Non-academic life

And the days are not full enough

The past month has been conference season for this Asianist – and a pretty exciting one, at that! I am feeling both rejuvenated intellectually & yet also melancholy. I relish the opportunity to reconnect with old friends & acquaintances and make new connections, but it reminds me how much I miss some things (and many people). However, it’s been a generally good cap to an almost-over-academic year that has been pretty upsetting for me, personally and professionally – I’m ready to have a summer of work and relative silence, one that I hope will be an opportunity to recenter.

In March, I went (for the first time) to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference, where I was lucky enough to participate in a really cool panel called “Retelling Fantastic Tales.” Luo Liang organized a really diverse & interesting group of papers, most focused on East Asia, but also some forays into other parts of the globe. Strangely, it was my first opportunity to sit and talk fantastical tales with other China specialists – ever! I absolutely loved the ACLA format, which is much more like a workshop. I wish more major conferences would follow it; it made for a much more positive experience presenting than the usual ‘2 hour panel with some commentary & audience questions.’ I was also excited to have the opportunity to get feedback from literary scholars on my work – one thing I’ve always loved about my project on ghost opera is that it really does lie at the intersection of several fields. Although my work is very much for China specialists (transnational? What’s that?) – unapologetically so – I do hope that it will be of interest to non-historians, and it sounds like it is. I made some great connections & came home feeling pretty good.

Boston wasn’t too bad, either (also my first time there). The weather was pleasant & I had some really good food – and bad Americanized Chinese food for the first time in, uh, years, but that can be fun, too. And I had a wonderful night out with a friend I hadn’t seen in 9 (!!) years, not since I’d left Taiwan before starting grad school in 2007. It was great to pick up where we left off & to catch up after all that time.

I just returned from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Seattle. I wasn’t presenting this year, but I’ve determined that – barring unforeseen financial difficulties – it’s a really important few days for me & I need to make the effort to go, even if I’m not getting a line on my CV. I skipped last year’s meeting in Chicago, and spent the whole conference feeling sorry for myself that I was alone in Bozeman. AAS is not so much about the conference portion for me (though I do like dropping in on interesting-sounding panels, and of course – the exhibit halls, with university presses running great sales on both new titles and old!), but having the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meeting new ones. This year was particularly fun, as the American Society for Environmental History was also going on, so my first night in Seattle – when I was feeling a bit grumpy for having some plans fall through – I finally got to meet a Twitter friend for real. We had some amazing food and cocktails and hours of great conversation. We had Skyped previously for work-related reasons, but it was a real delight to have a nice evening out with someone I always thought I’d get along brilliantly with & to no great surprise – I did. I also got to meet up with Nick Stember (aka the translator of that little Star Wars thing) for a quick chat – I hope next time, we’ll have a little more time to talk. But it’s always good putting a real face to the name, especially for someone that had a lot to do with the internet success of the lianhuanhua.

I really liked Seattle – another place I’d never been. A friend took us out to his family’s beach house on Vashon Island – an opportunity to get out of the city – and it was just gorgeous. But it also made me terribly homesick: the combination of a few days of running around AAS & seeing people I hadn’t seen in years, having a big UCSD program get together (where I stood up and said I had always appreciated how special our program was, but I really recognize it now that I’ve moved to being faculty, and how lucky I felt to be a part of such a strong, talented group of scholars), and seeing scenery that was so familiar. I thought of all sorts of little moments of years past, and really mourned the fact that it will never be like that again. I mourned who I used to be (as a friend said a bit wonderingly while we were walking around Somerville in Boston, ‘Taiwan seems like it was just yesterday! But it wasn’t. You were twenty-three once!’ I was. I was … we all were), since I feel like I’ve lost a sense of myself the past year – I wake up sometimes and am not sure who I am, other than a historian of modern China who does mostly serviceable work and stresses about everything. I wanted a few more days, the opportunity to cram in more time with people who matter to me & who I don’t get to see enough, a few more hours to catch up with people who have seen my ups and downs over the years and still love me, despite the fact I’m a giant ball of stress prone to emotional meltdowns and a pervasive sense that I’m just never going to be enough for anyone, or any institution, or any press. I missed people who weren’t in attendance – my faithful editrix most of all – and a wonderful little conference we had in Santa Cruz the summer I finished my dissertation ….

I’m still mourning. But life doesn’t stop, of course, and we keep moving forward: for now, looking towards the end of the semester, I have a book manuscript to worry about, and adventures to plan for the dog (more popular among my friends than I am!), and a long summer that will inevitably feel too short.

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And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

Remembering hearts

IMG_1352I have a whole whack of backlogged posts-to-write that I haven’t gotten around to: the end of spring semester (the end of my second year as a full-fledged assistant professor!) was full and busy. Two conferences, including a trip to Canada, thoughts on teaching an experimental-for-me course, other assorted bits of my life. Frankly, as summer slides by – as it’s wont to do when you’re an academic, I was at the dentist a few weeks ago & the hygienist said to me ‘It must be so nice to have the whole summer off!’, and I could only laugh, because it’s not quite that simple – every day means it’s less likely for me to go back and write those posts, or finish the half-written ones in my queue. I may sit on quiet, cool nights and tap through my phone, looking at photographs and little snippets of video that make me smile, but I don’t really want to write about them. But a past of mine that passed into history long ago: well, that’s a little easier to write about. A little more like writing proper history.

I don’t pay much attention to games writing these days, and honestly haven’t for a long time – certainly not for the past year or so, since there’s been so much hateful stuff directed at people I know and respect. It’s easier – as a person no longer connected to any of that, except in the most tenuous way – to get my news in snips here and there on Twitter, on Facebook. I don’t have to watch E3 because it’s my job, so I don’t. I don’t have to pay attention to GDC or the latest press releases, so I don’t – except when it’s already been filtered through people I know and trust, who have had to go through all that shit first. The first game-related thing I’ve felt strongly enough to post about in a while was Leigh Alexander’s wonderful essay on FFVII. It was beautiful. It was worth sharing.

This past E3, the long-begged for Final Fantasy VII remake was announced. FFX was my first ‘real’ FF (I have written about that), though I had played 7 & 8 & 9 prior to that. But I had a different relationship with those games than many people my age: though I played them close-to-or-shortly-after-their-release, it was still in a sort of second hand way, not in the excitement of playing the new thing that’s just come out. I was just starting to play videogames again – and really play them in more than a ‘7 year old with a GameBoy’ way – when these games were the latest thing; I didn’t even know what a JRPG was, never mind that I loved them. But I was close enough to 7 that I can understand why people have these bigger life memories bound up in it. It is of my generation, even if it wasn’t mine. I am currently replaying FFVIII (not one of my favorites in any case, but there’s a certain amount of comfort and nostalgia in its crazy junction system and story). I remember sitting on the floor of a friend’s cramped little room that I spent a lot of hours in as a high school student, watching him play the game. I remember how that room smelled and looked and felt.

Games always conjure up memories of where I was in life when I play them. That doesn’t mean I don’t have memories, important & emotional ones, attached to other kinds of media – music is particularly evocative, of course, and I can go through my library and give you a run down of where I was in life when I first read this book or that (even academic monographs). They have feelings attached to them. I hauled a bunch of books into my office today & going through them took forever, because I kept running down the hall to say to my friend ‘Look at this little memory or that! You should read this one … Oh, look at this random piece of academic dust that is living in the pages of this book I haven’t looked at in years …’, or I just sat on the floor of my little office and paged through them silently, remembering. But those memories are never as consistently complete as game memories are.

DSC00311.JPGThe game related to 7 that was mine was a PSP spinoff released in 2008, Crisis Core. It’s a beautiful little game in a lot of ways. I got it not because I was so attached to 7, but because I had played 7 & was curious about how Square was going to deal with a game where you knew the outcome before you started playing. I had also lived in Taiwan between 2006 & 2007, when FFVII prequel mania was at its height – my terrible little bathroom in my terrible (but wonderful) little rooftop one room studio with no kitchen had a FFVII prequel wall hanging in it (bathroom not shown here, but you get the idea). Crisis Core is a game where the main character is one that you know is dead in 7, the game that comes after. How does a writer deal with that? Can you write a satisfying story where everyone – well, everyone that had played the main game, which is the target audience here – playing it knows the character you’re playing is going to die? They did. I cried at the end – an end I knew I was coming. Maybe that’s why I liked it: it was like writing history with a sad end, where you know things are going to end badly.

861e3f3c6807f4d4762eff1ee6d054a6I played it on a PSP that I had bought myself on a whim the Christmas of ’07, at the end of my first quarter of grad school: I remember getting on the highway & driving down to the area with all the big box stores so I could go to GameStop. I came home with a trusty black PSP, which remained trusty and well-traveled until it was replaced with a Vita this year, long after it had become obsolete. It lives in my basement still, in its nice case, the kind that you could insert your own image into – which I carefully trimmed a photograph of the Meiji Temple in winter to fit, from my beautiful Christmas cards I used while I was in coursework. The interior simply said Peace. I still have a few in a desk drawer in my home office; I couldn’t bring myself to use all of them. I tried to find a case like that for my DS or Vita, because I just wanted to carry that beautiful image again, and I came up empty. That case (and PSP) went all over the US & to China (and various points in between), and now lives in my basement, mostly forgotten.

This past spring, I taught a seminar called “Games, Play & History,” which was basically a wonderful disaster. I had a lot of really wonderful students; we read some really wonderful stuff; I think I was trying to do something interesting. A lot of what I wanted to do didn’t happen, there were some unexpected bright spots that I was (delightedly) shocked by, and it was just a big learning experience in general. But while I was setting the course up in December and January, I was going through my archives and trying to find examples of good and interesting and different writing about games. An essay that kept nagging at me was one written by Leigh Alexander in 2008, about Crisis Core. I’ve read a lot (a lot) of Leigh’s writing, since my ‘career’ at Kotaku basically coincided with the early stages of her career, and while she’s written a lot of wonderful, smart stuff before and since – better stuff – this essay had stuck with me for a long time as a brilliant example of good writing on a contemporary game: striking a balance between nostalgic and insightful, personal and broad, a piece that talked about this cultural thing in her hands right now and how it connected to the past and spoke to it and was informed by it. It was, in short, a great piece of historical writing that wasn’t history. It’s what I try to do with my own academic work, I think: there is this thing I have right now in my hands that’s beautiful, and here’s why it matters beyond its immediate wonderful qualities.

CrisisCoreOSTI haven’t read it in years. But I remember saving a tab in my browser after it was published (where? I don’t even remember – maybe it was just on her Sexyvideogameland blog, the one that I linked to over and over when I wrote for Kotaku), and going back to look and look again, like I always do with good writing. In it, she talked about playing this game, this prequel to a game that had meant so much to her, and playing it while in the midsts of a relationship that was breaking down. And it wasn’t just that she was playing through this game where you know the main character is going to die, where the designers are deliberately making your heart stop with all these echoes of the game before, the game you are so attached to. But that original game formed the basis of that relationship that was breaking down. She wrote of this dying relationship, and silently passing the PSP between them, looking at this end-beginning – whatever one would term a prequel – that you know is going to end badly, at least for the current incarnation. And you have something here, in the right now, that is ending badly. But it’s a start, too: something new. It isn’t just the past replaying itself again and again.

It was beautiful. It was – it still is – one of the most beautiful pieces of writing on games I have ever read, partially because it was just so bloody personal and in a way that a lot of games writing, even relatively intimate stuff, just isn’t. I haven’t read it in at least six years, and I remember the way she described passing that PSP. Perhaps not in detail, but how it made her feel, because I felt it, too (and isn’t that what good writing is supposed to do?).

I don’t remember when she published the essay. Maybe it was April or May. Maybe it was June. I played through Crisis Core frantically when it first came out, in March. I galloped through it, I loved it, I finished it. I remember being glued to it, at least partially, when my boyfriend came to visit me (depressed, unhappy, freaked out, lonely me) in San Diego: it was, in many respects, easier to cling to the PSP than to him. I need to finish this. I reset it two months later, and frantically played through it again. Then took my time with the end, and maybe this is why I loved Leigh’s essay so much. I now had my own dying relationship on my hands: now I took my time in finishing it. The game, the essay, the relationship. I savored it, in a way, at the same time that it killed me to spend so much time on something where I already knew the ending. I sat in front of my shitty apartment in San Diego, on somewhat alarmingly rickety concrete steps, and smoked Camel Lights and drank Asahi, my PSP clutched in one hand. My dying relationship was different than hers, of course, but it was comforting to know that someone else had played through the same game I was now, feeling some of the same things I was feeling now.

When I pull out well loved monographs, or even novels, from my shelf, it’s hard to say that.

When I wanted to put the essay up on my course site this past January, I couldn’t find it. I wanted so badly to read it again, just for myself, even more than I wanted to be able to say to my students: This is what writing on a medium you don’t even think is very important can be. Maybe I just wanted to feel for a little bit what I had in April or May or June of 2008, when I was younger and a first year grad student and had a boyfriend I adored and still didn’t know how to handle distance. Maybe I just wanted to remember how those problems felt, the things I dealt with and survived, while I faced down new problems I don’t quite know how to manage, where I sit up late at night and whisper to myself that I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe I’m just hopeless. Maybe there is no good ending. I do know that I often find myself reading about games I loved a long, long time ago & thinking about a long, long time ago more generally (again, something that doesn’t usually happen when I read, say, book reviews of a well-loved monograph, even from years and years ago).

But it was nowhere to be found, Leigh’s essay. There is no JSTOR of old games writing.

I sheepishly sent an email to another ex-boyfriend and asked for suggestions, Where can I get this? It must exist somewhere. It has to. He gave me another email address, and said to just ask. So I did – shyly, shamefacedly. It was Leigh Alexander, after all – and who was I? Just another person cluttering up her inbox, asking for an old piece of writing she probably didn’t remember & she’d written better things since, besides. I knew that. I didn’t want her to think I thought she’d written nothing of value in the years since – not that she’d care about my opinion – it was just that this had really meant something to me.

The first time I met Leigh in person was at E3 in 2008, when we both worked for Kotaku, and as the two women on staff, had a hotel room to share. I had gotten there earlier than her, and was already set up at one of the desks when she breezed in. She was beautiful and cool and dressed so fashionably and so clearly comfortable with being Leigh Alexander. I was a shy, bumbling, nervous grad student, looking slightly ridiculous for being at a videogame event, not very comfortable with being Maggie Greene – my one photograph from that whole expedition is a selfie, showing off my E3 badge, ME with an E3 badge! How ridiculous! – and I was incredibly intimidated. We had a ‘Kotaku’ party at a bar one of the days, and I hid on the smoking porch, attached to another writer, afraid to talk to anyone. The people that did talk to me seemed shocked that I was a writer for Kotaku. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but it clearly wasn’t me. I remember towards the end of the night going up to get a drink at the bar, and seeing Leigh surrounded by people & being so comfortable. I marveled at her even as we walked back to the hotel barefooted, having taken off our pretty high heels because they were hurting our feet. I wondered if I could ever be that pretty and hip, or if I’d ever be so cool (I wasn’t, and am still not, any of those things).

I don’t think I told her then that she’d written something that I’d loved so much; in retrospect, I should have, because she probably would’ve liked to have heard that, much as I like to hear from people I know that they like my work. It means something different than random compliments, delightful as they are.

When she wrote back to me in January of this year and said that her Crisis Core essay was lost to the sands of time – worse than that, not able to be found on the internet! – it broke my heart a little bit. Oh, a piece of my past gone, I thought. And I felt bad for thinking it: she’s not writing for my pleasure. But the academic in me thought it was so sad, because – for better or for worse – all the stuff I’ve written as an academic is available, or at least findable. On the one hand, I’m glad she’s managed to make things go “poof”: it’s her writing, after all. But it’s sad to want something and be unable to find it. It’s not that we haven’t lost stuff previously. I was a Latin major in a former life, and one of my most beloved Latin teachers told us that in grad school, one of the favorite questions to sit around & discuss while tipsy was ‘If you could exchange one piece of extant writing for one piece that isn’t, what would those two be?’

My professor was talking about writers that had been lost – literally – to the sands of time, with some hope of an ancient, ragged manuscript dug up somewhere in an ancient Egyptian trash heap. I have no hope of that with a Crisis Core essay: it’s gone, just like those nights of sitting on rickety steps, chain smoking & drinking Japanese beer. Maybe that’s the wonderful and horrible thing about all these words on the internet. We talk about it as if it’s ‘simply’ disposable, but it’s ‘simply’ disposable – or becomes intangible – in the same way bits of our life do. It happened; it was; we remember; but we can’t touch it, can’t access it any more.

For now, for these little bits of digital flotsam, I just hit the ‘Paginated PDF’ button on my browser – as I did when I read Leigh’s most recent piece on FFVII – because wonderful writing might just disappear and not be hanging out in the Internet Archive for me to read, and there is no paper version. Even my own boring, run of the mill posts on Kotaku are gone, things I want now, brief records of what was important then. So I hit ‘Paginated PDF’: because you might find yourself years down the road longing to read just a certain essay, connected to nothing contemporary, since you want to remember what it felt to be like then. 

It’s yet another summer of learning how to say ‘goodbye,’ something I’m not very good at, but is a constant fact of life as an academic. And I know there are all sorts of things that are happening this summer that I’m silently telling myself to remember: remember how this feels, and that, and that. Because that’s all I’ll have soon. And I tell myself to remember those things, because invariably, something – like my class, or Leigh’s recent essay, or whatever – will crop up and remind me, whether I would like to remember or not. Pass this thing back and forth, remember together. It’s sad and beautiful. It means something. There should always be something more tangible than there was this thing that made me feel once, but often, there isn’t.

There’s a beautiful poem by Mary Ursula Bethell called “Response.” She writes of letters, and minor happinesses, and the now. Also the past. The last stanza is beautiful:

But oh, we have remembering hearts,
And we say ‘How green it was in such and such an April,’
And ‘Such and such an autumn was very golden,’
And ‘Everything is for a very short time.’

It reminds me of those fleeting moments: devouring Crisis Core on my lousy San Diego steps; walking back to a hotel near the convention center in LA, barefoot because my feet hurt; walking home with a person I adore so fiercely my heart could burst; laying on my couch, half-asleep, listening to a dog dreaming loudly; all those moments from Shanghai or grad school or or or ….. I think we get accustomed to the idea that our lives online stretch on and on, last forever (after all, isn’t that what all the news articles say?). They are for such a very long time -  but really, the bits that make it up can be (or are) such slippery things, and everything is for a very short time.

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With thy needle and thread (and dictionary and word processor)

A few weeks ago, Maura Cunningham wrote a fun post for GradHacker called “My Dissertation Sweater.” In it, she compared her experience writing a diss to knitting her first full sweater; although I don’t knit, I read it & nodded – both for the feelings about being a grad student in those final throes, as well as for the feelings evoked when I thought of the embroidery I do (and how it relates to my professional life). I also just finished an enormous (by my standards: 21″ x 10″ or thereabouts) embroidery project, which I’ve been working on in earnest between teaching, editing, writing, researching, and general living since July – something that’s made me reflect in general on Big Projects (like manuscripts – I’ve been throwing myself seriously into my first the past few months).

I’ve been cross stitching since I was 4. A great aunt taught me during the Thanksgiving holiday; I have the product of that first foray into needle, thread, and Aida cloth (it’s a Christmas ornament, a rocking horse with somewhat sloppy stitching – but, I was four!). I’ve drifted back to it over the years, going through periods where I finished (or almost finished) pretty big projects, periods where I would put a few hours of effort into something & then give it up, etc. I did some cool stuff in grad school – like a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex OST album cover (this was given to a  then-SO), or a logo from Final Fantasy X (this still resides in my office). I wrote a how-to guide for Kotaku on charting & creating non-sprite cross stitch. When I got back from my research year in China, the sister of my significant other at the time was about to have a baby, and I wanted to embroider some kind of “birth announcement.” Now, if you have any familiarity with the types of kits available at your average craft store, they’re pretty sickly sweet (if you’re lucky, it’s a relatively non-saccharine version of Noah’s Ark. If you’re not, well …). So I started looking for something … interesting. Something that someone could conceivably hang on their wall at a much more advanced age & not be embarrassed of (e.g., not blocks, bears, or Noah’s Ark; something that perhaps had more intrinsic artistic value, at least as I defined it).

10550813_10100117091973801_5877238373363768657_nAnd so I discovered the world of what I refer to as “high-end” cross stitch: patterns and fibers that are stocked at specialty shops, not your local chain craft store. This includes a pretty wide variety of patterns, from antique reproductions to super-modern patterns (I tend to gravitate more towards the “antique” side of things; perhaps this is lesson 1: historians often like old things); there are beautiful linens in addition to the more typical Aida cloth; fibers go way beyond plain cotton DMCs (I myself have a great love of hand dyed, over dyed cottons and silks, where one of the real draws is the often subtle variation in shade). It’s the one part of my life where I find myself consistently drawn to the high-end, the slow-made, the handmade, the produced-in-small-quantities. The one place I will consistently shell out for the luxury of something artisan crafted (a skein of mass produced DMC cotton thread generally runs about 30 cents; hand dyed cotton, $2 or more; silks – luscious and bouncy and just wonderful feeling, a real splurge! – $6 or $7). Well, that and artisan goat cheese.  But to set aside smart-ass commentary, spending a lot of time with needle & thread has taught me a lot about myself & the ways I prefer to work, as well as some of my deep-seated anxieties and concerns.

Lesson 1: If you spend enough time with something, you’re going to constantly pick apart its flaws. 

Every time I post pictures of my embroidery on Facebook or Twitter, friends invariably comment on how pretty it is! Meanwhile, I’m sitting at home going “OH MY GOD, I can’t believe I was so lazy that I let that stitch slip by … Doesn’t anyone notice that weird blending there? Why didn’t I rip out those flattened stitches? WHY did I leave this sitting in a frame for too long, I’ve ruined it.” When you spend a long period of time with your nose pressed up against something, you’re bound to notice its shortcomings and have a hard time viewing it objectively. Although I recognize this (with research, too: I’ve played the genuine cheerleader while a friend has commented negatively on their own work, seeing that they’re just too close to view it objectively), it’s hard to get over. I’m trying hard to get over it (as I am with all these things). I am (frankly) too lazy when it comes to embroidery – something I do for fun and relaxation – to fret too obsessively about it, but my perfectionist tendencies can really stymie getting good writing done, because I’m often afraid of making a mistake.

Lesson 1.5: Getting some distance is good, and will help you see past those flaws.

Cross stitch often looks a lot better from far away than it does close up. Is anyone going to see those slightly smushed stitches when this is hanging on my wall & they’re glancing at it? Probably not. A better example is my Final Fantasy X logo, where I tried the “blended thread” technique (using two different colored threads in one needle). As it turns out, I really (really) don’t like the effect, but it’s a lot more muted (and more harmonious) when viewed from a distance, and I’ve never had anyone look at it and go “My god, that’s hideous.” I suppose it’s possible they thought it, but more likely is: they saw it from a distance and thought it looked nice, because they haven’t spent a million hours mired in it. Even I – now that it’s been many years since I spent many hours mired in it – think it looks nice from a distance. The first six months after I defended my dissertation, I couldn’t open it without crying. I was ashamed of myself for producing such a half-baked, horrible piece of scholarship (and the typos! Oh my god, the typos). With some distance, I’ve managed to come around to seeing its good points and its flaws. I needed some time away from it before I could appreciate what I had done.

wachet backLesson 2: Getting from nothing to completed work often looks kind of ugly on the backend.

There are some kinds of embroidery that are designed to be viewed from both sides equally. The “Holbein stitch” – so named because it appears in a lot of Tudor-era Holbein portraits – is one such stitch; it needed to be the same on both sides, since it shows up on collars and cuffs that didn’t just sit in one place. My embroidery, on the other hand, goes on a wall, or on an ornament, or on some other object that is going to be viewed from one side and that’s it. I try to keep things as neat as possible (carrying threads too far, or leaving excessively long tails of thread, or making knots does have an impact on the final impression from the front), but I could frankly care less whether or not it looks the same on the front as it does on the back. Some people can in fact do ultra-neat embroidery that could be displayed equally on the front or the back, but I am not one of those people. Likewise, I am not a perfect researcher or historian. I have bad habits. I am often a disaster in progress on the backend, and often feel perilously close to nervous breakdowns (friends who have been on the receiving end of one of my tear-filled ‘I am incompetent & I’m never going to be able to do this!‘ meltdowns can attest to this). But when it comes down to it, I get the job done, and get it done well (even if I do have to tell my students “Do not follow my example! Don’t do it! I’m telling you from experience!”). I’m always looking for ways to be a little “neater,” but it’s never going to be a totally smooth process and that’s OK.

Lesson 3: Mistakes happen. They’re not the end of the world, though they sure can seem like it.

10552518_10100117848058601_4105017966663198818_nI’ve had to rip out an insane number of stitches in my years of stitching. It’s inevitable: you get motoring along, you stop counting as carefully as you should, and the next thing you know, you’re half a count off and the whole project is in danger of being off kilter. In embroidering on linen, I most often count over two, which means that mistakes are not always immediately apparent (part of the image at left is half a thread off: can you see where?). It is downright painful to spend hours ripping out many hours worth of stitching (as I did on the section shown), but sometimes you can fudge and redirect, sometimes you can’t. It’s usually not the end of the world. I suppose one of the nice things about being a historian is that often, when you run into a wall, it means a shift or redirect – not a “failure.” Kind of like figuring your way out of a half-thread mistake on a piece of linen. Sometimes it means a few hours of ripping out those stitches you so carefully put in … sometimes it means figuring out where you can shift a little here, shift a little there, and …

Lesson 4: Things sometimes look stitched together to you, but it’s often not that noticeable … and just part of the process.

10623351_10100165843724901_3606760155800218901_oThe latest piece I finished was a band sampler – different horizontal bands put together vertically. In retrospect, the smart way to do this would have been to embroider each horizontal band, moving down the sampler. I didn’t do this for a variety of reasons. This means that there’s a pretty clear dividing line running through the middle of my project … or is there? I mean, it’s definitely there, but going to point 1, I’m not sure how many people would really notice (some time with an iron also seems to help this). I’ve read academic work and been able to see the “seams,” but most often, the author needs to note those for me. And when it comes down to it, few projects just spring fully formed from someone’s head – particularly a first project, often based on one’s dissertation and article(s). The author (you) is going to notice the Frankenstein aspects of how everything fits together, but the average viewer isn’t going to see those seams – or at least not to the degree that you do. And pulling things together is just part of the process.

Lesson 5: Your stash can be the best motivation to get through something.

I have a giant stack of projects I’ve stashed in anticipation of getting to them … someday. I sort through them occasionally just to give myself an idea of what comes next (and to stop myself from adding to the stash). But really, one of the biggest motivators in getting through a piece in progress is the idea of starting something new – something that’s really exciting, and has caught my attention! While I guess it would be great to take all the time in the world to see my dissertation through to its (hopeful) conclusion, I have things in my academic stash – projects I’m incredibly enthused about, but can’t get started on until this one is done.

Lesson 6: Appreciate the fact that there are wondrous things that only you are going to notice.

10155660_10100158462551831_1018454225360675027_nI ran out of a dye lot of thread halfway through the project. As it turned out, the new dye lot (of the same “color” thread) had the most glorious shade of lavender in it: I mean, really spectacular. I spent a long time just looking at the thread when I started using it (even though it didn’t “match” exactly – going back to point 4). I tried to photograph it and failed (though you can probably see a little of the variation). I loved the way the pale blue ran into darker blue then into pale purple – just exquisite. I was thrilled with the way it stitched up, and thought it added a nice pop to the project. It’s something I think most people wouldn’t even notice. But I know it’s there, and I take delight in that subtle shade shift. In much the same way, everyone’s work is sprinkled with things they – experts on whatever it is they are writing on – are going to notice, and the rest of us won’t. Friends often query after I read a draft: “Oh, did you think such-and-such part was funny? What about this? Did you notice that turn of phrase? Did you like it?” I usually answer: “Ah … no? I didn’t notice? Was I supposed to? I’m not saying it’s not clever, just that it flew right by …” Most of the time, I’m just not in on the joke, because I’m not the one that has spent a billion hours with the sources and subjects. In much the same way, I still take an unholy amount of pleasure in some of the stories I relate (“Isn’t this spat between high level Marxist intellectuals over this minor point of historical materialism as applied to the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl just HILARIOUS?”), and I just have to come to terms with the fact that they make me smile (because I’m the one that’s been wallowing in them for a period of years), and that’s enough.

Lesson 7: Take pleasure in the mundane joys of work.

Cross stitching is fundamentally pretty boring work. By which I mean: it’s repetitive. I have a pattern. I have one stitch. It is not thrilling from the perspective of changing from moment to moment. There are color changes … and the patterns can be complicated … but it’s not some crazy exciting process. And yet I take great joy in it on a number of levels. It’s productive (you can see progress!). It’s pretty. It’s soothing. It’s comfortable, and something I enjoy. Research, to me, is much the same: sometimes it’s wildly exciting, often it’s not, and sometimes it can be one hell of a horrible slog. But there’s something comfortable about it, and it is something I really enjoy (even when I’m grinding my teeth in anticipation of the end). As I’ve dug into my manuscript, I’ve found myself reminded that I do enjoy the mundane process of nosing around sources (not even things holding exciting finds: just filling in holes here and there), and I especially enjoy writing. It’s a terrifying process, but also one that reminds me of why I’m doing it in the first place – I enjoy this. I’m good at this. For all the inevitable flaws, I’ll be able to do this. It’s just a matter of transferring some of those lessons from needle and thread to dictionary and word processor.

I often feel oddly bereft after finishing large projects, be they embroidery, research, or editing - what do I do now? I like keeping projects around for a little while after finishing, so I can take a peek back and look at all the hard work I’ve done, before moving on to something else. I’ll be taking this latest piece down to the framer’s next week, but until then, I’ll keep it in a safe place to look at and touch now and again. I’m a very tactile person, though it’s not something I often get to indulge in with my research. But there’s something about running my fingers over the surface of an embroidered piece (even though you’re not supposed to; skin oils are bad for fibers!) – it’s a nice sensation, something I can’t quite describe – or feeling the peculiar weight of the fabric once a large design is mostly or entirely stitched onto its surface. It’s a wonderful, heavy feeling – the weight of progress, I guess.

 

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Those happy golden years (?)

10653510_10100150925336471_1539700535619140759_nThe semester is back in full swing here in Montana, and I’ve been feeling like I’m drowning on multiple levels (though I have had the time for some nice hikes the past two weekends, which has made me and the dog super happy!), but still trying hard to keep my head above water. It’s good for reminding myself that I can cope with stressful situations with (relative) aplomb, but has made those precious hours at home where I can just veg out, embroider, or watch mindless TV all the more magical. I preordered the latest Theatrhythm months ago & had completely forgotten about it, so when it showed up late last week, I was totally delighted (more low-stress, repetitive task activities to distract myself with!) – despite being completely & utterly disgusted with the whole cultural edifice of “videogames.”

The past two months (give or take a week or two) have been utterly insane on the internet, at least in the world of videogames. I was going to describe it as a ‘kerfluffle,’ but the campaign of harassment and vitriol has been totally appalling (this is too light a descriptor) to watch from a distance. Although I don’t write about games much anymore – and even then, write only here, sporadically – I still have a number of friends and acquaintances who are involved in the “games criticism/journalism” community in some capacity or another, and I spent several years pretty close to it on account of my then-significant other. The past few months have been pretty bad, with a lot of talented writers (particularly women) exiting the space for a number of reasons, anger from freelancers over their working conditions (similar in many respects to the adjunct crisis), many things just seeming pretty untenable as writers scramble for limited Patreon dollars to try and support themselves, etc etc. A lot of these issues aren’t new, but they have reached a boiling point. The past couple of weeks have just added to that, and it’s hurt to watch people I care about be targeted, one after another (and just when it seems to be dying down, it comes back with a vengeance …).

At some point, while watching crazier and crazier things be retweeted (my only contribution was replying to people I know: “These people can’t be serious. They CAN’T.” If it were satire, it would be brilliant and cutting – but sadly, I think it was (is) all being spoken or typed with the utmost seriousness), I had this weird thought: My “career” happened during a golden age. I’m teaching a course on “memory & culture,” and talked early in the course about the development of Chinese historiography; we pondered the mythical “golden ages” discussed by ancient historians in various places. Of course, it’s not only an ancient impulse (the “Back in my day” or “Kids these days” – or, more elegantly phrased by Cicero, O tempora o mores – point of view is something every generation needs to come up with). Part of the strange thing about the way people (namely, those who seem to think that the current state of games journalism is Really Awful and Something Needs to Be Done) are talking about games journalism now – or criticism, or blogging, or the Twitterverse, or whatever – is that they seem to believe there’s some amazing mythical past where everything was fine and to their liking. I’m not sure when they’re talking about – four years ago? Seven (when I was writing)? Ten? Twenty? Never? I tend to slot this mythical age of Perfect Games Journalism in the same category as the Yellow Emperor.

It’s made me sad to watch: all of this, but particularly this latest outburst. Things didn’t used to be like this. I don’t think the period I was writing was really a golden age – there is so much smart writing on games now, and much easier ways to connect with people who are interested in the same sorts of things you are! – but on the other hand …. I got the job at Kotaku after Brian Crecente made a post specifically looking for women writers. I don’t remember any hue and cry over this, and Kotaku did in fact hire not one, but two women (I was deemed – justifiably – a bit too dull for weekday rotation, but was offered a weekend spot). I wonder what would happen now? Would a major site put out such a call (based on the recent hires, I’m going to go with ‘no’)? Would there be rants, raves, and death threats over a perceived “social justice warrior” agenda? Probably, is the sad answer. The toxicity that makes it so that I don’t even want to look at games-related tweets on my Twitter feed, for example, just wasn’t such an issue. Oh, sure, there were grumpy, sexist, asshole comments even then (Ian Bogost’s constant wise counsel was ‘Don’t read the comments!’) – but a coordinated harassment campaign? No. I don’t mean to imply that my experience was the norm; but considering the targets of these recent campaigns, I have a hard time imagining I would’ve escaped unscathed were I still writing – and it quite simply never occurred to me that someone would be threatening my life & make me move out of my house due to what I was publicizing in whatever way. And I was pretty paranoid about putting myself out there on the internet!

Theatrhythm LogoCompared to the average history professor, I suppose I’m something of an “insider” as far as games go, but I recognize that for game studies – never mind the enthusiast group – I’m on the fringes, at best. Even when I was writing about games, I didn’t play everything; these days, with time at a premium, I’m far less likely to do so. JRPGs are my poison of choice, and I plink away at a couple of games of a far more casual variety on my iPad when I just need to be distracted. Chances are, if I’m going to invest significant time into a game, it’s going to be something already known and loved (i.e., old). In a word, I’m boring, behind the times, and not a particularly good example of a person who plays a lot of AAA games (or indie games. Or, really, ANY kind of games). I’m never going to be a “games writer” ever again; on the other hand, I do love videogames (some of them, at least).

I don’t love them because of the shit that’s happened the past 2 months. I don’t want to teach with them because of the incredibly toxic community that’s grown up around them – truly, far and away more toxic than I remember anything being 7 years ago. I’ve been playing the latest Theatrhythm release for 3DS (I do haul that around with me everywhere, even though Bozeman is a terrible place for streetpassing!) & reliving “Great moments in gaming past.” Just hearing the music from well-loved titles from many years ago has sent me on a nostalgic bent – it’s not something exclusive to games (I certainly get the same feelings with the right kind of literature or non-game-related music, for instance), but it is a bit funny how bound up certain game memories are with bigger life memories. That’s why I will always play games in some capacity or another.

I remember watching the end of Crisis Core (which I sorely wish would be re-released!) at some point during my first year of grad school, on a PSP I’d bought myself as a Christmas present on a total whim. I loved it. I loved the gameplay, and the story, and the music. I really loved the music (despite not being much for dramatic guitar riffs – but damn, is that a good theme). As I often do, a few months later, I once again clocked through the game after that first frantic playthrough. It was good (more than good). It came at a difficult point in my personal life, and I remember sitting out on the concrete steps of my crappy apartment in a so-so San Diego neighborhood, with my big wonderful black dog keeping watch from inside the steel security grate, while I was drinking canned Kirin Ichiban and smoking cigarettes, playing through the ending (again!), and thinking how sad it all was.

I had weird intimations of that moment this week, as I motored through Theatrhythm & was delighted to discover songs from Crisis Core were included (along with a lot of other things). I love that feeling. It’s why I still bother to buy games (chasing that particular high of wanting to play more more more!), add to my console collection, still have game music in my collection, still have old consoles and handhelds hanging around. I remember how this made me feel, or that, or that. Those feelings often come burbling up at incredibly appropriate times.

Mambo GirlMy office tea mug is known as Mambo Girl (曼波女郎), after the film that graces it. It’s a “homemade” mug – the kind that screws apart so you can put whatever you’d like inside as the decoration – the image trimmed from a DVD cover. I have had it since 2006, and it’s older than that – my friend carried it for some length of time in Taiwan. The night she, her partner, and their Shiba Inu left Taiwan, we were frantically stuffing things into suitcases and bags in that last panicked sweep of their apartment. I caught sight of Mambo Girl – “Cindy! It’s Mambo Girl, you can’t leave her here!” – but there was no room to bring her back to the US, so I took her & have carried her ever since. The lid has chew marks from that Shiba in his younger days (he is much older now – he even has arthritis!), and I’m sure most people would look askance at using a mug that’s pretty ancient, as far as these things go, and has been chewed on by a dog. But I get a kick out of those youthful chew marks, and remember watching the actual Mambo Girl film in Berkeley on my first trip out there, and every time I pour some tea into her (uh, it), I feel warm and fuzzy with the weight of happy memories. Not unlike when I return to well-loved game worlds.

Things like the past few months make me glad I’m happier returning to the past than excitedly looking towards the future, at least insofar as games are concerned; unlike many people I know, I can ignore this stuff these days. I’ve gone through periods wishing I were more involved in the writing community, but having watched what my friends and other people I think highly of have gone through, I’m happy I haven’t. That’s a sad, sad statement of affairs.

‘So let’s write letters’

Screen Shot 2014-08-22 at 11.33.13 PMI bought a wondrous anthology while living in Taiwan, back in 2006; it’s called Women Writers of Traditional China (I’ve written about it before), and at the time, it seemed like it cost a bloody fortune (little did I know how quickly my spending on books would accelerate in the years after that!). I teach with it now, and while I can’t say my students always love the same things I do, nor can I say I do a great job teaching with it (yet)1, I’ve had enough good responses to think that I should keep trying to teach with it. I nearly fell over when a student – who had been in my lower division course & read some poetry of Qiu Jin 秋瑾 there – excitedly told a classmate in my spring semester gender course about that badass revolutionary woman poet, and seemed genuinely pleased when I said we’d be reading her again (as I’ve noted before, I actually have a deeper appreciation for her friend Xu Zihua 徐自華, but I get the appeal of Qiu Jin, in all her beheaded revolutionary glory). In any case, it was really important for me at the time – something I enjoyed spending a little time with every day, a bit of an inspiration. My Chinese was awful, but someday I’d be able to read all that (and, with some exceptions, I can, though I’m woefully out of shape when it comes to producing elegant translations – one reason I often use examples from the anthology when writing here).

I have a tendency towards being hard on myself, and getting in a pretty vicious cycle of berating myself for perceived failures and being unable to get out of it, and generally just feeling pretty bad at everything that counts for something. I spent a fair bit of time this summer pouring effort into other people’s work, and trying really hard to be positive and helpful and supportive and say lots of nice things (along with the ‘WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS AGAIN’ marginalia). As easy as it is for me to get into a self-flagellating mode, I really hate to see people whose work I respect doing the same things to themselves – no matter how minor – so I do try and swoop in with a kind comment when I can. But it’s hard for me to balance that with feeling pretty terrible about myself, and sometimes the balance gets really upset. I think I’ve comported myself pretty well the past year, despite being anxious about my ability to do any of this, and my fear about fledging the grad school nest, and I guess the past three weeks of being pretty hysterical and unable to keep stuff together are the culmination of a fulfilling, but utterly terrifying, year, and an oddly exhausting summer.

In any case: what does that have to do with poetry? In low points, I often find myself reaching for my poetry books. This anthology is living in my office, so I’ve been tucked up in bed the past few days nosing through the Chinese originals of some of these women poets, and also more standard fare – Xin Qiji 辛弃疾, Wen Tianxiang 文天祥, the Tang 300 唐诗三百首.  It’s one of those outrageously self-indulgent things: I know it’s probably going to make me even more upset, but there’s a certain pleasure in throwing salt into the wound. And sometimes, I can just lose myself in the rhythm and not think too hard for a while, other than playing with translations in my head.

But I like being reminded that certain sorrows are just a fact of life, and they were a fact of life then and they are a fact of life now and this too shall pass. Chinese poetry is full of parting (in a way I don’t remember from, say, the great Roman poets): Li Bai writes of it often (one of my favorite lines is from his 送友人, Seeing Off a Friend: 蕭蕭班馬鳴, the ponies cry xiao xiao), for instance, and for all we think of Chinese women as cloistered, locked in the house somewhere, with no life other than trying to carry on the family bloodline and raise the next generation and deal with household things, they write of it a lot. And not just in regards to husbands or lovers, no: one reason I was initially enthralled with the great women poets of the Ming-Qing period is because of the networks (often familial, but not always) they created. You can see a lot of that in the big anthology, and tracing the connections is neat. It’s also oddly comforting, when I’m terribly homesick for some place that never was, and missing my friends that are scattered across the globe. 

At least we can get on Skype, I remind myself. We’re not confined to writing letters (though of course, writing letters has its own charms – a dear friend is an inveterate postcard sender, which is one of many things I love about her. I always look forward to the postcards from her that arrive when she’s been traveling. They are taped on my office wall, and make me smile when I can see them, partially because you’d never know there was a lovely affectionate message on the other side). I’m not alone, and I do have people that care a great deal about me (and I about them), and talking to them is always a bright spot on days – or during weeks – when it feels like everything else is a disaster and I’m a disaster and my research is a disaster and my teaching’s a disaster and how did I manage to make it this far.

Screen Shot 2014-08-23 at 12.51.55 AMWhen I was 23, I sat in my favorite restaurant in Taipei at the end of a massive dinner with friends who were leaving, and having consumed a lot of Asahi and a lot of lamb chops and a lot of other delicious things, we sat over our beers and the weight of the evening kind of settled in. We smoked our cigarettes and drank our Asahi and at some point I burst into tears, because I already missed them. I quoted a bit of Chen Deyi 陳德懿  (though my Chinese was not yet good enough to do it in Chinese): “Not knowing when we shall meet again, let’s write letters./Looking at each other, we only pick up cup after cup of wine”2 后会无由托鱼雁。相看惟伏酒频倾。 If I had known that goodbyes were going to become such a standard part of life, that writing letters – well, long novellas of emails, in my case – was going to be how I maintained connections to people I loved most, I don’t know if I would’ve gone to grad school. I wonder sometimes if I’m just shy enough – and get just attached enough, just quickly enough – that this was a really unsuitable career path for me. On the other hand, it is a great joy, having all those people in my life who I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

If the past decade of constantly feeling like I’ve been flung off the deep end & everyone’s waiting to see if I drown or not has taught me nothing else, it’s that while I am prone to fits of panic lasting weeks when I don’t have other things to distract me, sometimes culminating in spectacular miniature breakdowns, I’ll be over it soon enough and things will keep moving forward (I will keep moving forward). Classes start on Monday, and I’m looking forward to teaching again, and have a regular rhythm to punctuate my days. I’m already feeling a bit better with the knowledge that a summer that dragged on just a hair too long is quickly coming to a close. As miserable as I’ve felt the last few weeks, it’s not a feeling that will go on forever. I’ll put my poetry up until the next rainy day when I’m feeling a bit low (or until I need to make a photocopy for class), and get back to the thrilling world of 1950s Chinese intellectuals and ghosts and opera. Most of this summer was a pretty nice lark (an educational one to boot), and I shouldn’t let a few weeks of being unhappy overshadow that. Life will go on. I will write letters.

Show 2 footnotes

  1. A perfect example of this is the fact that I neglected to inform my students that Qiu Jin’s surname means autumn, which I only revealed when they asked a lot of confused questions about why Qiu Jin & Xu Zihua were constantly babbling about “Autumn this” and “autumn that.” Oops. I did remember to put a note in this year! ↩
  2. Trans. Michelle Yeh, Women Writers of Traditional China, 160 ↩

Knowing that when light is gone,/Love remains for shining.

I’ve always loved reading the acknowledgement sections of academic books – it’s interesting to see academic connections, of course, but the personal acknowledgements can be so touching. One of my favorites is from Joshua Goldstein’s Drama Kings – he says simply: “This book is dedicated to those who struggle with love to stay awake.” Research can be such a solitary activity, so necessarily selfish at times – and those who struggle with love to stay awake do deserve as much praise as we can heap on them.

Last month, a dear friend (and steward to two of my favorite dogs in the world) made a short post that wiggled its way into my brain, and I was reminded of it earlier this week while looking at other academic acknowledgements:

The other day, while rereading my advisor’s latest book, I noticed for the first time that he had dedicated it to M– after his passing. That put a smile on my face, even as it made me tear up a little.

Yup, somewhere in the venerable catalog of Harvard University Press, there is at least one book dedicated to a simple, sweet little dog. Family members and spouses are recorded in public documents, but the true identity behind this dedication would be lost without those who were there to know, care, grieve, and memorialize.

Alas, such is the injustice inflicted upon some of our closest companions.

I think most of us have indulged in some sweet navel gazing, thinking of who we will put in our acknowledgements – of the dissertation to start, and then hopefully memorialized in some university press volume – and I always knew I’d have a line dedicated to the silly, sleek pit bull who has been part of my life for nearly 10 years. I just assumed she’d be there to see the project through, just as she’d seen so many other things in my life through: most of college, breakups, new relationships, several moves (including several where I was gone for long periods), most of grad school. She was there when I drove from San Diego to Phoenix, where my grandmother was dying; she charmed the nurses at the hospice. When my grandfather died in his sleep 24 hours before my grandmother’s death, she charmed the EMTs and police officers who streamed through their apartment. She was my only companion on the drive back from Phoenix, the loneliest drive I ever made. Papers, teaching, conferences, oral exams – I knew no matter what was going on, I had a big black dog waiting for me at home. She was my constant companion – dogs can’t, of course, complain about their lot in life, or refuse to move, but she was always cheerful and ready for whatever my life threw at her.

I got her when I was 20 and she was just turned 2, an adoption from a private owner who could no longer keep her. I had no idea at the time I would be ping ponging across the globe in pursuit of a PhD. I later felt guilty – somewhat frequently – that my career of choice left her in the lurch. She lived with friends and family at various points, and in fact was still in Virginia with my mum up until now. We were finally in a position to bring her to California, and had planned that she’d be coming in January. My solace is that she was always, always loved, no matter what household she was in.

I got a call today from my mum that she was gone. A sudden, severe medical problem came up last night, and diagnostics today revealed a terminal problem. It was decided to euthanize her, and my mum was there stroking her head as they administered the solution. She was fat, and happy, and very much loved all the way up to the end. I was sorry not to be there for her, but glad someone else who loved her – and who she loved – was there with her.

She tolerated my many foibles and failings as a pet owner, all the missteps I made along the way with her, my very first dog that was mine. I was not always the owner she deserved to have – and yet, she never held it against me. She was the most wonderful introduction to a most wonderful breed – my mom’s first reaction was “A PIT BULL?!?!”, but when I brought her up to introduce her to the family, she said ‘You know, she really is like a Boston Terrier on steroids.’ We did obedience classes & she passed her CGC – I wanted to make sure I had one of those awesome representatives of the breed, and I did.

She put up with having a stray cat brought home, and when that cat turned out to be pregnant, dealt with being a canine scratching post/jungle gym for the kittens with grace (see above). She shared our (her) bed with me and foster dogs, putting manners on the young rambunctious ones and being a perfect matched pair with the older, mellower one.

When I got to grad school, she integrated into life in the department along with me. She came on our camping trips – I will never forget having to drag her into a tent at 11 PM (bravery not being her forte, especially when it came to small, dark enclosures made of nylon), or having to figure out how to get her up a series of boulders when we got off the path during our gentle walk (having opted out of the strenuous hiking group). Figuring hauling up 50 pounds of pit bull over a rock that came up to my shoulder was not going to happen, I patted the first rock and told her cheerfully to jump up. She looked, and she leapt – and made it easily. One of my professors let out an impressed ‘Wow’ – she was lazy, but surprisingly athletic when she needed to be. She was not a boxy, muscle bound pittie – a mix of some type, I’m sure, but she was long and lean and wasp waisted, athletic and muscular without working at it. I thought she was beautiful.

She came up to campus with me when I had to go up late at night, went to parties and office hours. She was laying on the floor of our grad lounge when I got the email notifying me I had been awarded a Fulbright-Hays, and leapt around with excitement as I shrieked and my friend hugged me, as one of his undergraduates looked perplexed at this sudden, uncharacteristic display of a grad student’s extreme relief and joy. And occasionally went even to lecture, where she was better behaved than many students. My apartment in SD didn’t have AC and could get unbearably hot, so I once brought her to our 200 person lecture class, forgetting that we had a pop quiz to pick up. She was delighted to see 200 undergrads streaming towards us from their seats, absolutely convinced, I think, they were there for her – and there were tummy rubs in the offing, her very favorite thing.

Even after two cross country trips, she hated riding in the car – she spent 12 hour days in the car standing up, only to collapse when we would arrive at our destination for the night. But she tolerated it because coming in the car meant she got to come with me and see people. She was so well behaved she was welcome everywhere I was. We had a lot of fun in San Diego – I used to joke that people just wanted to hang out with me so they could hang out with the dog. She snoozed at bars and made the round at parties, and came to coffee shops to hang out for hours. I think she enjoyed grad school more than I did, and made friends wherever we went.

I don’t know what I would have done without her. I don’t quite know what I’ll do without her. For all the changes that have happened since I was 20, she was the one constant. She would’ve been twelve in two months. We had almost 10 years together & I’m very thankful for that. She was the very best dog I could’ve asked for, and was more than I deserved.

She deserves more than a little line in a dissertation or a book, but she’ll get that at the very least – and a permanent place in my heart, saccharine as that sounds. I hope she’ll remind me to be grateful for our long-suffering companions, whatever their species, who are so patient and loving and struggle to stay awake.

This dog only, waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone,
    Love remains for shining ….

And because he loves me so,
Better than his kind will do
    Often, man or woman,
Give I back more love again
Than dogs often take of men, —
    Leaning from my Human ….

Mock I thee, in wishing weal ? —
Tears are in my eyes to feel
    Thou art made so straightly,
Blessing needs must straighten too, —
Little canst thou joy or do,
    Thou who lovest greatly.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To Flush, My Dog”

Iron girls

'We are proud of participating in the founding of our country's industrialization!' (1954; from chineseposters.net)

I’ve been trotting through the history of Chinese women in the 20th century in preparation for a course I’m teaching this coming winter. Unraveling these narratives that have been put in service to nation building has been both a trip down memory lane (recalling the early days of my fascination with Chinese history) and diving into new-to-me secondary sources that have popped up in the past couple of years, while my attention was turned elsewhere. It’s been dovetailing nicely with other talk of gender, one that played out (for me, an outside observer) on Twitter and on blogs – I’m referring to THAT panel (“The Words We Use”) at Freeplay 2011, a games event in Australia.

[Some relevant links: Brendan Keogh’s take, Ben Abraham over at Gamasutra, a post by Searing Scarlet, and lots of other links to be gleaned from those]

It’s been interesting, as a woman-journalist-that-once-was – I’m not sure I still count among the illustrious crew anymore, having mostly been resting on my laurels for the past few years, but I was once – interesting and sad and irritating and all sorts of things.

I was never made to be uncomfortable at Kotaku – part of that was my own design (and listening to Ian Bogost’s admonition not to read the comments! – which I pass along on Twitter to this day), part of it was the fact that I generally shied away from writing about gender and sex, part of it was the fact that most of the audience (if not always the most vociferous) weren’t into making irrelevant, sexist commentary. I did do at least one long form essay on the subject of sexuality and gender, and I’m sure the comments were a mix of thoughtful conversation, some ‘What? This again?’, and a smattering of ‘tl;dr’ or ‘Maggie is such a pedantic bitch’ (I wonder sometimes if the vitriol that was occasionally directed at me for looking down on my audience and thinking Kotaku readers were stupid and generally being a stuck up bitch would have been lobbed had I been male; I honestly don’t know). I think I wrote that under the ‘Everyone must produce feature articles’ phase of my employment, and I had been thinking about eroticism in Chinese movies (specifically, the subtle foot squeeze in Red Sorghum (红高粱 Hong gaoliang) and the wonderful tension present in the Maggie Cheung/Tony Leung pairing of In the Mood for Love (花樣年華 Huayang nianhua)).

However, that was not my first brush with issues of sex and gender and games. My first experience with writing ‘criticism’ was on the subject of sex and gender in games; it wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but I was about 22, so I try and cut myself a little slack. It appeared on Slashdot, and the comments literally made me cry. I remember being too horrified and hurt to even look away. It probably was a stupid essay, and perhaps was only parroting things that had been said before (and better), and almost certainly wasn’t a shining example of the genre. But I had never in all my life been subject to the kind of commentary thrown at me (and never since – whatever one wants to say about the Kotaku comments section, comments were moderated to a greater extent and people did get banned). ‘Clearly she just doesn’t get fucked enough,’ or ‘Must be a fat, bitter bitch – anyone have a picture?’ – and on and on and on. It was shocking and hurtful and offensive.

Here I will say that I have absolutely benefited from privilege-with-a-capital-P – maybe it shouldn’t have taken until I was 22 to realize that people who didn’t want to engage with me on an intellectual level would simply hurl insults based on my gender instead, but the only place this has ever happened to me personally is when writing about games. No academic paper reviewer, no matter how monstrous, would return an essay with the notation that ‘Clearly this author doesn’t get laid enough and probably does not fit into culturally accepted standards of beauty, which is obviously impacting her ability to engage with post-colonial interpretations of subjectivity.’ I realize some of this is just the vagaries of the internet, but honestly. I bristle at the implication that comes out sometimes, the one that says that we should just get used to it, and things will change … someday. In the meantime, toughen up, cupcake.

I hadn’t killed any kittens or mugged any grandmothers; I had simply been audacious enough to write an essay that was linked by Slashdot. An essay about what I as a woman who wrote about games would like to see in the games that I played. The nerve I had as a youngster.

Even Kotaku commenters weren't heartless enough to insult the world's cutest pit bull

In any case, that early experience had a rather large impact on how I conducted myself later. I generally think I flew pretty under the radar. At Kotaku’s E3 party in 2008, I hid outside on the smoking patio, sharing a couch with Mike Fahey and an assortment of people who passed by during the course of the evening. No one recognized me – a strange position to be in, since everyone else I worked with seemed so visible, but not an unexpected one. I avoided putting a face to my posts and making things ‘too’ personal, occasionally in stark contrast to my coworkers. The only photographic evidence readers got of me was my bookshelf (unimpeachably academic and wonderful!) and my dog (way too cute to insult).

I wonder if any of my male colleagues, the ones writing under their own names, ever felt nervous about putting a picture of themselves out there for public consumption. I did. I posted one picture of me as an adult on Kotaku, and that was with my goodbye letter – I was already halfway out the door, if someone wanted to call me a fat pig as a parting shot, more power to them (no one did). Even my user icon was a game character and not a photo. I liked sharing bits of my life with the audience, but I never wanted to be too out there – and by ‘too out there,’ I mean using a photograph of myself, not spilling out my deepest, innermost fears and dreams on there interwebs – lest it could be used against me.

Yes, that speaks deeply to my own personal insecurities, ones that are quite independent and alive separate from the sphere of games writing, but nevertheless: that run-in with utterly inappropriate, extremely hostile, very-much-tied-to-my-gender commentary did have a significant impact. I couldn’t – still can’t, actually – imagine anyone using my male colleagues’ bodies as criticism of their writing: ‘Brian Crecente’s opinions are stupid because he’s unattractive’; ‘Simon Carless must be fat and bitter, that’s why I don’t like his essay’; ‘I need to see a photograph of this Ben fellow before I determine my feelings about his writing.’ No, I don’t think everyone – or even a majority – of people in the industry, or people who follow blogs and critical discourse, would say (or even think!) such things. But it doesn’t take much of a minority, just a vocal one, to drown out all the other voices.

It saddens me that we’re still having the same conversations we had years ago, despite what seems to be an increase in visible female writers and critics.

But I agree with those that say people are ‘tired’ of the talk of sexism, it’s all been said before, and any current debate will simply rehash that. I am alarmed by the notion that “gender will stop being an issue when we stop acknowledging that there is a divide.” There is a divide. Refusing to acknowledge the divide just means … refusing to acknowledge it (the author more or less contradicts herself a few sentences later & appears to advocate for people speaking up, but this sort of idea – that talking about an issue is what propagates it – is definitely in play well beyond the game blogosphere. I think it’s a lie, a dangerous one at that, and we should stop throwing it out there. Not talking about an issue will never resolve it, just make it easier to ignore). But I do understand the dislike of talking about it, and the exhaustion with the subject. There is fatigue that sets in as we go round and round in circles and nothing ever really changes.

There’s a fine line here, at times a contradictory one, but I think it’s one that we collectively walk every day in different permutations. I am a woman. I don’t want people to flatten that out and not see my gender (because what usually happens when gender magically “disappears” is categories collapse into one appropriate one, the default being heterosexual male, with differing experiences ridiculed or ignored), but that’s not the only thing that defines me, or even the most important one. But it is part of me. I don’t often think of my gender in relation to my academic work, for example (primarily because I exist in a comfortable, supportive ecosystem in my program). But I am always aware that my experience has been shaped to larger and smaller degrees by being female. It’s not the most important characteristic I use to define myself by far, but it is more than just a box to check on standardized forms.

I’m currently reading a collection of essays published by acclaimed women writers who grew up under Mao – Wu Hui’s wonderful Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women. The experiences and ruminations of these writers – most of whom were once told they were “iron girls,” that they held up half the sky, that they were equal (and indeed, did do everything that men did and then some; but ‘a new woman is just like a man’) – is packaged neatly and tightly. Some of the essays are absolutely brutal; most will at least give the reader pause. I’ve certainly been examining my own life in contrast. Here’s the introductory paragraph by an essay by Lu Xing’er called “Women and the Crisis”:

In recent years, I have been thinking about women’s issues and written about them in a fiction series. I plan to continue writing about these issues in the future. Indeed, since ancient times, woman has never failed to be a topic involving prolonged, heated discussions. I am sure that women will continue to be talked about, in depth and forever. However, women’s situation and future will see few fundamental changes, despite so much writing, thinking, and discussing.

I said “fundamental,” not superficial.

(Ouch)

I would like to think Lu is wrong. I’m hardly the poster child for optimism (if something can be worried about, I can worry about it like a true champion worrier/pessimist), but I would really, really like to think she’s wrong, both on a big scale and on a smaller scale like … the community that writes about videogames.

Here is a slightly more positive take on getting over the gender divide: “Androgyny” (which can also be rendered as “neutrality”) by Bi Shumin:

Androgyny is different from saying that women can do whatever men can do. This statement identifies women as a little boat managing to get close to the mens large ship. In contrast, androgyny is the lighthouse. Toward its welcoming lights both men and women move forward, helping and enabling one another, leaving no one behind.

I have been lucky in my academic career to not brush up against overt sexism from professors or classmates, as I mentioned above. Reading Katie Williams’ response to the Freeplay panel was painful – not because it reminded me of my own experience, but because it was so foreign, and no one ought to feel like that, nor should it be tolerated by those in a position of power. It underscores the futility of staying quiet. I wonder if we haven’t done ourselves a great disservice by distancing ourselves from the discussion, saying we’re not interested in those kinds of issues. I hasten to say that I would have no interest in focusing exclusively on gender issues, but sustained conversation could be a good thing – both in public and in more private (possibly ‘safer’) spaces. I’ve never had the opportunity to sit around with other female journalists and critics and talk about our experiences, and it’s something I would be interested in doing.

Obviously these issues go way, way beyond a conference in Australia and women who write about games. I hope one day, Lu Xing’er will be proved wrong. Until then, I’ll simply wish for thoughtful and sustained discussion on issues that impact all of us, female or not.

Back in the fold

The Guozijian (國子監), Beijing, April 2011

Immediately following on the heels of a family visit (and lots of Kindle reading!), I headed up to Beijing for a work-personal visit, which has actually been really great for work overall (and recharging my batteries in a different sort of way).  Shanghai has been oddly isolating, particularly after coming off of three years of a small, close knit program and people within easy reach most of the time.  And, to be fair, perhaps a lot is due to some of my inherent shyness and general dislike of “going out to meet people” (where people mean strangers, without the veneer of some common interest, as at academic conferences) – or even just being friendly with strangers at the coffee shop.  I’m just generally not feeling up to that sort of personal interaction on my own, nor do I find it pleasurable in the least (not the random encounter in a restaurant or coffee shop).  In any case, my generalized-yet-subtle angst with the situation seeped into my work (or lack thereof).  I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten more done this past week than I have done in the past two months!

Some of that is just finding myself in wonderful, well trod old patterns with good friends.  A cohortmate, actually (meaning we’ve been together since our first fledgling days as PhD students), and her husband; other than the change of scenery and food options, it feels like old times when we lived only a few blocks from each other in San Diego.  The only thing missing is my erstwhile pit bull, Torres, begging for food & mugging people for snuggles and tummy rubs.  The pattern of work or hanging out – three people in one room, sipping coffee and tethered to respective laptops, with occasional commentary on whatever we’re doing punctuating the quiet – is familiar from other well-loved friends.  All told, I feel very at home – which means I’ve been cheerfully humming along with productive, grad student-y things (papers, research, translating, woo).

While I can’t package them up neatly and bring them back to Shanghai with me to ensure continued productivity, this kickstart to work is something I will be bringing home – as well as my scribbled notes from my meeting with my advisor who happens to be in Beijing this year (the other is holding down the fort at UCSD).  I’ve been pretty radio silent since arriving in Shanghai – a not entirely natural state of being for my garrulous, more prone to not shutting up than being too quiet self – and it was nice to lay out what I have gotten done (and get instantaneous feedback).  My trusty Eslite dayplanner – which I have studiously acquired one of each year since 2006 – has a mere two pages filled, but somehow it’s enough.  When one is dealing with minds who manage to cut to the heart of a matter in a sentence or two, who needs an entire legal pad?

In any case, I’m feeling revived and like I have a path, which is really the most important thing in making sure my last 6-7 months in China are as wildly productive as they can be.  Outside confirmation that your gut was right is always good, but so is that very large nudge to get going with stuff you know you needed to be doing anyways.  It’s also nice to hear that maybe taking a path a bit different from your classmates hasn’t had a totally deleterious effect on one’s research year.  Being tossed out of the proverbial nest – so safe, so softly feathered, so sheltered from the outside world! – to fend for yourself (kind of) is a rude shock, so it was with great relief I returned to another familiar, well-trod path and pattern: office hours.  The more things change, the more they stay the same ….

So I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out at “my” desk, listening to new-to-me Renaissance choral music (usually not my bag, preferring plain old lute-‘n-single singer varieties of early music, but it does have a certain je ne sais quoi and makes me long for collegiate architecture à la Princeton), and turning back to Meng Chengshun in earnest (which is paying off by turning up interesting and not-so-interesting phrases and other things – having found what is, to date, the least attractive metaphor for someone longing for a loved one I’ve seen: spitting up pent-up feelings of sadness like a spring silkworm expels threads [of silk] from its mouth).

All in all, I’m finding Beijing to feel more “lived in” than Shanghai (I suppose this makes sense), but I’ll be glad to get home to the Concession and the humidity and a different pattern of life.  But it’s been a nice first trip to this city I’ve read so much about; we’ll see what the next few days hold.

I had just commented on the fact that one could forget one was in the middle of a giant city. Well, sort of.

Recharging the batteries

How I clean up my laptop desktop

So I’ve had the occasion – thanks to a visit from family – to completely set aside work for about two and a half weeks & just relax.  One thing I’ve found since starting grad school, lo those many years ago, is that “relaxation” is sort of a misnomer for what’s going on when you’re not working.  I tend to be tightly wound and neurotic (several doctors at the clinic on campus have noted with some wonder how tight my shoulder muscles are!), and saddled with a Type A personality with a streak of laziness (a Type A-, perhaps?) – which compounds the neuroses.  In a conversation with an undergraduate contemplating grad school, I opined that separation and compartmentalization can be hard to achieve; work comes home with you, never stays where it’s supposed to, and you can never quite turn off the nagging voice in the back of your head telling you to start working and stop watching TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras marathon.

In any case, I always have a very long to-do list & this has only gotten worse since I’ve been set loose with only a vaguely defined agenda: “research dissertation” is quite different than, say, “write historiography paper that’s due in two weeks” or “research X topic for the next 10 weeks while updating seminar on progress weekly.”  I will be trekking up to Beijing at the beginning of April for a two week business-pleasure trip: the pleasure part is seeing good friends I haven’t seen in months and months (or longer), the business part being seeing one of my advisors.  I am actually quite relieved at the prospect of being able to have a talk – and having a very real, very definite deadline coming up soon has definitely helped my thinking on what work I have gotten done and where I hope to go.

But I haven’t been thinking about that for the past two weeks, no.  I’ve been mellowing out in a happy cocoon of family and pleasure reading.  One thing I have been taking a lot more time for since crossing the qualifying hump is reading for me, not for my research.  My first three years of grad school were stuffed full of a lot of books (of course), but precious few were for my own pleasure.  Those that were could generally be tied in some way, shape, or form back to research or teaching (I had a six month spate of using late Meiji and Taisho era Japanese fiction as my “bath time fluff” – one never knows when one might be called upon to teach a course and need those kinds of materials!  I like to be prepared for most reasonable eventualities).  For once, I haven’t had the overwhelming guilt of “But I should be doing something else!!!”; I’m hoping that this lengthy pause to regroup and rest up will mean better,  more productive weeks ahead – I really needed a break, and I’m finally getting to the point of being able to take one with only a little guilt.

Last summer, I bought a Kindle on a half asleep, 7 AM whim. It actually turned out to be an excellent purchase – I don’t have to worry about access to English language books in China & I don’t have to worry about storage anywhere.  It’s actually made me more inclined towards pleasure reading, since I don’t have to go through the checklist of: Do I actually want to own a physical copy of this book?  Do I need a physical copy?  And finally, would I be embarrassed to have this sharing shelf space with the rest of my books (an important question, to be sure)?  OK, the last bit is an exaggeration – but as I find myself acquiring ever more (academic, research-related) books, space is at a premium & my “light reading” is the first to get pushed out in favor of Serious Secondary Sources.

Looking over what I’ve read in the past few weeks, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, particularly – it’s just not “serious” (as in, having a direct relationship to my research or field of study).  A lot of it is still historical & the vast majority is non-fiction – but I always find it interesting to compare with friends what we consider “fluff,” since it tends to vary wildly.  I have just moved on from a six month sojourn with Tudor history (mostly pretty serious history books; but again, it’s not my field & I can just turn off and enjoy in a way I can’t when I read Chinese history books), where I read good stuff, bad stuff, and in between stuff (and still have a few volumes I need to finish off for good measure).  I’ve been tending towards the slightly more eclectic of late, though still sticking to some favored genres.  Anyways, a couple of highlights:

George Catlin, Sioux Indians hunting buffalo, 1835

Two books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn (here is where e-books drive me crazy: what I really wanted was Evan S. Connell’s seminal – utterly wonderful – Son of the Morning Star, which of course was not available).  First up was A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan (2009), then Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (2010).  I read these in quick succession, which was good for comparative purposes.  The Little Bighorn, like the Civil War, has a terribly devoted fanbase and has basically been done to death – which isn’t to say there isn’t anything “new” to say, just that an awful lot of books seem to crib unabashedly off forerunners (you can feel Connell’s influence on both newer volumes – Son of the Morning Star has aged exquisitely).  Still, it’s one of those subjects I like to come back to, as my mother likes to claim that a trip as a 4 year old to Crow Fair – including a sidetrip to march around the battlefield – was a formative event for me as a youngster.  She’s possibly right; I do know that when I read accounts, I find myself wanting to go back (it’s on the list for next year or the year after, I hope).  In any case, while neither book was particularly enlightening, they were solid introductions and reasonably researched popular histories (Philbrick was in desperate need of a better editor).  I’m still hoping Connell’s magnificent narrative will show up in digital format sooner rather than later ….

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cleopatra and Caesar

I read two biographies, drawn from wildly different perspectives: Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life (2010) and Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love by Yehuda Korean & Eilat Negev (2008).  Not simply divided by time & subject matter, the books were on opposite ends of the spectrum, quality-wise.  Schiff’s take on Cleopatra was surprisingly good – considering the dearth of sources we have, and the fact that Schiff is not a classicist, really good.  I came across it on the hunt for Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (also not available in digital format – sigh), and while it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to sink into, it was a nice diversion for an afternoon.  The author also spent a fair amount of time considering how history has come to be, at least insofar as it reflects on the telling of Cleopatra’s life.  Parts of it felt like coming home & I’ve already downloaded a copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to flit through for fun at a later date, since I’ve been feeling renewed interest in at least sort of returning to well-loved Latin tomes of yesteryear.  I got the impression from Amazon many people were expecting a much “beachier” read – it wasn’t taxing, but I did find it quite satisfying and well written.  It wasn’t mindless fluff to be wandered through without thinking, though I guess the cover image deceived a number of people.

The biography of Assia Wevill, on the other hand, was one of the less satisfying books I’ve read recently – actually, it was just plain bad. I imagine some of the difficulty came from the fact that no one in the story comes off as very likable – Wevill is constantly in odd triangular relationships with a husband and a lover, Plath is, well, Plath & prone to depression and rages, and Hughes comes off as an insensitive jerk, albeit a very talented one.  But the authors didn’t seem clear on how they wanted to package Wevill – thus the narrative came off as confused, and red herrings were tossed into the text with little explanation (does a later feminist poet’s view that Hughes “murdered” Wevill really matter when thinking of what led to the event?  Would it not be better to put that into the, say, section reflecting on her legacy or lack thereof?).  It’s a bit unfortunate, because Wevill comes up only tangentially in biographies of Plath, or of Hughes, or of Plath & Hughes, so the promise of a biography centered on “the other woman” was intriguing.  In the end, though, the only one I felt sorry for was the young daughter of Wevill & Hughes, Shura, who wound up dead on the floor of the kitchen alongside her mother.

I read some other assorted things – a book on the Donner party, two books on Anabaptists in the US – which were consumed in much the same way I consume TV: they just sort of were.  However, I’m currently trotting through a very fun history book that involves one of my very favorite genres of non-fiction – namely, high-altitude climbing tales.  Now, I am not a climber.  I will never be a climber; I will certainly never be a high-altitude climber.  I’m not even sure when I developed a taste for climbing literature. I do remember being totally fascinated when they found George Mallory’s beautifully preserved body on Everest a few years back, and I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air a few years after it came out.  Other than my inborn hillbilly love of mountains – and the Himalaya and other high ranges are certainly impressive ones – there’s really no rhyme or reason for my affection for non-fiction stories centered on climbing this or that crazily high point.  Maybe it’s simply that it’s so out of the realm of possibility for my life – I can’t even fathom wanting to do something like climbing Everest or K2 – that it goes from non-fiction to high fantasy.  There is something otherworldly about the high mountain scenes captured by talented photographers.

In any case, while I’ll usually read (guiltily, in the bath, ravenously) memoirs and accounts of varying quality as my most favored of fluff reading, Amazon – for once – had a good suggestion for me in Maurice Isserman & Stewart Weaver’s Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (2010).  It is possibly telling that my favorite book of the past few months was published by a university press.  In any case, unlike most climbing literature which (at least these days) takes the form of memoir or disaster narrative, this is a delightful, juicy history that puts climbing in the Himalaya into context & situates it in larger forces.  It’s really fun and really interesting – and quite a change from my usual guilty pleasure climbing reading. The authors have less interest in obsessively documenting the details of specific expeditions (probably wise, since a great many books exist with only the subject of this or that expedition); rather, they sketch the outlines of what happened while devoting the bulk of their efforts to detailing why this all matters in a bigger picture.  I’m finding it engrossing, but good enough that I’m trying to spin out the reading experience as long as possible – thus only reading in chunks here or there.  Luckily, it’s a pretty “weighty” tome (or would be, if I had a paper copy), so there’s plenty of pages left to be spun out.

I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would bore anyone looking for a quick, light, inspirational (or cautionary) tale to tears, but it’s the sort of “fluff” I love best: serious history that has no bearing on the stuff that I do.  Or at least, if I don’t take notes, I don’t feel bad.  Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t read the footnotes!  I’m looking forward to getting back to my realm of expertise, but a few weeks of diversion has been restful & good for me – I’m feeling more energized than ever to delve back into Meng Chengshun, Meng Chao, opera, and various other projects.

Vittorio Sella, Camp Below the West Face of K2, Karakoram, June, 1909