Workroom

Florence Price, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America: II. His Resignation and Faith.

Writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed by my colleague Ignasi Gozalo. In about 10 minutes, he offers a masterful ristretto with some of the skills or qualities that any scholar should have. For example, a sense of empathy–moving away from moral vanity as a starting point; a sense of scale–connecting specific topics with broader issues; a sense of literariness–using narrative as a way to fight for attention. Or the ambition for complexity–allocating the time/extension that complicated problems deserve:

I like complicated subjects, I usually have a lot to say. So something like Tik Tok is very hard for me. I have children (…) and for them if you can do it in a minute you are going on too long. And that’s a scary thought for me because the truth is that life is complicated and sometimes it takes some time to explain a complex issue. 

In this interview, Professor Carles Boix offers the best synthesis of the typical European paternalistic view of (or blindness to) what is going on across the Atlantic. To the question “What do we read wrong about Trump, from Europe?,” he answers:

You don’t look at yourselves enough. The very same forces that are behind Trump exist in Europe. And, truth be told, I would say they are even worse. Because Europe hasn’t grown as much. And because Europeans are much more ethnic in their conception of nationhood than Americans.

Delighted to have been part of the doctoral thesis committee that today evaluated Inventando Filipinas: Discurso colonial en la literatura española de finales del siglo XIX (1876-1894) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Even more delighted to have acted, a few years ago now, as academic matchmaker between Cristina Guillén, the thesis author, and my colleague Rocío Ortuño, one of the thesis co-directors, during one of our ALTER seminars.

Reading: Jeremy Tiang, State of Emergency (2017).

Ann Patchett, The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret:

Because I do regret email. Even though I’ve turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.

(…) I’m a fairly disciplined person. Most novelists are. I’ve turned my email off for certain hours of the day. I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.

If Marcelo Bielsa were an academic, what kind of academic would he be?

I always thought that my basketball wisdom would end up being useful for work as well: Yan Zhuang, Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy.

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline.

Wonderful visit to the exhibition Xiulant el temps at the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món. The exhibition includes an intervention that has (temporally) modified one of the museum’s rooms. It has been curated by our ALTER colleague María Íñigo, who gave us a superb guided tour with plenty of critical thoughts about contemporary museology.

Crazy days. Still in full rebound effect after a couple of weeks mostly away from admin tasks… Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988: Var. 5, performed by Víkingur Ólafsson.

This summer, the Catalan skyrunner Kilian Jornet completed one of his greatest challenges: he connected the 82 4,000-meter peaks of the Alps in just 19 days. I wonder if anyone asked him if on his way from Mont Blanc to Gran Paradiso he made this or that detour, or if he visited this or that typical spot.

When I go to a conference or on a short, intensive research trip, I always get asked these kinds of questions. Academic tourism has done a great disservice to our profession. It is probably all well deserved: scholars have been very persistent about it. I remember my frustration when I served on committees that allocated department travel funds and found, year after year, applications to travel to cool and trendy places to present the same old (tweaked) paper… This has probably made me overconscious. And so when I go somewhere for work, I basically spend all my time working.

Reading: Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island (2016).

At Mollie Used Books NTU: Anacole Daalderop, Strings Across Moon. 

Gave a talk at National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature.  Very grateful to Prof. Chi Ta-wei for inviting me–and to all those who attended and shared questions and comments!

Humanity’s progress can probably also be defined by small, apparently insignificant details. For example, eduroam.

I never had the chance to take Comp Lit 285 with Professor Heim. I remember him as an imposing presence, but always giving me a friendly, civil nod when we passed each other in the hallway. And I also remember seeing him reading while walking around campus!

After reading The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, I discovered his activist side. And I regret it even more not having taken his graduate workshop in literary translation.

I’m not quite sure his contribution to PEN (now the PEN/Heim Translation Fund) is sufficiently well known–even if, as Esther Allen explains in her chapter, he precisely wanted to keep it unknown…

He got straight to the point. He was concerned about the paucity of literary translation into English and admired the various initiatives PEN’s Translation Committee had taken to address that situation. Accordingly, he and his wife Priscilla had decided to donate $500,000 to establish a fund at PEN to support literary translation into English. He said this in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, with a hint of embarrassment. My mind went blank. The PEN staffers weren’t entirely sure they’d understood. He had to repeat himself.

There was, he quickly added, one stipulation: the donation was to be absolutely anonymous. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, ever, about having given away this money. No one was to know he and Priscilla were the donors. We all must be wondering, he continued evenly, taking in the expressions on our faces with some sympathy, how a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and his wife were able to make such a donation. He explained: the money came from a death benefit the U.S. government had paid his mother when his father—a Hungarian-born composer who enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II—died following an accident at a military base. Heim was a toddler at the time and had little memory of his father. The family had invested the money when it came in and left it to grow in the decades since. Mike had recently turned sixty, and he and Priscilla had decided this was what they wanted to do with it.

That was how I learned that Michael Henry Heim was an activist.

September and back in Barcelona–these days our very own overcrowded blend between Venice, Las Vegas, and Tijuana.

I found this recent piece by Michael Kimmelman on cities hosting the Olympics quite helpful to understand the roots of what is going on now in Barcelona and why we are squirting tourists with water pistols.

In truth, Barcelona’s makeover started years before the city bid on the Games. During the late ’70s, after the death of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, civic leaders devised an urban-renewal scheme for a newly democratic, independent-minded capital of Catalonia. With a potential Olympic bid in mind, they began during the ’80s to remake Barcelona’s railway system, airport and seafront. These and other changes, accelerated by the deadline for the Games, turned the city into a wealthy European gem and tourist mecca.

But at a cost. Low-income housing gave way to luxury hotels and high-end development. It’s no coincidence that American-style suburbs began proliferating on the edges of Barcelona during the years following the Olympics, catering to families seeking more affordable homes and fleeing the mobs and mosh pits along the Ramblas and the seafront. Thousands of Barcelonians, fed up with a housing shortage, the rising cost of living and overcrowding, took to the streets this month, squirting tourists with water pistols and toting signs telling visitors: “You are not welcome.”

Another very good piece recently published on the topic is Lisa Abend’s ‘The Demand Is Unstoppable’: Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism?: 

“Now there are drunk tourists peeing on our neighbor’s doorstep.” For anyone hoping to understand the complicated contours of overtourism in Barcelona, the Carmel Bunkers is a good place to start. The frustrations experienced by those who live nearby apply to other hot spots: residents of the Gothic Quarter who feel displaced by the crowds; pollution along the waterfront where massive cruise ships dock; and everywhere, it seems, an apparent disregard for local culture.

Reading: Ge Yan, Elsewhere (2023).

Pio Abad, To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum. Absolutely fascinating project. Info here and great video here. My favorite artwork of the exhibition: “1897.76.36.18.6”–a set of black and white drawings showing bronzes (from the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897) next to contemporary everyday objects. For example:

Ann L. Cunliffe, “Wayfaring: A Scholarship of Possibilities or Let’s not get drunk on abstraction“:

Those of us doing non-mainstream work find ourselves in a paradoxical situation—on the one hand we are exhorted by journal editors to be “original”, “insightful”, “curious”, “theoretically radical”, and “fresh” (all adjectives taken from well-known journal mission statements) and told by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2015: 2) that “Excellent social science needs people with the skills, curiosity and creativity to be truly innovative…”. Yet in my experience we are facing the opposite—a narrowing of scholarship through increasing normalization.

In a way, Cunliffe’s claim resonates with a recent discussion about the contrast between the macro, bombastic, paradigm-shifting claims in introductions that are then followed by micro, rigid, formalistic developments in the chapters–a fracture probably due to the inflation rhetoric of book and grant proposals in a competitive system.

Oculus by Tim Cornbill:

Best article explaining what happens when scholars working in Chinese/Sinophone studies reveal their job at any kind of social gathering–and then everybody feels legitimate to say this and teach you that about your own stuff: Andrew Keh, No, You Can’t Beat an Olympic Table Tennis Player.

Coincidence: reading le Carré at home this week, plus visited the exhibition Write Cut Rewrite at the Weston Library–which includes samples of his manuscripts, cut and pasted (literally: chunks cut with scissors and then taped together somewhere else). And then today I discovered this mysterious pile next to the books I ordered at the Bodleian.

Intrigue: is the fellow who picks up stuff next to me working on le Carré, having a super summer, or is there something else? (Then I sensed that someone was following me. I quickly turned back. But there were only shadows.)

Reading: John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

Lunched with a revered colleague. We discovered we often ask ourselves the same question: What should we do when a student inquires about embarking on a PhD and future academic career given the meager job market and future perspectives?

I first felt somehow relieved to know that we share the same ethical dilemma in these situations. But then I quickly realized that, if someone based at such a prestigious institution feels that way too, the situation is really really sad.

Can’t stop browsing: Adrian Tomine, New York Drawings.

Great news from home! Our ALTER proposal for a collective research project on Chinese and Sinophone transitions around the 1980s has been successful and will be funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. This is a highly competitive call, so we are all ecstatic. Super happy to share the project’s co-PI role with my colleague Carles Brasó. Can’t wait to begin working with the team–about fifteen scholars from different Catalan and Spanish universities. Great motivation for the days ahead at the library this summer.

Family visit to the exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon at the Weston Library. An excellent opportunity to explain the meaning of the (unfortunately very frequent) adjective Kafkian to the kids…

Writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s profile by Steven Erlange.  On living in East Germany before 1989:

In fact, she said, there was a “kind of freedom” in East Germany, where the ideology of equality meant less stress, competition and greed, and where there was comparatively little to strive for in a society that had only a few options for consumer goods.

“There are some kinds of freedom that you wouldn’t expect to have surrounded by a wall, but it’s also a freedom not to be forced to expose yourself and shout out all the time about how important you are and what you have reached, to sell yourself,” she said.

Kevin R. McClure and Barrett J. Taylor, The Hollowing Out of Higher Education.

Doris Santoro, a philosopher of education at Bowdoin College, has researched demoralization among teachers for over a decade. She noted that teaching is morally rewarding when “educators feel they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves.” Demoralization happens when “the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards (…) are now inaccessible. In the same vein, public policy has rendered many public institutions shells of their former selves. It’s harder for academic workers to do right by our students and colleagues.

Reading: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011).

Thrilled: Rosario Hubert and myself presented our books in Barcelona. As Rosario says, Disoriented Disciplines and Secondhand China are first cousins! It was therefore great to hold this joint presentation–a very special event for both of us. We were honored to have Nora Catelli and Bernat Castany as brilliant discussants and many good friends in the audience.

Days of feeling tired and distressed. Found some energy back in a wonderful biographical interview to Natalie Zemon Davis in the volume Visions of History. Particularly when she talks about vocation–and going beyond the profession’s trivialities that end up causing that distress:

Young people need to get jobs. People have to have a place in which to teach. There is a workplace. But as I said to my colleague Carl Schorske when I came to Princeton, “You know, I really think of myself in a calling or vocation” (…) And although the word intellectual is perhaps more appropriate for his generation than for mine, I’m more comfortable thinking of myself as an intellectual. The only trouble with the word is that it doesn’t suggest the artisanal side of the historian’s work identity. But I’m more comfortable with intellectual than professional and with vocation rather than career. A career has a certain fixed curve that the profession decides–when you get your honors and so on. I don’t think those are totally unimportant. There are certain rituals you need in order to know what a field is and where it’s going. You need elder statesmen and stateswomen who can stand for something. I’m not trying to do away with all ritual or structure, but I’m saying that you’ve got to see beyond it. If there’s nothing beyond it, it’s not worth it to me. Life is really more than our little ponds.

Happy to have participated in LASA2024. I shared a panel with Maria Montt Strabucchi and Brenda Rupar: “China desde el mundo hispanoamericano: Influencias, lecturas y representaciones.” Maria and Brenda were in Bogotá, while I joined them online from Barcelona.  We exchanged impressions about our books–all published recently.

Hectic days, weeks. Mid June, still… Nino Rota, Concerto for Harp and Orchestra: III. Allegro. 

Very honored to have hosted Chi Ta-wei at UOC. Interesting discussion with him and Alberto Poza about translation, academia, creation, and activism. And about The Membranes–particularly about Alberto’s Spanish version, Membranas, recently published by Egales.

Reading: Adam Brookes, Night Heron (2014).

Moderated an inspiring roundtable on research careers as part of UOC’s Doctoral Day. I could ask one of my favorite questions on the topic: How to juggle the different dimensions involved in an academic career–which require different temporalities too? Strategy and vision (looking ahead) with everyday groundwork such as reading, writing, fieldwork (right here, right now). Not easy–not only for PhD students but also for faculty.

Interesting experiences about alternative pathways across industry and academia–or a “third space”, which I guess has now become less alternative and more mainstream…

Hélène Grimaud at Palau de la Música. Bis: Valentin Silvestrov, Bagatelle III

Collective reading at La Central in memory of Paul Auster, who died on April 30.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. (Winter Journal)

Speaking of academic fraudsters, I’m afraid that in Spain we have our very own versions of them–less ironically sophisticated. And, no doubt, accepted with a very different degree of tolerance. See for example the case of Juan Manuel Corchado–who, by the way, was recently elected Chancellor of the Universidad de Salamanca:

Las trampas de Corchado eran muy burdas. Hacía resúmenes de sus conferencias, añadía una cantidad hiperbólica de autocitas y los subía al repositorio científico de su universidad. El catedrático sabía que el motor de búsqueda de Google Académico detectaba esos documentos y los tenía en cuenta para elaborar sus indicadores, según los cuales Corchado es uno de los expertos en inteligencia artificial más citados del mundo. En un texto de dos páginas de una conferencia en Chennai (India), se citó a sí mismo 200 veces. En otra charla para la Universidad de Tecnología de Malasia, Corchado incluyó más de 150 autocitas. El profesor también subía al repositorio seudoestudios científicos, como un documento de cuatro párrafos sobre la covid con un centenar de referencias a sí mismo. Justo cuando EL PAÍS comenzó a preguntar a su entorno por estas prácticas, Corchado ejecutó un borrado masivo de sus publicaciones más controvertidas.

Andrew Gelman, How Academic Fraudsters Get Away With It:

In recent reporting in the Chronicle, Stephanie M. Lee describes how “a famous study about a clever way to prompt honest behavior was retracted due to an ironic revelation: It relied on fraudulent data.” The author of the retracted study also wrote a book titled, appropriately, Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life.

Examples of this particular irony are more numerous than might be expected. The disgraced primatologist March Hauser wrote a book originally called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. The psychologist Dan Ariely, who was forced to retract an article containing faked data, and who has promoted a company making fishy claims about insurance algorithms, wrote a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially to Ourselves. He even participated in a radio show called Everybody Lies, and That’s Not Always A Bad Thing, in which he gave this amazing-in-retrospect quote to the ever-credulous hosts at National Public Radio: “What separates honest people from not-honest people is not necessarily character, it’s opportunity. (…) The surprising thing for a rational economist would be: why don’t we cheat more?”

What’s going on?

A few weeks ago I was invited by Silvia Fustegueres and Mireia Vargas to talk about Regresar a China at the podcast L’any de la rata. The episode is now available.

We recorded the episode right after Diada de Sant Jordi–the Day of Books and Roses. It was fun to talk about Lu Xun, Lao She and Qian Zhongshu on such an appropriate date…

Following the evolution of Canada’s experiment (?) with immigration: Amanda Coletta, Canada bet big on immigration. Now it’s hitting the brakes.

Reading: Roser Cabré-Verdiell, Aioua (2022).

Just attended the workshop “Legacies of Chinese Labour in Latin America and the Caribbean” organized by Harriet Evans and Hans Steinmüller at the London School of Economics. A very energizing couple of days!

Two organizational highlights. First, it was great to focus the sessions on discussion. We were asked to give minimal presentations (no slides!) and so we had ample time for questions, comments–an actual conversation. Second, it was particularly stimulating to share ideas and discuss with scholars from many different geographies and institutional contexts. I wish all academic conferences had the same arrangement and composition.

Today I led a session on Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak at the book club organized by the Confucius Institute in Madrid. We discussed Miguel Ángel Petrecca’s translation: El invisible, published by Adriana Hidalgo in 2016.

I love sessions in book clubs–always full of passionate and very sophisticated readers. So I am very grateful to the audience for their comments and questions. And to my colleague Andreas Janousch for the invitation.

Here is also an interview related to the session–in which I “reveal the secrets of a literary giant” (sic)!

Old interview with Kou Aizhe, creator and host of podcast 故事FM. Found that his way of understanding the relation between team and company is fairly similar to what has been our research group’s philosophy so far:

We’re not a team that’s building a company — we’re building a company to support a team.

Working on a talk on Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak I will be giving at the Confucius Institute in Madrid later this month. I plan to offer a summary of Ge Fei’s trajectory–great opportunity to submerge again in his fascinating early works.

Reading: Iñaki Uriarte, Diarios (2019).

Easter Holiday. Rest, finally. Max Richter, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons: Spring 1

Cal Newport, To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality:

The problem with the virtual factory, however, goes beyond the fact that it makes us unhappy. It’s also ineffective. The process of producing value with the human brain — the foundational activity of many knowledge sector roles — cannot be forced into a regular, unvarying schedule. Intense periods of cognition must be followed by quieter periods of mental rejuvenation. Energized creative breakthroughs must be supported by the slower incubation of new ideas.

Very honored to have participated in the Humanities in Transition seminar at Tejidos Conjuntivos, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Part of my talk was about “work” in academia. I mentioned some of the meaningless dimensions that now characterize our profession. Inspired by the artistic setting, I included a pseudo-performative feature: a hoax article made of 8,031 words–the exact amount of words that we had used in all the emails exchanged in relation to the bureaucratic preparation of the session…

The only letdown was unrelated to my talk–and related to architecture. I was able to wander inside the Nouvel Building, which I had never visited. I found it disproportionate, megalomaniacal–meaningless too.

Reading intensively on 1980s culture fever in China. Going back to Jing Wang’s High Culture Fever. (Coincidentally, caught a high fever myself.)

Christopher Lupke on C.T. Hsia’s strategies of reading and mentorship:

I would relay [Hsia’s] advice to any graduate student: Read widely and outside your field. Yes, it will slow you down somewhat, but it will give you contextual insight into your own specialization. (…) Hsia urged me to take afternoons and find a comfortable spot in the library where nobody would disturb me and read whole novels or chunks of novels, which I did and continue to do so.

Just when we are in the middle of an institutional nonsensical switch from “skills” to “learning outcomes” that will involve tons of nonsensical paperwork, I come across Gayle Greene, The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning Outcomes’.

“If I’d wanted this kind of crap, I could have gone into business and be making money.”

Reading: Belén Gopegui, Existiríamos el mar (2021)

Margaret Hillenbrand’s fascinating On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China. The impossibility of giving up working. A much larger and less fancy collective than tangping–and with much less media coverage, no doubt.

This is exactly the processual glitch that Hao Jingfang nails elegantly in Folding Beijing via her conceit of temporal warehousing—the notion that people can be put to sleep or placed in cold storage until the voodoo of market forces animates their insensible beings for drudgery once again. The difficulty, of course, is that real life is not sci-fi—not quite yet, anyway—and those who have been consigned to zombie citizenship cannot simply be magicked in and out of visibility. As such, they terrorize the fantasy of social harmony in the era of the Chinese dream.

Department workshop on research transfer–and dissemination, impact, exploitation, valorization, public engagement, outreach, knowledge exchange, etc., in the humanities.

I always think that teaching is the most obvious way of transfering research and knowledge to society. And I always wonder why teaching remains out of the equation’s semantics. Then a colleague provides a practical answer: universities measure teaching by its own metrics.

Notes that will stay in my head for weeks after today’s concert: Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47: III. Largo.

Still reading for the session I mentioned at Tejidos Conjuntivos. Got caught in David Ownby’s translation of Xiang Biao’s conversations with Wu Qi: Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World. Also listened to Xiang’s quite inspirational interview with Suvi Rautio in the NBN.

Just started in my new role as Director of the PhD program in Humanities and Communication. Looking forward to serve in this new institutional position. And, above all, very excited to learn more about–and help in–the different projects that our graduate students are carrying out.

Reading: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Heim (1984).

I tend to be quite reserved in class and didn’t share my recent promotion to full professor with my students. But somehow they found out–and at the end of today’s session a warm round of applause erupted and a bouquet of flowers suddenly emerged! I was so caught off guard that didn’t know what to say. And I only thought about taking a group thank you photo when they had already left the classroom… I went back home in levitation.

I tend to be quite reserved in this workroom too and hesitated sharing this anecdote. But I think it deserves to be known that there are also bright moments in dark academia.

Preparing a session for the Humanities in Transition seminar at Tejidos Conjuntivos, a program in critical museology, artistic research and cultural studies organized by the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in March. I will co-lead the session with my colleague Joana Pujadas.

The topic for our session is “to work”. I will organize my part around the idea of giving up work. I will try to connect two cases: the tangping movement and the academic quit lit. So I’m now warming up reading Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs–the full book based on the shorter piece that caught my attention back in 2018.

Alexander Borodin, String Quartet No. 2 in D, Notturno: Andante

Beth McMurtrie, AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing:

In doing so, they say, academics must also recognize that this initial public reaction says as much about our darkest fears for higher education as it does about the threats and promises of a new technology. In this vision, college is a transactional experience where getting work done has become more important than challenging ourselves to learn. Assignments and assessments are so formulaic that nobody could tell if a computer completed them. And faculty members are too overworked to engage and motivate their students.

Reading: Domenico Starnone, Ties, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri (2016).

My public defense for the promotion to full professorship went very well. I did my best to summarize my academic career so far and present a new research project to be developed in the coming years. I was very well accompanied by colleagues and family. And the commission was very kind. What else can you ask for?

Dmitri Shostakovich, The Counterplan, Op. 33: III: Song of the Counterplan

Quick quote from Agnes Callard’s inspiring piece, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is:

Humanists are not alone in their ignorance about the purpose of their disciplines. Mathematicians or economists or biologists might mutter something about practical applications of their work, but very few serious scholars confine their research to some narrow pragmatic agenda. The difference between the humanists and the scientists is simply that scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist, because the society at large believes itself to already have the answer to that question. If physics were constantly out to justify itself, it would become politicized, too, and physicists would also start spouting pious platitudes about how physics enriches your life.

(…) The task of humanists is to invite, to welcome, to entice, to excite, to engage. And when we let ourselves be ourselves, when we allow the humanistic spirit that animates us to flow out not only into our classrooms but also in our public-self presentation, we find we don’t need to defend or prove anything: We are irresistible.

Working on my public defense for the position of full professor. It will take place just before the Christmas break. The assessment conventionally includes the candidate’s academic and research records and a proposal prepared ad hoc for the occasion.

Since the setup is quite similar to that of an oral PhD thesis defense, I find myself returning to the 4 sage pieces of advice that a colleague offered me long ago, which I have since then passed down to other colleagues and PhD students–and which now boomerang back to me…

Very happy to share that our Catalan translation of Victor Segalen’s René Leys has just been published by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor!

Reading: Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016).

A week full of exciting ALTER seminars by visiting scholars… that, sadly, I could not attend… But I am very happy to learn that the sessions with David Ownby, Xin Fan and Yan He were super interesting and productive. Plus, David was very kind to refer to us in his newsletter and blogs as “wonderful people” and as “friendly,” “engaging,” and even “young”!

Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48: VII. In Paradisum

Just discovered this–the latest influence of contemporary Chinese poetry in Barcelona, very close to our place.

Reading: Hervé Le Tellier, L’anomalie (2020).

From Jacques Berlinerblau’s They’ve Been Scheming to Cut Tenure for Years. It’s Happening, I clipboard:

We also became aware of “administrative bloat”, or the mushrooming of an academic labor force whose mission was neither teaching nor research. A number of upper admins were hired to manage — some might say “rule” — the faculty. Some of those who accepted this task were scholars themselves. A novel hybrid creature, the everlasting tenured admin, was sparked to life. No three-year stint as vice dean and back to teaching freshman composition, for this guy! He was in it for the long haul.

The significance of this development is underappreciated. The decisions which ravaged the future for coming generations of Ph.D.s were made not just by consultants and suits, but by those with Ph.D.s and likely a few peer-reviewed publications. This was scholar-on-scholar violence.

Why is our vocation so vulnerable to fratricide? Maybe spending a doctoral decade in a moldy archive doesn’t heighten your sense of empathy. Maybe repeatedly venting your spleen as anonymous Reviewer Number 2 doesn’t sharpen your sense of solidarity. Maybe class consciousness can’t blossom when our final work products are, in many disciplines, solo recitals.

Reading: Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (2018).

Speaking of which: three things that I particularly liked in The Double Education of My Twins’ Chinese School, Peter Hessler’s piece on education in Chinese primary schools in The New Yorker:

First, the confidence of Chinese teachers, the respect they inspire. “The dignity with which they carried themselves”.

Second, the confidence of Chinese schools. “The fact that nobody cared what I liked—along with every other Baba and Mama, I was welcome to flush any nervous parental energy down the whirlpool of WeChat”. Of course, this can be controversial, etc. But it does sound refreshing when clientelism is taking over many school systems.

Third, unrelated to education, the actual impossibility of the in between (of combining cultures, systems–or, in my case, professional realities) that ends up making it necessary to have two lives:

Like many people with experience in both China and the United States, we wanted something in between. But each country had a tendency toward extremes, and deeply entrenched systems resisted reform. Solutions tended to be at the individual level, like the classmate whose parents sent her overseas every summer. In order to combine the strengths of both places, it seemed necessary to have two lives, two educations, two names.

Katie Kadou, The End of the Star System:

A few weeks after I got back from EI [the English Institute], I asked on Twitter whether anyone thought the “academic star system” still existed. “I feel like it does, but when once it was measured by adjacency to the English Institute or MLA presidency, it is now measured by adjacency to The New Yorker,” suggested Gus Stadler, a professor of English at Haverford College.

Loretta Lou interviewed David Graeber at Made in China Journal:

Question: The spiritual violence of doing nothing in a bullshit job seems to be the inverse of the labour exploitation we see among workers doing precarious ‘shit jobs’ in the casualised gig economy (for instance, university cleaners; Amazon workers being fired for not working fast enough, etc.). Are these two phenomena linked somehow?

Answer: There is an enormous culture of ‘lean and mean’ in the corporate world, but that is applied almost exclusively to blue-collar workers, not to white-collar ones, where the opposite logic applies. I always go back to the example of the Elephant Tea factory near Marseille, which illustrates for me a lot of what has been happening since the 1970s: in this case, workers improved the machinery and increased productivity steadily over the years. In the 1950s or 1960s, this would have led to increases in pay—there was basically an understanding that if productivity goes up, workers get a share of the increased profits—or perhaps hiring more workers, but since it was the 1990s, the boss just hired more and more white-collar workers. At first, there had been only two: the boss and a human resources manager. Suddenly the catwalks were full of guys in suits, three, four, five, ultimately maybe a dozen of them, wandering around with clipboards watching people work, basically trying to figure out some kind of excuse for their existence. They tried to concoct schemes for greater efficiency but the place was already about as efficient as it could be. They held meetings and seminars and conferences and read each other’s reports. Finally, they decided: well, we can just fire everyone and move the plant to Poland! The place has been in occupation ever since.

Elated to see this published! En el país de los chinos is the result of a very long collective project. All chapters have been written by ALTER members after a meticulous process of collaborative thinking and writing under Xavier Ortells-Nicolau’s superb editorial guidance. We are all super proud of this publication!

We hope the book will show the richness that underlies the interactions between China and Spain–both at the empirical, theoretical, and methodological levels. Our final goal is that the book becomes a helpful tool for future researchers on these topics. So each chapter includes a specific section with potential research lines waiting to be explored.

And, bonus track: the Archivo China-España includes now a special itinerary with a selection of materials that supplement each chapters’s content.

Early September: moving vigorously, but not too quickly. Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D Major: II: Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schell

Reading: John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).

Back home. It has been a very productive stay. Since I was a bit lost and was sensing a certain lack of direction in my reading and thinking, I decided to write a research proposal to myself. It was a very good exercise. Now I have 10,000 words with some questions and potential claims to be (hopefully) developed in the near future.

I will take a couple of weeks off. I feel a bit bad when I change the auto-response from “Thank you for your message. I am working intensively on two research projects. Unless your message needs an urgent response…” to “I am currently away from work until… I will reply to your message on…” But since vacation is important I still push myself to do it.