Invitation to a wedding

Click on the picture for the link, or go here.

Ahem...

Dear friends,

We thought you might be interested to learn that Yun-fen Lee and Scott Writer are engaged. If you think you are surprised, you should have seen the looks on our faces when we heard the news.

At present we are planning to mark our marriage with a small reception in Taipei on the afternoon of Saturday 10 February, followed by a similar event in Australia later in the year. We will be providing details in a subsequent email in the very near future.

We hope that we will be able to catch up with you all soon, and that the new year brings you as much happiness as it will no doubt bring us.

Yun-fen and Scott

[Chinese Announcement Follows]

親愛的朋友，
想知道蘊芬和阿浩為何突然「婚了頭」嗎？
看看下面這張照片中笑得甜甜的兩人，你大概就曉得了。
不長不短，交往三年之後，我們覺得是該往下個階段繼續攜手邁進的時刻了。
我們目前計畫在2月10 日上午公證，下午舉辦個小小的茶宴，邀請大家前來分享我們的喜悅。
我們期盼能趁此機會與大家相聚，也希望新的一年大家都能夠平安、幸福、快樂！

蘊芬(Yunfen)與阿浩 (Scott)

What the world needs now...

is more "individualists, international rolling stones, and slightly batty geniuses." ASIO does to, especially if they speak Chinese or Arabic.

In other news: reclusive, and slightly batty, genius drops a tome and a half on the literary world.

Choice Quotes...

At the moment I get paid to, amongst other things, read the newspaper. On my CV, it is known as "Media Monitoring"... Against all odds, this has taken all the fun out of what was once amongst my favourite leisure activities. But when you consider that the following is considered fit for print in Taiwanese newspapers (or at least the English-language ones), my disillusionment may be less surprising:

[the article compares several frontrunners for a major political party's presidential ticket in 2008]

On the other hand, [Presidential nomination contender] Hsieh has some red
herrings in the closet.

Red herrings in the closet - as well as mangling two metaphors that are overused enough as it is, it is simply not hygienic to keep fish in unrefrigerated spaces.

Or, "another nail in the coffin" of the English language perhaps?

I'm not your mate, mate.

From our PM:

"Mateship is a great Australian concept, it's a concept of everybody pulling together in common adversity. It's a concept of treating people according to how you find them and not according to the colour of their skin. It's very much part of our ethos. You say 'How do you test it?'. Well, I'm not going to start canvassing what the test is."

Here is a suggestion. And for simplicity's sake, the answer is always "D".

I'm sure that people around the world will be surprised to learn that the concept described above, also known abroad as "friendship", is a uniquely Australian ethos, and that Australians have a monopoly on "pulling together" and not paying attention to the colour of people's skin. I wonder if there are special Australian terms for "arrogance", "delusion" and "narcissism" - all demonstrated in the unthinking appeal to 'mateship' as a uniquely Australian social phenomenon.

But an UnAustralian like myself probably doesn't know what he is talking about.

This is cool

Unfamiliar Sights 3: Post-industrial society

Unfamiliar Sights 2: Scooters

Unfamiliar Sights 1: Elections

He is Yunfen's boss at the moment.

A rejoinder:

Perry Link writing in the New York Review of Books...

Many of the peices [in an anthology under review] remind me of the close connection in Mao's day between authoritarianism and public displays of technical skill. The amazing feats of Chinese ping-pong players or acrobats... told us nothing about what was in those people's minds. It didn't matter. They were flabbergasting, so we watched. We admired "mindless" achievement - which suited the authoritarians quite well. (There is a certain parallel today, for both participants and observers, in China's "economic miracle," with the proliferation of spectacular buildings in big cities.) [my italics - Scott]

How true, how sadly true...

Random scrawls...

Well, things kind of ran away from me in Beijing. I'm back in Taipei now, but I might keep writing stuff on here until I get bored...

To wrap up the whole China trip, the following was scrawled down in a taxi on the way to Beijing airport, in an overly optimistic to at least get a few of the tangled lines of thought that had been bouncing around in my mind down on paper. I haven't bothered editing or explaining...I might need some assistance to do the latter!

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23.11.06 Beijing: Enroute Airport

Beijing as "city of eternity"（at Urban Planning Exhibition Centre)

vs

"instant city": Zhongdu, Dadu, Ming/Qing Beijing, Beiping, Maoist/Danwei Beijing, Olympic City, magnet for global capital. [and cf. Shenzhen: "the overnight city"]

Ian's metaphor of Black Rock City

instant population of immigrants (why taxi drivers here never know where they are going)

reordered symbolic/spatial system

798, 草場地: global cultural economy

"All that is solid melts into air" - daily reality here more than most places
- token gestures made to "cultural preservation" (of monuments and representative fractions of old neighborhoods) while cranes rule the sky..."today's dream, tomorrow's nightmare" [i love misquotes]

Billboard: "再見，我愛你" [Goodbye, I love you.]

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