This is a very short post because really, almost nothing happened yesterday. I went to my ancient history and legend class, slightly but not wholly unprepared. The professor was trying out some pedagogical techniques I associate with Western graduate classes, i.e., making students translate classical Chinese on the fly. It was very stressful for them, because it's actually a pretty big lecture class, maybe 50 students. Translating anything in front of 50 students is kind of rough, so they tended to speak softly and get stuck a lot. I could barely follow, though I more or less could understand the original. The second part of the class was better. The professor discussed Sima Qian's final comment on the chapter, and said some things about his criteria for including things. Then he drew out a big genealogy of the supposed line of mythical early "sage-kings" and pointed out some problems with it, and some reasons why it might have been devised in the way that it was.
This class was from 10-12. Then I raced to the dining hall to get some lunch before my next class at 12:30. It was horrifically crowded. I just grabbed the first dishes that came to hand, which turned out to be an odd cooked cucumber thing and a vegetarian dish with these sort of chewy tofu cubes. I didn't have time to grab anything to drink, so I got kind of thirsty. I sat at a four person table with three other people, all perfect strangers to me and to each other. No one said a word, just all shoveling it in as fast as possible. It's rough if you have two classes in a row over the lunch hour. Then I took off for the next class.
It was really just one I was sitting in on, Yuan and Ming drama. It was incredibly boring, maybe because I didn't know much about it, maybe because the young female professor sounded like she was just reading from her dissertation. Long lists of names I'd never heard of. Minutely analyzed periodization schemes, carefully justified. Occasional quick plot summaries. Quoted words of fulsome praise for this or that playwright. The room didn't have any windows, and the weather was extremely hot. I was so thirsty too! Eventually I fell asleep for a while. I general I decided that although it would have been a useful class for me to take if I were writing my dissertation on Yuan and Ming drama, I wasn't going to be getting much out of it as things stood.
I should have gone to one other class, but I was so exhausted and hot that I ended up just going home and staying there. I stayed there, working on my blog and doing various other little things, right up until evening. I decided to go out for a walk and a bit of fresh air, and I found the real Disanji bookstore. It turns out that the one I'd gone to before was just some big book market, and wasn't in the Disanji building at all (sorry for the earlier misinformation). The Disanji building was amazing: the first five floors were a shopping mall and restaurant, while the top floors were a sort of book emporium. It was very different from something like a Borders. Each type of book had almost its own store, except you could freely move around. Various things were showcased in the halls in between: new books, remainders, specially recommended books. Among the remainders I made a hilarious lucky find. There was a book simply titled Sima Qian. Naturally it caught my eye, so I picked it up and looked at it. It turned out to be a historical novel about Sima Qian's life. I was tickled and of course bought it, along with a two-volume reference work on place names in the Shiji and a silly popular book on allusions to phrases in the Shiji, which might nonetheless be fun. Good discounts at that place--got four volumes for almost exactly 100 RMB.
And that was really all there was to the day. I ought to have taken some pictures of the giant weird bookstore but...well, next time.
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