links for 2009-10-23

• Language Log » Embuggerance & Feisty
  ah, those well known scholars Embuggerance & Feisty (2008). Cambridge University Press, no less.
  (tags: hilarious meta google fail languagelog)
• Flickr: Matthew Watkins' Photostream
  this has to be some of the most delightful, innovative iPhone art I've seen!
  (tags: whimsy iphone art flickr brushes inspiration)
• 五十年内，废除简化字如何 (Fifty years on, how about we abandon the simplified script?)
  "我们国家之所以落后…汉字难是很重要的原因。从这种感情出发，他们急于要改革汉字。这两种感情，一种要爱护汉字，一种要改革汉字，看上去是矛盾的，对立的，其实都是一个出发点：爱祖国。" — or, sometimes loving something necessitates changing it.
  (tags: chinese 中文 简体字 script language orthography reform modernpressures change)
• Persian helped promulgate Islam in China « Islam in China
  On xiaoerjin – Chinese written phonetically in Arabic script, by Chinese Muslims who would be fluent in spoken Chinese but literate only in Arabic! Conclusion: romanization not inevitable, though in modern times, quite irresistible.
  (tags: romanization arabic script orthography xiaoerjin 消经)

links for 2009-10-22

• The Chinese Character – No Simple Matter
  small rumblings in Chinese orthography – should the simplified script be abandoned? and would this revocation be another small milestone in the slow disentangling from the communist legacy in China, I wonder
  (tags: 中文 简体字 orthography chinese writing politics language)

small thoughts

Exhortation to self: try to write a small amount, more frequently, rather than a large amount, less frequently.

Question to self: When did I start to attend lectures not simply to listen to what the lecturer has to say, but to see how he says it? or to attend undergraduate courses and learn, in the course of it, how I might myself begin to put together a course? A strange sort of dual consciousness now attends each lecture and seminar with me: somehow, at some point, I started to pay attention to content as well as form. At the same time as being taught, I am learning how to teach; and similarly with giving presentations, lectures. Not that I’m complaining — perhaps it’s just me, but I believe in the efficacy of this sort of learning: it hones the attention marvellously. And it does have an earlier precedent: since I can remember, I have read in part in order to learn how to write.

As an aside, I have in truth been thinking quite seriously about constructing a course on Southeast Asia, to the extent that I’ve kind of even started to collect materials for it. I’m nowhere even near to being in the position to teach anyone yet, but I regard this as a glacial amassing of interesting photos, secondary reading, sound and video clips, primary sources, quirky anecdotes, translations of key materials — out of which I’ll one day, hopefully, be able to fashion something really rich & interesting on the decolonization of Southeast Asia (which is totally a course I would love to teach!), or perhaps any sort of course on nineteenth and twentieth century imperial experience in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately I’m given to understand that Southeast Asia just isn’t sexy enough for most American universities; these days it’s all about China and the Middle East. I suppose until Southeast Asia starts rearing terrorists or becoming economic giants, I’ll have to fashion myself into a historian of empire or of East Asia, somehow.

links for 2009-10-10

• Director Tony Kaye disowns his own film | American History X | Movie News | Movies | Entertainment Weekly | 1
  old story, I know, of the histrionic Hollywood nutcase director who attempted to disown what is certainly one of the best films I've ever seen
  (tags: film history backstories crazy hollywood media)
• 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography | Wired Science | Wired.com
  truly there are more mysteries to be found in every lethargic glance about our daily landscape than in the most enthusiastic of stargazes
  (tags: photomicrography microscope photography)
• Malaysia's Annexe Gallery in Kuala Lumpur Takes a New Approach to Art – WSJ.com
  more on the Annexe
  (tags: kl art malaysia alternative wsj)
• Malaysia's Modern Art Scene Grows Up in Kuala Lumpur – WSJ.com
  the Annexe finally makes it to the international press – about time, too, for it's been the heart & soul of Kuala Lumpur's radical, artsy, alternative, anti-establishment scene for well over three years now
  (tags: kl malaysia art progress alternative future lookingahead wsj)

bookporn #43: heffers, cambridge

A bookporn entry in commemoration of my return to England — I present a bookshop in Cambridge that should have ascended its luscious throne a long time ago: Heffers. Heffers began as a family business, and continues to lay claim to over a hundred continuous years of Cambridge bookselling, since 1876

even though it was bought over by Oxford’s Blackwell’s in 1999. (growl)

What I love about Heffers is the impossible cunning of its architecture. It takes its two floors of allocated building space and somehow, by some astonishing & satanic feat of interior design, engineering and L-dimensional skulduggery, somehow pulls four floors out of the rabbit’s hat. In all the following photos you will be able to discern, among those stern concrete pillars, four levels of gorgeous bookery. (Click through to Flickr for exposition).

The skulduggery continues. We have here a space deceptively masquerading as a cafe from the top of the stairs, until you move closer, and lo! a hitherto hidden Book Cranny balloons into sight.

Heffers also has nested nooks — crannies within crannies;

its History section curls away into two cosy corners in the basement, segueing into Classics and Philosophy at its fringes;

and, right at the back — no doubt situated according to some greater, inscrutable design between Politics and Medicine — a resident skeleton.

Love Heffers! it’s one of a kind. If you can stagger past the Cambridge kitsch out front, creep past the alleged bestsellers and resist the stationery sirens, the lower mezzanine floor now features a brand new secondhand books section. And from past experience, a secondhand bookstore in a town stuffed with owlish academics is Not To Be Sniffed At.

links for 2009-09-27

• Revealed: the royal waive which means no spending cuts for the Windsors | UK news | The Guardian
  I am so writing an essay out of this
  (tags: monarchy publicdebate finance raisetherepublic)
• New title on Vietnamese nationalist Phan Chau Trinh
  Phan Châu Trinh, often credited for being the first and most articulate champion of democracy and popular rights in Vietnam – Cornell releases a translation of his four best essays. to investigate.
  (tags: books vietnam intellectuals)
• WWB: The Culture of Translation by María Rosa Menocal, translated from the Georgian by
  on the richness of medieval Arabic culture, and its impact on medieval Europe, when, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it travelled across the continent "in many guises, in translations of a hundred varieties, in attitudes about culture, or in songs that were sung and heard and then played again in a different language"
  (tags: arabic islam europe translation crossculturalfertilization poetry cities history middleeast)

links for 2009-09-24

• Dust storms in Sydney | World news | guardian.co.uk
  this is incredible! I can't help feeling as though if an event like this occurred five hundred years ago, people would have promptly dissolved into Armageddon hysteria. today, we jog blithely around in it & take stunning photos on our DSLRs.
  (tags: photography australia duststorm guardian)
• Tim Kreider – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com
  I like Tim Kreider
  (tags: toread timkreider nytimes)
• The Referendum – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com
  "The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt…Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control." This is totally what ten-year reunions are for.
  (tags: choices nytimes timkreider happiness parenting life)

archive iniquities

In an archive that shall remain unnamed, I have recently encountered iniquities. Many, many of them — O it is an archive corpulent with iniquity — and I shall inflict four of these iniquities upon you, so that historians among you may know how good you probably have it in pretty much any other archive, and non-historians among you may know not to become historians, at least in certain regional specialisms. And that you may also know what soul-disfiguring things have been occupying me these past weeks.

links for 2009-09-13

• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  - is a grammatically correct sentence!
  (tags: wtf words english language linguistics weird)
• All quiet on the God front – Simon Blackburn
  I like this essay; it seems to fill my head with ideas, only I don't exactly know what they are.
  (tags: religion silence simonblackburn bookreviews karenarmstrong)

links for 2009-08-17

• Op-Ed Contributor – Why We Need Health Care Reform – NYTimes.com
  good lord, I could read this man all day. Prez Obama breaks the healthcare issue down (and not only for the scaremongered cretins)
  (tags: healthcare america obama article nytimes)