Other People’s Thoughts

This is the fifty third 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.

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My thanks to my brother, Scot, for reminding me of Denis Leary’s 1993 song. I now think of it as the theme song of the Trump era (2016-).

— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
16 January 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, LIII

AI

So, if I’ve got this right: we’re smart enough to invent A.I., dumb enough to need it and so stupid that we can’t figure out if we did the right thing.

— Jerry Seinfeld, January 2025

Resolutions

There’s probably no greater example of our fickleness and vacuity than the way we treat new year’s resolutions. Each year, the same superficial pantomime. You want a six pack. You want to look good in underwear. You buy a copy of Men’s Health. It tells you that you can do it in six weeks if you eat fish and brown rice and turn into a cunt. Nine days later you catch the waft of a burger as you pass a restaurant and your short-lived sense of discipline collapses in on itself. And then the whole godawful cycle begins once more.

— Ian Dunt, Happy New Year: Now sort your fucking life out, Striking 13, 3 January 2025

Jimmy Carter

One of the three meanest men I’ve ever met. The other two are Muhammed Ali and Sonny Barger, president of the Hell’s Angels. Those three men are a whole cut above everybody else I ever ran into in terms of sheer functional meanness. The ability to get from A to B, C, Z, or wherever you want. Carter would have cut my head off to carry North Dakota, cut both of your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx. Never apologise for it; he understands the system. That’s why he won. I admire that.

— Hunter S. Thompson, 1977

A Dish Best Served Hot or Cold

That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires — smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge — are basically solitary pursuits.

I think holding grudges is kind of like the modern equivalent of having standards.

— Fran Lebowitz

兩位大師對中國落後的觀點你認為誰對

胡適認為：中國落後的根源並非人民而是朝廷特權們為保護自己的利益而實施封關鎖國、愚民、弱民、貧民的政策，政策的目的就是讓人民接受奴性教育，使人民貧窮，使人民無知，導致人民無法進行理性的思考。 如果有良好的制度和真正的教育，中國人民肯定半點毛病也沒有。

魯迅認為：中國落後的根源在於國民的素質低，無知、奴性見官老爺就拜、無獨立思想。

— 因特網所見

Expanding Universe

… Shapley’s picture of the cosmos was erased when on 1 January 1925 Henry N. Russell (1877-1957), professor of Astronomy at Princeton University, read out the communication that Edwin P. Hubble had sent to the joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he clearly demonstrated that Andromeda (M31) is a galaxy, though smaller than the Milky Way, and that it is far beyond the limits suggested by Shapley’s Great Galaxy. This discovery expanded the universe enormously in the minds of astronomers.

Within a few years, hundreds of galaxies in our local environment had been recognized. Successive mappings of the cosmos carried out with increasingly powerful telescopes revealed to us an observable universe whose building bricks are hundreds of billions of galaxies. This represented a huge leap forward in our understanding of the cosmos.

The title of Hubble’s paper, “Cepheids in Spiral Nebulae,” was relatively technical for a conference with such a general scope. However, it revealed a fundamental result: many of the nebulous objects that astronomers had been observing and cataloging for centuries were, in fact, distant galaxies that were like the Milky Way.

— Bernard J.T. Jones, Vicent J. Martínez, and Virginia L. Trimble, The Reinvention of Science: Slaying the Dragons of Dogma and Ignorance, World Scientific Publishing, 2023, p.260

The Book of My Enemy

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots —
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.’

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error —
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

— Clive James, London Review of Books, 2 June 1983

Gauchiste Intellectuals

The disturbing thing for liberals now is that there are still so many gauchiste intellectuals who persist in believing that the roots of injustice might be found in liberal democracy itself, and the roots of justice in some version of unlimited, self-perpetuating power. Generously ready to concede that the second thing might sometimes go wrong, they nevertheless earn their living from reminding the first thing that freedom is an illusion. They are free to do so, and will never be short of evidence; but their position is false, and their marks of falsification are the tip-off.

— Clive James, Letter to the Editor, LRB, 31 March 2005

The Art Trade

I did not and still do not care whether people wish to be “abreast” of the shared follies of the art market. Art prices are largely about voyeurism and toxic snobbery. They are what you see when you peer up the anus of “culture.” Of all the attributes and characteristics of a work of art that one could talk or write about, by far the least interesting one has always seemed to me its price, a largely irrational product of desire—and nothing, as any hooker, art dealer, or auctioneer can tell you, is more manipulable than desire. The act of paying gigantic prices for works of art is one of the means the very rich have of saying to the relatively poor: “Fuck you, these things are meant to be ours, not yours: you have no real entry to them.” In this way the art trade becomes one of the worst contaminating agencies in culture. It is built on inequality, it works through inequality, it celebrates inequality, and none of the soggy little bromides we like to resort to about the “democratization of culture” can prevail against it for long.  The full truth of this would not become apparent until after the turn of the century, when, due to the entry into the art market of unimaginably large amounts of new money, quite insane prices started to become the norm—$80 million for False Start, for instance, a large Jasper Johns which my acquaintance the architect François de Menil had sold for a comparatively trifling sum not so many years before.

— Robert Hughes

歷史課這樣講會不會更有教育意義？

北宋時期，牛津大學成立；
崇禎九年，哈佛大學成立；
九子奪嫡時，德國實行義務教育；
乾隆登基，美國獨立，法國爆發大革命；
乾隆57年，紐約證券交易所成立；
道光17年，全球日化巨頭保潔成立；
光緒12年，可口可樂成立；
光緒廢除科舉時，愛因斯坦提出相對論；
慈禧66大壽，袁世凱熠送奔馳車，成為中國第位奔馳車主；
李鴻章穿著黃馬褂訪美，看到紐約高樓大廈，疾馳的轎車，運行了幾十年的地鐵。去德國，成為中國第一個做X光的人。在英國，他看到了新式電話機，抽水馬桶，他感到震撼、心酸和絕望；
宣統三年，IBM成立；
小兵張嘎在抗日時，西方的孩子在家吃著漢堡薯片看貓和老鼠。

— 因特網所見

Hope

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don’t think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental …

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

2025

I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.

— Colson Whitehead, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in The New York Times

Cunt of the Year

There’s no competition. The man above it all. The closest thing to a super-villain the 21st Century possesses. By far the single most important figure on the face of the earth.

That’s a frustrating thing to write but it’s true. Putin demonstrated from the very beginning how right-wing populism would work: the hatred of difference, the obsession with strength, the nihilism, the use of disinformation to obliterate objective reality. He now functions as a litmus test of politicians around the planet, on left and right. Some support him proudly. Some support him sneakily. It is support for an idea – of conformity and power over diversity and freedom. Any other politician on earth, including Donald Trump, is ultimately less powerful, less damaging, less important.

Putin is the original cunt, the OG, bona fide, all the way down. He is the totem. There is no greater or more important project on earth than his total ruination.

— Ian Dunt, The Complete Dunt Awards 2024, Striking 13, 27 December 2024

Same Same

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex: you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

— James Baldwin

Muskovites

We all live in the Muskoverse now. It’s a quirk of the age that the genius leading the race to the stars is also the idiot leading the race to the bottom.

— Marina Hyde, How low will British politics go? Ask Elon, master of the Muskoverse – he’ll decide, The Guardian, 7 January 2025

Martian Wannabe

Elon Musk @elonmusk • Dec 18, 2022: Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it
patrick @knowitall143 • Dec 18, 2022: Least self-aware Tweet I’ve ever seen.

Trump / Musk

Behind every twat is an arsehole.

— Jimmy Carr, The Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2024

Look At Me

Is it any wonder that negative attention has come to define needy virility? I was particularly struck by the screed left by the Las Vegas Cybertruck nut, who was clearly addled from too many years of low-level blasts from lethal weapons as much as from a media diet apparently full of apocalyptic conspiracy theories promoted by Rumble. “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” he wrote in a suicide note. “What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?” Yeah, what better way, Officer Livelsberger — or, for that matter, pin-up assassin Luigi Mangione, or brooding ISIS convert Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who recorded himself describing his rejected plan to wipe out his own family instead of 14 innocent New Year’s revelers as he maniacally drove his death wagon from Houston to Bourbon Street. Pay attention! Pay attention to my spectacle of violence!

But why should I pay attention? Why are all these male human wrecking balls so driven by the need to be seen and heard in the first place? Social media has made everyone a star in their own mind, but I am tired of the futile inspection of their repetitive homicidal motives on cable news, their broken marriages, their financial failures, their normal if withdrawn interactions with their stunned neighbors. I am tired of the implication of guilt because none of us noticed another killer in our midst about to blow. I am angry that the military doesn’t care enough for the PTSD soldiers decommissioned with the adult equivalent of shaken baby syndrome.

But have any of these sullen, kamikaze psychos ever observed the loneliness and financial desperation of half the women on their street? Their lives of domestic abuse cohabiting with men like them? Women have been used to being ignored since time immemorial and yet, most of the time, they slog on, trying to keep it together for the sake of the kids. They rarely feel the need to convert their private miseries into public mayhem and post it on social media. So, to the late officer Livelsberger and the rest of his cohort, I am sorry you feel guilty about your actions in Afghanistan—with an American exit so feckless Biden’s entire national security staff should have resigned—but try being a woman living there under the Taliban now that you’ve left. Any chance you or anyone else will pay attention to her? Or to that insignificant woman living a few yards away from you in the house with the curtains drawn?

— Tina Brown, 7 January 2025

In Retrospect

The very regrettable lesson of the past few years in UK politics is that no matter how bad things seem, they can always take on a rosy glow in light of what comes after.

— Marina Hyde, There are no adults in the room: there’s barely a room, The Guardian, 10 January 2025

T2

Across the land, a willing suspension of disbelief has taken hold. (Critical thinking is so 2017.) Certain titans of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and (God forgive us) the media have hustled off to Mar-a-Lago, a scene of such flagrant self-abnegation, ring-kissing, and genuflection that it would embarrass a medieval Pope.

— David Remnick, The Inauguration of Trump’s Oligarchy, The New Yorker, 12 January 2025

Sure, since the last go-round, Trump and his entourage have acquired more experience and knowledge of how to manipulate, or break, the system. There is much to be anxious about. But like any sequel, this one will be derivative. The explosions may be louder, the body count higher, the plot twists more outrageous, but the spectacle will not be the fresh shock to the system his first term was. … for Washington, as for the rest of the nation, this too shall pass — albeit perhaps slowly and painfully, like a kidney stone.

— Michelle Cottle, Trying to Stay Steady as the MAGA Parade Marches Into Town, The New York Times, 9 January 2025

One of Trump’s most effective political maneuvers might be called “whacking the beehive,” a propensity to unleash so much buzzing menace into the air that it’s impossible to maintain calm, much less focus.

— David Remnick

A Gerontocrat Warns about Oligarchs

I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again. …

You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.

— Joseph Biden’s farewell presidential address, 15 January 2025

Attitude Adjustment

… thinking and acting in ways consistent with one’s true self, involves blocking out the system of rewards and punishments that every society offers its members. Effort is required to become adept at what the Soviet poet (and exiled dissident) Joseph Brodsky once called “the science of ignoring reality,” seeing through the transactional and provisional surface of life to the meaningful depths of principle.

— Gal Beckerman, A Mindset for the Trump Era, The Atlantic, December 2024

The Substance

It’s indeed a deeply political film, with body horror that subverts traditional gender presentation. It also critiques cosmetic “enhancement” culture, which was a stark contrast to an awards show in which nobody’s forehead moved.

— Anna Marks on the Golden Globes, 9 January 2025

Upbringing

I was raised by Jews, but reared by Catholics.

— Reuben Kaye, actress, model and award-winning cry for help

中國是全世界最自由的國家

政府可以自由收稅，國企可以自由漲價，領導可以自由決策，專家可以自由胡說，官員可以自由拿錢，法官可以自由判案，警察可以自由抓人，民宅可以自由拆除，歷史可以自由篡改，常識可以自由顛覆。

— 王劍回應華春瑩的號召

Santa Ana Winds

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

— Joan Didion, ‘Los Angeles Notebook’, 1968

An Ecology of Fear

Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region’s high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents

— Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, 1998

Kerson Huang’s translations/ transculturations of Fitzgerald have some good lines too —

— Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org, 13 January 2025. (While a graduate student in physics, Kerson Huang 黃克孫 created a Classical Chinese version of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám titled 魯拜集)

Asshole

Folks, I’d like to sing a song about the American Dream …

I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
Hot pink with whale skin hubcaps
And all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights (Yeah)
And I’m gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
Gettin’ one mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonald’s
In the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
And when I’m done sucking down those greaseball burgers
I’m gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I’m gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side
And there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it
You know why? Because we’ve got the bomb, that’s why
Two words: nuclear fucking weapons, okay?
Russia, Germany, Romania, they can have all the democracy they want
They can have a big democracy cakewalk
Right through the middle of Tiananmen Square
And it won’t make a lick of difference
Because we’ve got the bombs, okay? …

I’m an asshole, and I’m proud of it

— from Denis Leary, Asshole, 1993

Soap Opera Americanus

We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.

— David Brooks, Pete Hegseth Is the Secretary of Defense We Deserve, The New York Times, 15 January 2025

Timothée’s Red Carpet Bike Ride

Most tellingly of all, Chalamet looked completely unflappable as he arrived. Had he ridden the bike for any meaningful distance, he would have carried a look of exasperated fury at having to deal with the unending litany of cars trying to drive into him, other cyclists shooting past him and the swarms of pedestrians who keep wandering obliviously out in front of him because they’re too busy scrolling TikTok to retain even a shred of spatial awareness. Had Chalamet hopped off his bike, dropped it and embarked on a brief but impassioned rant about how much he hates people, then there would be more reason to believe he had made the entire journey by bike.

Chalamet, however, arrived at his premiere after a supposed bike ride through London, looking as though he didn’t hold any lingering resentment for humanity. He’s a good actor, but he’s not that good.

— Stuart Heritage, A twist of Lime: Timothée Chalamet rode a rental bike on to the red carpet, The Guardian, 15 January 2025

Asking for a friend

why do you eat like ur healthcare is free

— 千芸, Xiao hongshu, 15 January 2025

Small World

I’m a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It’s kind of exciting — the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

— David Lodge, d.1 January 2025

Vijayanagara

Maybe this is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats.

— Salman Rushdie, Victory City, 2023, p.142

Vale David Lynch

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.

― David Lynch, d.16 January 2025

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