Feliz Navidad
The Jose Feliciano version has always expressed the True Meaning of the Holiday Season in our household.
So Feliz Navidad to one and all. I am out of range for internet contact until early next year. Prospero año y felicidad.
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December 2007 Archives
December 21, 2007
Reader updates on three points
After the jump, updates from readers on three points: the etymology of "Suntime" wine and the Uighur Autonomous Region in general; a critique of my wife's feather-light Sherpa haul from the U.S.; and, about that battered ThinkPad T60 keyboard.
Procedural note: I appreciate hearing from readers via the "email" button to the right. I will try to be less slothful about posting interesting responses and elaborations. Toward that end, I announce this policy: Unless a writer says otherwise, I will assume that I am free to quote the comments and attribute them to the writer by name. If you say "Please don't quote" or "Don't use my name," no problem! But to avoid having to email each person for permission, I'll assume from now on that a comment is on the record unless otherwise stated.
Last comment of the year on the Beijing air situation
As promised earlier, I'm not planning to belabor the Beijing-air question while the Olympics are still more than half a year away. And as stated many times, I hope the Beijing Olympics will be a big success. China deserves to feel good about what it is putting together, and it will be best for the whole world if the Chinese people at large feel satisfied about this huge effort. I'm not being flip here: I'm rooting for China to pull this off just right and bask in deserved praise.
Also, these last three or four weeks in Beijing have included a lot of nice-seeming, if cold, days.
But the juxtaposition of the story below, from in today's Olympian, a weekly supplement to the state-controlled China Daily in the months leading up to the Olympics; and the picture below that, a view out the apartment window at 1pm today; and the almost unbelievable NASA satellite shot that is the third image, taken on December 17, a recent "nice-seeming" day, prompts reference to a few other observations. (The satellite image came via Danwei.org and BeijingAir.)
Continue reading "Last comment of the year on the Beijing air situation" »
December 20, 2007
A little more about the "art factory village" of Dafen
Because I can't help it, a few more pictures below and after the jump of the "art factory village" of Dafen, outside Shenzhen. All are clickable for larger version.
Plus, two updates: First, thanks to Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune for getting his story about Dafen back on line, here. It explains some of the business fundamentals of the place.
And, from Keith Snodgrass of the South Asia Center at the Jackson school at the University of Washington, this background of the Dafens of yesteryear:
[You give] somewhat the impression this is a new activity. As a matter of fact, Chinese artists have supplied mass production art for western markets for at least 200 years. Many early 19th century paintings of George Washington circulated in the US were originally produced in southern China, as were many of the "ship portraits", paintings which look like 2-3 ships at sail in a bay, but which are actually 2-3 different views of the same ship.
Ajay Sinha at Mt. Holyoke college gave a talk on this topic at the University of Washington in 2004. You can find him through http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/asinha.shtml
Now, more pics.
Wall o' art:
Continue reading "A little more about the "art factory village" of Dafen" »
Sherpa time!
Yes, I would be glad that my wife is now back from an unexpected trip to the U.S. even if she hadn't hauled along a suitcase full of provisions for the Beijing winter. But she did! Much of this is in the comfort-food category. Several items were made in China but are not that easy to find here. Not fully visible is the element that brought the sherpa suitcase up to its full 60-pound weight: twenty-plus new books from Amazon. But as I pointed out to her, they couldn't have been as heavy as they seemed, because after all most were paperbacks.
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The keyboard propped up in the background is a replacement for my battered eight-month-old ThinkPad T60 keyboard.
China wine watch cont. (Suntime department)
(Update below.)
As mentioned frequently before, I have found the Xinjiang-based Suntime wine a promising alternative to the dismal Great Wall etc. Two updates:
The Suntime cabernet that I thought cost 55RMB (about $7.40) at the local Carrefour actually goes for 48RMB ($6.50). All the more appealing!
At the same store, just saw this offer of two bottles of Suntime "Manas Red" for a total of 33RMB, less than $4.50 or $2.25 per bottle. Well see.
The promotional label says 新天葡萄酒, Xintian Putaojiu, literally "New Day Wine," which is Suntime's name in Chinese. Again, we'll see.
Update: Well, now I've seen.This wine is quite harsh and not nice to drink. I leave to utilitarian philosophers the question of whether, at $2.25 a bottle, it's still in some sense a good deal.
December 19, 2007
The FCC decision is bad news
The battle over media "cross-ownership" rules -- allowing local newspapers to own local TV and radio stations, and vice versa -- appeared to have been fought, and resolved, four years ago. I described the battle back then, and the stakes, in an Atlantic cover story called "The Age of Murdoch." At the time, the three Republicans on the FCC, led by chairman Michael Powell (Colin's son) voted in favor of the liberalization. The two Democrats, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, voted against. The liberalization went through, but it was so unpopular and so sloppy in its reasoning that the Congress and courts effectively countermanded it.
The FCC chairman now, Kevin Martin, was the newest White House appointee to the commission back then. I know, from reporting that story, that Michael Powell was badmouthed in leaks from the Administration for handling the whole issue so messily -- and ultimately to so little effect. (Side note; what other father-son team has as much to regret about its service in a single administration as Colin and Michael Powell do about their service under GW Bush?) Now Martin is the force behind the new effort to loosen cross-ownership rules. Nothing against him, but I hope his experience turns out to be the same as Powell's. Adelstein and Copps are still there, and to their credit once again voted No.
Changing the ownership rules was a bad idea four years ago, and it's a bad idea now. Full case in the article. Summary point is: no matter what you think is wrong with the media, corporate concentration won't make things better. Further discussion from the Media Access Project here.
Workshop of the world, fine arts division
Maybe this is the reason I ended up as a reporter: unless I've seen something with my own eyes, it's hard for me to think of it as real. Yes, of course, everyone is like this to some degree. And yes, of course, I believe in the Straits of Gibraltar and Antarctica, even though I haven't seen either of them. But I think there are people who can sketch out realms in their minds without personally having visited them. This would be a convenient skill for, say, a novelist. I understood, in concept, what the Panama Canal was like, or Cape Horn, or an electronics factory in China. But it was only after I actually saw them that I was able to think, Ah! Now I get what people have been talking about.
For later discussion: whether a relative weakness of imaginative function is a feature or a bug in a journalist.
Which brings us to the Dafen "art factory village" outside Shenzhen, in southern China. I had heard a lot about Dafen, including in a very good story by Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune early this year. (The story seems no longer to be on the Tribune's site. For reference, it was published on February 13, 2007. Update: now on line here.) But only this weekend did I see it, guided by Liam Casey, the Irish "Mr. China" I described a few months ago in an article about Shenzhen's more conventional factories. Now that I've seen it -- my lord!
The main point is: in one sprawling area are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine. European old masters. Andy Warhol. Gustav Klimt. Classic Chinese landscapes. Manet. Audubon. Botero. The super-hot and faddish contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose paintings and sculptures all feature people wearing enormous grins. Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light." Walter Keane, the "Painter of Mawkish Big-Eyed Kids."
This and more is on sale, priced more or less by the square meter. We saw suppliers delivering huge rolls of canvas, to be converted into "commodity art" -- which is what the English sign on one store said. A few pictures below (click for larger versions.) But if you're anything like me, you'll need to go see it for yourself.
Typical street scene in Dafen:
Reassuring information about the supply chain:
Continue reading "Workshop of the world, fine arts division" »
December 16, 2007
Sunday afternoon, Shenzhen Public Library
I'll say more another time about why I find Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, such a deeply fascinating part of today's China. Actually, I made a start on the explanation, here. (Subscribers only; subscribe!)
Shenzhen has a relatively new public library building, a twin structure to its new concert hall, the entire complex designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. (Flickr photos of the complex here and here.) The complex is next to a "Book City" store said to be the biggest in the world. I don't know about that, but it's the biggest I've ever seen.
I saw the library this afternoon, a warm and sunny Sunday. I would conservatively estimate that there were 8,000 people inside. Who knows, maybe 10,000. You doubt the numbers? Here was one of many many lines, on one of many floors, for people who were not reading in carrels, or using the hundreds of internet terminals (all with Dell screens, as far as I saw), or browsing through newspapers and magazines, or looking through the stacks, but had chosen their books and were ready to check them out:
But what really got my notice was the foreign-periodicals section. Right below Body & Soul magazine, right above Sea Power, and very close to Human Rights magazine (!) and Military Modelling, was.. well, see for yourself.
It's the current issue, too. No wonder Shenzhen is on the rise.
(Inside-baseball detail: the mailing label says the issue was sent to a Chinese government clearinghouse in New Jersey, which must waste no time in passing copies on to libraries back home.)
December 14, 2007
More Yuletide cheer, software department
Might as well keep this coming, while Santa is preparing his lists and so on.
1) My choice for best-ever utility for indexing and searching hard drives on a PC, X1, has come out with a new release with numerous small but important improvements. Speed, stability, range of files it can index, etc. If you happen to be using Vista, the new release is also stable under Vista, as the old one wasn't.
I've often complimented X1 in the Atlantic's pages, but here's the sincerest sign of my regard: Officially you can get away without ever paying anything for X1. After your initial 30-day free trial expires, you just keep on with the unlicensed trial version, which gives you no tech support and has certain limitations but is better than most other indexers available. (Or, you can use the similar limited version offered free as Yahoo Desktop Search.) I've gotten by on the trial version for years. But now I have actually ponied up my $50 for a legit license to the "Professional Client" version. My official reason is that it does a few things, like indexing archived Outlook files, that the free version doesn't -- plus the tech support. My real reason is that I have used this product so often for so long that I feel I owe these people something. Check it out.
2) Chandler - where do I start? This is one of the great epics/dramas/melodramas of the last two decades of computer-dom. In part it is the fulfillment of Mitch Kapor's vision of creating the perfect tool for organizing the data you need for your daily life. He began this quest decades ago, with the creation of the sainted Lotus Agenda program when he was in charge of Lotus. (Part of that background here and here). In part it's a very demanding test of what kind of software can be developed on a non-commercial, purely open-source basis. It even has an Atlantic connection, since part of its vision is to realize the vision of Vannevar 'As We May Think' Bush, who in our pages laid out the principles of the internet and of information management more than 60 years ago. It's also just an engrossing story -- one told in the recent book Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, which as its site shows I liked enough to blurb effusively.
Saying anything more about the Chandler saga would be too exhausting, except for this: a usable version now exists, even though it has only some of the features envisioned for the grand climax of the project. It is usable enough that I actually am using it. You can start here to find out more. Warning: at this point, it's still in the "mainly for tinkerers" stage. But it's very interesting, and is free.
Merry Christmas to all!
Also just in time for Christmas: Windows XP / SP3
As mentioned earlier, the good news for Windows Vista users is that Service Pack 1 is heaving into view. According to early word from Office Watch, it will be somewhat faster and more reliable.
The other news -- well, let's consider this good news too: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is also in its beta stage, for official release some time next year. According to this recent report on CNET news.com, via reader Chet Shannon, the long-in-the-tooth Windows XP with its new SP3 is twice as fast (on several benchmark tests involving Microsoft Office functions) as Vista, even with its new SP1:
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent.
More details about the test at CNET's site. I'll think of this as Happy Holiday news for XP users -- putting the XP into Xmas, perhaps.
December 13, 2007
Tired of those wacky U.S. airfares?
Think you'll go crazy trying to figure out how much a flight will cost, depending on whether you travel on a Wednesday in a month containing "r" or are willing to change planes in Tucson?
Yet another reason to come to China! (I say this as a fan of Chinese airlines.) Making a trip tomorrow from Beijing to Shenzhen. Four different airlines to choose from; a wide range of aircraft models; departures conveniently spaced through the afternoon. And fortunately the one factor I don't have to worry about is the price:
This is via CTrip.com, one of the main online travel sites. Yes, Ctrip often shows a range of fares; and yes, travel agents often have special deals for less than this official price. But this is s an interesting contrast to a similar array of US fares. In its own way it is weirdly comforting not to have to run the differential equations to see which is the best deal.
Just in time for Christmas: some (apparently) positive Vista news!
I've mentioned before how much I value the Office Watch website / newsletter. It is basically sympathetic to the Big Two products from Microsoft, Windows and Office, but it takes an informed and completely no-BS approach toward the good and bad aspects of them.
Therefore I was cheered to read the latest dispatch, under the headline "Vista Service Pack 1 is looking good." For those who haven't been through the drill before, the "Service Pack" is the omnibus set of bug-fixes and improvements that Microsoft puts out six to twelve months after major new releases of its software. The standing joke is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) should be considered the "real" release, everything before that being an extended beta-test period that users have to pay to participate in. Often there's a SP2 as well. Zillions of PC worldwide are running happily right now under Windows XP / SP2.
Since buying a ThinkPad T60 factory-installed with the first release of Vista early this year, I've been unhappily triple-tracking my own computing life. I have a Mac iBook, which I need to connect with the Atlantic's head-office server; the Vista ThinkPad T60, which I've kept running as a test bed; and a kind of heirloom ThinkPad T41, on which I installed Vista but then "downgraded" to XP/SP2, and which is both more reliable and faster than the Vista machine. On this one I do much of my actual work.
Last month, as a Thanksgiving gift, Microsoft (and later Lenovo) engineers explained how I could keep the new system from gobbling up every bit of the 105-GB storage on my TP60's hard disk. I was thankful for that! What it didn't change was the slowness and unreliability of Vista on this machine. I always have to allow between three and six minutes for the machine to become usable after I start it up or bring it out of "hibernation." It takes about as long to shut it down. At least twice a week, sometimes more, I have a "blue screen of death" system crash under Vista, which happens maybe once a month on the XP machine. One occurred just minutes ago, while I was on a Skype call on the Vista machine.
But that's in the past! Office Watch says help is at hand, in the form of SP1:
While installing Vista SP1 isn't always easy, the final result is worth the trouble. In our test Vista SP1 is noticeably more stable than the version previously foisted on the public. [Note: "foisted" is the mot juste here, and it demonstrates Office Watch's spirit.] Take with a grain of salt the talk of performance improvements in Vista SP1, especially regarding file copying and network transfers. The 'boost' is really fixing Vista bugs and putting Vista on the same performance level as Windows XP. .... When Vista SP1 is released to the public in 2008, we're inclined to recommend getting it. Though we know that most people are wisely staying with Windows XP for the moment, Vista Service Pack 1 might tip the balance in favor of Vista for new computers.
According to Office Watch, anyone "brave enough" can prowl around the Microsoft web site and find the beta version of Vista SP1. (More tips on finding it here.) Having put in my time as an involuntary beta tester of Vista, I am not going to do that and am instead going to wait until the real SP1 is released early next year. But for those of you who can't wait to open presents, be my guests...
December 12, 2007
Further on JK Glassman and public diplomacy
This hasn't happened in a while, but after taking a few hours to to think it over, I've changed my mind and regret something I posted very recently. This is the glory and the curse of real-time reactions via the internet. The curse is saying something in "public" I would have simply eliminated as an early draft in "real" writing. The corrective (rather than glory) is being able to say quickly: I didn't quite mean that, "that" being this post about Jim Glassman as a successor to Karen Hughes as leader of America's "public diplomacy" efforts.
In four years of reporting on Iraq-war policy and anti-terrorism efforts in general, followed now by a year and a half of living overseas, I have grown increasingly exasperated about the way America's story has been mishandled and debased by those in charge of telling it. The idea of America, in its authentic version, should be attractive and inspiring to people around the world. No, this doesn't mean they will all want to be Americans. It does mean that they can respect us for what we're trying to do. The Atlantic just devoted a whole issue to this very topic.
If the world doesn't feel that way right now, it's largely though not entirely our own fault. Partly it's because of choices we've made. For instance: the process of getting into America legally, as a graduate student or a tourist, has become so insulting and off-putting that fewer people bother to try. But partly the U.S. has suffered because of the way it has tried -- really, hasn't tried -- to understand and address world concerns.
I'm still exasperated at the damage done to my country's reputation and name, and I have very low expectations of what Karen Hughes's successor, whoever it might be, will be able to accomplish. That person will have barely a year to operate; Guantanamo will still be running; there will still be a large U.S. troop presence in Iraq; the current president and vice president will still be in office. But it is possible that the verve, energy, and ingenuity Jim Glassman has shown through his career could be just the traits the person in that situation needs. As I think about him more, and more about the sources of my exasperation, I say: let's see what he can do in this next year.
But I still shouldn't coach the Redskins.
December 11, 2007
James K. Glassman: face of America
Update: pls see this next post for "on further reflection" thoughts on the topic.
I have known and liked Jim Glassman for a very, very long time, since we were both on the college newspaper together. We've each been through a variety of incarnations since then. One of his was as publisher of the Atlantic for two years in the 1980s. The Atlantic was also the magazine that ran an excerpt from his (and Kevin Hassett's) notorious well-known book Dow 36,000 as a cover story in 1999. He is a lively, funny, and creative guy, and there are lots of jobs for which I would happily sign him up.
But as the head of America's public-diplomacy efforts? What's the right analogy here... Maybe, the Redskins, finally concluding that Joe Gibbs was great in his time but that time has passed, bringing me in as head coach? Or suiting me up as left tackle to strengthen their battered O-line? I myself am a wonderful guy, and I'm interested in football, but...
Karen Hughes was a preposterous, tin-eared choice to begin with, reflecting the narcissistic view that to explain America to the world what you needed was somebody who understood George W. Bush really well, rather than somebody who understood the first thing about the outside world. On all available evidence, she only made worse what people don't like about America at the moment, which can be summarized (and oversimplified) as:
- in much of Asia, the idea that we're living off their hard work and cheap products, meanwhile blaming and lecturing them plus being too lazy to learn very much about them;
- in Europe, that we're too boorish and boosterish -- and, while those two traits have long been part of the European snootiness toward America, it's worse now because of the perceived loss of America's moral standing via Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, et al, plus the sense that Americans are fraidy-cats who will accept just about anything in the name of anti-terrorism;
- in much of the Arab-Islamic world... well, you know this already.
As I've argued in the Atlantic recently, America's idea is still powerful and attractive, and America still has the opportunity to present a compelling and authentic face to the world. Over the years I have met, through reporting, many true-blue patriotic Americans who have spent their careers learning how Asian (or European or Arab-Islamic etc) cultures work and think, and how America could best engage them. Jim Glassman, despite being a great guy, is not one of these. As with Hughes, this seems another choice driven by internal comfort (the assumption that he'd face no confirmation problems) rather than external suitability (demonstrated understanding of the outside world), which means another bad choice.
Unless, of course, things are far enough gone, in terms of this Administration's effect on America's image, and there's so little time left, that who's in the job doesn't matter anyway. In which case I will be sorry to have said anything. *
* (Last three sentences altered since first posting, to make internal/external point.)
Suntime wine: not just for Xinjiang U.A.R. anymore
Three months ago, when my wife and I came across Suntime wine on its home turf -- in Urumqi / Wulumuqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region that occupies a huge swath of China's northwest -- we thought it was pretty good.
Maybe it was the power of local suggestion: We liked Xinjiang, and we liked Xinjiang's grapes. Our apartment shelves still groan with the huge sacks of Xinjiang raisins we brought back from the trip. (I'm eating some now.) Why not like the Xinjiang wine made from those grapes? Why not think fondly of the Taste of Urumqi? So we did.
While it might have been here all along, to me it's news that huge crates of Suntime Cabernet are on sale in the Beijing Carrefour, at 55RMB (about $7.30) a bottle. (Update: It's actually 48 RMB, a little under $6.50) It still seems pretty good.
So if you come across Suntime -- on its home territory, in greater China, or abroad -- give it a chance. And by the way: Suntime's website is only in Chinese, but even if you can't understand any of it, it's actually quite interesting as its own little taste of the Silk Road/Uighur culture of the Xinjiang U.A.R. Oddly enough, one part of the site has a tab in the upper right corner that says "English version" in Chinese (英文版 -- sort of the same idea as those airplane safety cards that say, "If you can't read these instructions, please contact the flight attendant") but I've never gotten that page to load.
December 10, 2007
Yet a little more on fiction, genre, and memory
Not to run the topic into the ground, but: following this and this on what makes fiction remember-able (subtly different from memorable) and which "genre" books achieve that goal, a little more.
- I recognize that what I'm about to say slightly undercuts my point that powerful fiction, of any sort, gets into your mind and won't get out. Still I will confess that I (ahem) forgot to mention unforgettable genre books like Ken Bruen's The Guards and related novels, from the cop-and-criminal world of Ireland. Or, Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mysteries, set in Venice. Dibdin's unrelated but remarkably creepy (and funny) The Dying of the Light is very much worth finding. Or, The Whispering Wall, by the Australian writer Patricia Carlon. (Premise: a rich old woman has had a stroke and can't talk or move, but she can hear and understand every detail of the plot being hatched by her relatives to do her in.) Or, three Japanese murder mysteries that have nothing in common except that each believably creates a sociopathic monster as the central character: Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi; Out, by Natsuo Kirino; and the recently-released The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada. Or, for a monster of a different sort, the "Ripley" books by Patricia Highsmith.
- On remember-ability in general: I am not sure how I feel about the fact that on average I can remember movies more completely and clearly than I can remember books. Take some oddball feature I saw on a Saturday afternoon as a kid --The Cardinal, let's say, an Otto Preminger potboiler from the 1960s about a Boston boy who becomes a prince of the Church.
Continue reading "Yet a little more on fiction, genre, and memory" »
December 9, 2007
Winter day in Beijing
Temperature in high 30s F, low single-digits C.
Cats keeping warm (Gongti area)
Briquette men, with charcoal for cooking and heating (East Third Ring Road)
December 8, 2007
Generally I look down on headlines with puns
because generally they're such a lazy way out. One example of a million: recently I saw a story about the sub-prime loan mess with the headline, "Can this mortgage be saved?" This was a "witty" turn on the old advice column "Can this marriage be saved?" Hardee-har! And I'm looking at one from a restaurant guide, about a Japanese place: "The seaweed is always greener." Please.
But these two, from recent issues of the Wall Street Journal (Asia edition -- don't know if they were used in the U.S.) seemed to reflect some actual effort. Cleverness, even! Especially the one at the bottom.
December 7, 2007
An interim mystery/genre fiction update
Thanks very much to the many readers who have sent in lists of the genre fiction they admire and enjoy. That's the problem with offering any list of "good mystery novels." It's like a list of "good things to do with your time." For each one you include, there are a thousand you leave off. I will probably post (and update) a list of suggestions ... although, for the reasons mentioned above, that's an open-ended challenge that maybe I should skip. In any case, three brief points:
1) I kick myself for having forgotten to mention Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, a very short book I defy anyone to forget. (High class endorsement, from Stanley Kubrick: "Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.") Also, perhaps strangely, the John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee" novels. "Strangely" because these have been so widely popular, Sidney Sheldon-style. But the character does stick in your mind -- mine, at least.
Continue reading "An interim mystery/genre fiction update" »
December 6, 2007
Good news: mystery fiction department
Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.
So I've figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later -- or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to "real" fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards. Rabbit Angstrom, Captain Ahab, and Clyde Griffiths (of An American Tragedy), to choose the first three examples that pop into my mind from American fiction.
I say that "genre" fiction, like spy and crime novels, ascends into the "real" fiction category when the world it presents can exert the same tenacious hold on your mind. (Meta point: in choosing life activities, I place a high premium on things I'm likely to remember -- new places, new activities -- because otherwise you feel you're just tearing pages off the calendar, in the way that old-time movies illustrated the passage of the years.) As I've thought about it I've been struck by how many "genre" books marvelously pass the test. For example:
December 5, 2007
Aviation buffs only: Japan-Taiwan snapshots
After the jump, several more pictures from the recent Tokyo-Okinawa-Taipei flight in a Cirrus SR22. If you're not interested in small airplanes, never mind! (All photos clickable for larger version.)
Continue reading "Aviation buffs only: Japan-Taiwan snapshots" »
December 4, 2007
Three simple points about Iran/NIE
These don't qualify as news, given no doubt voluminous discussion overnight (my time) in the U.S. Still, for my own personal record:
1) The report is unambiguously good news, of the sort we're not accustomed to receiving in recent years from that part of the world. At least it's good on the merits -- more on the politics below.
The Iran-hawks who have said that an Iranian nuke would threaten the very survival of the West should be relieved to hear that the threat is not at hand. The Iran-doves who have claimed that Iran could be turned away from the nuke path through diplomacy, delay, incentive, threat, etc should be grateful for evidence that something other than a U.S. military strike changed the Iranian leadership's mind. If an Iranian weapon would have been bad for America, for Israel, for Europe, and in the deepest sense for the Iranian people themselves, then all of those parties are now better off.
2) For nearly three years, "yes, they will" / "no, they wouldn't dare" arguments about the Bush Administration's intentions have raged within the press and among analysts. The question was whether the president and vice president might actually go ahead and order a preemptive air or land strike against Iran -- despite the absence of clear Congressional approval, despite the obvious lack of support within America's professional military, despite the overwhelming evidence that in the crudest sense a military approach could not work. I've been in the "they wouldn't dare" camp -- and have urged members of Congress to remove doubt by prohibiting use of funds toward this end. Other writers and analysts have consistently said: No, just you wait, it's coming, these guys are determined to get the job done.
December 3, 2007
Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China
Three updates! Below
The Economist.com takes at face value a silly speech by Barry Diller*, based on a silly survey, and draws silly sky-is-falling conclusions.
The headline on the Economist.com item was: "America's emobyte** deficit: China's youth surpass their American rivals online." The story opened with a quote from Diller:
:
“THE Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life,” said Barry Diller, an American media mogul, last week in a speech to students in Beijing...[Diller's data] revealed that in this arena as in so much else, China is surging ahead..
They "seem" to be way ahead? I suppose, in the same sense in which I "seem" to be way taller than Yao Ming. Both of these seem true only if you ignore the actual facts. In a million different ways China deserves to be taken very seriously. But there are only two ways in which Chinese people really do seem to be "ahead" of Americans digitally.
Continue reading "Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China" »
Continuing to acclimate!
I am in the local WuMart -- largest supermarket chain in Beijing, so I'm told, signage not that different from the nearby Wal-Mart's, motto "a dream of establishing an everlasting retail chain that Chinese people love patronizing, and that mingles with their daily lives" -- and I spot a great bargain in the wine department.
The label says "China Red Wine" in English, and 中国红葡萄酒, or "China Red Wine" in Chinese. It costs 11.8 RMB, or $1.60. I ask myself, How bad can it be?
Knowing that in this last year-plus I have often been startled by the answer to that question, I decide to wait for a while to find out. But I am curious.
December 2, 2007
Something I didn't expect to see (China, AIDS, and Bill Clinton)
This weekend's papers and TV news in China carried photos of president Hu Jintao shaking the hand of a patient at an AIDS center in Beijing:
The story from People's Daily, in Chinese, is here. The counterpart story, in English from China Daily, is here, under the headline: " President Hu: HIV/AIDS not scary." (Both papers state controlled.)
I could easily have missed it, but in a year and a half here I don't remember seeing other pictures of high Chinese officials actually touching people with HIV/AIDS. Yes, Princess Diana did this twenty years ago in England; and, yes, this summer Hu Jintao had been featured in similar sincere and natural-looking (to me) interactions with mentally-handicapped athletes at the Special Olympics in Shanghai. And, yes, China has been through various stages of denial about its AIDS problems. (Update: I am told that Hu had a similar publicized handshake with an AIDS patient several years ago.)
Continue reading "Something I didn't expect to see (China, AIDS, and Bill Clinton)" »
What was I thinking (Tommy Lee Jones update)
It must have been the travel blear of the Beijing-Tokyo flight, but I missed the obvious point about the Tommy Lee Jones "Boss" advertising campaign mentioned earlier. Here we truly have a case of life imitating art. Jones is living out the fictional role portrayed by Bill Murray in every gaijin's favorite movie about Japan, Lost in Translation:
I realize that Murray's role was itself art imitating life, based on countless Japanese ad campaigns by foreign celebrities. But Jones's "Boss" presentation does seem to owe something to Murray's "Bob Harris" in the movie. Thanks to Eric Redman for pointing out the connection. I'm sure that he, like me, remembers that Lost had another main character "Charlotte." Of course the homage to a great movie could not have gone that far, but it's interesting to think about.
December 1, 2007
Media problems in two countries: Part I, China
Two weeks ago I mentioned the difference that a VPN from WiTopia.net had made in my internet life in China. (VPN details below.*)
A few days later, a Chinese blogger named Ruan Yifeng mentioned my report on his own blog, and went on to discuss other ways Chinese users could deal with the internet filters collectively known as the Great FireWall (GFW). The original Chinese version of his post is here; a translation by the indispensable Roland Soong** of Hong Kong, on his ZonaEuropa/ESWN blog, is here; just for the hell of it, an auto-translated version via Google's online translation tools is here. It's very interesting to compare this with Soong's native-speaker, hand-crafted version.
Two days ago, Ruan Yifeng said that he had been reported to the authorities for putting such subversive information on the internet. (Original Chinese version here; Roland Soong's translation here; Google auto-translate version here.) From the ESWN version:
I just found out today that someone had just reported my "Methods of bypassing the Great Firewall of China" to the China Internet Illegal and Harmful Information Reporting Center.
I cannot help but say: Fuck, what a stupid jerk! No wonder someone said: When there is a shameless, disgusting government, there will necessarily be shameless, disgusting people.
(The auto-translate version of the second sentence is: "I really could not contain himself: damn, really such a SB!")
Ruan Yifeng says that Baidu (China's leading search engine, with a huge lead here over Google) has already filtered out his site, and "it is a matter of time when government filtering occurs." His whole saga is very much worth reading at Soong's site, for what it says about control on expression in China -- and the spirit of those trying to work their way around it. For instance, Ruan Yifeng directs his real fury not at the censors who implement the GFW but at the Chinese fellow citizen who informed on him:
"It is the existence of people like you that makes people despair about this country."
Continue reading "Media problems in two countries: Part I, China" »
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