Masa

http://masa-photo.tumblr.com/archive

Bertram Thomas

Hotline Bling

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

The Young Marshal: Zhang Xueliang

imgur

A very Chinese Christmas

#ham4ham

Old Chokey Christmas

In winter all’s still, and the sun’s scanty rays

Filter downward in pewter and silvery grays.

I find myself strolling down memory hutong

To Beijing in winters when life was more putong.



Glazed roof-tiles girded in glistening icicles,

Sonorous bells on still-plentiful bicycles,

Cabbages, coal smoke, and good shuanyangrou,

And sidewalks all covered in soot-blackened snow.



The winters seemed colder, and Houhai would freeze,

While the snow would collect on the boughs of the trees.

It’s rare now to see cabbage stacked on the stoop

Which by springtime would rot to gelatinous goop.



The tempting aromas of sugar-fried lizi,

And yams baked in oil drums wafts to your bizi.

Or sweet crunchy skewers of red candied haw

Which are no longer sold come the early spring thaw.



No Christmastime feasts back then, nothing so grand.

We McGyvered it up with what scraps were at hand.

Instead of the turkey and after-eight brandy,

We guzzled Yanjing and ate White Rabbit candy.



It may be the earth has been globally warmed.

It may be my memory by time’s been transformed.

But winter these days doesn’t feel so romantic,

As the pace of life toggles ’twixt hectic and frantic.



Modernity offers its own winter charms

(Though I’m not sure it helps more than it harms).

Both April Gourmet, and of course Jenny Lou’s,

Offer comfort-food cures for our grim winter blues.



And with broadband these days, the chill might not trouble you

Even considering the damned GFW.

Though Internet blockages make us quite bitter,

We still manage access to Facebook and Twitter.



The Web offers so many ways to enjoy

All those holiday classics I loved as a boy.

I sit by my space heater, warm in my qiuku,

And stream “It’s a Wonderful Life” off of Youku.



We send SMS to spread holiday cheer,

In Nativity missives at least half-sincere

And Hanukkah greetings as well if you choose

(Since half of the gringos in Beijing are Jews).



The net has made giving of gifts all too easy

From zhengban to shanzhai, from tawdry to cheesy.

And what could beat Taobao for buying your presents,

To have them delivered by tricycling peasants?



The traffic gets bad, but it’s bad in each season,

To get me to cross town, you’ll need a good reason.

I normally don’t mind the subway at all,

At least in the spring, or the summer, or fall.



But with everyone wearing a fluffy down jacket,

Each subway car needs extra staff just to pack it.

They shove you inside just as hard as they can,

Like they do for the rush hour trains in Japan.



Come winter, the nightlife does not drop a beat.

The revelers give off enough body heat.

The bars are decked out in the Christmas decor,

meaning lights they've left up since the season before.



Hot Toddies and mulled wine and egg nog with rum

(Though prices, I fear, are a princely-ass sum),

With globalisation, wherever you roam,

The holidays won’t be too different from home.



But I wonder if that’s what it should be about.

With each passing winter comes reason to doubt.

So for Christmas this year I’m inclined more than not

To dine with the family on mutton hot pot.



As for wintertime goodies completely indigenous,

Is goose all that better than fine roasted pigeon is?

An Old Chokey Christmas – now what could be finer

Than spending the holidays right here in China?



It’s the small things, they say, that make life worth living.

Intentions, not price tags, make gifts worth the giving.

Those home comforts can’t match the fresh-candied haws

Or the chestnuts or yams – suck on that, Santa Claus!

•

Kaiser Kuo

Place Names: The Place Beijing

The battle of Jakku

Kojima

Elite

So am I

GoRuck GR1

New York 1855

Floral Mutter

Ya Shi

Fragment

In summer        slit open a plump, cool lotus root
taste the sweet juice frothing up from its orifices.
On the rooftop       a dense and scorching pressure crowds inward
but . . . it's vague and speechless like the long wind.
The great many cruelties of life have gone ignored for ages.
—and what is loathsome is more or less similar
for all that is vulgar, keep strumming your shiny eccentricity!





The Moon

The tenderness of self-love can go to hell!
The locust has the locust's rationality, the dagger the dagger's
reasoning: in this unavoidable life
are so many who can finally forgive themselves—
rainwater soaks the tree roots, lightning
bisects the whetstone in the foothills in a flash
my question is: if god did just as he pleased
would the moon still whisper its secrets to wicked people? 





Translation and a Daoist Song

1. Translation

In life        we throw up too much dust.
Death ends this reprehensible behavior.
If we talked out the thoughts and mirages that bind us
how could it be better        than getting tipsy
and half-undressing, lying there in the half-light
of the tree's shade        sunbathing?

2. Daoist Song

Life like light on dust, death like dust in light.
A particolored fantasy. The fish flesh getting cold. 





Waking in the Night, Flipping the Light on. The Switch is a Bit Cold.

Perhaps you will write a line of poetry, perhaps.
In your tears is the tail of a steelhead trout, you say: the night is molting—
                                                                                    a mustard seed!

It's not good to be too sweet-sounding. It's not.
In early summer you'd just dug out an enormous listening station from 
                                                                                    the green jade
of your body: how could it be unrelated to past and future flowers? Better 
                                                                                    let your poems know.





Brief Sentences

Another day gone.
I have consumed all the substances I am supposed to, but
have not contributed that single small breath
of cool air.
Like a salmon in the dark and frothing water
gently releasing its floral mutter. 

translated from the Chinese by Nick Admussen

Black Ink Village

Wang An-shih

On a Farewell Journey to Send off
Mend-Source, a Sudden Windstorm Rages,
So I Write Four Lines on the Boat’s Wall

At the Huai River mouth, west wind turns
brutal. My friend’s stuck here who knows

how long. But look: the rising moon turns
all these thoughts we share incandescent!

Adele v Eminem

The Minotaur or, The Stop in Oran

There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities. Simply, certain conditions are required.

The cities Europe offers us are too full of the din of the past. A practiced ear can make out the flapping of wings, a fluttering of souls. The giddy whirls of centuries, of revolutions, of fame can be felt there. There one cannot forget that the Occident was forged in a series of uproars. All that does not make for enough silence.

Paris is often a desert for the heart, but at certain moments from the heights of Pere-Lachaise there blows a revolutionary wind that suddenly fills the desert with flags and fallen glories. So it is with certain Spanish towns, with Florence or with Prague. Salzburg would be peaceful without Mozart. But from time to time there rings out over the Salzach the great proud cry of Don Juan as he plunges toward hell. Vienna seems more silent; she is a youngster among cities. Her stones are no older than three centuries and their youth is ignorant of melancholy. But Vienna stands at a cross-roads of history. Around her echoes the clash of empires. Certain evenings when the sky is suffused with blood, the stone horses on the Ring monuments seem to take wing. In that fleeting moment when everything is reminiscent of power and history, can be distinctly heard, under the charge of the Polish squadrons, the crashing fall of the Ottoman Empire. That does not make for enough silence either.

To be sure, it is just that solitude amid others that men come looking for in European cities. At least, men with a purpose in life. There they can choose their company, take it or leave it. How many minds have been tempered in the trip between their hotel room and the old stones of the Ile Saint-Louis! It is true that others have died there of isolation.

As for the first, at any rate, there they found their reasons for growing and asserting themselves. They were alone and they weren't alone. Centuries of history and beauty, the ardent testimony of a thousand lives of the past accompanied them along the Seine and spoke to them both of traditions and of conquests. But their youth urged them to invite such company. There comes a time, there comes periods, when it is unwelcome. "It's between us two!" exclaims Rastignac, facing the vast mustiness of Paris. Two, yes, but that is still too many!

The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with poetry. For all the world's sorrows it is a hallowed spot. But at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of poetry. Descartes, planning to meditate, chose his desert: the most mercantile city of his era. There he found his solitude and the occasion for perhaps the greatest of our virile poems: "The first [precept] was never to accept anything as true unless I knew it to be obviously so." It is possible to have less ambition and the same nostalgia. /But during the last three centuries Amsterdam has spawned museums. In order to flee poetry and yet recapture the peace of stones, other deserts are needed, other spots without soul and without reprieve. Oran is one of these.

Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands

Jonsbo UMX1

Baskerville Typeface

The Englishman John Baskervile is a fascinating character, and reading about him is like reading the biography of two men in one. Space doesn’t permit to list all of his achievements; suffice to say that he always strove to improve upon existing methods and materials, whether that be in his recipes for new inks, or his finer quality glossy papers.


[Baskerville] was not an inventor but a perfector….He concentrated on spacing. He achieved amplitude not merely by handsome measurement but by letting in the light.–Type, the Secret History of Letters, Simon Loxley, page 54 (quoting from English Printed Books)

“Baskerville has less calligraphic flow than most earlier typefaces”***, and this can be said of just about all the Transitional Style types. Whereas the earlier Humanist and Old Style types owed much to the handwritten letter form, the pen’s influence has all but disappeared in the Transitional types. The following is a detail from one of Baskerville’s type specimens:

Andrew Batson's Blog

http://andrewbatson.com/