Kate Lingley 龍梅若

View of a grassy hillside with rakes and gardening gloves tossed onto several black plastic bags full of grass clippings. Half a dozen large white long-legged birds (cattle egrets) are stalking a man in jeans and a neon green shirt, who is bent over gathering grass clippings off the newly shorn lawn.

Cattle egrets on campus know to stalk the groundskeepers because they trim the grass and make the bugs much easier to find.

That's a lot of words Micah! Pat yourself on the back :)

My personal experience of translating pre-Qin texts makes me more than a little dubious about this 🤔 Can an AI bang its head against a wall for hours, I mean, turn a phrase delicately over in its head until the meaning snicks into place like a lockpick? (Both are simultaneously true)

The color coming from copper makes me think about the patina on ancient bronzes, which derives from a similar process, and I suggested to a colleague that these are really 青铜蒜, bronze garlic.

A canning jar full of plain white garlic cloves in pale yellow vinegar.

The same canning jar one week later. The garlic cloves are developing curved bands of pale bluish green.

Same canning jar at two weeks. The garlic cloves are turning an improbable blue-green color, but the ends of each clove are still white.

Final result. The garlic cloves are a distinct blue-green color, which is deeper in the center and lighter at the ends.

I decided to make 腊八蒜, a kind of pickled garlic that turns jade green as copper compounds in the garlic react with the vinegar. I kind of didn’t believe it was going to work, but it absolutely did and I’m so tickled (also, does anyone have recommendations for using the stuff up?)

So many good recs here already, but one comfort read I must add is Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and if you are an audiobook person the version read by Frances McDormand is one I go back to over and over

I heard about the reported TSA Precheck closures as I got on the train to O’Hare and I’m still two stops away as I see this 🫤

View of an urban streetscape in downtown Chicago, with the El train tracks above. In the foreground, workers are tearing up part of the street. Behind them are two storefronts: a modern one reading “Industry Ales” and a mid-century one that reads “CENTRAL CAMERA: Since 1899.”

Old home week in Chicago. This is the camera shop on Wabash where I bought my film (FILM!) for my dissertation research photography in 2001.

(thinking of you @kodyisover.com)

And the article about materiality and impermanence, which was not out of date but which link got deleted too:

Oops, previous link to the Hualin issue with my article about women's voices was not up to date. Here's the proper link:

I mean, you have standards

(right, 清流, sorry, just got off a red-eye)

Awwwww 😊 it’s the 清水獺

The saxophone gives it just the right touch of WTF, too 😆

Oo I’m keeping the phrase “ebullient tracery” for the next time I teach medieval art 🤩

Detail of a carved stone coffin from sixth-century China, with a horselike supernatural creature on it. The creature has the foreparts of a horse, plus wings and a fish’s tail complete with fins, and it is wearing a Sasanian (Iranian) moon-and-sun tiara.

Happy Year of the Horse, everyone! 🧧

I should also mention it to my colleague, whom we poached from Te Papa 😁 she also works on diasporic communities in Aotearoa, but mainly Tongan and other PI communities. Anyway, I’m interested myself because Asian communities here are something I try to pay attention to in my teaching

Oo this I want to read. Interested in what you have to say, plus Chris Fung and I go way back. Also, you’re right, the cover art is genius.

I can't think of another drama where I've seen this ritual reenacted, and it's such a flash in the pan compared to the full narrative of the show (29 episodes). But, in its own way, it was a bit nostalgic, and increased my warm feeling for the show.

This was a real zinger for me because this ritual was the subject of one of the first articles I ever read about early Chinese ritual, the classic "O Soul, Come Back!" by Ying-shih Yü (1987 iirc), and one of the first times I began to be aware of what "ritual" meant in an early Chinese context.

The Chu ci poems are especially evocative because they call the soul back and describe the dangers of the spirit world to north, south, east, and west, compared to the luxury and safety of the proper tomb. (See the Wikipedia page just linked for a partial translation.)

The idea was that in the liminal time just after death, it might be possible to recall the wandering hun 魂 soul of the deceased by a ritual that called it back to occupy its old clothes, that could then be interred in the safety of the tomb. (This is based on the old two-soul theory):

...waving the garment about and calling the empress dowager's name. It's about ten seconds of footage, but it's clearly a reenactment of the soul-recalling ceremony 招魂 from the Shi sang li 士丧礼 chapter of the pre-Qin ritual text Yi li 仪礼. This is also recorded in two poems of the Chu ci 楚辞.

Close to the end, in ep. 27, there's a funeral for the empress dowager (or so everybody thinks, but that's another matter). It begins with the coffin open and the empress's garments hanging above the head of the bier. Then the ceremony begins and the camera shifts to one guy up on the roof...

Although it suffers from some weird cuts (probably due to censorship), it's still fun. It's set in a fictional dynasty, vaguely Tang-flavored with mysterious Southern ethnic minorities, but the characters are engaging, even Song Weilong who's still figuring out how to act. Jing Boran is great.

The story is diverting enough - it's the kind of bromance routinely produced by writers adapting a BL source text for BL-shy PRC television (the only female main character is the evil empress dowager) but the detective work is engaging and the mysteries eventually wind up as one big mystery.

A League of Nobleman Zhang Ping, an impoverished orphan from a rural area, moves to Beijing to take the civil service exam but ends up selling noodles on the street. Despite...

I haven't had much time to think about anything research-related what with the Giant Pile of Admin on my plate right now, but I did watch the series "A League of Nobleman" [sic] 君子盟 which stars Jing Boran and Song Weilong, and was surprised to find a ritual right out of the Chuci in ep. 27:

SHH Brendan 😆

Definitely.

We all have a responsibility to walk those paths into existence, and we each have our own reasons as well. Here's one of mine (of course, he's much taller now and typically leaves me in the dust on hikes)

Second try:
I think: hope can't be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It's like a road crossing the earth: originally, there were no roads on the earth, but where enough people walk, a road is created.

Rats, I like their use of "the earth" better than mine - rather than just "the ground." Still, the sense is there.