“busy”

When I ask people how they’re doing – especially work colleagues, but others too – many reply “busy”. I never quite understood what the word meant, but for a long while, I assumed it was an actual description of their objective circumstances: so many demands on their time that they cannot stop to think, more work than any human could possibly handle, various pressures, etc. And I developed a certain guilt, because I so rarely feel “busy” – never for more than a few hours anyway. I am a perpetual slacker, who lets others take the burden and goes off on a stroll? Should I make myself more busy?

Yesterday, at a friend’s birthday party, I heard the ‘b’ word mentioned again from another work colleague I don’t know very much. I decided it was time to ask, and I did “what does busy mean, I’ve never actually understood the word.” She had an interesting answer “when you’ve got so much to do that you don’t have time to answer emails, and feel a bit dizzy.” “Oh, I’ve never been in that state, or at least never for more than two or three hours.” She called me lucky – slightly peeved, or jealous? And left.

I reflected. When I was in high school, and then in preparatory class, I always finished my essays and assignments on time, even a day early. I may have been the only one. People saw me as a strange oddity. The feeling was mutual. We had three weeks to finish a paper, the paper took between 15 and 20 hours to finish. Surely, the right time to start was not the evening before. Yet half the class did, and a good third only got to it a few days in advance. I could see that I was the odd one out, and yet I thought – if you started on time, you wouldn’t rush at the end.

I’ve now realised it’s the same with ‘busy’. Surely these ‘busy’ people are in the state not because they do more than me, but because they live with a backlog of things to do – just like people (the same busy people?) live with a constant negative credit balance, and only use their income to pay off their debt. But when they finish something, they don’t do some extra time to scale down their backlog, they just mop around. New deadlines arrive, and pile up. So that’s what ‘busy’ means: I have a debt of things to do that’s running after me, yet I never get on to it. I over-committed in the past, and never took the pain to renegociate my load. People are waiting for me to do things, and I’m holding them back.

But it’s not only that. “Busy” people will make you believe (maybe they actually believe) that holding back others makes them important. There’s a dark side to ‘busy’ people, so let’s be suspicious of them – and let’s not pity them too much. Let’s laugh at their scuttling around; and if something’s important, let’s keep the “busy” people away from it.

Blogging in Chinese

Wow – I just opened a blog on Sina! Thank you Lavender for your help. As a start, I will be re-publishing Australian Aesthetics there – with a bit of help from google translate. WordPress is blocked at the moment, and I think my descriptions of Melbourne would appeal to potential visitors or migrants here. But who knows, I may develop a radically new Chinese online personality, and start blogging away. I don’t quite understand every feature just yet, but I can make it out, more or less – CMS and blog servers become intuitive pretty quickly.

Still – Wow! – that’s a whole new experience . Interested? Follow ZhuZhu’s blog.

Afterthought on crowd-sourcing

In the previous post, I talked about how the bet behind the Marco Polo Project is that there is a demand for reading original Chinese voices in translation, rather than news about China.

I realise, after some reflection, that the model for Marco Polo rests on a paradox. That I trust the online crowd to bring across these individual voices, rather than water down the selection and translation, so that everything and everyone will sound the same.

Am I taking an absurd leap of faith?

The voice of the writer

One question has been bugging me a lot lately, around the Marco Polo Project. A core, central, excruciating business question. Why would anyone actually  come to our website? I’ve had  lots of tactical answers so far, and they were good enough: people will come if we advertise properly and if we build strong networks, and they will stay if our website looks good, if it’s quick and efficient. This was supported by all sorts of documents, of how China’s definitely suprt-hot, and there’s a shortage of Chinese teachers, and online learning is the new frontier.

But that doesn’t address the core, hard question: why would anyone spend time on the Marco Polo Project, rather than reading blogs about China written in English, translating articles for wikipedia, or doing a language exchange on qq?

The only good answer I can give to that is: people will come to us if they’re  looking for the voice of original Chinese writers.

It sounds like a paradox, because one potential flaw in our model is that we’ll be relying on the work of amateurs for our translations – with potential loss of accurracy, and problems of quality control. And yet, I believe that we are the only translation and media platform that, from its conception and structure, really focuses on Chinese writing – in other words, on text construction, choice of words and point of view, rather than news and information.

Accordingly, once our platform is up, our work should be to filter, tag and bring up the best writing from the Chinese web, and build a strong editorial team with taste and intuition.

I believe that ‘information’ is not all that people are after, that the way things are said actually matters. I believe it is worthwhile to listen to Chinese voices, and follow the way they build an argument, or what steps they take when telling a story. I believe that even an amateur translation will carry most of that across. AndI believe that making efforts to translate not only ‘contents’ but an individual voice is the best exercise to build on your language skills.

At least that’s the bet I’m making, and that there’s a public for it.

Foreign affairs

Last night, we had brilliant people over for dinner. Journalists, public speakers, writers from Australia and Ireland. The conversation was witty, smart and political – decrypting gender politics, social media usage, and journalistic expertise. Yet I remember, as it happens, finding that something in the conversation was strange. This morning, I realised what it was: nobody talked about foreign affairs. The focus of the conversation was on Australia. Overseas events was not where everyone targetted the power of their brains. This was very unlike a French dinner conversation with a similar bunch of people, where a long stretch would focus on Russia, the United States, Isreal or China. Now I wonder, is that a general Australian trait, just a single occurrence, or something I’ve made up retrospectively? I shall observe, and investigate.

Australian Aesthetics

I’ve been in Australia for three years now, and recently received my permanent residency. To celebrate my integration, and reflect on this new life environment, I will develop an observation blog called ‘Australian Aesthetics’. I want to try and capture the shape of Australian urban life, as I experience it, through text and images. There is a certain beauty, a certain aesthetic quality to Australian cities – isn’t Melbourne ‘the most livable city in the world’? – yet I don’t often see it represented: travel books will show either the glitzy towers, graffitied laneways, a misty river scene, or expenses of roaring ocean. These sights are truly Australian, but they are somewhat exceptional. What I want to capture is, on the contrary, the everyday, the banal, what people see when they get out their front door, walk to the station, or have a stroll around on the week-end.

I will write this blog in French and English. This will be an exercise in multilingual text production, and the occasion to experiment with inspiration – what does each language invite me to tell, how do I react to my anticipated audiences? But I still need to figure out the technicalities.

Meanwhile, drafts are coming online at australianaesthetics.wordpress.com

Blog aesthetics

Has anyone started doing research on aesthetics of blog writing? I would like to reflect on the way I wrote the Fake China, and what I was trying to achieve.

I have long been obsessed with the image of the mosaic to describe what I want my writing to be like: small, hard little square, light-reflecting, which together form a larger image – and can serve a utilitarian function – are solid enough to be trampled on, or eaten on, without damage. That’s a bit vague. Another way of putting it, is to think of my writing as fragments, or pieces, which connect in a global pattern, and together form a general picture, by the way they reflect on one another. That would be a set of interconnected short stories, poems, or a polyphonic novel. But – and that was the exhilarating thing I discovered – the blog form was particularly pliable to what I had in mind!

I wanted to write about my time in China (a simple travel blog, so my friends could now about my experiences there). I also wanted to reflect, more generally about one aspect: the ‘fake’, mixed, cross-cultural coastal China. I decided the best way to go about it – for me – was to write a series of vignettes, each focussing on one place, experience or ‘concept’. A form soon emerged: text and photographs, alternating one paragraph of text with one photograph – both reflecting on each other.

Once I had the form, the themes came up. Some I had been thinking about before – the Great Wall and the Grand Canal; travels around East Asia; Chinese ‘pop’ graphics; karaoke, etc. Others emerged as I travelled. I listed them – a list which kept expanding; took a few notes, or drafted them as I went. And I took photos, when I went out exploring, with a particular post in mind. Ultimately, as if I was preparing a rather detailed proposal for a documentary film project. But the blog form, with its list of single post, allowed me to bring together a strong of reflection, photos, and travel anecdotes, then close them, and open another. Some deeper themes emerged – captured by tags and keywords. But I like how this is not a consistent essay, novel, or chronological narrative. It is, really, a kaleidoscopic work of writing.

I had been thinking about this for a while, inspired by long conversations with my ex-partner, Jean Francois Laplenie, who was (and still is) doing research on German musical aesthetics. In particular, I have been meditating often on an article he wrote on the Lied-cycle form, as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism: capturing totality through fragments. The Lied cycle consists of independent pieces, which nonetheless echo each other – through repeated words, or through repeated musical segments. There is also motivation to how they follow each other – a key change, a repeated note. But all of this is non-systematic. They form a totality, but that totality is not a clear system, the shape of which can be directly visible to the eye.

I would like to reflect more in depth, looking at other self-contained blog and internet projects, such as Philip Thiel’s ‘a year with‘ series, and try to write a collective work on the aesthetics of online writing, identifying writer and artists’ projects and formal designs, and reflecting on possible sources and parallels in history.

Interested, anyone?

What people like – how to get clicks on your blog

Isn’t it funny, what people will look for? I have a post in The Fake China about baby fashion, where I describe the scene of a little girl peeing on the street. Thanks to the wordpress stat machine, I see that my blog is now appearing in many searches – of people looking for ‘little girl peeing’.

Will I turn paedophiles into sinophiles? Or get my blog shut off? We’ll see…

Back in Melbourne

After 11 weeks away – 3 and a half in Europe, 7 and a half in China – I am back in Melbourne.

I did miss Australia. Smiles, efficiency, clean air; a general rationality to things.

But coming back from 7 weeks in Tianjin – the third city in China, 11+ million people, a potential new financial centre for Asia Pacific – I am in a shock when people here say – ‘Tianjin – where is that?’ Educated people. Policy people. Literary people.

In the first few days, it made me slightly depressed – that place I invested so much energy in discovering, is it really so meaningless? Now it makes me more angry – ‘hey, wake up, that’s where our neighbours live, that’s where Australia’s customers live; that’s where new migrants come from – at least, look at a map once in a while’.

But well, these things take time.

Meanwhile, thefakechina.wordpress.com is still going.

The Fake China

After two weeks in Tianjin, I have finally got over the bad air and general difficulty of life in China – and got my Chinese blog started.

I will publish photographs and reflections on 7 weeks in Tianjin, a Chinese coastal metropolis and historical concession town. I have chosen the title ‘the fake China’, because I’ve often heard people – Chinese or not – advise me to go west, or to the countryside, to discover ‘the real China’. And I took a different approach – trusting that the coast, the interface, the cosmopolitan, is no more real than the central, the inland, the monocultural.

The blog is published at thefakechina.wordpress.com – I don’t pretend to understand or know better; I’m just trying to make sense of what I observe, hear and read from the world’s new superpowre. Comments are very welcome!