Blogs

I am posting to share a snippet from a talk I delivered at the biannual ASLE conference last week.

Are we forcing the world to conform to our own image of it? Are we asking foreign authors to fashion pictures of their societies that fulfill our own perceptions, desires, and fears?

In addition to my regular identity as a professor of medieval Chinese literature at UCLA, I'm also the proud parent of a child attending what I shall thinly disguise as "Guangdao Elementary School," which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District and houses a pilot program in Mandarin Chinese.

Here’s how I got to that question, and it’s not because I’m giving up on the standard English Ph.D. tactic of giving books as birthday presents to everyone I know (which gets more embarrassing every year, really).

The debate heats up in France after a pointed critique of "Le Féminisme à la française" by Joan W. Scott in Libération (06/10/2011). [Edited 07/06/2011]

A few nights back I stayed up late, reading this interview with "journalist" Janet Malcolm.

In Defense of Religious Moderation is due out this week, but a foretaste of the critical reaction is already starting to seep in.

It may not be so cool of me but I just loved Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his presentation of the Chauvet Cave, full of the oldest known human art, from 30 000 BC.

This recent thread on academic blogging is a fascinating one which, unfortunately, I was only able to skim because, though I do spend a lot of my time reading & writing, I am unable to do so in a more...speculative fashion. It strikes me that that alone is the the lovely & privileged way academics -- at least tenured academics! -- get to spend their time.

Okay, I've turned forty.  On my birthday I celebrated my obsolescence by translating a sonnet titled "To a Corpse."