On Vacation: Reeling in the Mind
For the last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with the ghost of Liu Xie 劉勰, the Chinese writer who lived between the fifth and sixth centuries, and whose work straddles…
The Hard Cross-Cultural Problem in Philosophy
How do we think about philosophy cross-culturally when philosophers inhabit a monoculture?
Writing, Work and Ease: Liu Xie
I first came across Liu Xie’s classic meditation on literature, the Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龍), long before I got into the serious study of Chinese. I stumbled Zong-Qi Cai’s A Chinese…
A Centre for Laziness: A Proposal
A few months ago, I received an email from the university saying that there were funds available for large-scale projects that could be both radical and disruptive, leading to the…
Optimally Empty
A piece about hanging out in coffee shops, the cultivation of empty stillness, and the foppishness of dogs wearing cravats.
Strange Happenings in Yangzhou
“In Yangzhou, during Jiayou era, there was an extremely large pearl that everybody could see when the sky was dark…” — an odd tale from 11th century China.
On Drinking Tea
My good friend Annie Pecheva has just published a wonderful blog post on drinking tea. Annie translates a list of the twenty-four best situations in which to drink tea, taken…
Storytellers and Anthropologists
I’m currently in the middle of editing a book that I’ve been working on about the Tanimbar islands in Indonesia. I was in Tanimbar some twenty years ago as a fledgling anthropologist,…
The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing
A piece about Tove Jansson, pleasure, and why we really shouldn’t suffer for our art.
