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?

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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!

I spoke with a guy there who works at Melbourne Uni, and said ‘these international students, they come here, but they stay together, they don’t really meet the locals, they might as well stay home.” I said,” Not so: they do meet people they would never meet home. People from Beijing meet people from Shanghai, and Chongqing, and Tokyo. How would they meet them, at home? It’s like the Erasmus yer for Europeans, you meet other Europeans, often some from your home country; and it’s extremely formative – even if it’s not a proper encounter with the country you live in.

So, yes, why not provide a platform where these international students could tell the stories of their time in Melbourne – and, maybe, share it with locals (or we could translate them, and spy on them); like Americans tell of their time in Paris. Melbourne as a playground for cosmopolitasians – why not?