Xi Jinping 习近平 in Washington

The New York Times

Until now, the Chinese government has successfully deflected international pressure for change largely because a group of money-grubbing Western investors, desperate politicians and opportunistic scholars have fawned over China’s vast foreign reserves and market potential. One can only hope that the American government will see past the money and unequivocally support the voices of reform and push for political change from within. Despite China’s tough talk, pressure from the West matters and can make a difference.

--Ho Pin 何频, founder of Mirrorbooks.com 明鏡网, a Hong Kong dissident publishing house. This essay was translated by Wenguang Huang from the Chinese.

Hiddenharmonies has a full retort.

"How to Memorize a Poem"

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

From chapter 6, "How to Memorize a Poem:"

Of the ten events in the World Memory Championship, the poem has bred the greatest number of different strategies. But broadly speaking, mental athletes take two general tacks, which happen to segregate the pool of competitors fairly neatly by gender. While Gunther and most of the other men on the circuit subscribe to a methodical strategy, the women tend to approach the challenge in a more emotional way. Fifteen-year-old Corinna Draschl, an Austrian in a red T-shirt and matching red socks and red baseball cap, told me she can't memorize a text unless she understands what it means. Even more than that, she has to understand how it feels. She breaks the poem into small chunks and then assigns a series of emotions to each short segment. Rather than associate the words with images, she associates them with feelings.

"I feel how the writer feels, what he is meaning. I imagine whether he's happy or sad," she told me in the hallway outside the competition hall.

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Story Structure: Creating a Step Outline

As the term implies, a step-outline is the story told in steps.

Using one- or two-sentence statements, the writer simply and clearly describes what happens in each scene, how it builds and turns. For example: "He enters expecting to find her at home, but instead discovers her note saying she's left for good."

On the back of each card the writer indicates what step in the design of the story he sees this one scene fulfilling -- at least for the moment. Which scenes set up the Inciting Incident? Which is the Inciting Incident? First Act Climax? Perhaps a Mid-Act Climax? Second Act? Third? Fourth? Or more? He does for Central Plot and subplots alike.

He confines himself to a few stacks of cards for months on end for this critical reason: He wants to destroy his work. Taste and experience tell (the writer) that ninety percent of everything he writes, regardless of his genius, is mediocre at best. IHe may sketch a scene a dozen different ways before finally throwing the idea of a scene out of the outline. He may destroy sequences, whole acts. A writer secure in his talent knows there's no limit to what he can create, and so he trashes everything less than his best on a quest for a gem quality story.

This process, however, doesn't mean the writer isn't filling pages. Day after day a huge stack grows on the side of the desk: but these are biographies, the fictional world and its history, thematic notations, images, even snippets of vocabulary and idiom. Research and imaginings of all kinds fill a file cabinet while the story is disciplined to the step-outline.

Finally, after weeks or months, the writer discovers his Story Climax. With that in hand, he reworks, as needed, backward from it. At last he has a story.

Robert McKee, Story: Structure, Substance, Style and Principles of Screenwriting, 1997

A conjecture about multiplicity: it's probably possible for successful writers to have multiple step-outlines active at any one time.

A conjecture about collaboration: writers' best chance at collaborating on story is in the stage of step-outline.

Film: Political Satire in "Being There"

Being There is the deepest political satire I think I have ever seen in film.
Besides humor and deep political content, the film has hair-raising sound engineering:
That last track is by Eumir Deodado -- an ingenius rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

A Game of Poems: Sikong Tu, Act 1

In the late Tang, there was once a young man from a small town called Yuxiang 虞乡 who specialized in doing nothing. Though he came from a family of minor officials, he did not even try taking the examinations until was thirty-three years old, in 869.

In my youth I used to waste my life,
The time pushed me hard, but I was always at leisure.

Nobody knows what Sikong Tu was doing in the years before 869, but he probably spent a good deal of his time in the Zhongtiao mountains, a place of Buddhist institutes where students and scholars gathered for study and teaching. Tu took the public examinations the same year his patron, Wang Ning 王凝, became the Chief Examiner. When he ranked fourth out of thousands of candidates, disgruntled young men said Tu only succeeded because Wang Ning helped -- but Wang Ning actually opposed corruption in the government, and his crackdown on favoritism cost him his own job the following year. Wang Ning's enemy, Wei Paoheng, married the daughter of Emperor Yizong 唐懿宗 -- that was how Paoheng gained the influence to retaliate against Wang Ning. Purged from the capital, Wang Ning was assigned to a series of minor posts in different outlying locations until his death in 877. Tu stayed with Wang Ning till the latter's death in the South, gaining experience as an exile that would mark his poetry:

The sun brings with it the roaring of the tide to the evening.
The smoke is soaked with the color of trees in the autumn.

From ancient times, the worthies and the talented have been tragic and sorrowful.
Everlastingly the powerful families controlled the important positions.
Henceforth I will get myself drunk whenever I hear a song,
And live as an idler without helping the world.

But such lines belie Tu's devotion to Wang Ning, who was fighting the rebels Huang Chao 黄巢 and Wang Xianzhi when he died. After Wang's death, Tu answer a summons to the capital for a new assignment, but as punishment for tardiness he was demoted and sent to Luoyang, the less important Eastern Capital. This city was a gathering place for all the men of talent currently out of power -- Lu Xi, one such official, came to admire Tu's character. When Lu Xi was summoned back to the capital a year later to head the Department of War, he shared his good fortune with Tu. By 879, Lu Xi was a Chief Minister and Tu was given a post in the Ministry of Rites. While in the capital, he lived in Chongyi Ward, two blocks from the palace; he was soon promoted, and even earned the purple-fish-bag (feiyudai) for meritorious service. But in the winter of early 881, the Tang capital of Chang'an was under attack; Wang Xianzhi was dead, but the rebel Huang Chao pressed on. On January 4, rebel forces took the Tongguan pass, the capital cities last defense. Eunuchs made accusations; officials committed suicide. Emperor Xizong fled in secret to a provisional capital set up at Chengdu, leaving most of the government and royal family behind. Rebels entered on January 8. Panic ensued.

Sikong Tu hid in a friends house in the gentry neighborhood of Chongyi Ward. He was just about to leave for Changpinglin, a government store-house of salt and iron, rebel soldiers burst in; one soldier blocked the door with a great spear. He stared at Sikong Tu. Then, he approached and took Sikong's hands. "I am Duan Zhang 段章, your former servant." Duan Zhang explained that he had been captured and forced to join the rebels, but now knew that Heaven had arranged events so that he, Duan, could save Tu's life in repayment for Tu's kindness. He suggested that Tu seek parlay with Duan's commander, General Zhang, who respected scholars. No! Tu would rather die than surrender and be disgraced. Moved by his decision, Duan lead Tu to the road, and escape.

Tu slipped out of the city through the Kaiyuan Gate under the cover of darkness, heading east. When he reached Xianyang Bridge, a boatman named Han Jun took him south, to Huxian. From Huxian, we lose track...

Paraphrasing Wong Yoon Wah, Ssu-K'ung T'u: A Poet-Critic of the T'ang, pp. 7-18

"Note on a Calligraphic Screen"

In "Note on a Calligraphic Screen" 书屏记 (900 AD), Sikong Tu 司空图 relates that when his father settled down in Yuxiang, Tu's calligraphy master, Pei Xiu 裴休,  received a present from Li Rong, who was "also famous for his calligraphy in scribbled 草 and clerical 隶 styles." Li Rong's present was a screen 屏, consisting of forty-two panels of calligraphy by Xu Hao 徐浩 (703-782), a great Tang calligrapher. According to Sikong Tu's account, his father so appreciated the masterpiece of Xu Hao that he studied it every morning and so enjoyed it that he even neglected to eat or sleep. Tu might have been exaggerating, but his account indicates his father's enthusiasm for the art.

Sikong Tu's account of Li Rong and Xu Hao's screen is the only information we have of them in Chinese art history. According to Tu, Xu Hao wrote in all styles, including the "eight styles" (bati) and most of the poems he wrote were quotations of five-syllable poems from Wenxuan, an anthology compiled under the patronage of Xiao Tong (501-531). The screen included two lines of a poem 杂诗 written by Wang Can of the Jin 晋 dynasty (265-420):

Winds from the north move the autumn grasses,
Horses at the border have their minds on return.

朔风动秋草,边马有归心

Screen paintings from a Tang tomb, discovered in 1987 and exhibited here at the Xi'an Expo, May 2011 .

Sikong Tu remarked that these two lines, together with some others, which were written in clerical or scribbled styles, were the outstanding portions of the masterpiece 或草或隶，尤为精絶. He also added that on the lower margin of the screen someone noted a very poetic comment on Xu Hao's calligraphy:

Mad beasts gouge stone,
Thirsty horse races to the well.
They can see all the blue sky.

怒猊抉石，渴驥奔泉

The first two lines of this comment have become the most often quoted description of Xu Hao's calligraphy. Unfortunately, the screen was burnt to ashes in 869 by a fire.

-Wong Yoon Wah, Ssuk'ung T'u: Poet-Critic of the T'ang (poetry translations meddled with)

Poem: Cat in an Empty Apartment

As we got in the van, someone asked about favorite poets, and the girl who had talked about translating Jackie Kay into Polish said she for one liked to read Wislawa Szymborska. I remember feeling a pinch of anxiety that I had not read Szymborska, but looking back, wasn't it wonderful to have met a reader of hers?

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die - You can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should. Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
--tr. Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak