A Good Beginning, Word Ocean, Prep!

I went to some classes on Thursday, but otherwise it was a quiet day. My first class was the History of Song and Yuan dynasty literature class over in the philosophy building. The professor was having some trouble with his microphone. It was obvious to me that the trouble was the volume was too loud, so there kept being a lot of feedback. Every time he turned to write on the board, a terrifying vibration would start, gradually getting louder until it seemed to shake the room. I'm not sure if the volume was adjustable or not, and didn't want to draw attention to myself by going up to check. The feedback problem got worse when he renounced the microphone by unclipping it and setting it on the lectern also. Sigh, nightmare. He doggedly talked through it, though. A very good professor.

His subject was supposed to be Ouyang Xiu's early years, including his posting in Henan. However, he quite inspired himself, and began talking about the deep importance of making a good beginning to things. Then somehow he began talking about a dissertation he had been asked to evaluate which used no sources other than the Siku quanshu (Four Treasuries Complete Books), a notoriously flawed and censored Qing dynasty imperial compedium. He waxed very eloquent on the reasons for its many mistakes--compilers (at least according to him) would deliberately introduce mistakes into the texts presented to the emperor for review. Then when the emperor would catch them he could feel clever. But if the emperor failed to catch them, what then? The text had been personally approved by the emperor, so it COULDN'T be corrected after that. That would be like saying the emperor was wrong. Thus the mistakes would stand, and stand still to this day in that edition. (Got the picture from here.) That's why no one uses it as a base text, or rather no one should. This dissertation did, and our professor proclaimed that he simply couldn't let it pass because it was a disgrace to the school.

I'm not sure that we ever did hear much about Ouyang Xiu's time in Henan with Mei Yaochen et al., but the whole thing was quite interesting, despite the microphone troubles.

Next, I trotted back over to Third Classroom Building for historiography again. It was the day on Shiji and Zuo Zhuan (weirdly in that anti-chronological order). You might expect that this would be a useful day for me, but I didn't learn much I didn't already know. I'm mostly in it to learn about later practices of history-writing and evaluation that I know less about. On the up-side, I understood it better than usual, because most things he said were already pretty familiar. During the break, my friend Crystal mentioned that she had a jiapu or genealogy which is book-length. I was impressed by this. She also mentioned--I'm not sure why, possibly related to some point in the lecture that I didn't understand?--the practice of executing the three sets of relatives as a harsh punishment. I attempted to hold forth on why I thought this was a flawed practice, but was perhaps less than effective in my rhetoric, because she opined that the "death by a thousand cuts" was much more cruel. Actually, macabre though it be, it's somewhat an interesting question. Is one's own unbelievable pain from bodily torture more weighty than knowing that you will be responsible for the execution--perhaps quick and nearly painless--of your parents, children, and siblings? The cruelest, of course, would be both, but if you had to choose? I'm not sure how we got to talking about this, but it was certainly lively.

After that class I went straight home because my cell-phone battery had died I hadn't realized it until after leaving. So many little details I never had to worry about before--recharging cell phone batteries, hm. I actually was supposed to go to a class, but it had been not very useful the last time I'd gone to it, so I didn't feel too bad about skipping it.

I did little things at home, none of them too important, and then dashed off (late as usual) for school to go catch the Classical Chinese class for foreigners, which I'd missed before. I did find it, though I was a little confused about which room it was supposed to be in, and was of course a bit late. I wasn't sure why the professor paused and glared at me so fiercely when I slipped in the back door and quietly slid into a vacant seat. A few minutes later, when a whole crowd of others came in, and he said "Okay, I'll have to say it again: on Monday do NOT come late. It has a bad effect on your classmates' learning." Actually he ended up saying it about two or three more times. I think it really just had a bad effect on his pride. As for being distracting to learning, his fussing had a worse effect. But if I go on Monday, I will be sure to go early.

Despite all this trouble over tardiness, class was fairly interesting. The text for the day was Fan Zhongyan's "Record of Yueyang Tower," a sort of Song dynasty prose poem. Although I had not prepared the text, I followed his discussion reasonably well and the textbook also had very good annotations. It's the sort of thing that's pretty to read in the original but almost impossible to translate well, because parallelism comes out elegant in Chinese and monotonous in English, and the vocabulary in Chinese has a more picturesque quality than could be easily introduced into English. Maybe later on by way of review I'll give it a try, just for fun.

That was the end of my school day. My last task was to call up YHz's student SXb, because he'd suggested we meet. I thought maybe he meant meet that day, but when I (trepidatiously) called him, we decided on the next (Friday) afternoon. I still hate calling people, even though it's a firm necessity in my life here. Arranging things by e-mail is just so much more comfortable! But there's no help for it, I have to do it.

However, now that I had no more responsibilities for the day, I felt very freed. I went to the hitherto unexplored second floor of the Farm Garden cafeteria, and tried out some of their other dishes. I think the students' opinion of Farm Garden is that it's overpriced for what you get? But for me the difference between fifty cents and a dollar doesn't trouble me that much, and it looks cleaner than many of the other cafeterias, though that could be just a misconception on my part.

After this, I headed home, going back out only long enough to make the daily book purchase, a copy of the bestselling Chinese dictionary, Word Ocean (Cihai). I hadn't owned one before, believe it or not. I went for the one-volume version, even though the print is quite small. The thing is, in my experience with the other big Chinese dictionary, Word Source (Ciyuan), I realized that having two volumes is a major pain in the neck and tends to prevent me from actually using the dictionary. So squinting at one-volume is better than never using two.

I confess that I squandered most of the evening previewing a book from Repressed Librarian's reading list (Repressed Librarian has a really cool blog, which I found by accident--check it out), called Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Of course it's far too new to appear on any of the online book sites that I frequent, but I read it on Amazon by clicking "Look Inside" and then clicking "Surprise Me" a lot of times. I think I must have read about 50 pages in this manner, though in totally random order. The book stood up admirably well to this sort of reading abuse, however, and I found it very easy to identify with its protagonist, a girl from Indiana who suddenly finds herself in a high-class east-coast prep school. I would say that I went through the same torments as she did when I first got to Harvard, but I wasn't nearly so self-conscious then. Most of her torments came from being acutely aware of class issues that I couldn't even begin to fathom at that time. Probably it's easy to identify with her because her response to the world is like mine NOW (though thank goodness I at least don't have to live in a dorm). Take this for example:


Ain't that just exactly how it is?

Well, that's about it for Thursday. Not a bad day all in all, if only I didn't have to cough so much.