Saga and Beata have made another installment in the avant-gard series of seasonal poetry. Now it's time for winter. Or rather, "Winter's last butterfly."
It was raining this morning, and not having brought an umbrella, I was soaked when I got to work. What to do? I had two hours to prepare for class, but I couldn't just sit there in my wet clothes. I carefully locked the door to my office, turned the radiator to highest heat and took off my clothes and dried them. It felt very naughty to sit there in my office with nothing on but the computer.
By a strange coincidence today's class was on the Greek conception of barbarians. One reading I give the students is Euripedes' Bacchae, about the good women of Thebes who are lured away from their looms and husbands by the god Dionysus. They all go off into the forest in a frenzy, to drink wine and have sex.
It was somehow very appropriate to prepare for that class in the nip. Dionysus would have approved. (I was going to tell the students about it, but then I realized that they might not want to imagine their professor that way. And who can blame them?)
It's been six months and I'm going back up to the big hospital in Taipei for a regular check-up. I thought I'd eventually get used to these regular tests, but I never will. I live in bits and pieces; a few months at the time. During every visit to the doctor I expect him to tell me my time is up. That the nightmare once again has begun.
I live like Martin Heidegger, and Buddha himself, wanted human beings to live: with a constant and acute awareness of the meaningless abyss which surrounds us. But I'm not cut out for nirvana. Occupying this elevated position makes me nauseous.
"It's a good thing they check up on you," says Saga. "Most people have no idea if they go around with some horrible illness." And of course she's right. It's just a regular check-up.
A nice woman callled Wang Hye Suk got in touch and introduced herself as "the Korean translator" of my book Surviving Capitalism. No wonder I was taken aback. I didn't know there was a Korean translation in the pipelines. Of course that's great.
What she told me about the reason for translating the book I found totally fascinating:
The Korean society is much similar to the Chinese society as you well describe in your book. Koreans also haveguanxi relations which is called youn'go. Like China, after launching the industrialization and especially democratization, such interpersonal relations have blamed as hampering the economic and political development.
For the so-called modernists, logic of youn'go seems to be against market rationality and fairness. However, I think they fail to see the emotional and social foundation of such relations and only highlight or exaggerate its instrumentality. Unfortunately, in recent Korea, their claims seem to gain power and, especially after the 1997 financial crisis, such relations themselves start to be dismantled.
According to recent reports, families are under the harshest attack from so-called neoliberal globalization. (However, there are also found some eveidences on the resilence of Korean families.) In this situation, I decided to translate your book also "with a sense of urgency." Your book shows totally different view on such interpersonal relations. I believe your interpretation will cast an important implication on our society.
We have to find out how we can cherish such precious moral resources and sustain the development under their protection. There's still left much to talk, however I think you would have already caught the point.
I just wrote up a 2,000 preface to the Korean translation. You can download it here.
Cambridge University Press just confirmed that Identity, Interest & Action, long available only in hard-back and ridiculously priced at some $130 US, now is out in paperback. It took 12 long years! But the price is much better — a mere $27.30 (although that’s still far too much).
This was my PhD. I got the CUP contract for the book the same week I got the job at LSE, and the same week I met Diane. All in all that was a pretty good week for me.
A neat thing about the paperback is that Charles Tilly took time out from his fatal illness to write a blurb for the back cover. Alessandro Pizzorno, my beloved teacher from EUI in Florence, wrote another blurb. I’m much obliged.
Now I’m just waiting to get my hands on a copy.
Jamie FlorCruz is CNN's leading man in China, and in his "Jamie's China" column he is quoting my Mechanics of Modernity:
Within its Great Wall, China has exerted strong control over its people. From the era of feudal warlords to modern China, rulers have been obsessed with avoiding bottom-up peasant revolts. The perpetual question in the minds of all Chinese was how chaos could best be avoided," writes Erik Ringmar in "The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia. "Political thought as it developed from the earliest times onward, including Daoism, Legalism and Confucianism, was more than anything attempts to answer this question."
My appreciation for CNN achor persons just went up by 500%. It turns out they are even reading fat and, lets face it, not very appealing-looking academic books. If you don't mind a pdf of my original manuscript, you can download it here.
Now this is what I'd characterize as a cool cover for a world-leading academic journal. And it's actually the first article in the issue! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever ...
I was in a very difficult position three years ago. I had just come out of the cancer treatment and was suffering from different side-effects. My work in Taiwan was really useless, teaching political science to technology students who lacked any incentive to read or listen. I tried to come up with a way to improve my life. The only thing I could think of was to write, write and write, so I did, and this IO article is one of the results. This article is one of the ways in which I returned to life. It feels really great.
I came across this sign on the wall of one of the reconstructed buildings in the Yuanmingyuan compound. Perhaps it would have helped if they had had the sign up some 151 years ago -- and perhaps it should have had text in French too.