homoLudens

A hawk perched for half an hour on the backdoor neighbor’s roof on NY eve. Just before midnight, I climbed Bernal Hill for the fireworks and found them partially blocked by one of the new high rises near the Bay Bridge.

Things in the air often surprise.

Per Petterson in Out Stealing Horses on the topic of New Year’s Eve:

In less than two months’ time this millennium will be finished. There will be festivities and fireworks in the parish I am part of. I shall not go near any of that. I will stay at home with Lyra, perhaps go for a walk down to the lake to see if the ice will carry my weight. I am guessing minus ten and moonlight, and then I will stoke the fire, put a record on the old gramophone with Billie Holiday’s vice almost a whisper, like when I heard her in the Oslo Colosseum some time in the 50s, almost burned out, yet still magic, and then fittingly get drunk on a bottle I have standing by in the cupboard. When the record ends I will go to bed and sleep as heavily as it is possible to sleep without being dead, and awake to a new millennium and not let it mean a thing. I am looking forward to that.

A few pictures from the first period of this luxurious lengthy 14 month sabbatical. Amsterdam snaps first, then Florence. Paris coming up in a day or two.
[Macro error: Can't call "includeHttp" because it isn't a script.]

???the season’s greetings from a Thai restaurant near our Craig’s List-provided studio on 12th. @ Greenwich in the W. Village.

[Macro error: Can't call "includeHttp" because it isn't a script.]

Tom Hoffman responds to Paul Allison’s two big questions:

Is blogging a means (or a tool) to achieve other goals (content knowledge or skills)?~~ OR ~~

Does blogging have a set of intellectual habits and skills that are worth learning for themselves?

Tom says the obvious answer is ‘both.’

I’m not sure I agree. The whole “blogging” as a genre idea makes me uneasy for some reason. Maybe I’ll have something to add to the discussion after I re-read Henry Jenkins’ ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture’ and then join Paul and Christina Cantrill from the National Writing Project (NWP) for a Thursday morning breakfast discussion about “things next.” Following Mark Bernstein’s experienced advice, two quick comments here from a vacation connection:

1. Kudos to Tom for the nod at NWP’s technology initiatives, where early advocates of blogging for the teaching and learning of writing continue to work thoughtfully and without a lot of fanfare or self-congratulation to implement this stuff in real classrooms with real teachers.
2. And speaking of real classrooms and blogging to achieve other goals, I can testify that having a blog gets you, if nothing else, the education discount for Nilaja Sun’s Off-Broadway “No Child???”. I showed up at the ticket office yesterday afternoon without my union card or any other proof of profession. With a little cajoling, the ticket seller checked our school weblog community’s url, selected library from the nav bar and saw my beaming face staring from the blog banner. Voila! 50% off. The show is worth more than even the full price of admission, btw. Sun stuns with her energy, wit, eye for realistic detail, and mind-blogglingly fast changes of character. Yeah, it ended on a note of qualified hope that I found a little precious. We need a k-12 version of ‘The Office,’ a relentlessly hopeless and funny BBC-style drama called “The School,’ to do justice to the working conditions, for teachers and students, inside of real schools. Until that happens, “No Child???” is the funniest, sharpest and most realistic dramatization of teaching that I’ve ever seen on the stage.

Time for home. If things go right, I’ll be back in Shanghai in three or four months.

When it’s cold.

A rare night of cool breezes took us on the bus to Shanghai Centre, on
a quick subway ride east to the PuXi terminus of Nan Jing Lyu (How come
the guy who reads Chinese can’t figure out where to board but the Dutch
speaker can? It’s not that I’m  without direction. It’s just that
mine is always vague.), and on a riverside stroll along the happily
crowded Bund. We capped pre-dinner events with a drink on the roof of
the Peace (formerly, the Cathay) Hotel.

So there we were, two
world-travelling queers sipping expensive bad beer on the deserted
terrace, below us the re-capitalized Bund and the room where
closeted and feverish Noel Coward wrote Private Lives.
Above our heads, cold air-riding dragon and shark kites attacked the
smog-smudged moon. The outdoor carpet smelled of mold. Waiters yawned.

The
Cathay was the jewel in the real estate crown of Victor (Lame) Sassoon,
one of the many Shanghai characters worthy of a Chinese Dickens. The
family got its start when great grandfather David Sassoon, born into a
Sephardic Jewish family in Baghdad, decided to flee Turkish rule in
Iraq in 1792 for new beginnings in Bombay. That’s right, Baghdad. How
crazy and small this odd world, and “more of it than we think”? 
Sassoon boats full of opium and cotton left India and emptied in
Shanghai, where they re-filled with silk, silver and tea for the West.
(Not as expensive as the tea Joel and company got suckered into buying
on our April trip here, but fragrant with similarly irresistible
exoticism.) Victor was the prescient one of the late generation, buying
up Huang Pu mud flats even during Depression and watching that mud turn
to gold over and over again. He quit China before the take over and
died old and rich in the Bahamas in ‘61, as tax exempt there as he was
in his Shanghai foreign concession.

Sassoon? Sassoon? Not any
relative of Siegfried? Yes, yes, so old Victor was.  Fitting on
the eve of the “hand off” that a Baghad Jew’s  rooftop garden
should have us remembering his relative’s “Declaration Against the War“:

“I
am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military
authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately
prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier,
convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this
War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now
become a war of aggression and conquest??? I am not protesting against
the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and
insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On
behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the
deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may
help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of
those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and
which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.”

Sigh. Add this from Suicide in the Trenches:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

There’s
a illicit pleasure, I think, in the ex-pat’s distance from the
maelstrom of imperial  power. Washington makes a sybaritic
lifestyle possible and yet, who really needs to pay attention to
Washington? A more pressing question is how to get the cook to make ice
cubes with boiled water, as noted in the Shanghai Yellow Pages Helpful Hints section.

Repeat: I do NOT make this stuff up.

The incongruity of all of it has Mr. Gary (’The secret to happiness
in life is severely lowered expectations.’) D. himself FINALLY using a
website. Welcome, readers, to “Lower Expectations, A lifestyles magazine for the 21st. century. ” Title gives you a sense of what it might be to live with me for 24 years, eh?

Meanwhile, on a more prosaic note (poetic, too, if you count all the forms we’re exploring), the BAWP Young Writers’ Camps have their first “Best of the Week” student writing online. Evan [aka eMan] Nichols
suggests that it will be worth a visit for even those non-teachers
among us. “Today in whole camp author’s chair, a student got up and read one of
the most beautiful poems I’ve ever heard from a student, or maybe from
anyone. It was wise, filled with emotion, richly detailed, powerful. I
shook as I typed it into the computer.”

We’ll have a CommentIt plug-in installed by the time you get
over there, so please, drop the budding writers a note. This
abecedarian  venture has us thinking that BAWP might want to
sponsor an on-going literary magazine along these lines. Raise us some
anti-imperial Sassoons of our own, maybe.

Gary’s arrived. We’ll give him his own
blog if he gets any more appalled at the sybaritic lifestyle on the
imperial fringe. Can’t have this site biting the hand that feeds me.
It’s not as blatant a disaster as what Crag Face and Issyvoo found in
Japanese occupied Shanghai, on their “Journey to a War,” but the
inequities under the skin of ex-pat and the new rich classes’ comfort
will assault us all eventually.  This from Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War Chapter 10 [via Tales of Old Shanghai]:

“In this city - conquered, yet unoccupied by its conquerors - the mechanism of the old life is still ticking, but
seems doomed to stop, like a watch dropped in the desert.
In this city the gulf between society’s two halves is too
grossly wide for any bridge. There can be no compromise
here. And we ourselves though we wear out our shoes
walking the slums, though we take notes, though we are
genuinely shocked and indignant, belong, unescapably, to
the other world. We return, always, to Number One
House for lunch.

In our world, there are the garden-parties and the night-clubs, the hot baths and the cocktails, the singsong girls
and the Ambassador’s cook. In our world, European business men write to the local newspapers, complaining that
the Chinese are cruel to pigs, and saying that the refugees
should be turned out of the Settlement because they are
beginning to smell. In our world ‘the only decent Japanese’
(as all the British agree in describing him) defends the
wholesale bombing of Canton on the ground that it is
more humane than a military occupation of the city. In
our world, an Englishman quite seriously suggests that
the Japanese should be asked to drive the Chinese farmers from a plot of land enclosing a grave-mound which
spoils the appearance of the garden.”

Well,
no garden parties yet, though the 4th. of July is coming up. We may
have to ransack the closet for appropriate attire. Nice to share an
open closet in China in the 21st. century.

That’s the hometown team playing someone or other, a few minutes ago in San Francisco at PacBell park. View is from David and Amy’s
season spot. Let’s see, I flew to Shanghai to live in a gated
ex-patriot community and watch the Giants live from third base box
seats. My, my, travel has changed.

The quality of connection was phenomenal, especially the sound. 10 of
the Blogopoly folks have iSights. Now all we have to do is enable video
chatting with the district firewall. Hehe.

In Shanghai, it’s Plum Rain Season.
Rain, rain, rain. I have to prepare Gary, arriving shortly, for 
disappointment at the absence of anticipated heat. He’s 50 now.
Disappointments will be legion. Best to start with small ones.

All the ex-pats are annoyed at the weather. Wang Wei wrote about the same season. Here’s his, and my weak homage:

IN MY LODGE AT WANG CHUAN AFTER A LONG RAIN

by Wang Wei

The woods have stored the rain, and slow comes the smoke
As rice is cooked on faggots and carried to the fields; 
Over the quiet marsh-land flies a white egret,
And mango-birds are singing in the full summer trees???.

I have learned to watch in peace the mountain morningglories,
To eat split dewy sunflower-seeds under a bough of pine,
To yield the post of honour to any boor at all???.
Why should I frighten sea gulls, even with a thought?

IN MY AIR CONDITIONED CLASSROOM AT THE SHANGHAI AMERICAN SCHOOL AFTER TWO DAYS OF PLUM SEASON RAIN

The sewers have gulped the rain, but slow move the cars
As buses stop in puddles and discharge soaking kids;
Past the front gate guard house sails a grey taxi.
My iPod songs are blaring in two cold sodden ears???
I have learned to watch in peace the city’s slick wet streets
To sip sweet milky instant coffee, my feet upon the sill,
To yield the post of tourist to any loud ‘lao wai’ at all???
Why should I frighten students, even with a task?

Turns out that the Shanghai American School is the U.S. consular school
for Shanghai. Expat clientele only; nationals need not apply, and
probably couldn’t afford it anyway. Teachers are housed at this
Shanghai Racquet Club. My two bedroom apartment has the square footage
of our Gates St. house. It overlooks several swimming pools, a two
minute walk from the clubhouse, from which meals can be ordered for
delivery. The staff, the ubiquitous staff, wear a particular color of
blue uniform. From quite a distance, you can distinguish them from
Chinese club members. Some of them rake and water the clay tennis
courts late at night. Swish, swish, swish went the sprinklers, all
night long.

I feel a bit like Peggy Ashcroft’s character in the Jewel and the Crown
series: pleased enough by human courtesy, but puzzled by the deference
that proximity to wealth incurs. This sort of expat opulence, the sheer
creature comfort of it, is not China, can never be China, and yet all
of China and the world would want to live in this sort of place. It
invites its undeserving beneficiaries to a a subtle sense of
superiority. White businessman (German, I think. Maybe Dutch? Naw -
couldn’t have been Dutch, right?) got nasty with line cutting at the
passport check in queue. “We’re entitled!” I sense a softer
dismissiveness in the treatment of “clubhouse” waiters.

Sigh. Already, “what a trip.”