I’ve been working on this a lot. I swear. Holidays, birthdays, travel, hospital visits (did you see what that ice did to me? Should have seen the other guy: the ice) have kept me from being anything close to timely with this. Bucuo, though, as I hope my laoshi would say. I am going to post enough chapters to get us into Part IV tomorrow. So let it be written, so let it be done. Also, thanks for the critical notes (lead/copper, for instance, though I don’t know what anyone could mean about “duck soup”….)
Also, I’ll be publishing some subscriber-only content about reading and other nonsense. The new Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey is great, for instance! I also have some old critical close-reading pieces that I might repost here, about the likes of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson. And an essay about Inland Empire, by David Lynch, that no one will care about, because who watched that movie seven times besides me without realizing that while I may have “figured it out” it’s not a very good movie? I also need to write something about Jin Yong (Louis Cha), Gu Long, The Outlaws of the Marsh, King Hu, Zhang Zhe, and others for the inspiration. And some dude named Edwin Turnbladh, whose name I have appropriated in the text, because he wrote his master’s thesis about a Jesuit trip to China at UC Berkeley back in 1930, which only exists in one copy in physical form at the Berkeley library, and without which I would never have been able to write this book. All of that TK. But chapter tomorrow.
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