Workroom

In the past few weeks I’ve been asked many times to share impressions or recommend readings about China and coronavirus and the virus and them over there and now  the virus and us right here and etcetera. Mostly I have directed them to the mandarin button and to Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin…

Martin Landquist, Gordon & Paddy theme.

Getting into a mood of anticipation. Similar to the mood brilliantly described by Yan Lianke a couple of months ago in China: When the epidemic ends, let our memories live:

In the predictable near future, as the nation celebrates its victory against this national battle that is the Covid-19 with music and song, I hope that we will not become empty and hollow writers who echo along, but people who are simply living authentically with our own memories.

Reading: Josep Pla, El quadern gris (1966).

‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide. In Barcelona we’ve had our own share of fellow citizens moving to their vacation properties in the countryside…

Still, a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

Terrific piece by Nick Admussen here. One of the best things I’ve read in the past few days. First paragraph:

As cases of Covid-19 spread and we begin a period of social distancing, I want to give you my argument for continuing to do the two things university was designed for: to read and to write. Colleges often present themselves to students as a package excursion for youth: open quadrangles, energetic friends and lovers, deep conversation, light beer, live music, parties. It is that, and much more. Yet my colleagues and I didn’t become literature professors – we didn’t become literate – by going to class. We learned what we know in rooms that lacked conversation, friends, and open doors.

Getting adjusted to this new situation. I read this Twitter thread from Aisha Ahmad. I find it very helpful. She later expands this thread in an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure. The article, though, does not mention what, for me, was perhaps the most important advice given in the Twitter thread: simplify, minimize, focus on the most basic and important things:

Third, any work that can be simplified, minimized, and flushed: FLUSH IT. Don’t design a fancy new online course. It will suck & you will burn out. Choose the simplest solution for you & your students, with min admin. Focus on getting students feeling empowered & engaged.

Rachmaninoff, Moments Musicaux, Op.16

Yesterday was the last day of school before lockdown. So the  kids are at home today when I leave for work. I take the train to UAB–I’m a committee member in a dissertation oral defense that has not been canceled. The campus is still open but there are no students around. At the end of the defense, the candidate, who has just come back from China, offers each member of the committee a few masks as a substitute for the cheese and wine traditionally offered by candidates at the end of defenses in Spain.

Carl Stamitz, Viola Concerto in D Major, Op.1

Anna Kornbluh on academic service in this interesting conversation, here:

I can’t believe that people don’t want to understand the conditions of their own work. There’s this terrible feminization of service, but there’s also the mischaracterization of it as not intellectual. Building a curriculum, inventing a gen-ed curriculum: Those are profoundly intellectual things. So one wants to be careful of upholding that divide.

I’m not quite sure that most of the tasks related to academic service that are part of my daily routine could be considered profoundly intellectual. But I promise I will give it some thought.

Reading: Emma Cline, The Girls (2016)

While I am driving to Reus for the book presentation, the news report the first coronavirus case in Catalonia. The presentation goes well and I am happy to meet again with friends and family, but there is a strange mood. Back home I read Ian Johnson’s piece, Coronavirus and the Panic Epidemic. Quite prophetic–this kind of government’s gesticulation will take place here too. The effectiveness of the government’s actions is another thing.

Delighted to go back home!

Mid-February…

Recognizing some of the feelings mentioned by Vikrant Dadawala in this piece. For example:

Like Stephen Dedalus in front of his British dean of studies, I found my tongue stumbling over familiar words, intimidated by how naturally Americans spoke English: caressing each word, adding lilts and twangs in the most unexpected places.

Indeed: “Maybe against all odds, and in the face of all this technology, and the distractions we have, the next cool thing that can happen with our culture is people consciously detaching from all these devices. That would be so cool.” Nickolas Butler dixit here.

Reading: Emmanuel Carrère, L’Adversaire (2000).

January is gone. Planning ahead…

Reading ahead for a doctoral dissertation oral defense. The dissertation is on Yu Hua’s fiction writing. Happy to reencounter Yu Hua’s “Death Narrative” and one of my favorite short story starters:

本来我也没准备把卡车往另一个方向开去,所以这一切都是命中注定的。

Translated by Teresa Tejeda as: “En principio no había planeado ir con el camión en otra dirección, así que todo esto estaba destinado a suceder.” Translated also by Lucas Klein here as: “I hadn’t planned on driving the truck in that direction in the beginning, so this was all predestined by fate.”

Joe Simpson, ‘After The Rain’ (Oil on Canvas 90 x 60cm)

Still about empathy… Teju Cole’s Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation against an empathetic value of literature but for a singular yet collective value of literature:

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there.

What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Literature does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the little fascists who once more threaten to overrun the West. So what is it good for—all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation?

I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 AM when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you’re absorbed in a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining.

Back again to teaching–this quarter, Readings in Modern and Contemporary East Asian Fiction. Really looking forward to it. On my way to the first session I just read that Jennifer Egan taught a course at Penn and banned computers and phones: “I won’t have it. I won’t. Unless people have a problem with handwriting, I have no computers in the classroom. I think these devices really erode our engagement with whatever it is we’re trying to do.”

Interesting piece  here by Karen E. Spierling on the humanities and critical empathy:

Functioning effectively in a globalized society — in business, politics, medicine, education, daily interactions with immigrants in one’s own community, or daily interactions with locals in the community into which one has immigrated — requires the skill of rigorous, critical, empathetic thinking. Not just run-of-the-mill empathy. Not a wishy-washy definition of empathy that reduces it to natural feelings or emotions. Not just instinctive “people skills.” Not some kind of imagined empathy that depends on a person’s inherent ability to listen well and think from another person’s point of view. Not touchy-feely but uninformed sympathy for “those less fortunate” in other parts of the world. Instead, navigating this globalized world requires sophisticated, well-honed skills of empathy.

Reading: Jennifer Egan, Look at Me (2001).

Quite shocking piece on “The Disgusting New Campus Novel” and “burping and vomiting on the way to academe’s collapse” by Kristina Quynn. And powerful images by Jan Feidt too.

Grading final papers and exams…

Yesterday, department seminar on the future of the humanities led by Marina Garcés and based on GUNi’s 7th Higher Education in the World Report presented this week in Barcelona. Today, read this piece by Aaron Hanlon–what is the future of the humanities, of knowledge, of higher education when the situation of the professoriate is so critical?

a professoriate that can count on a job for only a year at a time is not well positioned to build, or even to consider, the future of knowledge. What is the future of plant science? What is the future of literary studies? What is the future of pedagogy, of rhetoric, of media, of communication? People with tenure and job security are now working on those things, in many cases in partnership with people outside the university, but if such people cease to exist in a professional capacity, what will become of their fields?

Attended Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s double feature today here in Barcelona: a morning seminar on his theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature and an afternoon talk on transculturation and the global novel. Very inspiring–I hope to put that inspiration on paper very soon…

Wonderful seminar by Jorge Locane at our weekly departmental lunch series: “Literature between China and Latin America. South-South Flows and Exchanges in the Context of the Cold War.” A pleasure to share some ideas with Jorge about this great project ahead.

Reading: Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke (2011).

Back to Joan Torres-Pou’s Asia en la España del siglo XIX. His chapter on Luis Valera takes me back to one of the best moments in Sombras chinescas:

Son las once de la noche. Nos queda una hora hasta que llegue el cotillón, último número de los festejos. La gente se dispersa. (…) Las señoras bajan a orillas del lago y se embarcan en los dorados juncos imperiales, que parecen iluminadas góndolas venecianas. Yo también voy en junco. Desde el lago contemplamos de nuevo aquella visión de teatral apoteosis. (…) Las señoras que estaban en Pekín el año anterior, recuerdan lo que hacían doce meses antes, y cómo estaban encerradas en las Legaciones oyendo los gritos de los boxers detrás de la negra muralla de la Tártara Ciudad. Los que no estábamos entonces en Pekín contestamos a las señoras que todo aquello fue una pesadilla, cosa soñada y nada más; y si no, ¿cómo nos estamos paseando en la misteriosa Ciudad Prohibida, por el Lago de los Lotos Purpurinos, dueños de hacer cuanto se nos antoje y gozando de maravillosa fiesta? ¿Dónde están los boxers, dónde la Corte imperial y dónde los pérfidos mandarines que la aconsejaban? Alguien, desde la proa del junco, nos contesta incoherentemente: “cadáveres de boxers hay en el fondo de este lago, la Corte pronto regresará a Pekín, y quizás nunca vuelva a celebrarse fiesta como la de esta noche.” Lo de los boxers yacentes en el limo debajo de las aguas que surcamos no agrada a las señoras; éstas quieren tornar al embarcadero de la Rotonda, y tanto más deprisa cuanto que se oyen los compases del primer vals y las aguardan sus parejas.

Just finished my translation of Dai Jinhua’s essay–squeezed in the middle of this quarter’s teaching and while revising the book  manuscript too… Really happy to make her work available to Catalan readers in the Catalan language and for such a prestigious publication as L’Espill. It  should be out in January in a special issue on contemporary China that I have co-edited with my colleague David Martínez-Robles.

Preparing for the typical end-of-the-year rush…

Amitav Ghosh interviewed at The Creative Independent. What do you do when you feel creatively stuck?

I find that it’s very important to read. Really, a lot of the time I get my ideas for books or for essays, articles, whatever, from other sources. I think it’s very important to read not just literature but also history. It’s important to read poetry. It’s also very important to read in other languages because that also gives you a perspective on the world which can be very, very fruitful.

Reading: Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981).

Interesting definitions of alienation and resonance in this (rather old, given our high speed society…) interview to Hartmut Rosa on the LARB.

Hence, we can only make our world more resonant and less alienating when we change our own attitudes, but also the structures of our social and economic world. Economic democracy, a basic income, and the idea of resonance might be essential components for such a change.

Still re-reading and organizing my thoughts on James St. André’s Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance. On Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People:

Even though Lin may have set out to write a measured account that would refute both the overblown defense of China by Sinologists and the defamation of the Western missionary, trader, and diplomat, he finds himself acting the part of a Chinese (Daoist) sage and decrying the limitations of his own people. No wonder that, according to his daughter, a popular criticism of Lin’s work in China after it was translated into Chinese was the bilingual pun “ 賣 Country and 賣 People,” where the Chinese verb “to sell” is used as a homophone for “My” in the original title, so that it now reads “Selling [My] Country and Selling [My] People”.

Organizing the tons of notes taken when reading James St. André’s Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018). This is an amazing work. So far, one of the most helpful readings for my own project.

Great conversation between Ken Liu and Nick Admussen. Here. My favorite bit: Liu compares the work of a programmer, a lawyer and a fiction writer–and most modern jobs:

I’m like many other people in modern society: we’re paid to become skilled manipulators of symbols. One of the signs of modernity is the degree to which we cease to make anything concrete. A lot of our jobs are about manipulating symbols and putting them into virtual symbolic structures. We are engineers of symbols, if you will. That’s really what most modern jobs are.

Preparing my thoughts for today’s event at Casa Asia Barcelona. Looking forward to exchanging ideas with Irene Masdeu and Xavier Ortells. Glad that Regresar a China has opened so many interesting conversations.

Reading: Mark Greif, Against Everything (Pantheon Books, 2016).

I have let my book project rest for a few weeks. I am now engulfed by Dai Jinhua’s reflections on the end of the post-Cold War, which I am translating into Catalan for the dossier to be published by L’Espill. Happy to exercise my rusty translation skills–a totally different kind of mental gymnastics.

Finding a moment for pause and reflection with Niels Gade…

In the middle of a hectic rentrée. Finishing up all the logistics for the new semester plus some paperwork that cannot be further delayed. Preparing my notes for the final meeting of the Marcela de Juan Translation Prize committe. Drafting my intervention for a fishbowl conversation about SDGs and the university to be held next week–I’ve been (quite unexpectedly) invited to expose my critical ideas, especially from the perspective of the humanities.

Reading: Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1 (Henry Holt and Co., 2017).

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses,” thesis No.  3: “In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity.”

The shrinkage of the globe we live on has made it more necessary to understand the other nations, and for the past fifty years I have been trying to understand China. The gradual enlargement of my circle of knowledge about China has of course enlarged the circumference of my ignorance which surrounds it. Questions multiply faster than answers.

Found Álex Matas’s En Falso (Pre-Textos, 2017) at Olin Library, seventh floor. A very timely discovery for my impostor syndrome, which always increases when I’m here.

En este contexto de relaciones sociales constantemente dinámicas propiciado por tecnologías de la movilidad, el yo es tan sólo el modo como nos damos a conocer ante los demás. Preservar alguna clase de individualidad exige renunciar a toda posibilidad de ser reconocido por lo que se ‘es’, y excluye también, por supuesto, la adhesión sin fisuras a generalidades salvadoras, como aquellas grandes narraciones sociales o nacionales de antaño.

First signs of exhaustion after some weeks of very focused, intensive work on the manuscript. But I want to make the most of the few days left until we go back. So, as Rachel Toor, says here: “Productive writers don’t reach for excuses when the going gets hard. They treat writing like the job it is. They show up, punch the clock, and punch out. Nothing romantic about it.”

Thinking about potential changes in next year’s syllabi. Skimming some options. Then remembering Bruce Robbins in this piece on critical correctedness:

The sudden pervasiveness of this depoliticizing impulse came to me while teaching a graduate seminar last term on intellectuals. Two of the books I asked the students to buy, without having first done more than skim them myself (I know, I know), were David Scott’s Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke University Press) and Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press), both from 2017. Both enacted some version of “the new modesty.” And both, it turned out, depoliticized intellectuals whom I considered political heroes.

Mark Grief in this piece: “The reality is, for our generation, if you care about the life of the mind, you’re just going to have to keep doing it, (…) and who knows where you’ll be doing it? Is it going to be as an adjunct? On a tenure track? At Gotham Writers Workshop? As a journalist? As long as you can keep it going in your own head without going mad, you’ve got something.”

Ignacio Sánchez Prado in his great introduction to Strategic Occidentalism: “I decided to embark on this project a few years ago, and to do so in English, partly as a reaction to a couple of frustrations.”

Thinking about which of my too many frustrations I should pick and make visible in the introduction of my book.

Thinking about Robert Bickers again. He also dixit that research is sitting in uncomfortable chairs and straining your back. Yes. He dixit all that here. Still waiting for the accidental encounter in the archive he also mentions…

Reading: Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, 2019).

Found myself reading around, without a clear purpose, despite intense efforts not to do so–weeks go by and I feel that my time at Olin Library is limited. But then I calmed down when I remembered what Robert Bickers dixit: “Research itself is mostly a process of not finding things.”

Combining regular doses of freedom.to with Glass’s Metamorphosis in loop.

Yesterday, reading this piece by Douglas Dowland and Annemarie Pérez and thinking about generosity and the microscopic activities we do (or should do) in everyday academic life.

Today, bumping into this sentence in the acknowledgments page of Johannes von Moltke’s The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America: “While occupying the chair’s office in Screen Arts and Cultures, Markus went the extra step of leaving me the key to his beautiful of office at the end of the hall in Asian Languages and Cultures, which became an invaluable refuge for the completion of this book.”

Mortimer Menpes, “A Student” in China (A. & C. Black, 1909).

Reading about Emilia Pardo Bazán, her French connections, and her role as introducer of Russian literature in Spain. Just found out that her La revolución y la novela en Rusia, originally a series of lectures given at Ateneo de Madrid in 1887 and published in the same year, was quickly translated into English by Fanny Hale Gardiner and published in Chicago in 1890.

The novel is read neither quantitatively nor qualitatively in Spain. As to quantity, let the authors who publish, and the booksellers who sell, speak for what they know; of the quality, let the numerous lovers of Montepin and the eager readers of the translations in the feuilletines tell us. The serious and profound novel dies here without an echo; criticism makes no comment upon it, and the public ignores its appearance. Is there a single modern novel that is popular, in the true meaning of the word, among us? Has any novel had any influence at all in Spanish political, social, or moral life?

On coming from France, I have often noticed a significant fact, which is, that at the French station of Hendaye there is a stand for the sale of all the popular and celebrated novels; while at Irun, just across the frontier, only a few steps away, but Spanish, there is nothing to be had but a few miserable, trashy books, and not a sign of even our own best novelists’ works. From the moment we set foot on Spanish soil the novel, as a social element, disappears.

Starting to work on a dossier for L’Espill. So happy that Regresar a China caught the attention of the journal’s editors, who invited me to edit a dossier on contemporary China based on the claim for new ways of looking at China that I make in the book. Thinking now about structure, contributors, texts. Should be out next winter.

As every summer, going over past issues of the CHE. I wonder how I missed Jeffrey Williams’s The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual. I was probably too busy promoting myself.

The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.

Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors. The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.

(…) The new promotional imperative pressures scholars to produce more directly marketable products, skills, and ideas. It also produces a new mind-set.

Reading: Zadie Smith, Feel Free (Penguin, 2018).

In between settling in, grading the last dissertations and finishing up the end-of-the-year paperwork,  working on some more contextual readings for chapters three and four. For example, Malraux’s La Tentation de l’Occident. Interesting how Malraux could have written La Condition humaine only seven years later.

I will be visiting Cornell University for a couple of months this summer. Looking forward to reading, writing and revising the chapters for the project on Western representations of China.

It’s that time of the year again. Struggling to finish all the tasks associated with the end of the academic year. Would love to become Bernstein at 9:10 here:

Just received the 2019 Trotta Catalogue. So honored to be sharing pages with scholars I admire so much, such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos or Enrique Dussel.

Reading: Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (John Murray, 2008)

Working on a talk I will be giving at the China Centre, University of Oxford next week: China in Spain: Representations from the Rest of the West, 1880-1930. Will try to offer a general overview of the project plus summarize one representative example from each chapter. The project is growing. Looking forward to it.

Today I presented Regresar a China at La Central del Raval. Many thanks to all of you who came to share this wonderful moment with me! And very special thanks to Seán Golden, Marina Garcés and Manel Ollé for their complicity and for their very generous words about the book!

Too many things going on right now. Please: Aaron Copland, Quiet City.

Gathering resources for my work helping out in my department’s faculty development. To combat impostor’s syndrome and the perpetual self-perception of failure, I forward several CVs inspired on Melanie Stefan’s idea of a CV of failures, published in Nature in 2010:

As scientists, we construct a narrative of success that renders our setbacks invisible both to ourselves and to others. Often, other scientists’ careers seem to be a constant, streamlined series of triumphs. Therefore, whenever we experience an individual failure, we feel alone and dejected.

Reading The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China, edited by Tom Mullaney and published by Stanford UP–just as Stanford University is trying to eliminate its subsidy to Stanford UP…

Contents aside, the way in which the volume integrates text, maps and data is superb. Interesting “Colophon” by David McClure and Glen Worthey on the technological aspects of the volume.

So honored to have hosted Margaret Hillenbrand for a few of days here in Barcelona. As we are in the middle of conceptualizing our next collective project at ALTER, Margaret’s talks will be a great inspiration. We can’t wait to read her next book: Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke UP, forthcoming 2020).

Interesting talk by Dai Jinhua and He Guimei at CCCB. Good job by the consecutive interpreter–especially during the Q&A. The crowd, quite impressive for a rainy Friday evening in Barcelona, reminds me of Lisa Rofel’s opening of her editor’s introduction in After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke UP, 2018):

Dai Jinhua is the equivalent of a rock star in China. Students, intellectuals, and the general public flock to hear her searing, radical insights into the enormous transformations in contemporary life—and the injustices and ills they have wrought.

At one point, Dai refers to the powerful sentence that I remember closes her own introdution to the same volume:

The imagination of an alternative future is already under way. For China, this topic is especially urgent, because China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future.

Reading: David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (NYRB Classics, 2003 [1960])

Preparing a seminar on the limits of academic writing to be conducted as part of this year’s department seminar series. Organizing some materials and interviews on the Sokal and the Sokal Squared Hoaxes to begin the session with. Going back also to Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb’s edited volume: Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Will probably include a couple of ideas from the chapters by Spivak and Butler.

In the Spivak chapter I find this passage I underlined back in 2003. No Twitter back then.

And then there is the book. One has to accept the fact that the book is an archaic form now, and we want to keep it residual, rich in wonderful vocabulary. Given the way modes of communication are operating now, the book has to have a different contract with its reader, one that acknowledges that reading, as I said, is transactional. A book is not the functioning of democracy, nor is it the textuality of classroom teaching; the book is a different kind of negotiable instrument. If one wants something that comes more easily, then it is not to the book that one will turn on, and so we must give the book its due.

A book is an impacted thing. Either you have that contract with the reader, or the reader has that contract with you—or it won’t work. And the humanities are trivialized; the idea of taking time to learn—which is different even from knowing—is being trivialized into just information-command, until even that is no longer pertinent. So, therefore, let us at least, if we are going to engage in that archaic activity, let us insist it be what it can be—that instrument that goes at a slower speed in a world where speed seems to be of essence. That’s what the book is. It is archaic, must remain residual, can become alternative and oppositional because it is a defective form—a virtual enclave in which people can think.

Honored to have participated today in the presentation of my colleague Blai Guarné’s edited book: Antropología de Japón: Identidad, discurso y representación at Casa Àsia in Barcelona.

The volume gathers chapters from an impressive roster of scholars: Harumi Befu, Yoshio Sugimoto, Stefan Tanaka, Naoki Sakai, Ignacio López-Calvo, Roger Goodman, Joy Hendry, John Lie or Tessa Morris-Suzuki, among others. Great contribution making these texts available in Spanish.

Just received my copies! Regresar a China is here!

Thinking about how to combine academic research with aiming for a wider readership. Getting inspired by Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s combination of atonal and more conventional music.

Ten years ago, my colleague Blai Guarné and myself interviewed two scholars we truly admired: Sean Golden and Naoki Sakai. The conversation has now been published as a chapter in the book Antropología de Japón: identidad, discurso y representación, edited by Blai.

Thrilled to share some thoughts on common myths and stereotypes about China with the folks at deba-t.org. Even happier to see the invitation as an extended conversation started a few months ago with some students during my course on Chinese history and culture.

Some of the reasons why I’m not on Twitter are wonderfully summarized in Gordon Fraser’s The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.

For example this one:

The world may come to us for simplification, but we give it complexity. There is power in that complexity. But it is a power that evaporates the moment we reduce our considered findings to a tweet.

Or this one:

My skepticism of Twitter is not a skepticism of activist scholarship, or even activism by scholars. We bring wide-ranging knowledge to important public questions, and we should be heard. Rather, I am concerned that our participation in Twitter is tacitly endorsing a commercial platform that subverts democratic discourse and collapses the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of debate. Scholarship demands cultivated habits of mind, considered distance, and the unfolding of time. Twitter does not.

Reading: Han Kang, The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (Hogarth, 2016).

Reading the manuscripts that take part in the Jaume Vidal Alcover Translation Prize. Very honored to be again a member of the judging panel. And very glad to see that this year we have plenty of strong candidates!

Interesting piece in The Chronicle Review: Cal Newport, Is Email Making Professors Stupid? , a promo for his new book, Digital Minimalism. I share Newport’s diagnosis:

Society has been engulfed by a crisis of concentration that has hit higher education particularly hard. Our time and attention have gradually shifted from the specialized intellectual tasks that directly produce value to busywork, such as managing our inboxes and tackling nonessential administrative obligations.

Yet I’m not so sure about his remedy:

Instead of giving in to this reality, we should reaffirm the importance of the life of the mind by reforming the academy as a beacon of concentration in an age of distraction. Higher education can lead the way in turning back the tide of electronic chatter that threatens to overwhelm us. Do we have the will to protect what’s important against the pull of what’s easy? Will we stand for the power of concentration over the shallowness of rapid communication? And if not us, then who?

True. Yet, as inspiring as it may sound, is it realistic to combat managerialism with monasticism? Where are we working, actually? A recent reading particularly useful to understand how deep the problem is: Mark Garret Cooper and John Marx, Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2018), with, of course, its corresponding promo piece here.

Working on the final proofs of Regresar a China, to be published by Trotta. So exciting to see the book take shape. It will be out next month!

So honored to have hosted Tom Mullaney for a few days here in Barcelona. We got the privilege to discover how two of the most fascinating academic books I’ve read,  Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and The Chinese Typewriter: A History, were conceived, researched, thought and written. And we got to know the terrific scholar who lies behind them and who, among a trillion things, founded the great site Dissertation Reviews. A memorable visit.

Reading: Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2015).

Working on my presentation for the upcoming ACLA Annual Meeting. I will be participating in the seminar Dealing with the Distance between the Hispanic World and Asia, organized by Miaowei Weng.

Before traveling, checking out the last state of the discipline report–had been sitting in my reading pile for ages… I read some of the pieces included in the volume when they were posted on the wonderful web platform, but they somehow read differently in the book format.

Making small changes to the book proposal. A little tweaking here and there. A story of drafts combining like intermezzos and allegros vivaces.

Getting inspired by Ana Paulina Lee’s Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory. Great combination of sound historical research, fascinating studies of cultural representations, and important theoretical concerns.

Great workshop by Paulo Horta at our weekly departmental lunch series: On how to publish a book with an Anglo-American press. Timely topic! A real pleasure having Paulo around as a visiting scholar this year.

Reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World, 2017).

Wonderful seminar led by María Íñigo on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Métaphysiques cannibales. Made me think about how to work with uncommensurabilities and conflicting epistemologies.

Walking back home after class. Listening to Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue for Piano and Strings. Wintertime. Our friends in Ithaca will remain between -10ºC and -20ºC on Wednesday. When I am about to cross Passeig de Sant Joan I realize I am sweating under my unnecessary winter coat.

These days Rachel Toor’s reflections in “How Academics Measure the Value of Their Books” come back to my mind as I progress (slowly!) on my manuscript. Particularly this one: among the many different definitions of success for an academic book, most of them unrelated to sales, your definition of success

might be finishing a manuscript that took far longer than planned. The idea of never having to think about the topic again can be cause for celebration…

Writing about how the Battle of the Yalu River was reported in Spain. The map below could very well be a slide used in a History class in the pre-PowerPoint era. In fact, it was published back in 1894 in Madrid–only three months after the battle! Where did they get the data from? Well, that is what my book is about…

Reading: Pierre Lemaitre, Au revoir là-haut (Albin Michel, 2013).