Mostly Photos

Spent quite a while on skype yesterday morning but still managed to make it on time to my morning class, one I was quite interested in, on Qing evidential scholarship. Noticing it was in the same building as yesterday, the one full of renovation and paint-smells, I even left in time to go to the department notice-board and get the new classroom number. When I appeared at that classroom, however, it was full of undergraduates studying things like English and economics. I wised up and only waited ten minutes before I left. The only interesting thing about the whole wasted outing was that at the bicycle repair stand I pass every day, I saw the wonderful sight of them trying to repair a tricycle trailer.

Overall, I am totally fed up with classes. I guess they make them impossible to find on purpose, to weed out the dummies, but I am a dummy and felt weeded out. Maybe I'll end up trying to e-mail the professor and figure out where the class is. Meantime, I decided to go out and buy some books.

The bookstore I had my eye on, All Sages, is a long way from my house, maybe half an hour. I could have taken a cab or a bus of course, but I had the energy of frustration in me, so I set off walking, defiantly wearing shorts and headphones, though both are not so often seen among the general populace here. On the way I saw several interesting sights, probably more interesting than the trip itself from the standpoint of most of you readers.

The first was a particularly wonderfully overloaded tricycle trailer. I have seen many of these, of course, but this was the first time I saw one when I had my camera ready and had time to take some pictures. In fact, he was going so slowly that even my dawdling walk nearly outpaced him, and I had time to take a series of pictures over the quarter-mile or so that his route overlapped with mine.





Another grand thing that was going on on this Friday afternoon was window-washing. The window-washers somehow looked almost like a SWAT team, all scaling the huge skyscraper in concert. It was an impressive sight, and not an entirely usual one. I could tell because quite a crowd had stopped to watch.



Here, I got a shot of the latest seasonal product from the street-vendors: carts full of sunflower heads. I see them often but not often enough to make them a common and accustomed sight, and they are so beautiful to me that I catch my breath when I see one. But some ethical impulse had heretofore prevented me from taking a picture if I wasn't going to buy one. I dearly want to buy one, but what would I do with it? I can't conceive of eating that many sunflower seeds, especially if they are raw and unseasoned. I could fry them with salt, I suppose? but it sounds like a lot of trouble. I suppose I could get one for decoration… But anyway, for today I contented myself with photographing a temporarily unattended cart.


On the way home, my backpack very heavy because I'd found an astonishingly good deal on the ten-volume set of a famous Japanese commentary on the Shij, I just had to stop and take one more: I have never before seen someone working on powerlines just lean a ladder up against the lines and climb straight up like this. My jaw dropped. I suppose they must not have been power lines, but rather some other kind of line. I don't know, but I still have never seen such a thing before in all my life.




After all this excitement, I had a quiet evening resting at home and reading some of my new books. I also did some reading for the fun literature course, not because I had to but because I felt like it. One of the stories he had said to look for last week was Turgenev's "Mumu," which I had never read before. Until I get a library card, I am stuck with online texts for English-language stuff. And it took me forever to find the story because the title was given in Chinese "木木" or "wood-wood", which I assumed was a semantic translation. So I went through all kinds of contortions when it was in reality a quite simple (and quite apt) phonetic translation.

When I finally did track down the story and read it, I found it amazingly touching and tragic. I can see why it's considered one of Turgenev's greats, at least by the Sinophone world. Turgenev is so cruel to his characters, that though they are not always perfectly loveable, you have to love them because their author--like an angry god--seems to hate them so.

Not that Gerasim isn't perfectly loveable. I loved him at once. He reminds me of Colin, did Colin have a different life among the Russian peasantry:

Endowed with extraordinary strength, he did the work of four men; work flew apace under his hands, and it was a pleasant sight to see him when he was ploughing, while, with his huge palms pressing hard upon the plough, he seemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding bosom of the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe with a furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by the roots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long; while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever.... Shut off by his affliction from the society of men, he had grown up, dumb and mighty, as a tree grows on a fruitful soil.--Turgenev, "Mumu"