Easy, Tiger
Friday February 12, 2010
Recently I’ve been up to my ears in a very early draft of the next philosophy book, which draws fairly extensively – more extensively than I imagined it would at the outset – on various traditions of Chinese philosophy.
Alongside my reading, I’ve also been trying to get my Chinese up to scratch, and this has been enormous fun: I quite like the feeling of being utterly out of my depth, the sense that here is a task unlikely to be exhausted any time soon. I’m both trying to get a handle on modern Chinese, and also to develop some ability to read literary Chinese, which should – somewhere down the line – open up all kinds of philosophical resources.
My language learning has been given a kind of increased urgency, as I’ve recently heard that I’ve got the funding to head to China later this year for a month and a half, to do some research towards the next novel, and to spend a bit of time adding some final touches to the forthcoming philosophy book. As it will be my first trip to China, if anybody has any advice about anywhere that I really shouldn’t miss, or knows of any friendly Chinese philosophers I should look up, then let me know.
I’ll write more, no doubt, about the next philosophy book as time goes on. But now I have to go back to my labours over a hot stove: this weekend I’m hosting a tiger party to celebrate the coming Chinese New Year, and tomorrow a bunch of friends are coming to help welcome in the year of the tiger. There’s still a lot to do: there are tiger cookies to make, and I still have to paint some stripes on Bodhicattva, the thinkBuddha cat.
So I’ll leave things here, and wish you all a happy new year!
#3 · Rin'dzin Pamo
20 February 2010
Dear Will,
Stephan Feuchtwang at the London School of Economics might be a good person to ask about friendly Chinese philosophers. He is an anthropologist of Chinese religion and director of the China in Comparative Perspective Masters programme:
I’m sure he would be interested to hear about your work and visit to China.
I hope you had a good tiger party and that the cookies turned out well.
Rin’dzin
#1 · marc
15 February 2010
three clouds:
do you know: “unpolished jade, a chinese philosophy blog”? ——————————————
learning chinese, and reading Tang poetry… ———————————————
loving to much chinese classical culture can make a terrible clash when travelling in today’s china …