These pages contain my thoughts on life in East Asia — Taiwan above all — on the people I meet here and the things I experience. I was always a closet Orientalist. I want exotic countries to be exotic. After all, what else is the point of them? Since I’ve read Edward Said, however, I’ve learned to be ashamed of this approach to the world. So, I promise, I’ll hold off on the exotica. In particular, there won’t be many references to mangoes. Too many mangoes are a sure sign of travel writing gone wrong.
But there will also be observations on other themes — my family, Europe, Sweden and the UK. Life in academia, politics, and reports on things that I’m writing and thinking.
I asked my students to write something in their blogs about “the worst boss they ever had.” A surprising number of them wrote about professors they had worked for. Thinking that professors, on the whole, are pretty friendly chaps, I was surprised. “It’s obvious,” said the students with one voice. “Professors never had a proper job in their lives and they don’t know what it’s like to handle people. They push us around just to make a point.”
Since I moved to Taiwan I have, for the first time, money to employ research and teaching assistants. I could have a whole slew of them if I wanted. But I’m useless as a boss. I feel strange asking someone to do something for me that I easily could do myself. It takes too long to explain what I have in mind and half of the time I don’t have anything much in mind at all.
Or perhaps it’s rather that I have a problem with authority. I’m instinctively disrespectful of people who have authority over me, but I find it equally impossible to push others around. Thank god I’m only a professor and not in charge of something important.
I sometimes run into my research assistants on campus and I don’t know what to tell them. “Yeah, I’ll get back to you next week … Meanwhile, are you being paid? … Just collect the money for now, OK?”
We are just coming out of the tonghua season. The tonghua, or paulownia, is the flower of a tree which grows in the mountains outside of Hsinchu. The paulownia produces great wood and this was why the Japanese planted the trees during the colonial period. The tree is actually pretty unassuming except for during a few exceptional weeks in the spring when it comes out in cascades of flowers which turn entire mountain sides white. When the petals fall to the ground it looks like it’s been snowing.
The tonghua has special importance to the Hakka people. The Hakka are Han Chinese but they speak their own distinct language and they have a unique history. Hakka means “guest” and the Hakka are travellers. They have spread out over large areas in southern China; they live in Hong Kong, in Canada, and all the butchers and tanners in Calcutta, India, are Hakka. Hsinchu and surrounding areas too are predominantly Hakka.
When the Hakka people first came to Taiwan only the worst pieces of land were available to them. Many of them ended up in the mountains, working in the Japanese-run forest industry. Their lives were hard and they were considerably poorer than the regular Taiwanese. In the spring, however, the tonghua trees took pity on the woodcutters and their families, showering them in flower petals. The flowers inspired poetry, but also hope and a sense of resistance. The powers of flowers.
I know what girls like. Well, I know what 10 and 12 year old girls like. They like the new ASUS EEE 900 computer. It’s cute, it’s friendly, it’s easy to use and to carry around. Beata in particular has been pestering me about getting one for months. I promised I would buy one for every daughter who managed to save up 3000 NT ($100). Saga and Beata did and now we have two more computers in the family.
And make no mistakes about it. The EEE Pc may look cute, but it’s a very powerful machine. Even seasoned middle-aged reviewers are drooling over it. What they all complain about though is the keyboard — it’s too small. And it is. If you are a seasoned middle-aged reviewer your fingers are most likely too fat. But this is the beauty of it! For a 10 to 12 year old girl the keyboard is just right. It’s like the computer was made for her, and she knows it. Saga and Beata are now exploring the internet on computers their parents cannot control.
The next empowering technology project is to get them all a red sports car when they turn 18. Red sports cars, like cute computers, are wasted on middle-aged men. I want my girls to pick up guys, to leave them in the dust, to drive off into the sunset, on their own wheels. Why a red car? Well, red cars are loud and self-confident. I want my girls to be loud and self-confident too.
No, we can’t afford a red sports car for each of them. They will have to pass it onto each other as they, one after the other, turn 18. Unfortunately paying for an expensive car does mean that we can’t support them financially through college. But hey, life is all about getting your priorities straight.
Of course the Clintons would never stoop to race baiting tactics themselves. They leave it to their operators to do that - people like Sidney Blumenthal, the man Bill relied on to clean up the Monica Lewinsky mess.
I have personal experiences of how Blumenthal operates. His niece applied to do a Master’s degree in the program I was in charge of in London. Unusually, I was sent an applicant’s file not from the Admissions Office, as always was the case, but instead straight from the Office of the LSE Director — at that time Anthony Giddens. In the file was a handwritten note from “Sid” to “Tony,” making the case that accepting his niece to do a degree at the LSE would be a wonderful opportunity to “continue to deepen our trans-Atlantic ties.”
I was just trying to figure out why the file came from Giddens and why that mysterious note was included, when the phone rang. It was David Held, notorious important-person wanna-be. “Did you see the application from Blumentahl’s niece?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “it’s right here on my desk.” “Well, you should consider it very carefully,” Held continued, “Just read the name again. It’s BLUMENTHAL, OK? That Blumenthal.”
Of course I didn’t miss out on such an opportunity to take the moral high ground. I wrote an email to Blumenthal, Giddens and Held and informed them all that I was in charge of admissions and that I resented any external meddling. It was totally out of order to slip handwritten notes into a file or to make phone calls pressurizing me. Besides the niece’s grades were far below what we usually were prepared to accept.
I heard back from Giddens within a few hours and he was very apologetic and could not for the life of him understand how that note got included in the application. Blumenthal and Held never got in touch.
This, I guess, is how the power elite reproduces itself.
Reading about Hilary Clinton’s attempts to play the race card, I suddenly remembered Ricky Ray Rector. Rector shot a man in a nightclub in Arkansas in 1981 and killed a policemen who came to arrest him. He then turned the gun on himself, but the bullet didn’t kill him, it left him permanently lobotomized. Rector was first saved by the doctors but then sentenced to death by the courts.
In 1992, Bill Clinton took time off from the presidential campaign to fly back to Arkansas to confirm the death sentence. Democrats, Clinton insisted, “should no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent.” Yes, Rector was indeed mentally retarded. He left the dessert from his last meal, insisting that he would eat it “after the execution.” In 2002 the American Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally retarded people, labelling it a “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Ricky Ray Rector was black, and Bill Clinton was worried that the Republicans were going to accuse him of letting black killers go free. White voters don’t like that. This, after all, was what undid the Dukakis campaign in 1988.
The power of love … My two former students, Veronica and Styves, just got married in Canada. Veronica is Korean and Styves is from Gabon, West Africa. They met and fell in love when Styves’ father was working as a diplomat in Seoul. But from then on things weren’t easy.
Their respective families weren’t, well, over-joyed by the prospect of their union. Living together in Korea was out of the question and living in Gabon wasn’t easy either. Instead they figured out that they could go to study in Sweden, and that’s where I first met them back in 2002. They moved on to London and did a Master’s at LSE, but afterwards they were, once again, forced apart. Veronica decided to emigrate to Canada and for the longest time I didn’t hear anything about Styves.
Yesterday, however, I got this photo. Styves decided to do the right thing — he flew from Gabon to the Canadian prairie for a quick but by all accounts very romantic ceremony. Isn’t love great?! Best of luck to the two of them.
Although the Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers is a very elitist group of well-trained paper-liberators, this is not to say that you can’t join. Indeed you can. It’s easy. There are no rules really, and no membership fees.
First, however, we need to know that we can trust you. You need to do a job for us. You need to help liberate an old paper from an archive or a library and to upload it to a public access website such as the Internet Archive or Our Media. Post the URL as a comment here on this page and you are a member! (Maybe I’ll send you a T-shirt or something if I can come up with a good design).
Don’t upload illegal stuff; don’t do anything I wouldn’t do
Btw, there is an interesting discussion about this at BoingBoing:
A researcher for a new BBC Radio 4 program, iPM, got in touch and asked for an interview about “liberating old papers.” I’ve never done an interview before. I’m not sure I’ll like it, but Eddie Mair is in charge and how could I say no. He’s the Indiana Jones of contemporary affairs presenters.
Friday, 18 April, update: I just got off the phone with Eddie (as I like to call him). We had endless Skype problems to begin with but in the end they were happy enough with the sound quality. I talked about “civil disobedience” and the importance of “committing small crimes in order to prevent greater evils.” Ha, ha. Pretty silly. But pretty serious at the same time.
Saturday, 19th update: the iPM web page now has a write-up — “Order, Order” — and the whole program is here. This is the interview itself:
I helped rescue a Polish ethnologist today. Her name is Maria Antonia Czaplicka and she was born in Warsaw in 1886. In 1910 she won a scholarship to London and the LSE to do a PhD (leaving Poland at the same time as anthropology super-star Bronislaw Malinowski). She did her fieldwork in Siberia and in the winter of 1914 she travelled some 5000 kilometres along the frozen river Yenisey, taking photos and making notes.
She was only the second person in Europe to get a PhD in anthropology; the first woman to join the Royal Geographical Society; and, in 1915, the only woman to teach at Oxford. However, when the professor she replaced returned from the fronts of World War I, she was fired. She worked at the Deparment of Anatomy at the University of Bristol for a while, but her contract was not renewed. She had financial troubles and ended up committing suicide, by poisoning, in 1921, only 35 years old.
Her books on Central Asia and Siberia are obviously erudite, but also delightfully written, and My Siberian Year, 1916, was a great public success. What impresses me is the respect with which she treats the people she meets and analyses. There is no Western triumphalism here and not a trace of condescension. She is far smarter than most other Edwardians.
Czaplicka already had a Wikipedia entry, but links to her works were missing. Today I supplied two. You can now right-click and directly download pdfs of:
Hers is a sad story. A brave and beautiful woman who found more obstacles at Oxford than in the wilds of Siberia. I hope she will live long and prosper on the web.
I watched an interview with George Clooney on The Guardian’s website. The reporter referred to him as twice named “the sexiest man alive.” I didn’t know there was an annual award like that. But then again, I’m not much of a connoisseur of male beauty.
Apparently it’s the rather tacky People Magazine in the US that hands out this rather tacky honor. So far they have named the likes of Brad Pitt, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Johnny Depp, Ben Affleck, bla, bla. What a boring and predictable list! And are there so few sexy men in the world that some have to be nominated twice?
Besides, can it really be that the world’s sexiest men all are English-speaking and predominantly American? Just as a matter of population statistics, an American should appear on the list no more than once in 20 years and a Brit only once in 100 years. Meanwhile a Chinese man should appear every five years. Any candidates?
I remember, in northern Sweden in the 80s, my sister getting speechless and blushing down to her toes, when I unexpectedly showed here a magazine with a photo spread of Sakamoto Ryuichi. But he’s not Chinese either of course — and by now not as handsome as he once was (but then again, who is?)
I’m recovering from my pneumonia, and pretty quickly too. I should be back in the classroom before long. Meanwhile I’m having fun in bed — checking out the ChinesePod language podcasts. It’s a new way to study languages — based on downloaded mp3s and lots of web-based interaction. Each lesson is bite size, only a few minutes. And best of all, the presenters — John and Jenny — are fun and casual and a bit naughty. It’s nothing like learning a language in school.
Mouths were intended to be used for so much more than speaking Chinese. Sometimes the language of love communicates better than the best vocabulary, so it never hurts to get a little lip service… In this podcast, get smoochy-smoochy with us and learn to ask for a kiss, in Mandarin.
ChinesePod was started by an Irishman, Ken Carroll, back in 2005. They record and upload to the web from Shanghai, PRC. They have a great business model: a lot of free, and very useful, downloads and low costs for premier content. Very web 2.0. and just what I would do if I ran a business like this.
No, I haven’t disposed of my old textbook yet, but for now it’s great to be in bed with John and Jenny (especially, dare I say it, with Jenny).
We all caught pneumonia, first Diane, then Saga, Xiaomeimei and then me. I didn’t know you could catch pneumonia like you catch the flu. Maybe it’s an East Asian thing. They have a pretty impressive microbiological flora in this part of the world.
It’s weird to have very high fever. It’s like an experiment in existentialist philosophy. You see these people, you wonder who they are, and to your great surprise you realize they are your children. How did I end up having children? And who is that woman? Oh, it’s my wife. Am I married? We’re in Taiwan? Why Taiwan?
Luckily Taiwan has a world-leading health system. There is universal insurance coverage just like in Sweden and Britain, but in contrast to these places you can go straight to the hospital yourself and talk to a specialist. Since the top 1% of students go to medical school, the doctors are completely outstanding (and perfectly English speaking which is nice if you feel lousy). Thank god we’re not living in the US.
April 19 update: today Beata fell ill as well. There is only Yrsa to go. We’ve collectively been sick for a month by now. It solves the problem of what to do every weekend — we just cough at each other.
The nationalist wing of the British Labour Party are at it again. Lord Goldsmith, the warlord who provided Tony Blair with legal arguments for the illegal war in Iraq, is now proposing that all British school leavers should swear allegiance to the Queen. The ridiculousness of this idea should be obvious. Passively accepting the historical fact of monarchy is one thing, but how can a person in a democracy swear allegiance to a hereditary ruler? Brits, are you mice or are you men?
The ever-wonderful Now Show had a great piece on this:
“Copyright Does Not Exist,” is an amazing book by Linus Walleij, a legendary Swedish hacker and Linux guru, who persuasively argues that copyright is a very, very stupid idea. He kicks ass, and he writes like Hunter S. Thompson. Get the book here:
If you have read this book on a computer, without printing it out on paper, you’ve consumed something. Or have you? Do I have to charge for this book before it can be called consumption? I’ll leave that as an open question. I’ve certainly not made a dime from you reading this book, but maybe I’ve accomplished something that can’t be measured in terms of money - maybe I’ve taught you to question the mechanisms of power.
Do I agree with such anarcho-syndicalist drivel? You bet! Remember, information wants to be free!
This is an op-ed piece I wrote for the Times Higher Education Supplement – “Liberate and Disseminate.” It should be out in their next issue, on April 10.
“Free information freely available is the rallying cry of Erik Ringmar, who wants others to join in putting restricted documents on the web.”
Naturally you can read it first here (that link opens a download from the Internet Archive – seemed appropriate, I thought).
My friend Dave asks me about my favorite household management tips. I’m not so sure about household management, but I’ll readily talk about my favorite kitchen implement: our cheese-slicer with nine lives. It first got into our possession when Diane in 1995 decided that the kitchen in her dorm at Stockholm University needed it far less than we did. She was right. We had love, hope and cheese, but we had no cheese slicer. Let’s say that it was a crime of passion. The cheese-slicer has been with us ever since (and so have love and hope).
Yes, it has nine lives. We always seem to lose or misplace it, but it always magically comes back to us. Once in London my mother — on a temporary visit and a mission to move us out of student bohemia — threw it away. But the garbage bag broke and we found it on the street and rescued it. Another time we mistakenly chucked it out together with some carrot peels. It was buried in our compost heap until, one spring, a child’s search for worms suddenly unearthed it. We cleaned it thoroughly and return it to its place in the kitchen drawer.
The most remarkable occasion was when we went on a camping trip to Italy. We had just picked up all our bags at the airport in Rome when I cast a quick glance behind my shoulder. A metal object with a wooden handle had fallen out of someone’s bag and was making the rounds on the baggage carousel — it was our cheese-slicer. Ciao! Benvenuto a Roma!
After such on-the-brink rescues we naturally had to bring it with us to Taiwan.
Sometimes I wonder whether the cheese-slicer is trying to tell us something. Why else would it be so insistently loyal? Maybe it’s been sent from another planet with a secret message? Maybe this is the cosmic cheese-slicer which will appear at the end of all time to warn mankind regarding the impending doom? While we are waiting for further clarifications, we simply use it for slicing cheese.
This is a piece written by my oldest daughter, Saga. She came second in a national writing competition here in Taiwan with this article. At 12, she’s already an accomplished author, putting down some 2,000 words a day. It’s the family curse, poor thing. At least she writes fun stuff. Yes, I’m very proud.
I know that Obama is more than a “black candidate” and that Clinton is more than a “woman candidate,” but they are both nevertheless carriers of the narratives of their race and their gender. Their presidential bids draw emotional power from stories of “honor restored,” “slights avenged,” “underdog bites back” and similar cultural stereotypes. Americans love stories like this. Even McCain, as a septuagenarian, has a story to tell about resisting old-age stereotyping.
What’s strange is that these identities all concern gender, race and age and that none of them concerns social class. None of the candidates left on the stage tries to take on the role of “an ordinary American worker.” And the only candidate who tried, John Edwards, was quickly booted out. Americans, clearly, don’t want to identify with a working-class guy. Least of all, it seems, American workers.
Is this a wonderful example of the power of positive thinking — of aspiring to become something more than “just an average Joe” — or is it a form of self-delusion? After all, even the Village People had a member who pretended to be a construction worker!
It’s the economy, stupid! To people reading about the Taiwanese presidential election in foreign newspapers, it was all a matter of relations to China and possible parallels with Tibet. But what Taiwanese people really cared about was the sluggish state of the economy and the corruption scandals of the current DPP regime. My man, Ma Ying-jiu, won a very decisive victory in the end (60 % of the vote) and DPP was never even close.
Giving his victory speech behind a screen of bullet proof glass, Ma looked tired and a bit worried. In general he seems like a gentle and pretty soft guy (and is often accused of being indecisive). But perhaps gentle and soft is just what’s needed right now. I’m fed up with tough-talking nationalists.
DPP’s big mistake was to think politically rather than economically. They see the world in terms of zero-sum power-struggles — with KMT, with the Mainland — and forget that many issues actually can be solved to mutual advantage. Specifically, they have no sense of what economic growth and long-term prosperity require. People were rightly worried. In the end millions and millions of ordinary Taiwanese put their faith in Ma. Rightly so I think.
My students all seem to be going back home to their families today for the presidential vote. In some cases the trips are long and time/money consuming. I don’t have the heart to tell them about the most celebrated of all political science theories — about the irrationality of voting.
It goes like this: since there are millions of people voting, the chance that your vote will be decisive is so low that it doesn’t justify the trouble you go through. This is particularly the case if you have to travel far to do it. You are more likely to have a terrible accident on your way back to Pingdong, Gaoshiung or Jaiyi than to actually determine who becomes the next president. (Or find yourself a person here in Xinzhu who votes for the opposite party, make a pact not to vote, and save yourself the trip).
But rationality isn’t what it’s about of course (and political science is, everything considered, a bloody waste of time). My students go back home to participate in an important ritual of citizenship. To vote is to affirm your rights as a Taiwanese and to celebrate the country’s vibrant democracy. Not to vote is to not claim your rights. Go for it! (and cast your votes wisely …)
Tomorrow is the big one — the presidential elections here in Taiwan. The people will decide to vote for Frank Xie, the candidate of DPP, the independence party, or for Ma Ying Jiu, the KMT, Guomingdang, candidate. To a large extent people’s choices are determined by questions of who they, and Taiwan, really are. If your family came here with KMT in 1949 and you believe Taiwan is a part of China, you are for Ma. If your family has deeper Taiwanese roots, and you believe Taiwan is an independent country, you are for Xie. As always when questions of people’s identities are involved, sentiments run very high.
I sympathize very strongly with the DPP’s’ point of view (and I have several good friends who are fervent DPP supporters). They feel their country was taken over by outsiders in 1949. Outsiders, moreover, who ran Taiwan like a dictatorship for some 40 years, imprisoning and killing people. Still to this day, DPP supporters tend to be under-dogs. On average they have lower socio-economic position and lower education. They want their dignity and their island back. All of this makes a lot of sense.
However, I really hope Ma and KMT will win. To isolate yourself from China, as the current DPP president Chen Shiu-bian has done, is a very stupid policy which has strongly negative economic effects and which invites all kinds of unpleasant sabre-rattling. It’s outrageous, for example, that Taiwan is the only country in the world which is trying to limit the number of Chinese students and that there are no direct flights to the mainland. Relations to China have to be permanently sorted out and all military threats removed. Yes, it’s good for Taiwan. Only Ma and KMT are in a position to do that.
You can naturally still buy it from Amazon or whatever (the cover is nice, and you don’t have to stitch the A4’s together). Btw, I’m in the process of scanning my other books and uploading them as well. Bear with me, it takes a bit of time to do …
The US economy is doing badly, and worse seems to be around the corner. People with money are moving elsewhere. If interest rates hit 1 % in a year’s time, and the dollar drops against major currencies, investing in the US is stupid.
This is true unless you invest in the kinds of things that people demand during a recession. You could buy a used-car dealership, for example. Or a pop-tart business, or even shares in Wal-Mart (if you can live with yourself — Costco would be much better, they allow trade unions).
The problem with this kind of investing is only that rich people know very little about the kinds of goods poor people require. Rich people think about poverty in the abstract, not in the excruciating detail required to make a profit. To help them out an entrepreneurial poor person should start an investment consultancy firm. Poverty, after all, is something poor people know a lot about. Let’s hear it for Trailer Park Investments, Inc!
I’m telling Diane she should go for it. With years of in-depth knowledge accumulated in mobile homes all across Long Island, she’s ahead of the game. She points out, for example — go for it, it’s easy money! — that you should invest in companies that rent out storage space. That’s always what happens when the bailiff arrives — you’re chucked out on the street and you have to find somewhere to put your belongings. What rich person would have thought of that?
I’ve just come back from the Majie Hospital where the nice doctor made me run on a treadmill for 20 minutes while hooked up to all kinds of electronic equipment. There is nothing wrong with my heart. It’s pumping hard and strong. But its beat is uneven — it has like a back beat to it — and this is what sometimes can feel like cramps, especially when I’m stressed out. But there is nothing to worry about. It’s not normal perhaps, but it’s OK. (Or as Saga put it, “why should your heart be normal when everything else about you is so strange?”)
This is what I always knew, my heart’s got a funky rhythm. I have a Jamaican heart!
The doc gave me beta blockers for my stress, but I don’t think I take them. Beta blockers are some kind of happiness pills, aren’t they? I’m afraid to get too mellow. Adrenaline has always been my drug of choice.
When I got to work this morning my laoshi — my Chinese teacher — was picking fallen cherry petals off the ground outside of my building. “Look, how beautiful they are,” she said as she collected them on a paper plate. “You should get some for your office.” Unable to confront reality except through the screen of a literary device, I suggested she should write a poem about the fallen flowers. Like they do in Japan.
“I can’t write poetry,” she said. “You write!”
Compared with the delightfulness of spring, poetic forms are empty gestures. I want to be a poetic actor, like my laoshi, not a sophist. Life is indeed too brief.
It was great fun to take the bus and to talk to cab drivers, but it was too difficult to do shopping and we didn’t see any of Taiwan — we had to get a new car. And here it is! A spanking new Suzuki Swift. It’s everything our old KIA was not — peppy, easy to park and good on gas. And it’s cute like an overgrown toy car.
No, we don’t all fit comfortably into it for longer journeys, but the idea is to get two (once we’ve saved up some more money). The only thing that annoys me is that everyone else seems to be buying the same car right now. (The little car showroom where we bought ours sells one Swift a day). Maybe we should have gotten one in electric pink just to stand out from the crowd.
I finally went to the doctor. The EKG looks alright, but my blood pressure is far too high (175/100). And blood pressure is not only associated with heart disease but also with a pesky temperament. I don’t want to die from a heart attack and I don’t want to snap at my friends and family. I have to do something about it.
OK, I’m taking blood pressure medication, but I don’t like popping pills. Much better to change what I eat. So, after some thinking and some googling I’ve devised my own diet.
This is the logic behind it: human beings have existed for three million years, but the agricultural revolution — when humans became sedentary farmers and began keeping animals — only took place some 10,000 years ago. As a result humans are actually very badly suited to a diet of milk, wheat and cheese. What we should be eating are nuts, plants and the occasional jungle animal. To feel better — to lower our blood pressure — we must become contra-revolutionaries, we must undo the damage of the agricultural revolution.
Last night I had salmon and papaya salad for dinner. This morning I had cashews and apples for breakfast. Sacrifice, what sacrifice? I’m going back to the doctor on Thursday for some more tests. Maybe the numbers will look better already. Meanwhile I’ll dig up some tasty roots here on NCTU campus.
I just had photos made for my new Alien Registration Card. All foreigners in Taiwan need an ARC and all ARCs must have a photo. I hate having photos taken of myself. It’s not necessarily that I don’t like what I look like, it’s that I can’t recognize myself in the picture. I never could. Not since childhood. That person is not me. I’m much shorter. I have dark hair. A less bulbous nose.
It’s a very strange thing. Everyone else can see you, but you can’t see yourself. Not your face anyway. You can look at yourself in a mirror of course but the mirror always presents a partial, and completely staged, image. As a result, no one really knows what they themselves look like. We are all more or less mistaken about the most salient fact about ourselves — our looks.
I should write more about this in some context. It’s very interesting.
When I lived in London I had passport photos taken in a shop on Oxford Street. It was an obscure establishment with a perilously steep staircase leading up to a studio on the second floor. Yet once upon a time it must have been a famous place. There was a large collection of pictures of previous customers on the wall, including people like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Most of them were taken in the Swinging Sixties. Maybe this was one of the few places that did passport photos back then.
I suddenly realized I had found a private key to a line of a Beatles’ lyric. In Penny Lane there is “a barber showing photographs of every head he had the pleasure to know.” And of course some barbers have pictures on the wall showing examples of the kinds of haircuts you can get. Yet it doesn’t seem likely that a barber bothers to take photos of all of his customer. A photographer, however, does. On the wall of that place on Oxford Street the photographer was literally “showing photographs of every head he had the pleasure to know” (the famous ones at least). And Paul McCartney, responsible for Penny Lane, had obviously been one of those customers.
Do you have a PhD or are you just about to get one? Do you want to hang out with me and my friends in Taiwan for six months, all expenses paid? Eat great food, climb great mountains, learn Chinese and how to avoid getting run over by motorbikes?
Is this offer too good to be true? Well, maybe. But we are just in the process of applying for money to set up an “advanced studies institute” at NCTU (yes, like the one at Princeton). The idea is to accept some 6 foreign scholars per half-year. It could work as a post-doc or as a chance for someone who needs a fall-back position after Harvard denied tenure. If we get the money from the Ministry of Education in Taipei, we’ll start advertising for real. If you mention in your application that you read the news here, you’ll be placed first in line. Readership has its privileges.
It is now 147 years, 6 months, and 25 days since the Europeans burned down the Yuanmingyuan. (Lots of people in China have not forgotten -- more here).
