井底之蛙

I have tried to stay off the subject of how the internet will change the world, since there is enough of that on the internet already. I was struck by this piece, (Via Sullivan)  which gushes about the wonderfulness of self-publishing, specifically the idea that Joshua Marshall is hiring a publisher.

The sheer joy of the idea that the creators should have the whip hand and “publishers” just be errand boys who handle making the copies  (think of a university without administrators) is likely to cloud the mind, but there is more to this than just happy visions of publishers tending the gardens of the Forbidden City. What would the world look like without publishers? Without music company executives?

Happily, China had a thriving printing culture for a good thousand years before the introduction of western-style printing machinery in the late 19th century created a modern publishing industry, so we know something about this.  The Chinese reluctance to adopt movable type  is even now sometimes presented as a puzzling example of the anti-technological bias of those silly people, but actually there was no great need for it. Woodblock printing had already begun revolutionizing Chinese culture by at least the Song dynasty, and movable type did not add much. One of the big advantages of woodblock printing was that it cheaper and required less capital. To print a book with movable type need a set of type with many copies of each letter (expensive in the West, more so in China) and literate typesetters. Since the type is broken up up after printing a page you need to have the capital to buy enough paper (usually a major expense) and to wait for the things to sell or to swallow the loss if they don’t. With Chinese block printing you needed a literate author to write the book, but then you could paste the paper on a woodblock and have an illiterate (and cheap) carver cut it out. Storing all the woodblocks could be a pain, but since you did not break them up you could print as many copies as you needed (print on demand!) and then keep the blocks. At least some literati would leave their woodblocks in their wills. (I know Yuan Mei did, and I would guess others did too.) There was far less need for the work publishers do and the capital they provide.

China certainly had publishers going back at least to the Ming. Cynthia Brokaw has written about the small-scale publishing houses that churned out and distributed cheap books for the masses. The commanding heights of Chinese publishing, however, were occupied by the literati-publishers who were better known as writers, editors, and collators than as publishers.  If a person had a reputation that would sell books they did not need a lot of capital to go into business for themselves. China did not have much by the way of copyright law back then, but they were somewhat protected by the fact that they had already made up the printing blocks for their famous works. This would not help the small publishers making cheap copies of the Four Books, of course, so they lived in a cutthroat low-margin market while the more elite writers floated above that.

This seems to be sort of what technology is creating today. Publishers still exist, and if you want to publish “Chicken Soup for a Goldfish’s Soul” you will need a publisher to advertise it and make sure that stacks of it are piled up at the local gas station. If you are famous enough and not really wanting to go after Stephen King’s sales records self-publishing is getting easier and easier. We may end up with a two-tier system like China had.

Oddly, the one place where new publishing trends are not really taking hold is academia. You would think that given all the authors who sell dozens of books on their own reputations rather than marketing hype, and the fact that getting it out there rather than getting rich is the goal, scholars would go in for self or electronic publishing. Journals certainly have, but academic books of course serve a purpose other than being read, which is proving that you are a scholar by coming out in hardback with the name of a publisher on the spine so that you can keep your job. The cultural importance of publishers is still there, and it will be interesting to see how long they can resist the technological trends that are moving away from them.

There is a lot of scholarship on this, although I would not blame any of the people below for the errors above.

I just read on H-Asia that Harvard has announced last week that, in cooperation with the National Library of China, it will be scanning its 51,500 volumes of Chinese rare books. Early next year it will begin with its collection of Song to Ming dynasty works, and then move on to its collection of Qing dynasty works in 2013.

They also noted, importantly, that after digitization they will continue to allow scholars access to the works.

Read more about the announcement here.

I’ve been reading Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night.

It’s an odd sort of book, and you can see why an academic press published it rather than commercial press. The stories are quite short, usually only a few pages, and the author is someone who does not really fit the model of the modern western writer, since he still works as a cop in the city of Datong, rather than chucking his job and writing full-time. He also does not write about being a policeman, but rather about life in the Wen Clan Caves. Although it is possible to criticize Mao’s Cultural Revolution for lots of things, sending city youth down to the countryside does seem to have an effect on Cao, giving him a window into how the other 90% lives that he is still looking through all these years later.¹ The  Wen Family Caves is a fictionalized version of  the area he was sent down to, (a Chinese Yoknapatawpha County) and describing the lives of its inhabitants is his main purpose. The Chinese version is apparently written in a heavy Shanxi dialect, but pretty much all that comes through in the English translation is frequent use of the word fuck. This is rather appropriate, since food, work and sex seem to be about all the people in these stories are interested in. Building the revolution, getting ahead in society or even moving to the big city are goals that are so remote as to be non-existent.

I find the stuff about work interesting, just cause I always do, and because one of the things that makes peasants peasants is that their lives revolve around physical labor the way mine doesn’t. The food is mostly pretty gross, a bowl of oatmeal with wild garlic is about a fancy as these representatives of the world’s greatest cuisine get. There is an awful lot of sex, however.  In fact, just as people in the book don’t have dreams of attending Beida, or meals consisting of 6 dishes for five people they also don’t have much for “regular” human relationships. Mostly people are struggling to survive (they live in holes in the ground) and only the most stripped down forms of courtship or family formation are going on, (marriage costs money) and lots of violations of propriety. One of the longer stories is Heinu and her Andi. Heinu was an old woman who had been something of the town prostitute (although it’s not clear if she was ever paid).

Poverty was one thing that had been handed down over generations in the village. Some men were so poor they could never take a wife. Heinu thought that chickens and dogs all mated. As a woman she couldn’t bear to see the men as less then chickens and dogs.

This led her to let Zhaozhao have sex with her after seeing him try to mount a ewe, and later having sex with most of the unmarried men. The men take care of her, and she burns spirit money to them after they are dead, since they have no family.  When the story opens Heinu is rather old, and she has been given a chick by a traveling salesman who has been unable to sell his “Australian” (a word that means nothing to the villagers) chicks. She raises it (She never had any children) and it grows into an enormous black bird that is the envy of the village. At first it lays eggs and makes her “rich” but after an illness it stops laying eggs and starts mounting all the local hens (hence the name Andi). The roosters are not happy about this and gang up on Andi, but are defeated, leaving Andi with all the females (just as Heinu had been left with all the males years before.) Eventually Andi’s rebellion becomes too much for the villagers (Andi leads all the roosters and all the hens to crow not only at dawn but all day and night) and it ends badly.² Like most of the stories this one is very sparse in its narration, and presents a human relationship stripped down to its absolute minimum.

Of course another thing that makes the book great is that they sent it to me just because of this blog. Normally all I get is American History textbooks. Other publishers looking to have their books introduced to our tens of readers should take note.

1. According the the Introduction he was sent to supervise sent-down youth rather than being sent down himself [↩]
2. My students often complain that Chinese stories always end badly. [↩]

Zhao Ziyang’s memoir will be out soon. Some special people got advance copies, and you can see their reactions at CDT. Fillial children will remember that Father’s Day is right around the corner.

So supposedly they are going to tear down my office building and replace it with a new one. This may end up not happening, and it will probably not happen real soon, but this time it is apparently coming. Besides the hassles of being in a temporary office for a year, what is going to happen with all my books? I took a weird shaped interior office specifically so I would have room for them all¹ and now they are going to spend a year in limbo and then what? Will they all fit in the new office? What will happen to my careful system of disorganization? Could they maybe just cut my arm off and leave it an that?

I was going to write a poem about all this, but Bai Juyi already did it for me

Bai Juyi, On the Cabinet for My Literary Collection

I broke up cypress to make a book cabinet,
the cabinet sturdy and the cypress strong.
Whose collection is stored there?-
the heading says “Bai Ledan.”
My lifetime’s capital is in writing
from childhood on to old age.
Seventy scrolls from beginning to end,
in size, three thousand pieces.
I know well that at last they will be scattered,
but I cannot bear to rashly throw them away.
I open it up, I lock it tight,
placing it by my study curtain.
I am childless Deng You,
and there is no Wang Can in this age.²
I can only entrust it to my daughter
to keep and pass on to my grandchild.³

1. well, all the ones in the office [↩]
2. Deng You was a famous litereratus who gave all this books to the young Wang Can [↩]
3. From Owen The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century p.55 Not exactly the same problem as mine, but pretty close [↩]

As finals week is here for many of us I thought this would be a good time to dip into Benjamin Elman’s A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Elman includes a whole chapter on student methods of dealing with the exams, most of which seem to involve cheating or some form of divine intervention rather than, say, studying. Below we see the 1604 optimus, top scorer on the exam, being given the answers by the god of literature while he is passed out drunk in the exam cell.

More interesting to me is what Elman has to say about grading the exams. Ch’ien Ta-hsin reported on his grading work for the 1782 provincial exams in Hunan.

Over 4,000 literati took the Hunan examination. The three sessions produced a total of 12,000 rolls of answers. If you separately count the papers on the [Five] Classics and the [Four] Books, poetry, discourse, and policy questions there were no less than 56,000 compositions. From the time we began to read the [essays on the] rolls until we made the final selections, my fellow examiners and I spent eighteen days and nights on them. The number of the rolls of essays was huge, and the time [to grade them] was limited. If we were to say that those we chose were always correct, or that even one man of talent was not overlooked, then, sincerely, I would not dare to believe this myself. We did our best, however, to open the path for selection widely and to evaluate the papers impartially. p.423

Elman has a good deal on ways that the Qing in particular tried to deal with the grading load. One method was to shorten the examiner comments on winning essays. In the Ming these could be several sentences, by the Qing they had been reduced to 8-character stock phrases and by the Late Qing to single characters (zhong 中, hit the mark). Examiners also skimmed over categories deemed less important and imposed length limits. Unfortunately none of this seems to have worked. Exam results were widely regarded as fairly random, with little stability in rankings from exam to exam. The bumbling exam-grader became a stock figure of Qing fiction. Doubtless multiple choice exams would have solved all these problems of essay-grading, but China failed to make this educational breakthrough.

I’ve been reading Gardner’s Chu Hsi: Learning to be a Sage. The book consists of a long introduction to Zhu Xi and his work (He was the Thomas Aquinas of China, a comparison that does not mean much to American undergrads) and a translation of Conversations of Master Chu (朱子語類) ,thematic selections from Zhu’s many writings and commentaries on the classics.¹ Two of the chapters are on reading, which was a major theme for Zhu and is a major theme for American academics. Trying to figure out what texts our students should read, trying to teach them how to approach these texts and trying to figure out what the heck they did with them as you read their reactions are some of the main things we do. In fact it they are -the- main things, since students will usually forget us, our lectures and our exam questions fairly quickly. They should not forget their encounters with Zhuangzi, Thomas Paine, or Paul Cohen, at least if liberal education has any meaning at all.

Zhu Xi was somewhat critical of reading. Book learning is a secondary matter for students. ( 4/1) since moral principle is originally complete in man, and does not need to be added from outside. Despite that he spends a lot of time on reading, since it is the a way to have contact with the sages and worthies. It is worth a lot of work.

Here’s what is necessary: one blow with a club, one scar, one slap on the face, a handful of blood. Your reading of what other people write should be just like this. Don’t be lax! (4.14)

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1. The full text of his conversations with his disciples was compiled after his death and a thematic edition was published in 1270. Garner works from Chang Po-hsing’s 18th century abridgment with additions of this own. [↩]

Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time has been re-issued. This is good news for everyone, and especially for those of us who got a copy for Christmas. (Thanks Sis!) For a number of years all that one was likely to find even in used bookstores was the Sentry edition (1967), which re-printed only the first half of the book. The two parts of the book are the same in that they are both the stories and pictures of Peck’s wanderings in Western China during the War of Resistance. The first volume ends on December 10th, 1941, when a group of local officials come to visit him. Peck has been fairly contemptuous of Kuomintang officials throughout the book, since he regards most of them as corrupt feudal remnants with at best a thin layer of modern jargon spread over them. They in turn are convinced he must be some sort of crypto-Communist. On this occasion however they are happy to inform him that 500 American planes have bombed Tokyo and that they are now allies.

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John McKay, at Archy, is publishing excerpts from his work on the natural history and historiography of wooly mammoths. The latest installment is about China, particularly the Kangxi Emperor’s (r. 1661-1722) collection of mammoth-related materials and, surprisingly, personal contributions to the field. It seems that under Kangxi’s tutelage, the Chinese realized that the mammoth was most likely related to the elephant, after centuries of referring to it as a giant but uncategorized rodent. (Also, he’s looking for some help with consistent Romanizations.)

Just for fun, it inspired me to pull my copy of Elvin’s Retreat of the Elephants off my “wanna read” shelf and go through the introduction and first few chapters, including “Humans v. Elephants: The Three Thousand Years War.” The charts and diagrams in the introduction are nearly worth the price of admission. I’m not sure if I’m going to have time to get through much more of it this semester, but the overlap with my Early China class (especially using Hansen as the text, who does take environmental issues seriously) is significant, and I’m going to try to make the time.

I’ve been known to assign absurdly long books before; has anyone used Elvin in class?

One of my colleagues recently passed on his copy of The Far East by James H. Maurer Sentinel Printing, 1912.

The author says that the book is not the product of extensive research, and that is is mostly a compilation from other sources. At the time it was written Maurer, formerly a member of the Knights of Labor was a Socialist member of the Pennsylvania Legislature. In 1912 he became  President of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor and in 1928 Socialist candidate for Vice President of the U.S.

The book itself is fascinating, as its main purpose seems to be creating a left-wing understanding of East Asia (mostly China). Thus there is a lot about opium and foreign capital’s attempts to exploit the Chinese, making the book radically more pro-asian than anything that would be published in the West for a long time. You also get a lot of zombie errors and  standard orientalism. Thus it is worth reading if you are interesting in attempts to create a left-wing understanding of the world or if you are interested in understanding foreign images of Asia from outside the standard elite sources.

One of the thing that jumped out at me was a quote from William Bancker of Springfield Mass., writing to the head of the Cigar Makers’ Union. Mr. Bancker is worried about the competition to American labor from cheap Asian cigars, and thus, in a very modern way, sees himself as in competition with Asian labor rather than in sympathy with it. Apparently the elite/labor split over relations with the non-white world goes back aways.

“I served two years in the Philippines in the army, mostly around Manila, and out of curiosity I visited a number of shops there. Now every solider knows the uncleanliness of the average Filippino, and if you ask him he will tell you that many a poor fellow came home in a box by too close association with them as they are poison to the white man. They are affected with a skin disease, and a large majority of them are covered with open sores or scars. Leprosy, beri-beri, cholera, beubonic plague and other infectious diseases, are, as everyone knows, prevalent there. They sit half naked and work and scratch, while the air is rank with the smell of decayed fish and rank cocoanut oil which the women use on their hair.  Now, imagine one of these natives, whose teeth have rotted black by the constant chewing of the betel-nut, biting out heads, which I took particular notice to see if they did, and using their spittle to help past the heads on their work, and you can form some idea of what the American smoker will get when the trust dumps these far-famed Manila cigars on the market. The United States government spends thousands of dollars to quarantine against these Asiatic diseases and when one leaves the island for this country, himself and all his effects are thoroughtly disinfected, and in the face of all this our law makers propose to put their seal of approval on this bill which will put in the mouths of thousands of citizens, a most prolific contagion, and if as I fimrly believe, it will be the means of infecting those filthy Asiatic diseases into the blood of the American people the present administration can thank itself for that. “