LINKS
I have added new links to the right.
The first two new additions were linked one day from Chinabounder's (now defunct, or at least invitation-only) Sex in Shanghai blog (see post below, 8/19/06). They were advertised as endlessly more informative or interesting than the Chinabounder blog itself, and judging from what I've read, I have to agree. Chinese--Beyond the Textbook is a truly useful site for anyone learning Chinese or (especially) living in China. One of the difficulties of learning any language is learning the most common expressions or phrases that don't end up in your textbook or your teacher's lesson plan. Without the system of cognates to rely on for an English-speaker, Chinese can get particularly exclusive at this point. This blog seems to seek out the most practical and at the same time foreboding Chinese knowledge, and present it with technical and technological accuracy to the Chinese afficionado.
If Chinabounder is, as some reports have claimed, the creation of a group of performance artists somewhere between Andy Kaufman and Howard Stern, Fanfusuzi 凡夫俗子 is a site by an artist (or artists) engaged in China with an interest in challenging without alienating its readers. Consider its masthead slogan, China in English: perception is an act of translation. We also use what we cannot understand. The result is a panopticon of surreal essays ("The secret to travel in China," my dad said to me when I first went in 1995, supplanting André Breton's Mexico with my own China, "is to accept the surreal as the real.") about what confronts the foreigner in China. The most recent post at the moment settles on the parallel between urban planning and learning to read.
wood s lot was shown to me by a contributor to CipherJournal whose piece had been linked from this literary link log. What many blogs seem to be for the political intelligencia, linking to news and political analysis around the (English-speaking) web, wood s lot is for readers of poetry: links to some of the best literary writing around.
The fact that wood s lot and Damn the Caesars, along with its concomitant blog, contain, link to, and publish a grand overlap of writers that I read, publish, and know, is a strike against my earlier trepidations about the validity, let alone advisability, of a community of literary outsiders. For a long time I resisted notions of the post-avant, say, against the School of Quietude, as divisive or partisan and so forth. But as my understanding of politics grew, so did my understanding of the non-textual aspects of literature: community is important--it may in fact be why we read at all--and Rich Owens, editor and blogger of Damn the Caesars, seems to understand that.
The following two additions, Labor Notes and LabourStart, were additions acquired from the Damn the Caesars links page, and while I haven't perused them yet, I am glad to see another hint of literature and labor concerned about each other.
I have added new links to the right.
The first two new additions were linked one day from Chinabounder's (now defunct, or at least invitation-only) Sex in Shanghai blog (see post below, 8/19/06). They were advertised as endlessly more informative or interesting than the Chinabounder blog itself, and judging from what I've read, I have to agree. Chinese--Beyond the Textbook is a truly useful site for anyone learning Chinese or (especially) living in China. One of the difficulties of learning any language is learning the most common expressions or phrases that don't end up in your textbook or your teacher's lesson plan. Without the system of cognates to rely on for an English-speaker, Chinese can get particularly exclusive at this point. This blog seems to seek out the most practical and at the same time foreboding Chinese knowledge, and present it with technical and technological accuracy to the Chinese afficionado.
If Chinabounder is, as some reports have claimed, the creation of a group of performance artists somewhere between Andy Kaufman and Howard Stern, Fanfusuzi 凡夫俗子 is a site by an artist (or artists) engaged in China with an interest in challenging without alienating its readers. Consider its masthead slogan, China in English: perception is an act of translation. We also use what we cannot understand. The result is a panopticon of surreal essays ("The secret to travel in China," my dad said to me when I first went in 1995, supplanting André Breton's Mexico with my own China, "is to accept the surreal as the real.") about what confronts the foreigner in China. The most recent post at the moment settles on the parallel between urban planning and learning to read.
wood s lot was shown to me by a contributor to CipherJournal whose piece had been linked from this literary link log. What many blogs seem to be for the political intelligencia, linking to news and political analysis around the (English-speaking) web, wood s lot is for readers of poetry: links to some of the best literary writing around.
The fact that wood s lot and Damn the Caesars, along with its concomitant blog, contain, link to, and publish a grand overlap of writers that I read, publish, and know, is a strike against my earlier trepidations about the validity, let alone advisability, of a community of literary outsiders. For a long time I resisted notions of the post-avant, say, against the School of Quietude, as divisive or partisan and so forth. But as my understanding of politics grew, so did my understanding of the non-textual aspects of literature: community is important--it may in fact be why we read at all--and Rich Owens, editor and blogger of Damn the Caesars, seems to understand that.
The following two additions, Labor Notes and LabourStart, were additions acquired from the Damn the Caesars links page, and while I haven't perused them yet, I am glad to see another hint of literature and labor concerned about each other.
posted by Lucas at 10:29 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home