Bring up your words, bring up yourself.

It occurs to me after looking back at my old blog that on many levels this blog has been a failure.  But that’s depressing and self-fulfilling talk!  Say stuff like that and the terrorists win.  Also, I blame authoritarianism. (see Great Firewall of China, The and related works). 

I am enjoying my Lu Xun project now — the same project that drove me to despair mere days ago.  But I spent an inordinate amount of money on thick (and thin) books of Chinese lit crit, and I wallowed in the internet, bobbing like a corpse in the hot mangrove slums of political blogs, Baidu, and Wikipedia, and now I face the future like a man!  Like WFB (who against all reason I have decided to emulate in certain very very specific ways)!  I am alive and happy!  There are worse things to be. 

Things that both make my friends squirm and have influenced me recently: The Fountainhead, WFB’s infinite eulogies, Lolita, To Live (the book, not the movie).  But I count them all as positive influences.  Progress towards up!  Haven’t forgotten that one. 

I may not get to go to Tibet because there are problems there.  This is deeply annoying to me, in the way that only the sudden revoke of undeserved privilege is annoying.  How am I supposed to develop as a human being if I can’t travel at will to the moral equivalent of a giant Indian reservation on a plateau 4,000 meters above sea level?  That is the best way to think of Tibet, I think, as well as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and all other pockets of China inhabited by significant numbers of ethnic minorities: they are Indian reservations as Indian reservations looked several decades ago in America (read: worse than now).  This is a good article on the subject.  

Last thing: I’ll just mention my trip to Sichuan of a couple weeks ago.  Ate hotpot, drank tea, saw baby pandas, got bit by a monkey (didn’t get through my awesome jeans), climbed a mountain.  The long version is more exciting, but I’m way too snarky to type much more without beginning to hate myself.  Adios for now!