iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

You can spawn as police or boss (see below) or both (management).

CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Also caught the reopening of the Shanghai Antique Books Store 上海古籍书店. Really impressive relaunch. It is essentially a new bookstore and they now have *everything*. Cool to be squeezing past people in the aisles of a bookstore that is floor to ceiling texts on premodern China.

Entrance of Shanghai Antique Books Bookstore with grand opening decorations

People browsing books in the Shanghai Antique Books bookstore.

Three young people in traditional Chinese clothing done in the style of dress from the Tang dynasty. Women in the foreground is browsing a facsimile edition of the Yongle Dadian 永乐大典.

A Ming Dynasty print of a collection of commentaries on Du Fu’s poetry collection.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Since I asked, I’ll go. This Japanese language CC character/word dictionary is one of my favorite works to browse for the sheer quantity of information packed into each entry. Great on 虚字, clear, uncrowded historical maps and charts. 1800 pages, but easy to hold in one hand and extremely durable.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

If you’re winding up at AAS and still have room in your luggage, Prologue Bookshop on High Street just down from the convention center has a great selection, including lots of translated fiction. #AAS

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Based on this sentence alone, I’ve decided this article is about Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault” and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

Frame from the horror manga “The Enigma of Amigara Fault” featuring a man in his underwear pointing to a human shaped hole in a cliff face and shouting “This is my hole! It was made for me!”

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

I think no person alive more fully embodied what it means to live the life of the mind for me than David Lynch. Thank you for teaching me how to catch the big fish. RIP

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Heart grew three sizes browsing Book People’s @bookpeople.bsky.social (new? newish?) “World Literature in Translation” section yesterday. What other indie bookstore’s have a section dedicated to literature in translation? Let’s make a list.

Picture of the World Literature in Translation section at Book People in Austin, TX.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

One of the funniest tweets of all time imo

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

A charming little book. The author spent several years retracing the Tang poet Du Fu’s 杜甫 (712-770) travels across contemporary China, taking 120,000 photos in the process. The text is his diary of visits to sites eerily unchanged and many more lost or changed forever.

A map of contemporary China showing sites Du Fu passed through or lived in at various points during his life.

A picture of a run down brick house constructed at the site of Du Fu’s former residence in Qiang Village. Doubtful, but still extraordinary that such places are still said to exist.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 23/08/2024

Valued friends and colleagues burst into my office and slam my laptop shut as I try to make this dril tweet the epigraph for a thing I’m writing on the Classical Chinese commentarial tradition.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 05/08/2024

6x Gold medalist in Stair Ascent. Hardwood specialist. Iconic bushy tail. World record for footfalls per stair. “Traction and control are overrated. All you need is pure, unadulterated fear of strangers.”

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 23/07/2024

Oracle bone script calligraphy is fun because you can be writing out a cool-sounding phrase and then you get to draw a cute little silkworm and then it’s back to writing.

A spring couplet by Pan Zhulan 潘主兰(1909--2001) written in oracle bone script calligraphy and the character for silkworm 蚕 is a cute little silkworm.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 03/07/2024

As long as this is the Biden camp’s response to SCOTUS going completely rogue, the “Joe is too old” stuff will stay at the top. The campaign has the power to make headlines and shape the narrative with bold actions and positions on major issues. They won’t do it.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 27/06/2024

Picked up this classic for $1 at the local used book barn. 1975 paperback edition, but you already knew that just by looking at the cover design 😍 #booksky

An image of Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics with the most beautiful 1970s looking cover design you’ve ever seen. Concentric circles of brown and orange radiating out from the title in a simple elegant font.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

As a meme. (And before anyone pounces, my actual position is that we should always be teaching both canonical authors/works and marginalized authors/works while being careful never to assist the forces of annihilation, which are intent on sweeping *all of it* into oblivion.)

Frame one: Happy guy labeled “professor who wants dusty old canonical works removed from humanities syllabi” reaching up towards a balloon
Frame Two: Happy guy no longer happy but anxiously looking back as he realizes he is being held up by an excited looking giant labeled “tech billionaire who wants to see everything removed from humanities syllabi”

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 23/06/2024

Quote is from “Beauty and Her Sisters in the Nineteenth Century and After” in this volume. I have it via ILL. It costs $95 and I swear to god is printed on office inkjet printer paper with bargain bin ink. Several pages are glued together at the top. Oxford University Press folks!!

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 23/06/2024

Essay by Jonah Siegel makes an interesting point: if you hold that critiquing the canon is a mode of resistance to the powers that be, you must grapple with the fact that *our* elites no longer go to art museums, see plays, attend film festivals, or read books. Moreover, they hate the people who do.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 24/05/2024

“Sauté onion and garlic in gasoline until fragrant.”

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 22/05/2024

post a PERFECT album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice In chains

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

Sniper atop student union building, IU Bloomington. This is the photo I’ve seen circulating in connection with the claims by students who were there that they saw snipers. If you were there, please confirm.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

What do you want to hear from them? They are all watching this unfold like

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 12/03/2024

Just gave a talk on how reading scholarship in other languages has transformed my whole sense of what counts as research and got a few queries about language learning “hacks.” My answer is always the same: Anki spaced repetition flashcards. Nobody in the audience had heard of it. 🤦

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 07/03/2024

Needed a pic of Jacques Le Goff the great Annales School historian of the Middle Ages, for a slide and every single photo (not to mention fit) is a vibe. I like him even more now.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

Been turning the kid’s Pokémon cards into little word puzzles by looking up the Japanese name—nearly always a portmanteau or furigana given in katakana—and then trying to work out the meaning. E.g. Entei, fire-type legendary Pokémon, en tei …. 炎帝!

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 16/02/2024

POV it’s 221 BCE, the First Emperor of Qin has ascended the throne, and you’ve just been added to the Justice Ministry’s listserv.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 10/02/2024

Seeing an image of “spring couplets” on the Tiangong space station during the Spring Festival Gala last night has me wondering whether anyone has ever recited a Classical Chinese poem in space. One would think, given the name of the vessel, that someone has.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 02/02/2024

Putting this in my Wang Bi 王弼/“Dark Learning” 玄學 PPT.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

After years of using Watson, I’m teaching Brook Ziporyn’s translation of the Zhuangzi this term. I like certain strategic choices—“the Course” for dao 道, usually “the Way”—but feel pretty ambivalent about others. This should be fun.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 31/12/2023

In 2023, I actually kept a very basic New Year’s resolution for the entire year. 1+ hour workout 4x per week. Jump rope, boxing (heavy bag), and weights. By late Feb, I stopped needing any caffeine in the afternoon. I had energy to spare. Anyway. Small victories.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 31/12/2023

Don’t have an end-of-the-year list to contribute but here’s the podcast I was happiest to discover in 2023. Casual conversation (in Mandarin) about literature and culture. Recent episodes: Tibetan Chinese-language novelist Alai 阿来, love and war in Eileen Chang’s novels, Wang Xiaobo’s 杂文…

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 30/12/2023

Brand new collection of articles from a top academic press on the many ways excavated manuscripts have already fundamentally altered our understanding of the Qin and Han periods. Hardcover, 569 pages with hundreds of illustrations and color plates. But I’ve buried the lede. List price: $21 US.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 21/12/2023

Just finished up two talks at Fudan University’s 古籍所in Shanghai. One on 说文解字, the first etymological dictionary of the Chinese written language (though my talk challenges this characterization) and the other on textual practice in the early empires (Title:帝国作为文本实践的视野：对近来欧美先唐文学研究趋势的批判性反思)

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 07/11/2023

Someone was asking what everyone’s favorite sci-fi worlds outside of the big franchises were. The near-future worlds of Simon Stålenhag’s books would be mine. Just re-read this one last night with the freezing rain ticking against the window. Highly recommend.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

While searching for the review, I found this interview with Dykstra about the book. Look like it is the product of the perfect storm of hubris and negligence.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 28/09/2023

Me too. This was me teaching from the Waltham translation last semester. So. Many. Problems. Must. Maintain. Composure.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 21/09/2023

Yes, although tracing as a mode of copying is a mid-6th C development. The most famous version of the most famous work of Chinese calligraphy, Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection” was produced using this tracing technique.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

Final day of the Gods and Monsters unit of “Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernatural from East Asia” concludes with Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla. Today we’re gonna talk Gojira as revenant and radiation as a contemporary modality of haunting.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 14/09/2023

The works in 小楷 garnered the most praise from the shoals of school children and parents drifting from case to case for being “neat and tidy” 整齐. Boys and girls, it may not look it, but there is more evidence of technical mastery in this one character than there is in the entire《汲黯传》.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 14/09/2023

Got to see the work of one of my favorite calligraphers, Deng Shiru 邓石如(1739-1805), in person at the Shanghai Museum where I also enjoyed the company of the extremely dignified looking older gentleman who studied these works in silence at exactly my pace as everyone else raced past.

A work of calligraphy in the hybrid clerical-seal style of Deng Shiru entitled《大舜舞干戚赞》

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 14/09/2023

Accidental contemporary art installation on the walls of the Fudan University subway station in the Shanghai Metro.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 09/09/2023

Was lucky enough to catch the final day of the Shanghai Museum’s “Pages Through The Ages” 玉柱流芳 exhibition, which featured this 800-year-old anthology of Du Fu’s poetry, one of the earliest extant witnesses to his collection.

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CE @siegeweather.bsky.social · 10/08/2023

Greetings from Shanghai~ (Not using a VPN for this btw. Bluesky too smol for the firewall.)

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