Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is 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.
— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
25 June 2023
***
More Other People’s Thoughts:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, XXXVI
Wagner’s Götterdammerung
I love it how the whole of Russian Z-snakepit is now twisting hands in its dramatic rant:
“The Motherland is in danger, the Russian blood is being spilled, and a civil war is underway now”
“There’s now fratricide, a stab in the back upon the regular military that is heroically holding on to the front line amid overwhelming assaults”
“In the gruesome hour of hardship and trouble, men of honor need to show their integrity and save our common Mother Russia, which is waging a sacred defensive war with the most evil enemy.”
“No matter what happens now in Moscow, dear brothers, keep killing those hohols with anything you have in your hands. There’s nothing more important than Russia.”You bunch of sorry-ass morons, with your delusional dictator obsessed with his wretched ego and idiotic pseudo-historic conspiracy theories, unleashed the biggest war of aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler.
Because you thought you are here to rule the world, you were entitled to anything you want, and there was no one to say no and fight back.
You were sure you were going to have breakfast in Kyiv and then dine in Lviv, just like that.
As a result, some 16 months ago, you sustained a stunning, humiliating defeat in what was one of the lamest, most incompetent, and overconfident attempts to run a blitzkrieg operation against a large European nation.
You continued in the most absurd way possible, simply sweeping cities off the face of the earth only for the sake of declaring them “liberated” and claiming yet another “major victory over Nazis and NATO” in capturing yet another hog farm lost somewhere in Luhansk Oblast.
For many months, you were fighting your senseless 10-day “special military operation” the way not a single military power or a nation can afford with such gains.
Just for the sake of never admitting defeat, you did and normalized the most unimaginable things for the 21st century.
Atrocities and mass graves, masses of suicidal prisoners sent to die in meat grinder assaults, castration, beheading, mutilation, the leveling of major cities full of the civilian population, nuclear threats, bombing campaigns to strip a European nation of heating and electricity in the middle of winter, the worst man-made ecological disaster since Chornobyl, the unprecedented occupation and militarization of the biggest European nuclear power plant.
You sustained the most unbelievable failures that completely revealed what was underneath all those years of propagandistic bravado and eye-washing.
You turned the whole of Donbas into a depopulated desert of ruins and fields of dead bodies scattered as far as the eye can see. You senselessly slaughtered countless thousands of forcibly mobilized males of Donbas who were naive and foolish enough to trust and welcome you in 2014.
For your idiotic war that has no goal and no plan other than letting Putin sit on the throne for just another day, you raised a monster — a giant mercenary army, the meat-grinding machine that is now strong and bold enough to turn its jaws against you.
Now you poor pieces of Nazi scum, enjoy drowning in the pile of shit of your own making.
You are done.
Ukraine was your end.
You had it coming.
And history will remember this as the most insanely idiotic war ever.
— Illia Ponomerenko, 25 June 2023
Afghan Assassin
Roberts-Smith is nothing if not determined. He transformed himself from a chubby regular army infantryman in 1996 to a muscle-bound patrol commander in the SAS, the elite regiment he joined in 2003 after a gruelling selection course; from one of many unnamed SAS soldiers who repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan to the most decorated Afghan veteran in Australia; from a middling high school student who never went to university to a mature-age MBA candidate and media executive; from an absent, indifferent husband to Australian Father of the Year; from a bully known in military circles to prey on and punch those smaller than him to the face of public campaigns aimed at stopping violence and bullying; from a man who enjoyed multiple audiences with the Queen and successive prime ministers to a figure of global infamy.
— Nick McKenzie, The Rich and Influential Cheer Squad Who Backed a War Criminal, 2 June 2023
The United States of America
‘If only they could invade themselves to bring democracy.’
— Marina Hyde
A Korean Couplet
金日成正日，日成金正日。
(Kim Il Sung fucks himself a Kim Jong Il.)
— from the Chinese Internet
Diplomacy in the Late Qing
一味蠢，一味蠻，一味詐，一味怕。因愚蠢而行蠻，行蠻不成則使詐，使詐失敗則跪地求和。
‘Stupidity with an admix of brutality; slyness married to trepidation.
’Fundamental ignorance invariably leads to thuggish missteps which, when unsuccessful, are cloaked in deceptive guile. After this, too, fails there is no recourse but to seek amity on bended knee.’
— Guo Songtao 郭松濤, Qing diplomat
Huang Yongyu on Dying
南方週末：你怎麼看待死亡？
黃永玉：死有很多形式，一種是害病的形式，痛得在床上打滾，也醫不好，子孫們哭。一種是窮死、餓死，沒有飯吃。一種是打仗犧牲。自殺也是一種方式。
我活一天干一天活，不能工作的時候就死了，死了怎麼辦呢？跟真正的人民群眾在一起。把人送到火葬場，手上戴的什麼表、好一點的東西就留下來，骨灰呢就不要了，朋友大家喝一杯咖啡了事。你留一個骨灰在家裡，你兒子對它可能還尊敬，你孫子可能還稍微有點珍重，重孫子扔到哪去就不知道了。
人生就是這樣，又不是你一個人死，別人都不死。年年都死這麼多人，李太白、蘇東坡也沒有怎麼樣，活著的人欣賞的東西不過就是他的文章而已。
— 黃永玉：教授滿街走，大師多如狗, 2016年11月14日
Aging Disgracefully
“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady,” she once said. “I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”
No Country for Old Men, where the old sheriff, who doesn’t get much of a run in the movie, says: “You know the good thing about old age? It doesn’t last long.”
— Cormac McCarthy
Kiwistan
“We have become a very negative, wet and whiny, inward-looking country and we have lost the plot.”
— Christopher Luxon, Leader of the Opposition, New Zealand, 12 June 2023
明日歌
明日復明日，明日何其多。 日日待明日，萬事成蹉跎。
世人皆被明日累，明日無窮老將至。 晨昏滾滾水東流，今古悠悠日西墜。
百年明日能幾何。請君聽我明日歌。(文嘉 版本)
三不政策
不談經濟；不談中美關係；不談時政。—— 當今中共黨建黨務、宣傳思想、網絡信息、組織人事、公安安全多個部門對知識界的聯合要求。
White People Food 白人飯
It is a handful of oatmeal mixed with low-fat yoghurt, with half an apple and a carrot. If such a meal is to extend life, what is the meaning of life?
— Rafqa Touma, ‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China, The Guardian, 15 June 2023
Toxic Competition
The usual MO of Facebook’s chiefs has been to deny they even did the thing they’re being accused of, until the position becomes untenable. At that point, they concede they did whatever it was on a very limited scale, until that position becomes untenable. Next up is accepting the scale was more widespread than initially indicated, but with the caveat that the practice has now come to an end, until that position is the latest to become untenable.
Clear evidence that the practice never came to an end and, in fact, only became more widespread will come with aggressive reminders that it is not and never has been technically illegal. If and when whatever-it-is has been proved to be technically illegal after all, Facebook will accept the drop-in-their-ocean fine, with blanket immunity for all senior officers, and move back to step one in the cycle. We get rinsed; they repeat.
— Marina Hyde, Finally, Facebook can say it’s not the most toxic social network, The Guardian, 22 October 2021
Cancel Culture Takes a Big “L”
Chappelle walked away from $50 million years ago, probably in part from being freaked out by his own popularity. Now he’s resurfaced in a country where an invisible Cultural Politburo, driven mainly by the same upscale white intellectuals who first made him rich, has decreed racism no laughing matter, a crisis so grave and urgent it can no longer be left to potty-mouth amateurs like him. Moreover, this “Thanks, we’ll take it from here” crew identified 497 additional varieties of impermissible prejudice, under which he, Dave Chappelle, is also a bigot. This is the same comic who once went way out of his way to be as gentle as possible in breaking the news to white America that it hadn’t exactly left the door to Dr. King’s mountaintop all the way open. Now they’re going to tell him what bigotry is?
— Matt Taibi, Cancel Culture Takes a Big “L”, 23 October 2021
10,000 hours, 100,000 lies
Boris Johnson is the most extraordinarily bad liar, which is really embarrassing for him considering how long he’s spent practising. I heard if you spent 10,000 hours doing something you were supposed to be an expert in it. In which case, Johnson should be able to compete intergalactically in this particularly discipline. He should be good enough to be Earth’s tribune in the Bullshit Games.
— Marina Hyde, 9 November 2021
Look at, See, Read
I remember, another time, trying to prod him into talking about political positioning by asking whether he had read Tony Blair’s splashy piece in The New Statesman, which declared that the Labour Party would die without total change. “I didn’t,” Johnson said. “I looked at it. I saw how big it was. I beheld it. When you’re a journalist, people come up to you and say, ‘I saw your piece,’ and that means they didn’t read it. ‘I looked at your piece’ means they tried to read it. ‘I read your piece’ means they read the first paragraph.” Here Johnson is mocking everyone: Blair for taking things so seriously; me for taking Blair so seriously.
— Tom McTague, The Tears of a Clown, The Atlantic, 24 January 2022
Vale ‘good chaps’
Referring to British political life, the political historian Peter Hennessy has coined the “good chap theory of government”, to suggest that the working of our own system depends on politicians (both women and men) being fundamentally decent. Hennessy has wondered whether Boris Johnson has marked the end of the “good chaps” period in UK government.
— Mary Beard, Boris Johnson, Greek tragedy and Publius Clodius Pulcher, Times Literary Supplement blog
Bored of Boris
I’m so bored of Boris Johnson I could scream
It’s hot. I’m like a boiling kettle – ejecting steam
I’m just so bored of Boris Johnson and his life
I know more about him than I do about my wife
The glory years of japes and pranks at Eton
The never giving up or knowing when he’s beaten
The web of Oxford chums – Dave and George and Gove –
The trysts with trusting girls in flats, hotels and groves
The lies he told to them, then the lying to the Times
Long before the fatal porkies over party lockdown crimes
The shrugging off of misbehaviour with a laugh
The “cripes, I’ll make it up” reporting for the Telegraph
And words like cripes and chums and japes and pranks
And yikes and Bozza – enough, no more, no thanks
All that gobbling up of airtime and paper by the ream
As we’ve all been jailed inside one man’s mad dream
Oh..I’m so bored of Boris Johnson I could scream
I’m so bored of Boris Johnson I could spew
Even the successes; for yes, there were of those a few
Genial, liberal Boris in the years at London’s City Hall
Election winner against Ken and Corbyn, never short of gall
Very fast to take the credit, eg Borisbikes, eg Crossrail –
He always wanted monuments, they wanted that to fail –
He sliced through state bureaucracy that was Byzantine
At least I s’pose they’ve called it the Elizabeth, not the Johnson line.
Then his return to Parliament, prepared to oil and suck
Up to Tory leaders. I’m so bored of Johnson I could chuck
He always wanted to be lovable like Paddington or Gromit
A cuddly national symbol. I’m so bored that I could vomit
He picks a thing up, caresses it, then wrecks it
By “thing” I’m thinking obviously of Britain, and of Brexit
Of whoppers, fibs and fraudulence and guile
And for his enemies, threats and menaces and bile
At birth the angels gave him the gift of tongues
A glittering tree on which all life’s prizes hung
They gave him great intelligence and sex appeal
Strength of a grizzly bear, eyes of a baby seal
But then, they said, we’ve given too lavish a gift-list
To baby Boris so you’ll be, as well, a selfish narcissist
And everything will turn to dust. Bad, then badder
Will be your choices; the high call of politics a ladder
No more than that – to clamber up. So nothing mattered
Not voters conned, nor a once-great party shattered
He wanted greatness. But yes, it’s vanished like a dream
Sometimes I’m so bored of Boris Johnson I could scream
— Andrew Marr, LBC, 12 June 2023
Exit
‘Dignity is a grossly overrated commodity.’
— Alexander de pfeffel Boris Johnson
Reputation
‘What other people think of me is none of my business.’
— RuPaul
Coffee Spoons in Italy
There were my cappuccino years. Then the espresso years. The years of the brioche, the risino, the treccina. Or sometimes even the bignè. The years with chocolate on my foam, and the years without. Amid the confusion of my first months in Italy, struggling to learn the language, to get a permesso di soggiorno, a certificato di residenza, to find work and, even harder, to get paid for work, the ritual of morning coffee quickly presented itself as an oasis of pleasure in a misery of bureaucracy and graft.
The carabiniere with his machine gun beside me at the bar was all smiles and solicitude
I remember particularly the Pasticceria Maggia in Montorio Veronese, a village near Verona. Outside, everything seemed hostile, hurried, hot and humid; but, inside, decorum, polished surfaces, pretty pastries, rapid service. How do Italians produce your coffee so much faster than elsewhere, so much stronger and better, with so much less fuss? Perhaps playing with the milk jug to trace a heart on your foam. Placing a small glass of mineral water beside. With friendliness and flourish. Leaving newspapers freely available on the tables.
Much of my Italian I learned in cafes, over the pages of the Arena di Verona, trying to get my mind around Andreotti and Craxi, Christian Democracy and communism. It was 1981. In town, the Red Brigades had kidnapped an American general, there were road blocks on the streets. But the carabiniere with his machine gun beside me at the bar was all smiles and solicitude. I like this place, I decided. And in the 40 years since, with the one terrible hiatus of the Covid lockdown, this aspect of Italy has never ceased to be a consolation.
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” moaned Alfred J Prufrock, as if it was a defeat. In Italy, it’s a triumph.
Goop après ski
Every aesthetically challenging day in that hideous orange Utah legal facility, Gwyneth has swept in wearing category 5 neutrals, hopefully drawn from her own brand’s Courtroom Casuals line. (Though all Gwyneth’s garments are made from the neck hairs of these really incredible Himalayan goats to whose sheddings a normie like you could never have access, do be reassured they WILL be lovingly ripped off in never-pill nylon and available later this year as Halloween costumes.) Just as Goop is a place where food is never eaten, but “grabbed” or “reached for”, so it is that one of the best things Gwyneth’s website can say about any outfit is that it “takes you effortlessly” from one part of your day to another. In this case, from pursing your lips in court, to making that evening’s waiter give you the resume and achievements of every ingredient in the biodynamic salad, before pursing your lips once more and hissing: “No thank you, I’ll just have broth.”
— Marina Hyde, Did Gwyneth Paltrow ski into a retired optometrist? I couldn’t care less, but the farce is unmissable, The Guardian, 28 May 2023
Comedy vs. Satire
Satire and comedy overlap—satirists are often funny and comedians satirical—but their goals are essentially different. The goal of satire is reform, the goal of comedy acceptance. Satire attempts to show that the behavior of an individual or a group within society violates the laws of ethics or common sense, on the assumption that, once the majority are aware of the facts, they will become morally indignant and either compel the violaters to mend their ways or render them socially and politically impotent. Comedy, on the other hand, is concerned with the illusions and self-deceptions which all men indulge in as to what they and the world they live in are really like, and cannot, so long as they remain human, help being. The object of the comic exposure is not a special individual or a special social group, but everyman or human society as a whole. Satire is angry and optimistic—it believes that the evil it attacks can be abolished. Comedy is good-tempered and pessimistic—it believes that, however much we may wish we could, we cannot change human nature, and must make the best of a bad job.
— W.H. Auden, Byron: The Making of a Comic Poet, The New York Review of Books, 18 August 1966
Pasternak
‘The Foreigner Visiting Pasternak at His Dacha’ is its own subgenre of intellectual history. Its principal theme is the excitement of discovering a lost generation who, like ‘the victims of shipwreck on a desert island’, have been ‘cut off for decades from civilisation’ (Berlin). The foreigner, moved by his role as witness to an impossible reality, records every detail of the encounter: the welcome (Pasternak’s handshake is ‘firm’, his smile ‘exuberant’); the walk (oh, that ‘cool’ pine forest, and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation, with Pasternak holding forth ‘as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his contemporaries’; the meal, at which his wife, ‘dark, plump and inconspicuous’ (and often unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual companions — Tolstoy, Chekhov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov. And finally the farewell at the gate, at which Pasternak disappears back into the dacha and re-emerges with sheaves of typescript. These are given to the visitor (‘the guest from the future’, as Anna Akhmatova put it), who is now tasked with the sacred and thrillingly immortalising responsibility of carrying Pasternak’s writings out of this place where the clock has stopped and into the world beyond.
— Frances Stonor Saunders, The Writer and the Valet: on the ‘Zhivago’ Story, London Review of Books, 25 September 2014
Belushi on War
We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!
— John Belushi, National Lampoon’s Animal House, 1978
The Party as Prison
“The most powerful prisoners are not the gangsters,” Boris Franklin wrote later. “They are those who have earned the respect of the other prisoners and the guards. There is less violence in a well-run prison than many on the outside assume, since it is the word and stature of these prison leaders that creates social cohesion. These leaders ward off conflicts between prisoners, raise issues of concern with the administrators, and intercede with the guards. They intuitively understand how to navigate the narrow parameters set by prison authorities, giving them something that resembles freedom. Prison is a lot like the outside world. There is a stratum of people you try to avoid. There are the majority who spend most of their free time slack-jawed in front of a television set, and then there are those who have recovered their integrity and even, to an extent, their moral autonomy. They have risen above prison to become better people. Yet even they can be arbitrarily disappeared into solitary confinement or shipped to another prison by the administration. Everyone in prison is disposable.
— from Chris Hedges and Boris Franklin, Caged, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020, pp. 21-22, quoted in Hedges, Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, 2021
學渣
學渣 ，也叫學灰，網絡詞彙。指那些平時不努力學習，快臨近期末時才開始突擊、臨時抱佛腳的學生群體。一般不帶有貶義，與學霸相對，是學習不理想的學生對自己的一種自嘲，也成為學校壓力釋放的一種方式。但隨著學渣的廣泛使用，許多成績理想的學生開始用學渣表示自謙。
— online definition
On Yelling ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theatre
‘What in the culture today gives you pause in the way that your work might give other people pause? The new censorship. I think I should be allowed to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. I believe in the extremes of free speech. There is horrible pornography; we have to put up with it. The most right-wing — I don’t get why they aren’t allowed to come to colleges. Where does it stop? People don’t like what I say? So what. I’m allowed to say it and I live in the greatest country. I’m a down-low patriotic person. In my old spoken-word show I did an entire thing of what it would be like to have sex with Trump that was rude and graphic, and I didn’t get the firing squad. In some countries I would have.’
— John Waters, The New York Times, 21 March 2022
Trump
We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.
That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as anyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.
— Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, 2016
Nader on Nada
“Ralph once said he’d be a Democrat when the Martians invade,” said Green, who has known Nader for half a century. “They invaded and they’re here and they’re a few inches away from engaging in a fascist takeover of our few-century democracy.” He said that Nader’s father, a Lebanese immigrant, had told his son not to join either major political party because “they’re both bad.”
Nom Nom
