random ruminations of a recluse

Victor Mair:

The ultimate send-up of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing’s famous Tiānshū 天书 (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake. When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot. Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing’s 4,000 characters from the sky. All of the strokes and all of the components are “legal” in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in “illegal” ways. That is to say, they don’t add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries. Once they realized that they had been “had”, conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system. It wasn’t long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

I have met Xu Bing several times, e.g. once in his studio in New York and once at a lecture in Hong Kong, and I’ve gone to three or four of his exhibitions in the United States and have read his autobiographical and theoretical / critical writings […] Yet I have not been able to determine precisely what his intentions were in creating A Book from the Sky (though I certainly have my theories about what prompted him to spend so many years of exacting labour to produce such a monumental work of completely impenetrable “literary” art). To tell the truth, I do not think that Xu Bing himself knows exactly why he felt driven to produce this mind-boggling / jarring multi-volume book that makes no sense whatsoever.

In the roominghouse by the RR tracks the old men drink and the flies buzz and there she is, the softest girl in the world. If you had 20 bucks you could have her. The blinds are falling apart, the wallpaper sags, and that flash of naked leg like a memory from childhood, sunlit backyard and the smell of water,

And according to the radio there’s a storm coming. Electricity above the plains, filling up all that pointless sky, and three grain silos

About a block from the ice plant and the canning factory and the creaking bare-board floors of the hardware store you’d gladly rob,

If you had a gun and a car and she’d come with you, in her sundress and blue suitcase

But instead you’ll enlist in the Navy, like planned, and somewhere off the island of Okinawa, bright and young and shiny with sweat in the tropical sunshine, you’ll drown.

—Unremitting Failure

So many films today have characters that say things to suggest that you be deeply moved, in front of a long shot of some background, backed by an epic score; characters that have done nothing to build rapport, nor built any basis to confer a reality of the feelings, who act unaffected beyond the skin deep.

Emotional sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This is what the Star Wars prequels stood out for to me. I watched TRON Legacy yesterday: it consists of nothing else.

Show, don’t tell!

Peter Woit:

A British journalist contacted me about this recently and we talked about M-theory and its problems. She wanted me to comment on whether physicists doing this sort of thing are relying upon “faith” in much the same way as religious believers. I stuck to my standard refusal to get into such discussions, but, thinking about it, have to admit that the kind of pseudo-science going on here and being promoted in [Hawking’s recent] book isn’t obviously any better than the faith-based explanations of how the world works favoured by conventional religions.

When nature stops chattering in the language of surprising experimental results… the endeavour of science comes ungrounded, a hapless stumble in the dark. Oh, string theory.

The real dialogue in the film has some depth and starkness; commentary about delusions or grandeur, image and reality of war, the human element of survival in a claustrophobic iron casket at sea… and meanwhile, the subtitles bludgeon all subtlety with Nazi and German clichés.

F.ex. here’s a soliloquy from the guest on board, a reporter, as the sub is lying on the sea floor and being repaired, after the captain concludes survival is unlikely and says “I’m sorry” to him. From the subtitles:

They made us all dream for this day. To be fearless and proud and alone. They told us it would be the test of our manhood. To need no one and sacrifice all for the fatherland and courage. Is that not the way they said it all? I just want someone to be with. The only thing I feel is afraid.

Now imagine me going “what… the… hell…” as I watch that fly by while I hear him say this instead:

Well, this was my own wish. To confront the inexorable once. “Where no one’s mother looks and sees, no woman crosses our path, only reality reigns, cruel and grand.” I was so drunk with it. Now it is reality.

I seriously hope the subtitles do not correspond to an English synchronisation of the film.