I have been watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand with much enjoyment and would like to counter various sneering reviews such as this (it was another review I can no longer find that provoked me to write here)… The general drift seems to be to point out the banally obvious, that the show contains a constant diet of sex and violence, and to state that there is no plot. It seems to me that this entirely …
At a time when a great fuss is being made about Google’s sudden discovery of morality that has made them pull out of the Chinese market – it occurs to me that this apparent reaction in China to the film Avatar is suggestive. It is perhaps not the full frontal assaults of such ‘champions of freedom’ as American corporations or Western leaders lecturing their Chinese hosts about human rights that are going to bring down …
Britain is expressing outrage at the execution today of Akmal Shaikh, one of its citizens. Notwithstanding the human tragedy that this represents, this reaction seems to me to reflect a failure of historical memory. We none of us easily forget humiliations that we have suffered, and the Chinese have not forgotten the Opium Wars. In that shameful episode, Britain, shelled Chinese cities (the origin of the term ‘gunboat diplomacy’, I think – and, if not, …
Well, predictably, the Copenhagen conference was a washout. I am not, however, ready to follow George Monbiot in declaring it a disaster. The way I see it is that Copenhagen is the first time we have got together as a species to tackle a common problem. That this happened at all is a clear admission that global warming is a threat that we all now recognize. That in itself is amazing progress. Further, there were …
I was watching the ravishing “House of Flying Daggers” for the second time, and was again struck by how ravishing Chinese martial arts can be. I find them far more compelling as ‘dance’ than I have ever found ballet, for example – and it does seem to me that martial arts plays the same role in China (perhaps less so in Japan) as ballet does in Europe… I studied T’ai Chi (that is the yin, …
The April 25th issue of New Scientist has an article discussing a computer that can read from a speaker’s lips what language he/she is speaking. This reminded me of something I came across stating that people in southern Russia had a characteristic face shape that was thought to be due to the heavy bread that was their staple – the intense and persistent chewing required, bulked up certain face muscles. I would suggest that what …
Continuing my, possibly reckless, exploration into Chinese, I want to discuss the character for the singular pronoun (I, me) wǒ which is the first character shown. Now this is composed of two elements: the one on the left, the 2nd shown, is a pictograph for ‘hand’; the one on the right is a pictograph for ‘halberd’ or ‘lance’. So wǒ is written as a hand holding a halberd… This seems to me to pose two interesting questions. …
I had become increasingly curious about the Chinese language, but everything I read about it contradicted everything else. So at last I took the plunge and I am now in the 2nd term of a course in Chinese. I am less interested in learning to speak it than I am in learning to read and write it – at least a little bit. Fundamentally, what I am after is an insight into China and its people: I …
