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Diary (18) [four flavors]

Whole Earth to Night Skies (trying to keep it short)[Brand on acid / planetary systems / Rumsfeld's strange world / inside versus outside / the stars in Pyongyang]

The Bodhisattva of Yoshiwara (a schematic to avoid the work of the essay) [desperation in the old pleasure quarter / compassion of the Virgin-Bodhisattva / helplessly turning away]

Notes, again, on fragrance: Soviet perfume (Chanel No. 5 is Russian / sensual Marxism / Brocard and State Soap Factory No. 5 / Bulgakov's black magic)

Diary (17)

Notes: Pyongyang aromas [comparing three generations of industrial perfume policy, speculative scent memory, hyangsu vs. hyangsu, scent portraits of the leaders, crab apple perfume craze]

Notes: How should an extremist smell?

// quick, incomplete notes detailing: Everything becomes synthetic // (Kensington lab analyses / Cumberland poppy patch / opium to red pills in a generation / xylazine / renunciation)

_poking thru the ashes: a review of some what i wrote/read this year_ (+ contemplating my lack of productivity)

Brief acknowledgement that I have translated a book: Mai Jia's The Colonel and the Eunuch

Notes on dog meat compiled or written after reading the announcement that South Korea will ban the trade by 2027 [Fan Kuai, symbolism, farm dogs and farmed dogs and fighting dogs, etc.]

Considering Yeonmi Park: Another preparatory sketch, another exercise for an essay on dissidents

Richmond, Meguro, Subei, the Wasteland: Preparatory sketches, an exercise for an essay on dissidents

JRA URA / LOD NAGANO / INSIDE OUTSIDE

Painting and urban planning are as incompatible as fire and water / translating Lu Xinghua again / PART ONE

Some notes after the closure of a beloved online media outlet (we have become stupider)

It's not there but it might be someday / notes for an essay on Woman in the Dunes and Qian Xuesen's industrial sand theory

Briefly, an ode to Misora Hibari

Can I translate Alain Badiou on the Cultural Revolution? Yes, but the results are uninspiring. ("Resurrection of a revolutionary paradigm," preface to Jiang Hongsheng's record of the Shanghai Commune)

The Okinawan Diet [small town living] [a recipe for taco rice] [scattered notes after a social media storm]

Everyday antifeminism (beauty pageants, the woman question, gender war, Maria Katasonova) [there's nothing original here, I warn you]

Translations: Renke POPULAR FICTION (GZ sleaze literature under the influence of bootlegs and Echenoz)

Abandoned entry: Restoring the dignity of the dictator (and ourselves). What is left: digressions about irony and sincerity, Nixon and Jiang Qing, the tyranny of humor, the humor of tyranny

A few notes after reading The Man Who Saved Kabuki by Okamoto Shiro (translated and extensively condensed by Samuel Leiter)

Sakaguchi Ango / what should be conserved / burn down the temples / Datong wall

Exiled from the discourse / sanctions piece reflections

Artificial intelligence is for nostalgia / Miyako Harumi [two halves of entries]

Translation, excerpt, Sun Ganlu's A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains

The question concerning small arms technology under shared industrial civilization / Korean rifles / black plastic vs. Manchurian lumber

Diary (16) [2010 resuscitation]

An explanation of Dao Lang, "Demons and Mirages," the unmarketable against the market, and return of a relic

Pandemic project / CCTV-6 interstitial music / nostalgia again

Diary (16)

Paris 1924 Moscow 1934 New York 1944 San Francisco 1954 London 1964 Mogadishu 1974

Early stage Việt Linh fandom / Dấu ấn của quỷ (1992)

A quick note on slums (answering debates on social media, instead of being productive)

Recycled: Returning from the beach to learn that Peco-chan and Ryuchell have divorced.

Dai Jinhua on elite overproduction and the misery of middle-class youth

Diary (15)

Prefaces on the uses of translation (as public opinion warfare, as ambivalent commentary, as lens on the wider world) before Chinese impressions of French unrest

Brief note: 50,000,000 Taiwan Experts (Can't Be Wrong) (but this is actually about France)

Ketamine and state capacity ASMR

Incomplete notes on Anne Alombert / digital civilization / Tu Zipei from an airport lounge

Instead of anything substantial, a brief personal essay about language learning

Written sometime around 1/6/20: Dalian dancehalls, trams

Reading list for Chinese cybernetics

National addiction, state power, compassion and compulsion, and the need for models

René Viénet vs. the Catholic Maoists / some comparative Sinology / cultivating rivals

Filler: updating, reading, end of May start of June

Diversion: Fishtank Live (Josiecels, American walls, adolescence out of time, Airsoftfatty goes seal-hunting with Sam Hyde)

One world / reading DPRK architecture magazines

Publication day is not a real holiday / The Shaanxi Opera

On the Road in Chinese. A tepid conclusion follows, but these are mostly just descriptive notes.

The secret is kindness (paternalistic and oppressive kindness); notes for/from article on Chinese drug rehabilitation

Taking pictures (more on tourism)

The face of my father - (Lortie-)Yamagami-Kimura through Legendre

Tomb of the Unknown Incel: Picturing the End of the Gender Showdown (macho eunuchs [again] / crying in a BMW / priced out of the bourgeois family / misquoting Stiegler [again])

Fascist comedy | A very short entry on Japanese right-wing politics

Stupid history stupid counterhistory and the Dalai clique (expanding earlier notes)

15MINUTE XIAOQU小区; commodity housing enclaves for reform and opening and beyond // ft. excerpt from Xu Qianjin's Floating Abundance: Everyday Scenes from a Xiaoqu

Mass tourism is demeaning / [outing myself as a crank] [Tokyo focused personal comments]

Lu Dewen's peripheral organized crime anthropology: "The 'path to survival' for county-level organized crime groups."

China defeated global communism (Tora Bora, Brzezinski, Type 56 rifles) | spiritual Americans (prewar, postwar, Third World War)

Let's read Jia Pingwa: "Limits" (1985) (fable of lust and abstinence, 1980s masculinity crisis projected on the 1960s, serialized story experiment)

Quick notes, another opinion on the Cultural Revolution (and its psychopolitics, aesthetic reorganization) (easing my conscience): art for the masses and Tsui Hark

Jiang Qing, Nietzschean terror

A short entry about Ikiru (1952) (generations, infantilization, metal balls, city fathers and fatherhood)

Jia Pingwa on women (1995)

Partial notes for review of Jia Pingwa's The Sojourn Teashop, having completed three fifths of the book (Chu T'ien-wen's designer rhapsodies, Eileen Chang, scholar-beauty romances, overtranslation)

I know this doesn't matter: brief comments on Taiwan, so I can be on the record (bets with friends, Wang Huning, unfathomable Taiwanese domestic politics)

Immersed in terror and beauty / a look at a work in progress [to assuage the guilt]; writing about Jiang Qing trying to find the lushest recording of Verklärte Nacht

Recycled: Atago Hill, rebel suicides, roasted pigeon. From Toranomon. In the middle of Golden Week. 5/6/2022.

Aimless thinking on the theme of the last entry (end of political imagination, generational conflict)

The end of political imagination / Because of the Ito Masaaki article and New York Times coverage, a brief entry on hiroyuki and Narita Yusuke

A brief entry on online leftist disputes: the Longyan deception case (plagiariasm by Zhihu left swindlers / theory for sale) (notes at the end)

Bureaucracy lessons from Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge/Taliban comparison)

I can tell you what else I have written in the meantime (Lu Xinghua, assassination politics, Xinjiang film)

The Issuikai Took My Baby Away // explaining Suzuki Kunio and the New Right / watching Kaneko Yu's Belgrade 1999 / politics of futility + mental health

A partial entry written late in a busy week, after reading a newspaper report on the death of Suzuki Kunio, then watching half of Belgrade 1999

A scorpion and a centipede in a clay jar with smooth sides and a tight lid. (Rubio and Liu Jianhua find common ground without realizing it.)

Let's read Cao Zhenglu and lament the demise of the social novel

A Red Guard prayer and an elegy for Osama bin Laden by a disciple of Rancière (2011)

Thoughts after watching a contemporary production of Shajiabang. Political esthetics. If nothing else, a chance to talk about Jiang Qing's photography.

Birth rates (experimental form — straight polemic — kicking off another year) (Koike, Yuwa Population Research, psychopower, communism means babies); let me get back on track soon

War in the heartland (jotting notes on the postwar methamphetamine epidemic, gukppong reversed, etc.)

Talking about Lu Xinghua again