Other People’s Thoughts

This is the fifty second chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.

Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.

In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.

The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.

Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.

This chapter in Other People’s Thoughts is dedicated to Roger Pulvers, friend, mentor, inspiration, with whom I also happen to share a birthday — the 4th of May — although not the same age. My thanks to Roger for permission to include his translation of a poem by the ‘tea monk’ Baisaō, as well as to Linda Jaivin for the quotation about ‘Doctor’ Sebastian Gorka and to Catherine Churchman for her Christmas card.

— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
23 December 2024

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Other People’s Thoughts I-LI:

• Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage

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Other People’s Thoughts, LII

過節

為什麼過聖誕節就是崇洋媚外，
看到外國人過春節就是文化傳播？

How come Chinese people who celebrate Christmas are ‘slaves to the West’,
but foreigners celebrating Spring Festival are a cultural success story?

Merry Xmas, Boss

Hey. If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here … with a big ribbon on his head! And I want to look him straight in the eye, and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-assed, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed, sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?

— Chevy Chase, monologue in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 1989

It’s only a phase

Remember the words of Taine: “for a young person the world always seems a scandalous place”. Later in life, the world seems only to be an imperfect place which can be worked on here and there. I’m told that finally, in old age, the world becomes either infinitely amusing or infinitely annoying — according to one’s temperament.

― Frank Moorhouse

Word of the Year

Kakistocracy has the crisp, hard sounds of glass breaking. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on whether you think the glass had it coming. But kakistocracy’s snappy encapsulation of the fears of half of America and much of the world makes it our word of the year.

—The Economist, 29 November 2024

Wishful Thinking

“Manifest”, meaning to dream or will something into existence, has been named the word of 2024 by Cambridge Dictionary, after a surge of celebrity-inspired popularity on social media.

— The Guardian, 20 November 2024

China’s Economy in 2024

Heads: The nation is brimming with an air of optimism (整个国家都洋溢着乐观向上的氛围)

Tails: China’s economy + total collapse (中国经济 + 彻底崩溃); China + beset on all sides (中国 + 腹背受敌); economy + beset on all sides (经济 + 腹背受敌); fading prosperity (繁华渐逝); China’s economy + slump + balance sheet (中国经济 + 陷入 + 资产负债表); Third Plenum + no cure for China’s economy (三中全会 + 中国经济无解药)

— from Sensitive Words, China Digital Times, 19 December 2024

Drink up!

If you are in the mood you may want to leave space also to glance at the other imps that swim in every martini – to feel the delicious bewilderment of being alive on a planet surrounded by unimaginable infinite space and unimaginable time; to experience once again the angst of living with an imperfect intelligence, and incomplete knowledge, and a consciousness prone to all weathers of the soul, and which is unable to answer the fundamental adolescent questions of our children about why we are here, why we exist; to laugh at the dangerous, nonsensical, religious narratives we concoct to handle all this; and the nature of inescapable death. Or you may not, as the case may be.

— Frank Moorhouse, ‘The Thirteen Awarenesses’, in Martini: A Memoir

老祖宗正說反說都有理的14句話

The A-Team

The Wrestling Lady will run our schools! The guy who beheads a whale, straps it to the top of his car and drops a dead bear he wanted to eat off in Central Park will be in charge of all our Health and Human Services! The weekend guy on Fox and Friends will be in charge of our 2 million soldiers and launching our nuclear missiles! And we actually got one of our own, an ex-Bernie campaigning Congresswoman who we all know really well, a crazed but lovely Hawaiian who looked higher than you at that Phish concert, to be in charge of all of our spy agencies! Yes!

— Michael Moore, The America I Want to Save Is the America We’ve Never Had, 28 November 2024

This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Bondi; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard; Noem — are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

— Timothy Snyder, Decapitation Strike (December), 2 December 2024

Algo Cult

We’re watching our political, intellectual, and even moral culture get torched every hour of the day on social media. And Elon Musk is now one of the greatest arsonists out there, while he and his fans pretend that he is the fire marshal coming to the rescue. Elon is being celebrated by legions of credulous and self-deceived people as the person who is doing more than anyone to restore and protect the integrity of our public conversation, while he is probably doing more than anyone to sabotage it.

He has become almost an apostle of a new religion, whose sacrament is algorithmically amplified bullshit, and like many religious figures, he simply does not care about misleading people. He isn’t noticing his errors, much less correcting them, to say nothing of apologizing for them. And if you notice them for him, you become his enemy, fit only to be smeared and lied about in his digital hall of mirrors.

You have to be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same moment. Yes, the man is the most talented entrepreneur of his generation, and yes, he has become a total asshole. To call him reckless and irresponsible is an understatement.

— Sam Harris, Intellectual Authority and Its Discontents, 12 December 2024

Gatekeepers

In the United States of Donald Trump, American journalism faces a defining test.
Will it be the sleepwalking servant of a propaganda machine? Or will it reclaim its role as public servant, tenacious watchdog, and guardian of democracy? …

Our alarming situation — we are on a path to American fascism — demands a far more assertive, scrappy, and resolute press. Some news organizations aren’t ready to be aggressive because they don’t accept their broader responsibility in a free society. They have been fact purveyors, always mindful of their own commercial viability. These news companies will continue to be enablers, justifying their behavior by championing strict impartiality, rigorous objectivity, and fast facts.

— Paul Horvitz, A Little Mudracking, Please, 26 November 2024

Quid pro quo

It’s weird to think that Elon Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter.

— George Conway, 19 December 2024

Gorka

Out of what seems to be the endless parade of whackadoos, smackbrains, rockheads, fanatics, lunatics, and general shit-for-brains that has been following El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago [Trump] ever since he rode down the escalator [at Trump Tower in 2015] and sent the American idea of self-government on an express escalator to hell, none have been more ridiculous than ‘Doctor’ Sebastian Gorka.

— Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 27 November 2024

Unfashionable Nazis

So hard to take my oppressors seriously when they have no drip

— online comment

Polly Mellen

“You could see her precision in the way she dressed” — often in a sweater and a pencil skirt — “and held herself, ramrod straight. She’d pop an Altoid and say, ‘Delicious! I’m full!’”

— Linda Wells, founding editor of Allure magazine

末代大儒

“倚老賣老”“自我陶醉”的梁漱溟，在“閉門書”之後，又不甘寂寞，大放厥辭了。我對於“老”一向沒有好感（不是由年齡分，有些年高的人，頗富靑春之氣；而有些少年，卻已達到“未老先衰”之境。）因為他們總是自以為穩重、溫和、公正、周到、人生經驗豐富，社會地位現固。其實是遲緩、麻木、是非不清，自以為是，永遠騎在年青的一代的頭頸上。自身頭輕尾重有如不倒翁，不管力量從哪一方來，都惜得保持他的社會地位的。

— 靳以，《質梁漱溟》，1949年2月25日

Identity

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void — ourselves — it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us — “from the evil that is in the world.” With the same motion, at the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape.

— James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, Zero, Spring 1949

Encountering Marlon Brando

I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white T-shirt and denim trousers, because of his squat gymnasium physique—the weight-lifter’s arms, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened “Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud” was resting on it)—I took him for a stagehand. Or did until I looked closely at his face. It was as if a stranger’s head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, superimposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks: taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed, sensual expression.

— Marlon Brando, on Location, The New Yorker, 9 November 1957

瓊瑤輕死

不要哭，不要傷心，不要為我難過。我已經「翩然」的去了！

「翩然」是我最喜歡的兩個字，代表的是「自主、自在、自由」的「飛翔」，優美而「輕盈」，我擺脫了逐漸讓我痛苦的軀殼，「翩然」的化為雪花飛去了！

— 瓊瑤遺書

Criticism

Monica Maristain: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?

Roberto Bolano: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm. …

M.M.: What do you wish to do before dying?

R.B.: Nothing special. Well, clearly I’d prefer not to die. But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she’s neither a lady nor very distinguished, but, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she’s a hot wench who will make your teeth chatter no matter how fancy you think you are.

M.M.: What kinds of feelings do posthumous works awaken in you?

R.B.: Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.

— Stray questions for Roberto Bolano, July 2003

Green Screen

Near the end, … “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life. The climax is protracted but darkly thrilling: ugly secrets spill into the open, winged monkeys screech and scatter, and Elphaba comes into full possession of her powers. “It’s time to try defying gravity,” she belts to the skies, and the film shrewdly follows suit, with a vertiginous airborne number that doesn’t just feel like Oz—it feels like Vegas. You’d want to see it projected onto the Sphere, perhaps with Elphaba soaring on a rhinestone-studded broomstick and then leaving the MGM Grand—sorry, the Emerald City—in the dust.

— Justin Chang, “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” Offer Nostalgic, Half-Satisfying Showdowns, 21 November 2024

Go time

I used to wear a watch that didn’t tell the time. The battery ran out, and I kept wearing it. You know what that watch did for me? Every time someone looks at my watch and says, “Your watch isn’t working,” I say, “You know why it’s not working? I know what time it is. And that’s go time.”

— J.B. Smoove of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, The New York Times, 30 March 2024

On History

Steven: How can we use history to help illuminate or sharpen our thinking about the present moment?

Tom: History is the most valuable guide we have to the behaviour of human beings in the present; but this is not because it offers neatly tailored lessons of the kind that Thucydides or Machiavelli were prone to celebrating. The true value of history is that it reminds us of how infinite are the ways to be human; of how utterly contingent are our own circumstances; of how inevitable it is that much of what we take for granted will be viewed by later ages and peoples as utterly bizarre. Try to make decisions in the consciousness that the assumptions governing them are largely the product, not of universal truths, but of the very opposite: a moment in time that will very soon have slipped into the past.

— 5 Questions With Steven: Tom Holland – Historian and Podcaster, Forbes, 4 December 2024

Why don’t you teach us history instead of always harping on the past?

— from the song Something Bad in the musical Wicked

On Joe Biden

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

— Benjamin Franklin

Mile High

Historians searching for the real reason the Bidens clung to power too long may look no further than the looming loss of Air Force One. After flying private a few times with gilded friends, I am convinced it’s the single most seductive experience in the world. You realize there is no one you wouldn’t kill, betray, or sleep with to ensure a lifetime of luxe relief from the armpit of mass transit.

— Tina Brown

Luigi Mangione

… the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, you can slot him into whatever appalling American tradition you like. He’s a 21st century John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps, cheered by the dispossessed as he lives out their fantasy of preying on those who’ve exploited them financially. Or he’s a modern-day Weatherman or fin de siècle anarchist, aiming to kill his way toward social “progress.”

— Nick Catoggio, Killing Time, The Dispatch, 10 December 2024

just from a folklore point of view, “attractive hooded man kills billionaire head of hated business with bullets inscribed with political slogans and then vanishes” is narratively breathtaking.

— Ian Rennie, BlueSky, 7 December 2024

very bad of people to be hinting at sympathy for the CEO silencer-assassin. it is absolutely not the American way to execute by extrajudicial means unless one is a police officer with guaranteed immunity or a vigilante rightwing hero like, for instance, the murderer of Trayvon Martin.

— Joyce Carol Oates, X, 8 December 2024

For the CEOs it was the first time that they saw, that we see them the way they see us.

— Josh Johnson, monologue, 18 December 2024

You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand.

— Nick Hanauer, The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats, Politico, June 2014

結婚面臨的問題：

彩禮、房子、車子、吵架、冷暴力、媽寶男、婆媳不和、懷孕、生娃、坐月子、帶娃、上班、家務、學區房、孩子上學、輔導、降低生活質量、養老、二胎、感情不和、出軌、小三、家暴、離婚。

不結婚面臨的問題：

吃啥、喝啥、玩啥、穿啥。

Nobel

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands. I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences. As if I am sending out an electric current. And when I sense this current being transmitted to the reader, I am astonished and moved. In these moments I experience again the thread of language that connects us, how my questions are relating with readers through that electric, living thing. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have connected with me through that thread, as well as to all those who may come to do so.

— Han Kang, 2024 literature laureate, in her Nobel Prize lecture, 7 December 2024

選擇題

世界最瀕危動物:
A，大熊貓
B，金絲猴
C，考拉
D，中國人民的老朋友

Angela Merkel: a sphinx without a secret

Just because a person lacks outward charisma doesn’t mean they have inner depths. (Call this the Gordon Brown Fallacy.) In all likelihood, there is even less to them than meets the eye. Merkel was said to embody a “post-heroic” style of leadership. A great strategic mind was said to smoulder away behind that quiet exterior and that coy rhombus of a hand gesture. Yeah, no. She was a sphinx without a secret. It is a type of person that recurs not just in history but in workplaces everywhere, forever having wisdom and high talent read into them.

— Janan Ganesh, Merkel-worship was liberalism at its worst, Financial Times, 7 December 2024

Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes

Wherever her main residence is now,
Asma unpacks her pretty clothes.
It takes forever: so much silk and cashmere
To be unpeeled from clinging leaves of tissue
By her ladies. With her perfect hands, she helps.
Out there in Syria, the torturers
Arrive by bus at every change of shift
While victims dangle from their cracking wrists.
Beaten with iron bars, young people pray
To die soon.
This is the middle ages
Brought back to living death.
Her husband’s doing,
The screams will never reach her where she is.
Asma’s uncovered hair had promised progress
For all her nation’s women.
They believed her.
We who looked on believed the promise too,
But now, as she unpacks her pretty clothes,
The dream at home dissolves in agony.
Bashar, her husband, does as he sees fit
To cripple every enemy with pain.
We sort of knew, but he had seemed so modern
With Asma alongside him.
His big talk
About destroying Israel: standard stuff.
A culture-changing wife offset all that.
She did, she did. I doted as Vogue did
On her sheer style.
Dear God, it fooled me too,
So now my blood is curdled by the shrieks
Of people mad with grief.
My own wrists hurt
As Asma, with her lustrous fingertips
— 
She must have thought such things could never happen —
Unpacks her pretty clothes.

— Clive James

巴沙爾

阿薩德醫生富二代，血里尿里滿是紅色基因，不開診所不掙大錢，淨為敘利亞人民服務，夠委屈了！祖傳大把香車美人，出門穿破皮鞋，就為照顧敘利亞足球隊，球員為國爭光，但球鞋都買不起呀！巴沙爾識時務，硬話會講，便宜敢佔，誰家飛機都坐，清真寺、靈隱寺，管你佛祖安拉，開門就進。不死心眼兒，絕不坐以待斃，風緊立即扯呼，既然普京在位，就先找他歇歇腳，趕明兒大鵝也垮了，跟普京搭伴兒找廟出家——他去少林寺，我來靈隱寺嘛！為啥不堅守大馬士革？請問薩達姆、卡扎菲、齊奧塞斯庫、墨索里尼，有誰堅守了？誰視死如歸了？還不是運氣不好，他們逃命不成，才被抓住送了狗命的？在獨裁者里找真男兒，跟老子使激將法？姥姥！

— 浦志強，推特，2024年11日12月

Syria

It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.

— Russian proverb

不外傳的心計

第一、翻臉，是解決人際矛盾的最佳方式。
第二、捧殺，是毀掉一個人的有效手段。
第三、裝傻，是隱藏實力的聰明做法。
第四、藏拙，是避免嫉妒的自保之計。
第五、示弱，是麻痹對手的巧妙策略。
第六、借力，是拓展資源的快捷途徑。
第七、佈局，是掌控局勢的關鍵步驟。
第八、沈默，是應對挑釁的有力武器。
第九、拖延，是爭取時間的實用技巧。
第十、暗示，是傳達想法的委婉方式。
第十一、離間，是分化敵人的厲害招數。
第十二、收買，是獲取情報的常用辦法。

— 簡中圈網絡所錄

A Few Words on Burning my Tea Utensil Baskets
仙窠燒却語

— 売茶翁 Baisaō, translated by Roger Pulvers,
author of The Unmaking of an American

Lookin’ for the right at the end of my wrongs

Man, what a hell of a year it’s been
Keep on bluffin’, but I just can’t win
Drowned my sorrows, but they learned to swim
Man, what a hell of a year it’s been

Head in the bottle, but my heart in the cage
Yeah, it’s gettin’ harder to act my age
Play a sad song on a tiny violin
For the man at the bar confessin’ his sins

I need some good news
Sittin’ here, sippin’ on cold truth
Nobody knows what I’m goin’ through
Bet the devil wouldn’t walk in my shoes

— from Shaboozey, Good News

Christmas Day

It was in Oklahoma City,
It was on a Christmas Day,
There was a whole car load of groceries
Come with a note to say:
“Well, you say that I’m an outlaw,
You say that I’m a thief.
Here’s a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.”

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

— from Woody Guthrie, Pretty Boy Floyd, 1958

God vs. Santa

Q: What’s a distinction between God and Santa?

A: They both decide if you’ve been naughty or nice but the latter doesn’t kill you before making up his mind.

— Mrs. Betty Bowers, 23 December 2024

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— Cathy Wilcox, 20 December 2024