundle tied up with rope in front of me. Wufu's foot was sticking out, and you could see the yellow plastic shoes stuffed with cotton wadding. Dammit, that picture was no better than an ID mugshot - full face, and ears showing. They make everyone look like a criminal. I've got a prominent nose and a well-defined mouth, but she wouldn't take me in profile, the bitch!

That photo's not really me, it's not. No way…..

Once Wufu's body had been taken to the undertakers, they let me go. I had to go back to the station to wait for Wufu's wife, who was coming to take care of the funeral and so on, but there were lots of people in the station square looking at the newspaper, pointing at me and saying: "Look! That's the man who tried to carry a corpse onto the train!" They called out: "Hawa Liu!" but I ignored them. Then they shouted: "Shangzhou chowmein-eater!" In Shangzhou, where I come from, the land is so barren that last year's grain doesn't last till the next harvest, and at the Spring Festival, all there is to eat is fried noodles, which we make from persimmon mixed with rice husks. It was a pretty demeaning thing to call someone, so of course I paid even less attention. What I needed was time to have a good think. It occurred to me that Wufu's body had been taken to the undertakers, but his spirit must still be around here in the square, maybe perched on the traffic lights or sitting on the piles of roast chicken, hard-boiled duck eggs, steamed rolls and bottles of mineral water on the peddler's push-cart. I felt sore and tired now, and I pushed my hand against the small of my back. Then I had another thought: you judge a car by its engine, not by what it looks like. Well, wasn't a kidney a fundamental part of your body? My flesh was from Qingfeng, and was Hawa Liu, but I had sold my kidney in Xi'an, so that obviously meant I belonged in Xi'an. I really was from Xi'an! I was proud of myself for working this out. It made me feel a little bit alone, and also a little bit proud. I held my head high and began to stride along. And as each step rang out, it proclaimed: I'm not Hawa Liu. I'm not a Shangzhou chowmein-eater. I'm Happy Liu from Xi'an. HAP-PY LIU!

When I first met my girlfriend Yichun, she said: "Happy, you don't look like a peasant." I disagreed. "Mutton never loses its muttony smell," I told her. But she said she had met a lot of people in Xi'an, and some of them were more like peasants than the officials, businessmen or professors they made themselves out to be. Her words went right to my heart. I always thought I was different from the people around me, at least different from my friend Wufu. I couldn't put this into words, but I knew I really was a cut above them.

I can give you some examples: first, I'm really good at mental arithmetic. When I had to do maths as a little boy, I could give you the answers without having to work out the sums on paper first, even if they were three- or four-figure numbers. Of course I had my own ways of working them out, but I didn't tell anyone. Second, I'd walk ten miles, and go hungry too, to get to a show in the county town. Third, my clothes are old, it's true, but they're always clean. I don't have an iron, but I pour boiling water into my enamel tea mug and use the bottom to iron the creases into my trousers. Fourth, I can play the flute. In Qingfeng, lots of people could play the Chinese violin, but only I played the flute. Fifth, if I have a problem, I don't tell anyone about it. If it gets really bad, I just make a joke against myself, and have a laugh, and that's it. Six, I hate foul-mouthed people. What have you got against heaven? What have you got against your parents? What's the point of cursing them? The man who bought my kidney off me said it was going to a big Xi'an businessman, so he had to check I didn't have any other diseases. Go ahead, I said, and the only thing he found was haemorrhoids. I was putting on weight, he said, and like the classic Chinese essay, "the form wandered a bit even though the spirit was sharp and to the point". I got annoyed at that, but not for long, and when he left I gave him a basket of pullets' eggs. Seven, I was born with upturned lips, so I'm happy by nature. Four years ago, when Mother Wang was looking for a wife for me, I played the flute for three days and three nights. Mother Wang had said I had to build a new house, so to raise the money, I sold my blood. I did this three times, until I heard that people from Dawanggou had caught Hepatitis B from selling their blood, so I didn't do that again, I sold my kidney instead. I used the money to build the house, but then the girl went and married someone else. OK, so she married someone else. I still played the flute for three days and nights, and then I went out and bought a pair of women's leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes. "You bunion!" I said. "I'm going to marry a woman who wears leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes!"

And of course a woman who can wear leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes must be a city girl from Xi'an.

I can't explain why I have such strong feelings for Xi'an! After I had sold my kidney, I had several dreams about Xi'an - its city walls, the archways and their solid wooden gates, the studs as big as rice bowls on them, and the bell tower with its gilded roof. In my dream I was sitting on a white rock under a crook-necked pine outside the city walls. When I arrived in Xi'an, the gates in the city walls and the bell tower were exactly as I'd dreamed them, and outside the walls there really was a crook-necked pine tree with a white rock under it. That made me ask myself a few questions: why was I never physically strong enough? Wufu could wade a river waist-deep in water with a load of firewood weighing 150 pounds on his back. Why couldn't I? Wufu could eat ten pounds of cooked sweet potato in one sitting, so why did I burp acid after I'd eaten three pounds? Wufu was such a dope, but he married ages ago and had kids, so how come I was still a bachelor? What was the reason? The reason was that I was going to be a city man, from Xi'an!



Happy (Gaoxing) Published by Renminwenxuechubanshe Publishers (2007)


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Book Review


Yiyan Wang's Narrating China is the first book-length study in the English language on the life and works of Mr. Jia; it is also part of an ever-shrinking group of monographic studies devoted to single writers today. As the only title on literature in the Routledge Contemporary China Series so far, Wang's in-depth study of Jia is a welcome contribution to the field of Chinese studies. In the 1970s, Twayne's World Authors Series, sponsored by Boston-based Twayne Publishers, brought out more than twenty volumes on classical and modern Chinese novelists, poets, and dramatists, which significantly broadened the understanding of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world and brought these writers into the purview of “world” and comparative literature. Since then, interest in book-length studies of single literary figures has waned, especially in the field of contemporary Chinese literature, though there is no shortage of volumes on such writers as Lu Xun.

Addressing the close biographical connection between Jia's life and writing, and his identity as a “peasant writer” (nongmin zuojia), Chapter 1 explores literary nativism (“the belief and the practice that literary writing should … continue and develop ‘indigenous’ narrative traditions,” p. 10) in relation to the artistic and ideological construction of native place in modern Chinese literature. Recognizing the emotional, cultural, textual, and even pragmatic ties between Jia's writing and Shaanxi Province, Wang argues that Jia's three-decades-long preoccupation with his native place reinscribes rural China in the national discourse of modernization (p. 24). She points out that Jia's pride in his regionality does not necessarily create a binary opposition between urban centers and rural communities. Rather, Jia's writing constitutes a conscious incorporation of both popular and elite narrative traditions, staking claims to a native place that “articulate[s] regional aspirations for national identification” (p. 14)—hence Wang's thesis that Jia's interest in local eccentricity is part of a larger project to narrate China, or what Wang calls “the poetics of native place.”

Throughout her ethnographic and biographical study, Wang details the roles of folklore, local dialect, and popular culture in Jia's works. Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the questions of cultural landscaping, sexual dissidence, and female domesticity in Jia's most important novel, Defunct Capital (Feidu, 1993; also known as Ruined Capital, The Abandoned Capital, or La capitale déchue), a controversial work that has been regarded by some as misogynist and a distortion of history and by others as exemplary social criticism. Wang defends Jia's use of female subjectivity that is “regressive and removed from social reality” (p. 94) in his first attempt to portray an urban environment. While his previous stories set in Shaanxi are “imbued with vitality and energy,” the cityscape in Feidu “is a forecast of the doomsday of Chinese high culture” (p. 50). Wang traces the protagonist Zhuang Zhidie's “soft” masculinity to the Chinese tradition of scholar-beauty romance (caizi jiaren) and suggests that the novel is a necessary “antithesis to the ‘real man’ that had been sought after in contemporary Chinese society” (p. 93).

Chapter 6 examines another novel with a male idler as its protagonist in search of personal identities, White Nights (1995). Having connected the idea of insomnia and the title of the work to the French phrase une nuit blanche (“a sleepless night,” p. 118), Wang suggests, “Ye Lang is the alter ego of Zhuang Zhidie and White Nights is very much a story of emotional and mental survival in a totally alien and isolating environment” (p. 129). The next four chapters analyze several other works, poems, and essays, including Earth Gate (1996), Old Gao Village (1998), and Remembering Wolves (2000), that simultaneously defamiliarize “contemporary Chinese quotidian” life (p. 205) and bring rural China forcefully into the discourses of modernization. The national imaginary of the native place and its symbolic weight return to full force in these dystopian visions caught between the urban–rural divide.



Excerpted from Alexander C. Y. Huang, Review of Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World, by Yiyan Wang. In The Journal of Asian Studies, 68.4 (2009): 1272-1274.

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Throw the Horse Over the Frence Some Hay

The lecture on November 16th was a roundtable discussion on about the Strunk and White Elements of Style. This discussion takes place after the 50th anniversary of the publishing of the Elements of Style. Those discussing the book are Dr. Scott Smith, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State, Dr. Robin Schultz, Head of the English Department, and Dr. Cheryl Glenn, a liberal arts research professor of English and Women’s studies at Penn State. The majority of the discussion focused on the history of Strunk and White’s book and why it came to be. Cheryl Glenn, however, discussed its usefulness today. She claims that some professors may put a tad too much emphasis on the correctness of student writing and how language evolves. Also, that English grammar should be taught well, not just expected from the student.

The history of Strunk and White’s book makes sense to me. The creators were afraid that the language would degenerate as they thought the culture of America was degenerating. Therefore, they wrote a book, similar to that of the French dictionary, to conform the language and its dialects and slang. For me, the writing of this book wasn’t to evade the gradual evolution of the English language, like some may argue, but rather to preserve the purity of the language. Unless a book of rules is written, it is hard to have a precise language. Without a guide to what English is, statements can be misconstrued to mean something else. Sure, English speakers would be able to understand one another most of the time, but I will use an example that my dad used to say. This is an example of Pennsylvania Dutch English or “dutchified English”: “Throw the horse over the fence some hay.” Am I throwing the horse of the fence, or the hay? Read more ...

Turning Paris into an Eco-friendly Metropolis

December 7th’s comparative literature luncheon lecture at Penn State was given by Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, professor and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Paris-La-Villette. He spoke about the challenge of turning a long-existing city, like Paris, into a more eco-friendly metropolis. His team of about 40 members, along with 9 other teams are working together reconstruct Paris into a cleaner, more green city. The teams came up with five negative aspects of cities and ten solutions that address each negative effect of urban living.

His focus was mainly of containing a city, preventing urban sprawl, preventing the total isolation of classes (as in Rio-de-janero), moving away from housing projects (as can be seen in Chicago and many major American cities), and keeping Paris beautiful and not “cookie-cutter.” Therefore, the teams developed different solutions that range from combining different architectural styles to create a sort of “patchwork” city (to keep the city beautiful), to changing zones to make taxing more appropriate for certain arrondissements and banlieu, while making a single fare for all public transportation.

It make me uneasy when architects decide to “revamp” a city like Paris. I am afraid that Paris will lose its charm and history. However, there are places in Paris, places tourists never find, that do require a change. It is for this reason that I would support the reconstruction of parts of Paris. With the goal of greenifying Paris in mind, it is not hard to be in favor of the effort. However, I still have qualms about changing all of the arrondissements, because some seem perfect to me. I have visited the city many times and it saddens me that when I go back it will not be the Paris I remember. Read more ...