The Pessimistic and Optimistic Case for the Future of Innovation in China

January 28, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Austin Dean

It is always interesting when two books released at nearly the same time — written by two very different authors and aimed at two distinct audiences — at first glance appear to have nothing to do with each other but end up focused on the same thing. It is even better when they disagree.

Yong Zhao is Professor of Education at the University of Oregon. Shaun Rein is a marketing consultant based in Shanghai. Zhao’s book, Who ’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, came out last September and aims to disabuse American educators of the dangerous notion that the U.S. education system should be more like China’s. Rein’s volume, The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation, and Individualism in Asia, came out in the same month and seeks to puncture illusions that the business environment in China is the same as it was a few short years ago when he published his first book, The End of Cheap China. Both works, though, ultimately center on one of the watchwords of our time: innovation. Continue reading →

LARB Channels

Making Their Way in The World Today

January 27, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Today’s post was originally published by LARB Channel Avidly.

By Sarah Blackwood

“City’s hard,” my three-year-old son occasionally remarks. He offers those words as mere description, though, no real judgment. (I mean, he’s three; lack of judgment is the best and worst thing about him). He’s no stranger to the strains of urban life. He helpfully reassures my husband and I as we lug ninety pounds of children plus stroller up and down the urine-soaked stairs of the subway station. “We’re okay!” he chirps in encouragement from his seat, and we grimly move forward.

Last week’s cold open of Broad City found the unlikely protagonists running for the train, high-fiving when they snake between the closing doors, and then turning to confront the hell of other people on the train along with them. The bit that follows is a riff on the dystopian film Snowpiercer, in which humans have taken refuge from a dead world by boarding a never-stopping train that simply becomes yet another vehicle for brutal class warfare. But where the protagonists of Snowpiercer move forward through the train cars aiming to assassinate the single guy (heh) in charge (heh) of stoking and maintaining class warfare, Abbi and Ilana move in another direction. Continue reading →

Essays

Reading Security

January 24, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Image: Julianna Brion

By Randon Billings Noble

I’ve been reading a lot these days – novels, essays, and online articles about reading novels, essays and online articles. My own reading has been voracious and omnivorous – largely because the rest of my life is limited to being home with three-year-old twins and reading The Magic School Bus, Frog and Toad are Friends and Mr. Tiger Goes Wild.

So I do not have “reading insecurity,” as defined by Katy Waldman in a recent Slate article of the same name. Instead of “the subjective experience of thinking that you’re not getting as much from reading as you used to,” I fear I am in danger of taking too much from it. As soon as the twins’ door closes on their naptime or my husband comes home from work I am counting the minutes until I can fix a cup of tea and curl up with a book. Then, at last, I can rejoin Eula Biss as she explores vaccination in On Immunity, or Cheryl Strayed as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail, or Lucy Knisely as she travels across Europe and into The Age of License. Through these journeys I can leave struggles with socks and broccoli and tantrums behind. Continue reading →

The China Blog

Free Speech and Its Enemies in Greater China

January 21, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Image: “Let’s show Hong Kongers what it means to kneel for your country!” Soon after Wang Liming (a.k.a. Rebel Pepper) put this cartoon online, a post calling him a “traitor” appeared on People’s Daily BBS. (Artist: Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒).

Note from the China Blog editors: Issues of free speech, censorship, and attacks on journalists have made headlines around the world this month. The biggest news, of course, has come out of Europe, but some stories associated with the topics have broken that relate to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. These topics are regular staples for some of the websites we track here at the China Blog, including the Hong Kong-based China Media Project and the Berkeley-based China Digital Times. This post is devoted to introducing Covering China from Cyberspace in 2014, a new e-book by the latter that focuses on political developments of the past year on the Chinese mainland, in Hong Kong, and in passing also Taiwan. Fittingly, given the headlines from Europe, it includes some pointed political cartoons from 2014, including the one shown above.

What follows are two excerpts from a section of the book dealing mainly with the Umbrella Movement that erupted in Hong Kong last September, but also with the Sunflower protests that rocked Taiwan before that. Each of these events has been the subject of essays for the main page of the Los Angeles Review of Books (see, for example, this and this) and they were compared and connected in a previous post for this blog. In the excerpts that follow, readers can see how CDT’s latest e-book deals with, first, threats to freedom of the press in Hong Kong during the months preceding the Umbrella Movement, and, secondly, efforts by the mainland authorities to control the narrative of the protest surge once it was underway. Continue reading →

LARB Channels

The One That Got Away: On Inherent Vice

January 20, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Today’s post was originally published by LARB Channel Avidly.

By Evan Kindley

“Doc stroked his chin and gazed off into space for a while. ‘You know how some people say they have a ‘gut feeling’? Well, Shasta Fay, what I have is dick feelings, and my dick feeling sez—’” — Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” — Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)

***

The new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson is out, in most major U.S. cities anyway. It’s an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, and you should see it, unless you hate all of Anderson’s movies (some people do) or Pynchon’s books (ditto), because in various ways it represents tendencies that have long been latent in each of their work, and in American literature, film, and culture more generally. I’ve seen the film twice, and found it intensely pleasurable, but I will try to show how the nature of the pleasure it offers might not be available to everyone, and how that might be a problem. Even on its own terms, it’s not a perfect movie — it might be the most flawed film Anderson has made, though I’d give the edge to Punch Drunk Love — but, like all of his movies, it is touched with enough greatness to justify the price of admission and bear careful scrutiny. Scrutiny (and spoilers) follow. Continue reading →

Triptych

This Week’s Triptych Artist: Maya Hayuk

January 18, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

With their symmetrical compositions, intricate patterns, and lush colors, Maya Hayuk’s paintings and massively scaled murals recall views of outer space, traditional Ukrainian crafts, airbrushed manicures, and mandalas. Hayuk weaves visual information from her immediate surroundings into her elaborate abstractions, creating an engaging mix of referents from popular culture and advanced painting practices alike while connecting to the ongoing pursuit of psychedelic experience in visual form. She has painted her iconic outdoor murals all over the world and, when not traveling, maintains an active studio in Brooklyn, sketching in paint to inform the large-scale works. She sees her studio painting practice and mural making as both inversely relational and symbiotic.

Essays

The Interrogation Room

January 17, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Jessica Gross

A week after the journalist and critic Deborah Solomon visited the Museum of Communism in Prague, she spoke about it in a workshop on how to conduct interviews. “They have something there called an interrogation room,” she told the couple dozen of us, mostly women and mostly journalists, clustered around the table. The interrogation room was a Soviet-era recreation, and Solomon was curious what she’d find. “I looked, and it was just a desk and a chair,” she said. “No water boarding instruments or weapons. And I thought, well, whoever was sitting behind that desk must have known how to ask great questions.” Continue reading →

Events

Piety and Perversity: The Palms of Los Angeles

January 15, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Image by Stefano Galli.

Victoria Dailey, the author of “Piety and Perversity: The Palms of Los Angeles,” which was part of our recent collaboration with Flaunt Magazine, is giving a talk (the talk has the same title as the piece) today at UCLA. Information on the talk is below.

Piety and Perversity: The Palms of Los Angeles

Thursday, January 15, 2015
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, William Andrews Clark Library – Facility

Free and open to the public, but advance registration is requested. Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. Confirmation will be sent via email.

This illustrated lecture seeks to analyze, document, and interpret the history of palm trees in Los Angeles and how they came to dominate not only the landscape but also the cultural mythos. Although the palm tree is not native to the Los Angeles area, it has become accepted as a regional icon. More recognized than native sycamores, oaks, or willows, palms have become a visual synonym for Los Angeles. An explanation of this phenomenon and a suggestion about a new horticultural future for the city comprise the talk. Continue reading →

The China Blog

The Book the China Crowd Missed – Lawrence Osborne’s The Ballad of a Small Player

January 14, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Paul French

Every so often, a novel that captures the essence and flavors of the modern China experience is published — yet seemingly totally escapes the attentions of the devoted China reading crowd. They praise and discuss, absorb and dissect other, often distinctly inferior, novels, while Lawrence Osborne’s The Ballad of a Small Player has attracted no attention and fallen through the cracks of the Sinology drain. Yet Osborne has written an acutely observed novel detailing one part of the contemporary China experience and he deserves to be widely read. In fact, I’m going to just go right on and out and say it — Osborne’s novel is the best on contemporary China since Malraux’s Man’s Fate (which, rather depressingly, means we might have to wait another 80 years for the next one!) Continue reading →