At four o'clock this morning I was trying to turn a sphere inside out like it was done in the video clip I put up yesterday. I couldn't do it, and just go frustrated and irritable. The sphere either got squeezed in the middle or became a twisted mess. Then my mind dropped the sphere which bounced away into darkness and my thoughts started slipping away in all kinds directions, the way they do at that hour of the morning when one is still not fully awake. I found myself thinking about history and the problems of imagining the past. I have been reading J D Legge's The Writing of South East Asian History that introduces the Cambridge History of South East Asia. He gives a good scholarly account of the changing attitudes that have been taken by historians and the problems of studying another culture. Post Structuralism and Edward Said's Orientalism have been hugely influential among modern historians and though when I was at SOAS students were expected to read Orientalism the others were seldom mentioned but ran like an undercurrent beneath much of the teaching and the savvy student knew that there were points to be got by mentioning Barthes and Derrida, even if you hadn't a clue what they were talking about. And in the case of Derrida, who had? But unless you try to turn your back on history altogether then you need a narrative of some kind to pull it all together. And Lazlo Montgomery's China History Podcast from “lovely and quaint Claremont, California” is one of these. Lazlo is not an historian or academic but someone who has worked and lived in China and has a huge enthusiasm for Chinese History. His podcasts have a world wide following, partly because of the extraordinary fluency with which he leads the listener through the many dynasties, emperors, warlords, adventurers and all the rest of the characters who come and go in the course of Chinese history.
So my thoughts flittered about until I felt it was time to get up and have a coffee and finally pay an instalment of my Council Tax. It is extraordinary how difficult these things can be, I have been trying to do this simple thing for three days. It takes less than five minutes online yet I was paralysed with fear and found it almost impossible. i know there are other simple things that people find hard, often pleasant or exciting things like flying or bungee jumping, but it is difficult to understand how other people find the things that I find hard, simple. I would put it all down to money and power but there are rich people who still dislike flying. Would they find form filling as difficult as I do?
But it is done. I bought myself a cinnamon roll as a breakfast bribe.
Now I will listen to Lazlo who has now brought me up to the fall of the Ming and the final Manchu Dynasty.
So my thoughts flittered about until I felt it was time to get up and have a coffee and finally pay an instalment of my Council Tax. It is extraordinary how difficult these things can be, I have been trying to do this simple thing for three days. It takes less than five minutes online yet I was paralysed with fear and found it almost impossible. i know there are other simple things that people find hard, often pleasant or exciting things like flying or bungee jumping, but it is difficult to understand how other people find the things that I find hard, simple. I would put it all down to money and power but there are rich people who still dislike flying. Would they find form filling as difficult as I do?
But it is done. I bought myself a cinnamon roll as a breakfast bribe.
Now I will listen to Lazlo who has now brought me up to the fall of the Ming and the final Manchu Dynasty.