The Musings of Alencia Lysander

The emperor of Han laid weight on looks and pondered what lays countries low; though world’s pilot, many years he sought and did not find.  Now the family Yang had a girl who’d just begun to grow, fostered in deep chambers which people did not know.  Fine mettle born of heaven can hardly let itself be spurned: a single morning saw the Lord King choose her for his side. She’d look askance and from a smile birth a hundred wiles -- at which the blush and liner of Six Palaces was all made colorless.  In spring’s chill He granted her to bathe at Fine Blue Pool: the watery gloss of that warm spring soaked her soap-slick limbs. Up the servants propped her tender feebleness, and thence she for the first time bore the bounty of His grace. With cloudy hair and flower face, adornment of the gold-step shake, beneath hibiscus canopy, the spring nights elapsed balmily. Over bitter-short spring nights the sun sprang high; from then the Lord King held no early court. From banquets a...

I like business.  The table is arranged, or I hear dishes being scrubbed.  The camera moves in to the wall so the light can breathe.  In the background also they inhale and exhale; towels scrape their skin. "Pan over all the traffic on the street; see the grass and hear the shuffle of shoes over cement."  -- Right now it could be the rhythm of fingers and keys, the key-hole in the coffee-can, two pill bottles that just happen to be where they are, the stapler, above, I never use, a tube of cream in front of it, lying on its side, the air conditioner's remote control.  Lists of objects and a catalog of their relationships has an appeal.  The more details, the closer I get to what's real.  So a TV screen is just a window, a wandering eye.  It looks at us from a distance, but consistently, with due attention.  It is close enough so that we can hear each other speak, but far enough away to keep us from speaking to anyone but ourselves.  Ever...

Listened to the Invisibilia  podcast about emotions.  Actually dove-tails nicely with what I've been reading in Hume -- began his analysis of pride and humility in the second half of the Treatise.   (Finished the first half of the Treatise  -- first time I've ever read it all the way through.) The podcast contains an interview of Liz Feldman, the author of a book called, How Emotions are Made.   I skimmed some highlights from the interview at NPR's website, but I couldn't make much sense of them -- except for the provocative claim that emotions aren't real.  Or at least, they aren't universal.  The initial support for that, it sounded like, was that people could express different emotions in the same way depending on the culture (person, context).  Someone could smile because he was afraid just as much as because he was happy.  "But just because all the same responses are associated with happiness in context C and fear in context C' doesn't...

The students here spend (or are supposed to spend) the time that they are not in class studying for TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language).  I asked a student and one of the Chinese English teachers whether they wouldn't learn more English if they used that time to study it in a different way. They could read a novel or watch movies and TV shows in depth (record every line, look up all the words they don't know, watch them until they memorized them). The student didn't have anything much to say. The teacher simply said, flatly (but he always speaks flatly) that it is more useful for them to study TOEFL, because they will go abroad in half a year.  Someone could make a satire out of it: students are more concerned to improve their English score than to improve their English. "There's a correlation -- a rising tide lifts all boats."  If only the instrument were perfectly precise! And couldn't it just as well go the other way? You could spend more ti...