This Is Water by David Foster Wallace.
It is worth the 20 minutes.
“This is Water”
May 1st, 2012I Am Not Da Shan.
March 14th, 2012I’ve been walking around Shanghai a lot lately (Have you seen me?), and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am kind of a big deal. Whenever I go out to the market or a fruit stand, the local people tell me I look like Da Shan, especially when I wear my glasses. For those of you who don’t know, Da Shan is China’s other professional white guy who looks nothing like me. 
Basically, Da Shan is big in China for being white and speaking Mandarin well. We made it on a bunch of Chinese TV programs back in the ‘90’s and hasn’t looked back. He’s done endorsement deals, made a bunch of money, and been Canadia’s Good-Will Ambassador type for the last 10 years.
Now, could you imagine the opposite version of Da Shan? To set the scene, you are in a TV studio, and an Asian man steps up to the microphone. In a deep, radio announcer voice, he says “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Leonard and I am here to tell you about stuff.” :::makes lightsaber noises::. Everyone would burst into applause, complement him on his amazing ability to speak English, and then throw money.
I don’t know exactly why, but that’s racist.
That’s … My Bank.
March 13th, 2012Eric Abrahamsen over at NY Times Latitude blog on closing his Bank of China account.
BEIJING — Last Wednesday I tried to close my bank account. I won’t pretend that the Bank of China is the most Orwellian institution in the world, but in terms of human suffering inflicted by bureaucracy, it has to make the long list.
Read the rest.
Okay, You Lazy Bitch.
February 28th, 2012This lovely missive comes from Hunter S Thompson, trying to get The Rum Diary made into a movie. As always, the man has a great turn of phrase.
Also, check out The Rum Diary. Rather good.
Werner Herzog on Chickens.
February 17th, 2012The Highly Sensitive Person
February 1st, 2012I’ve just finished reading The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. Aron is a psychologist who’s studies in temperament have led her to the discovery that about 15 – 20% of the population have been born with a highly sensitive neurology (HSPs). That means they sense, process, and experience the world in different ways than most people. For example, a child will shriek and wail when a rough, woolly blanket is placed over it, because it is too much stimulation. Loud noises, crowds, pungent smells, and pain can be overwhelming. Aron portrays the trait as value neutral, meaning it is neither a good thing or a bad thing.
This kind of sensitivity is highly correlated with introversion, high intuition, and high IQ. HSPs need to spend large amounts of time alone, processing their experiences. It can also lead to a rich inner life of fantasies and day dreams.
The flip side of the coin is over-arousal. HSPs can become frazzled quickly, which leads to a retreat from life and stimulation. It also means an overactive fight/flight response, which can be triggered by insignificant events. It is also strongly correlated with neuroticism.
All in all, it is a very interesting read.
American Gods
January 17th, 2012I’ve just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It is a deeply weird and engrossing book about belief in America.
In the book, gods (and legendary creatures and “gods”) are real and are manifest in the flesh. Odin, Kali, Ibis, leprechauns and other hobgoblins roam around America, brought by the immigrants who believed in them. They can influence worldly events. The story is about the conflict between the old gods and the new “gods”, like Media, the Internet, and Markets. There is a war brewing between both sides, with a regular dude stuck in the middle.
The book won prizes in the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror categories, but isn’t really a product of those genres at all. Highly recommended.
Romantic Love vs Eastern relationships.
December 27th, 2011So, I’ve been thinking about romantic love, vis-a-vis my last post.
I’m not sure that Johnson is right to lionize Eastern relationships the way he does. In my experience, they are just as prone to break down, turn into drama, and dehumanize both parties as Western relationships. The divorce rate in Korea and China is nearly the same as in the West. As traditional communities have broken down, the support structures that keep life-long monogamous relationships together have broken down as well. Couples and in-laws in China can treat each other terribly.
So, I don’t know if East Asia has answers for our structural relationship problems. India, maybe, but somehow I doubt it.
We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love
December 26th, 2011From the introduction:
Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy…
We are so accustomed to living with the beliefs and assumptions of romantic love that we think it is the only form of “love” on which marriage or love relationships can be based. We think it is the only “true love”. But there is much that we can learn from the East about this. In Eastern countries, like those of India and Japan, we find that married couples love each other with great warmth, often with a stability and devotion that puts us to shame. But their love is not “romantic love” as we know it. They don’t impose the same ideals on their relationships, nor do they impose such impossible demands and expectations on each other as we do.
Romantic love has existed throughout history in many cultures. We find it in the literature of ancient Greece, the Roman empire, ancient Persia, and feudal Japan. But our modern Western society is the only culture in history that has experienced romantic love as a mass phenomenon. We are the only society that makes romance the basis of our marriages and love relationships and the cultural ideal of “true love”.
One of the greatest paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationships as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayal; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of “being in love”.
Romance, in its purest form, seeks only one thing – passion. It is willing to sacrifice everything else – every duty, obligation, relationship, or commitment – in order to have passion.
From We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert Johnson. Johnson was a Jungian analyst. The book follows the myth of Tristan and Iseult as the birth of romantic love in the western psyche, and then Johnson teases out our ensuing muddle.
This one gave me weird dreams, that’s how I know it’s good.
The Adaptive Unconscious.
December 21st, 2011I just finished Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy Wilson. Wilson is a experimental psychologist at the University of Virginia.
Wilson attempts to wrestle the study of the unconscious away from the Freudians and take a scientific look at it. The most interesting portion of the book is the author’s discussion of self-knowledge. How do we know things about ourselves? How accurate is that self-knowledge? What are the limits of self knowledge? The answers are pretty depressing. We are quite good at making up stories about ourselves that have very little to do with what has actually happened. We are also quite poor at ascribing causation to the things we do.
Quite an interesting and disturbing book.