In all my experiences of international travel, I’ve been able to get by in English without too much difficulty, and where I’ve had trouble with English I’ve generally been met with very accommodating, apologetic service. And so, as a native English speaker, it’s hard to walk through the world without a little cultural arrogance. A…
We saw nothing interesting about the architecture as we walked through the French Concession district of Shanghai, and our language issues persisted. There’s literally an English-speaking façade here in the sense that storefronts, billboards and even highway signs display messages in both English and Chinese. You might see a place called (in English) “Such-and-Such Tea…
Shanghai has not felt warm since we arrived, in any sense of the word. It was 5° C last night, and I woke up to a bomb blast. Well, not literally. Just before I went to sleep last night, I was flipping through the TV channels. On one of them was some kind of hotel…
“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think,…
The other night a small group of us went to see a play called “godeatgod” by local playrwright, Haresh Sharma. On our first or second day here, Tracy handed me an eye-catching post card, and ever since then I’d been spotting them around town. post cards for godeatgod The cards quote a review from the…
By way of Brett, whose friend Nathan Piazza has authored an eloquent primer for honing the rhetoric of the left… “As I contemplated the depressing outcome of last night’s election, one thought kept bugging me. How incompetent can the Democrats be when it comes to the cutting edge of political manipulation? Throughout the Clinton presidency…
Someone named Taylor Donahue, vice president of production at Timely Studios, wrote this memo to his boss. It’s pretty funny, but not nearly as funny as the pitch for the film itself.
I’ve been re-reading bits of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy: book 1 – Spring Snow book 2 – Runaway Horses book 3 – The Temple of Dawn book 4 – The Decay of the Angel. Basically in a Japanese phase, I guess. I’ve been devouring Murakami. Of his books, the only ones I haven’t read…