It’s been interesting over the past year or so to keep track of what’s going on in Hong Kong. I’ve only been to the Special Administrative Region a few times, and I missed out on going there pre-handover, which will forever haunt me as a regret. The Chinese government has been slowly tightening the screws on local rule, despite – or more likely because of – its agreement during the handover to respect local essentially English law traditions for the first fifty years of post-colonial rule. That’s kind of a powerful slap in the face for a large and lets face it imperial nation like China; once sufficient time had passed, and once it was obviously there was nothing a diminishing second class power like the United Kingdom could really do about it other than marshall “world opinion”, that clause would be ignored. And so it has been: the Communist central government in Beijing has essentially passed a set of laws which eliminate any pretense of “one country, two systems” with respect to the HKSAR. It’s officially one country, one system.
Continue reading “Power failure”Socks and sandals
The inspiration to write hasn’t quite been here lately, as Americans – and probably North Americans more broadly – have been in a kind of limbo, waiting to see how the election will turn out. I’ve been actually a bit blown away at how Matt has been developing The Deckle Edge into an amazing multimedia platform, and how Mark has been expanding on the themes of identity and translation, while in the background I’ve been caught up trying to find a couple cords of firewood for the winter and keeping the boy focused on learning.
Continue reading “Socks and sandals”Translating myself
We walked together through the Olympic Park in east London, about a month ago, on a bright October morning, talking, as we often do, about the books we had recently read. In my case, Another Country, a James Baldwin novel from the early 1960s which I had greatly enjoyed. In his case the plays of Bertolt Brecht. He was also reading some secondary literature on the German author and he mentioned that some critics consider Brecht’s best work to be his poetry. Like many people who read only in English, I think of him primarily as a dramatist, one of the best from the previous century. However, our conversation prompted me to recall a review of the new English translation of his Collected Poems, which came out a couple of years ago, which stressed the centrality of poetry to his oeuvre. At well over one thousand pages, it is an intimidatingly large body of work, which I have yet to engage with, although I know that I have a shorter selection of his poems on one of my many bookshelves, awaiting my attention.
Continue reading “Translating myself”Social distancing
We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance. In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people. The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics. The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others. Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.
Continue reading “Social distancing”Guffaw
Laughter isn’t an easy thing to characterise, especially across cultures. I’ve spend enough time in non-English speaking places to realise that I’ll never really understand their humour, but I’ve spent far more time in English speaking places and still even there, I know that I have a different sense of what makes me laugh. Actually the more time I’ve spent in different places, I believe, the less I laugh – I mean an outright guffaw, a good solid belly laugh, an uncontrollable rollicking snort. I still find humour in lots of things – even more than before – but the burst of laughter that I would have served up as a kid no longer comes up.
Continue reading “Guffaw”