Reposted by Dylan Levi KingEquator @equatormag.bsky.social · 29/10/2025On the receding shores of Central Asia's Aral Sea, a Chinese man known as "the King" lives alone in a tent, digging for shrimp eggs. By Liu Zichao, a bold new voice in travel writing, translated by @dylanleviking.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/kin...equator.orgKing of the Aral Sea • Articles • EQUATORA Central Asian travelogue, translated from Chinese by Dylan Levi King 142
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 28/05/2025I will send more pictures of life on the Hibiya Line. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 22/05/2025I hate the way that high-quality black-and-white film looks. There's something off-puttingly sharp about it. It doesn't resemble the way that I see the world. My eyes must be getting worse. I want haze and blocks of color. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 10/03/2025She is going to read Yuk Hui's article on technodiversity in CONG (and she has already read my contribution, which is about going out in Guangzhou). This is promotion for a magazine that I'm not sure anybody but its contributors and publishers have read. 000
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 07/03/2025This is an old picture. Provia 400X isn't made anymore. A pack of five rolls of slide film in 120 would be more than a hundred bucks. I used to not think much about the price. I had no clear approach to selecting film stock. I lost all of the pictures, anyway. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 18/02/2025A note on a bookstore shutter in Jinbocho: "To an unknown Frenchman..." 020
Reposted by Dylan Levi KingLongreads @longreads.com · 10/01/20253. "Eastern Promises," @dylanleviking.bsky.social @thebafflermag.com "Reading a delightful essay on clutter in Japan made me realize how I’d held a romanticized version of Tokyo in my head for 20 years. Dylan Levi King’s Baffler piece challenges me in a similar way." thebaffler.com/salvos/easte...thebaffler.comEastern Promises | Dylan Levi KingIn Japan, the economic miracle has fizzled. Citizens, expats, and guest workers alike cling to the country’s past rather than face an uncertain future. 121
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 21/01/2025Someone should at least turn Barthes to enka, if they haven't before. It's beyond me. I had never read this essay before today. I am too late. It must have been done before and more thoroughly. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 21/01/2025I have watched this a hundred times. I have watched it a thousand. I wrote about it in an essay on Miyako Harumi. But language fails. Adjectives fail. That is what Barthes says. We are left with "the impossible account of an individual thrill." 130
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 21/01/2025I could never explain precisely what I love about the 1966 performance of the song. I appreciate that her growl is clearly not from rokyoku but borrowed through Hirota Mieko from American R&B records. I appreciate the adolescent flirtation in the performance, incongruous with a song of parting. 100
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 21/01/2025I have still never heard Charles Panzéra and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, so I would like to rewrite "The Grain of the Voice" about the Miyako Harumi singing "Anko tsubaki wa koi no hana" on Furusato no uta matsuri in 1966 and Miyako Harumi singing a duet on the same song with Ishikawa Sayuri in 1971. 100
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 19/11/2024I think this is the right way to explain the situation: it will be published by Guizhou University Press but is a production of Yuefu Culture. I think an English translation is unlikely.book.douban.com803《803》是旅美作家胡凌云的长篇小说。 803，一个极具时代特色的基地代号，是父母为之奉献一生的工作单位（父母年轻时作为上海光学仪器厂技术人员支援三线建设来到贵州山区），是主人公船长出生、成长和始终想... 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 19/11/2024(I do not write like Jia Pingwa or Zhang Chengzhi, but from the process of translating their work, I have learned a certain amount about how to structure a novel, and how much dedication is required to write one.) 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 19/11/2024The author—Hu Lingyun—has translated J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. (I am not imagining that the novel resembles in any way their work. The work of translation is instructive, though, I hope. It is like tearing apart a clock or a camera—some mechanical thing—and putting it back together.) 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 19/11/2024Since I learned about it a few years ago, I have wanted to read 803. It was described as a Proustian memoir of Third Front industrialization and its aftermath in Guizhou, narrating decades in a monologue sustained across eight hundred pages. It will come out this year. 240
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 15/11/2024I would like to write about the enjoyment I felt standing at the kitchen counter this morning, fishing with a set of long kitchen chopsticks the desiccated chicken skin, gristly meat, and brittle, black bones out of my jar of Lao Ganma Chicken Oil Chili. I can turn this into something productive. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 13/11/2024November, 2022. (I can see the Skytree from north of Ueno Park.) 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 12/11/2024I am comforted sometimes by the thought of the contents of the internet being slowly deleted. I always hoped that certain confessions could disappear. It's not that I am ashamed but that I would like to make them again, in a more artful way. Well. But it's still a terrible thing to contemplate. 000
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 11/11/2024Later, I noticed for the first time that the temple hosts an annex that teaches classes in yoga, meditation, and energy healing. I thought of my neighbor, who opened up to me about her vaccine skepticism. It seemed to be the product of the same neuroses that led her before to veganism and crystals. 010
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 11/11/2024I could not understand those activists that stormed buildings temporarily hosting vaccination clinics. I still think that they must have been, like many radicals in this country, caught in the wash of American social media. They disappeared. The bulletin board was up-to-date. 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 11/11/2024I thought the information must be outdated, from the time three years ago when there was a drive to have everyone vaccinated, and we all received invitations in the mail. Unlike other places around the world, there was lax enforcement of the vaccine mandate. Skeptics were not under pressure. 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 11/11/2024Temple bulletin boards display for passers-by devotional art, calligraphy, updates on maintenance of the cemetery, schedules for ceremonies, or material from the sects they are affiliated with, so, I was surprised to note one down the block taken over by warnings about mRNA vaccines. 110
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 10/11/2024Although I should love Shintani Noriko, whose maudlin ballad about a Parisian self-immolation sold nearly a million copies in 1969, I agree that her inability to choose songs led to her exit from show business, rather than her Catholic social conscience and left-wing politics. God bless her. 000
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 14/09/2024I looked her up once. I know there's no use doing that. It's just that I get curious about the people that stood out in those years. I always wonder if they have left. She has. She moved to an even smaller town. She put out a record album of songs detailing the collapse of her first marriage. 100
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 14/09/2024I set aside the task of cutting pictures out of magazines to make a collage. I bought the CD that weekend at the only music store in town. I didn't then, but when I play it now, I picture Megan as I remember her—square jaw, too tall, and wearing big, square frames, hand-me-down sweaters... 100
Dylan Levi King @dylanleviking.bsky.social · 14/09/2024My most significant musical memory occurred during a Friday afternoon art class in eighth grade. We were required in turn to bring in CDs to play. A girl named Megan brought in Live Through This. I had never heard it before. There were many things I had never heard before. I lived in a small town. 131
