iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 01/10/2026

London friends! I'm having a book launch later this month at LSE. Hope to see some of you there! registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/easting-th... details: www.lse.ac.uk/internationa...

EASTING THE WEST:
THEORIZING THE POSTLIBERAL
CONJUNCTURE FROM CHINA

BOOK LAUNCH

DR CHENCHEN ZHANG

PROFESSOR SHAKUNTALA BANAJI
DR KARIN NARITA
DR CHRISTIAN SORACE

CHAIR: DR JASMINE K GANI

**Wednesday 21 October 2026**
**6.15pm to 7.30pm**
MAR 2.08, Marshall Building

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 26/09/2026

a document circulating online shows Harbin Engineering University issued disciplinary warning to 20 students for using VPN to visit foreign websites sad to think of the first email sent from China in 1987 that read “across the great wall we can reach every corner in the world”

a Harbin Engineering University notice on giving disciplinary warning to 20 students for using VPN

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 23/09/2026

a nice day to visit beautiful Lund, meeting friends old and new!

yellow historic house with green-trimmed windows and red roses along the front, on a cobblestone street.

A speaker (I) presents to an audience in a library, with a presentation projected on a screen.

A white historic building surrounded by greenery and a lawn, with a bust displayed in front.

A person (I) stands in front of a historic ivy-covered brick building with large steps and arched windows.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 21/09/2026

despite the border drama, looking forward to the Lund event tomorrow! www.ace.lu.se/calendar/eas...

Poster with text that reads: Easting the West, Theorising the postliberal conjuncture from China. Open lecture with Chenchen Zhang, Durham university

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 09/09/2026

filmmaker Jia Zhangke's comment on duanju (vertical short drama) interesting to ponder "been watching hongguo (duanju platform) recently. Whether a story is told in two hours or two minutes is a matter of format, not lineage.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 08/09/2026

when entirely different worlds collide... Sister Jiang (Jiang Zhuyun) was a highly revered revolutionary martyr made a household name by the novel Red Crag TIL her son is a professor in computer science in the US; her grandson also did his PhD in the US, and then came back to China for executive

a poster of Sister Jiang in revolutionary/Maoist style

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 02/09/2026

highlight of my #EISAPEC2026 is discussing Easting the West with these wonderful people! @europeanisa.bsky.social

A panel of six people seated at a table during a book roundtable, with a presentation slide projected behind them.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 31/08/2026

anyhow, this is my favourite kind of modified "traditional" dress haha. I like round collar (stand collar feels suffocating to me!), loose fitting, one or two knot bottons (not too many to deal with). the diagonal knot button closure is a distinctive post-Qing feature influenced by Manchu clothing

photo of me wearing the kind of dress described in the post

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 31/08/2026

it was exactly 10 years ago when I last visited Lisbon excited to go back for conferencing!

A woman (myself) walks down Lisbon’s iconic tram-line street, with tracks running through a steep cobblestone road lined with colorful historic buildings and the waterfront visible in the distance.

two dogs on a cobblestone street in Lisbon, with buildings and the sea visible in the distance.

A rooftop terrace overlooking a historic city with white buildings and red-tiled roofs, with several people standing and dancing.

A black-and-white photo of a narrow cobblestone street lined with old buildings, balconies, and several people.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 30/08/2026

basically he thought everything since the Xianbei Wei (4-6th century) had been “barbarian” 胡服. apart from Zhu Xi or contemporary Hanfu activists, no one actually cared. one of the most popular styles in Tang, worn by both men and women, was Sogdian.

photo of a mannequin showcasing a Tang woman wearing Sogdian style dress

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 30/08/2026

"authentically Chinese clothing", and he wanted to go back to Song style (which was before the Mongol Yuan). But what did Song scholars say? Neo-confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) lamented that "contemporary clothing is all barbarian/foreign)

而今衣服未得复古，且要辨得华夷。今上领衫与靴皆胡服，本朝因唐，唐因隋，隋因周，周因元魏。隋炀帝有游幸，遂令臣下服戎服，三品以上服紫，五品以上服绯，六品以下服绿，皆戎服也。至唐有三等服：有朝服，又有公服，治事时著，便是法服，有衣裳、佩玉等。又有常时服，便是今时公服，则无时不服。唐初年服袖甚窄，全是胡服；中年渐宽，末年又宽，但看人家画古贤可见。唐初头上裹四脚软巾，至鱼朝恩以桐木为冠，如山形，安于髻上，方裹巾，后人渐学他。至本朝渐变为机头，方用漆纱做。本来唐时四脚软巾，只人主后面二带用物事穿得横，臣下不敢用。后藩镇之徒僭窃用，今则朝廷一例如此。学蒙。与上条闻同。
And yet today, clothing has not returned to the ancient style, and it is still important to distinguish between Han Chinese and foreign styles. Nowadays, the upper-collared shirts and boots are all Hu (barbarian) garments. Our dynasty inherited them from the Tang, who inherited them from the Sui, who in turn inherited them from the Zhou, who themselves adopted them from Yuan Wei. During Emperor Yang of Sui's imperial tours, he ordered his ministers to wear military uniforms; those above the third rank were allowed to wear purple, those above the fifth wore crimson, and those below sixth wore green—all of these were forms of military attire. By the Tang dynasty, there were three categories of official robes: court robes, formal official robes worn when handling affairs (which were considered ceremonial attire), and included garments with sashes and jade pendants. There was also everyday wear, which is the official robe of today; it was worn at all times without exception. In the early Tang dynasty, the sleeves on robes were very narrow—entirely Hu (barbarian) style; During the middle period they gradually widened, and by the late Tang dynasty they were even wider—this can be seen in paintings of ancient sages. In the early Tang dynasty, people wore four-cornered soft head coverings. Later Yu Chaoen made a hat of paulownia wood in the shape of a mountain and placed it on top of his hair bun before wrapping the cloth; later generations gradually imitated him. By our dynasty, this style gradually evolved into the ji tou and was made using lacquered gauze. Originally, during the Tang dynasty, the four-cornered soft head covering had two horizontal bands at the back of the emperor's head fastene…

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 30/08/2026

if you think the "1644 historical view" (that Qing isn't part of Chinese history) stuff is weird, don't forget the Hanfu movement (which started in the early 2000s) emerged from the same premise. that the garments worn by Han Chinese women continuously in late Qing & Republic era were

photo of female garments from early-mid 20th century China

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 29/08/2026

it's really devastating to think how, as the flood went downstream, although it was still horrifying, you begin to see videos shot by people as there are surviving witnesses. but at the checkpoint there's only CCTV image. no one would have survived.

map showing the route of glacier collapse and floods in Tibet-Nepal

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 28/08/2026

saw some image analysis online that suggests this is where the 6-story Gyirong checkpoint building was... (can't verify if it's really the site, just sharing the images for ref)

Two rescue workers in orange protective gear walk through a rocky mountain landslide area.

Two rescue workers in orange protective gear walk through a rocky mountain landslide area. Coloured circles highlight features of the mountain.

A large border checkpoint building sits between steep mountains, with yellow and green circles marking rock formations on the hillside.

photo of the port building before and after the landslide

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 27/08/2026

"white skin, black mask". painstakingly used LLM to translate and read the introduction (by manually copy-pasting...) and it's worth it. solid critique of decolonial studies.

book cover of Piel blanca, máscaras negras.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 24/08/2026

looking forward to a couple of book events this autumn, starting with the EISA conference in Lisbon next week!

poster. text: Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China book conversations. 2 Sept Lisbon 22 Sept Lund October London

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 24/08/2026

discussed this in the last chapter of my book academic.oup.com/book/62722/c...

However, the commitment to opposing colonial violence everywhere also
means one has to work with ethical and strategic tensions. A pertinent
illustration of this is how Palestine activists responded to the Trump administration’s fund freeze of foreign aid. This resulted in the shutdown of
Whynot (歪脑), a Chinese-language news magazine affiliated with Radio
Free Asia (RFA). Kite and Olive issued a strongly worded statement to condemn the hypocrisy in Whynot’s coverage of Israel and Palestine despite the
magazine’s ‘state-sanctioned progressivism’. Calling RFA, which was funded
by the US Agency for Global Media until Trump’s termination of grants,
complicit in imperialist wars, it argues that the fact that media organizations like RFA amplify ‘the voices of those resisting oppression in nonWestern countries’ does not change its fundamental nature, and that ‘no
great power is the saviour of the oppressed’.⁴⁴ In the broader discussion
of the consequences of the fund freeze, however, other collectives used
social media to call attention to the dire situation this put into Uyghur
and Tibetan communities and pro-democratic activists in Myanmar, as well
as the humanitarian crisis caused by the halting to development aid. The
strong condemnation of US imperialism in the context of Palestine does
not need to preclude the recognition that the empire’s selective support
for human rights in some cases provides a much-needed lifeline for antiauthoritarians and persecuted groups who have little other resources to rely
on.
An organizer who relocated to Europe from China reflected on how the
proximity to different structures of oppression has shaped the direction of
their political energy. They recalled that when residing in China and Southeast Asia, their politics focused more squarely on local regimes and did not
involve a strong rejection of Voice of America or RFA as tools of liberal imperialism. ‘In a certain reality and from a certain position’, they noted, ‘RFA was definitely …

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 23/08/2026

I've spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at campist reactions to this and it's amazing. now, if the argument is just "there's only one BIG EVIL. it's the 'primary contradiction'. talking about oppression elsewhere, especially in places that are resisting the BIG EVIL, is helping the EVIL",

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 22/08/2026

they are. they've been attacking the sinophone network Palestine Solidarity Action Network for PSAN's coverage of Iran and China

workshop4Gaza: You should probably then also retract the made up atrocity propaganda about Iran that you spent weeks posting about in the lead up to this war. Funny, haven’t seen a word about the slaughtered Iranian schoolgirls or anything about Iran on your timeline since.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 17/08/2026

the film grossed just 7711 RMB in the first 10 days and then suddenly took off because of the DIY homemade quality. two days later box office reached 5.5 million.

Two crudely rendered, anthropomorphic bulls are facing each other in a forest. Chinese subtitles at the bottom read: “别说，这个味道真不错”

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 09/08/2026

for no reason at all I made a video to demonstrate a unique initial 声母 in my dialect (zhongyuan mandarin)... which I *think* in IPA would be rendered /ŋʐ/. but I'm not sure, maybe some phonologist will come across this one day and tell me what this is.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 08/08/2026

the size of the effort I have made towards "grant capture"...

folder screenshot: readings 4.9 GB, teaching 3.3 GB, grant proposals 92.7MB

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 06/08/2026

whatever institutional failures Cremin might have represented, these "my citation count is higher than you" people are part of the problem.

Aaron Bastani: Amazing.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism has over 1,000 google scholar citations. In a few years I can run a department at Cambridge too!

Alex Edmans: Hilary Cremin, who fawned that Arday was "the best in the world", has 2,000 Google Scholar citations in a 26-year career. While citations differ across fields, in my field a senior professor might have 2,000 in a single year. Many UK education scholars have several times that number.

This is why meritocractic hiring matters. As the saying goes, As hire As, Bs hire Cs.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 05/08/2026

people love a "Chinese versus American" story so much. Zhong Shu has had all her education since high school in the US and is doing a PhD in political philosophy (specialisation in classics) in an American university.

Chinese interview: The concept of atonement didn’t really exist in Ancient Greece and it didn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey. It exists in your Odyssey. Did you Christianize the Odyssey?

American interview: spin the snack wheel and then read these thirst tweets they called you zaddy

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 24/07/2026

funny thing about this is the same can be said to this post: facebook's problem is allow too many people to have a say and post something stupid like this

facebook comment: As a Chinese, moved to the U.K. at my late 30s. The problems of the west are to let too many people have a say. A lot of people are too stupid to say things. That created woke culture. Those are unrealistic ideologies. Also, East Asian culture is very blunt. Uk culture, people won’t directly say you are stupid and shut up. Instead, uk culture encourages people to speak up including stupid ideas. Uk has gone too far left.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 23/07/2026

today's reality stranger than jokes Instagram a HK property video tour turned up on my timeline and the agent unironically says this 3 m2 "room" for domestic worker in a 30 mil HKD flat is her favourite part of it, and that it's worth 900k HKD based on square meters

Instagram screenshot showing a tiny 3 square meters closet room

Instagram screenshot showing a master room with ocean view

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 20/07/2026

can't believe this was already 7 years ago...

photo of me standing in front of a university dorm building, wearing a tshirt that says "the worst part of censorship is ⬛⬛"

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 19/07/2026

like what?? what's the mental gymnastics here?

https://jacobin.com/2026/07/world-cup-argentina-geopolitics-soccer

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 15/07/2026

world cup discourse on X is SO WEIRD analysis is futile

@bonmatimessi: watch the "woke" crowd support the 3 horsemen of colonialism and genocide over Argentina just because it's trendy

@ryuIsn
> i hope that all of u, since y'all r so woke, support argentina and not a colonizing country that committed genocide (france, spain and england)

Mati Smith 🇦🇷 ✅ @Trumpe... • 3d
Translated from Spanish · Show original
Post Text
> 🇦🇷 The only team in the semifinals without Africans or Muslims.
> 100% Argentine, that's why they hate us so much.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 15/07/2026

you may as well propose an ethnic unity law, kemi

Kemi Badenoch: Britain is multiracial, but we must never become multicultural. We need to be proud to be British and understand what that means

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 12/07/2026

people say this site is dying. when I share my blog post across different platforms, not using algorithm optimized language and not putting the link in the comment (can't emphasize enough how much I hate it), bluesky brought in most views. I'm just happy it exists.

website stats, showing referrers ranking: bsky 116, X 32, LinkedIn 13, Facebook 6.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 12/07/2026

bonus picture here which is a photo of my high school classroom in the early 2000s, where I prepared for the gaokao.

scanned image of an old photo, showing a student sitting behind piles of books in a worn-out classroom.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 07/07/2026

I'm dying at these AC memes from weibo caption: "EU president is critically using Chinese AC"

a meme that uses an AI generated picture of EU president von der Leyen enjoying cooling from Midea AC unit

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 03/07/2026

how do Chinese ethnonationalists imagine contemporary Britain, 2026 edition. Bilibili vlogger adapts a famous episode in Chinese history, the so-called "five barbarians disrupting China" (now the phrase is often used in anti-immigration context) and makes it "five barbarians disrupting Britain"

screenshot of bilibili video. text reads: You brought it on yourself. Five barbarians disrupting Britain. 自作自受，五胡乱英.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 01/07/2026

this is a real state-media-run Facebook page and it has 15M followers?!

screenshot of Facebook page "Xi's moments"

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 26/06/2026

reason to praise China: no protests at all reason to praise Japan: there are but only on weekends, number is tiny, and people are polite

The Spectator · Follow
2d

Why Japanese students aren’t woke

PHILIP PATRICK

THE SPECTATOR

> One of the joys of living in Japan is the lack of wokeness. It is not that it doesn't exist — there is a Tokyo Pride, the odd Gaza protest, and gender equality is increasingly discussed — it's simply that the concept doesn't quite translate.

Like the strikes that only take place at the weekend so as not to inconvenience customers, woke protesters here are tiny in number, generally polite and devoid of the threatening aggressiveness of the West

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 25/06/2026

why do people like Nigel Farage and Elon Musk like to talk about "meritocracy"... check out our paper on the role of meritocratic discourse in the construction of majority male victimhood www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Screenshot of Nigel Farage post on Facebook: white working-class boys are currently lowest-performing group in the country's education system thanks to the Equality Act. Reform will scrap it and return Britain to a meritocracy.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 16/06/2026

husband is particularly amused by this ruguanxue meme and suggests me posing a photo with this image lol

photo of a page in my book... discussing ruguanxue

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 12/06/2026

oh the postsocialist condition. could totally see this as an essay question in China in the 2000s. probably not now because "peer competitor", "already got our own Steve Jobs" etc.

Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen
@C_NMNg
It’s Vietnam’s national high school exam season. One essay question in literature praised Elon Musk, Steven & Mark Zuckerberg as ‘technological innovators’ and asked students to respond how a ‘Vietnamese Steve Jobs’ can be made. Such primitive worship for oligarchy & capitalism.

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 10/06/2026

I can't... anyone who has any idea of global intellectual history can see how not making any sense this is

Branko Milanovic: I spoke of it very briefly at my book promotion yesterday in Paris--I think it is an important if somewhat speculative point. The Sinification of Marxism may, for the first time in history, create a unified Euro-Asian ideology that would bring together ancient Greek and ancient Chinese influences. Plato & Confucius through Marx.
The ideological implications of China’s economic success
Sinified Marxism and its future

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 04/06/2026

this is one of the slogans on the square I think often: "let's see who lives longer" even when all other hopes are exhausted, this is the last hope. individuals are fragile and temporary. the demand for justice and freedom will outlive us all. #June4th

photo from the 1989 protests in China. A banner says: 看谁活得长

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 02/06/2026

huge turnout for Ilan Pappe's keynote, Gaza as epicenter - the breakdown of the international order, at BISA 2026 @mybisa.bsky.social

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Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️ @chenchenzhang.net · 01/06/2026

Happy Monday and here's your June motivation quote. Anton Chekhov's letter to editor Nikolai Leikin, dated May 27, 1886

No money, and too lazy to earn any. Send me some shelves to put my teeth on. But I shall keep my word: I'll laze through May, and from the 1st of June I'll sit down and get to work.

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