I would like to thank the English language for making it possible for me to yell this sentence from the kitchen in the direction of the teenagers: “Whoever is toasting toast, it’s toasted.”

Today was the FOURTH campus closure in a month due to intensive rain and flash flooding (March 13, March 20, March 23, April 10). I feel we have had enough rain, thankyouverymuch.

And if not, why not?

Maybe you have already done the WorldCat search but mine suggests it is also in the collections of the Smithsonian, Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Oklahoma, in case that helps

Oh jeez maybe I do 😉

A board game store without regulars is by definition a failure so no they’re not tired of you

...to work their thoughts out and explore the implications of their ideas. GenAI assumes that the goal of writing is to produce text, rather than to clarify ideas, solve problems, articulate complex concepts, and above all to communicate from one human mind to another."

...as my students sometimes do despite course rules against it, leads to the production of text that sounds vaguely right but says nothing substantive. It also entirely prevents one of the most important functions of academic writing, which is to enable the writer...

Oh ok.

"GenAI produces pablum - a distilled version of the vague and noncommittal English that it digests. It tends toward the least common denominator on any subject and therefore forecloses on originality of thought and clarity of reasoning. Involving it in one's writing...

...to comment on the uses of genAI in humanities writing. Rarely have I been so very prepared for a question. I think my keyboard should stop smoking any minute now.

...to discover some of their own best ideas. Then I got a request to do a survey on the use of generative AI in my research (I have occasionally used machine translation to check my formal academic prose and catch typos when I am writing in Chinese), and was asked...

I just taught a session in my writing-intensive course, which was in part on the intellectual value of writing as a practice: how it provides the writer with a way to work out their ideas and thoughts, and how the process of writing generates a draft which the writer can then mine...

My kingdom for another 5-8 episodes

NGL, that's how we sold it in part. If you are the guy in the dorm who can cook, you will be very popular. One of them (15yo twin boys) has gravitated to yeast breads and the other to pastry.

Image of a cranberry pie with a densely woven lattice top, baked by a 15-year-old boy stuck indoors due to historic rainfall and flooding.

Lots of good parenting decisions are made by accident, as when we somehow convinced the teenagers that a good remedy for boredom is baking.

…which really does take the prize. (Bonus, for certain values of bonus, for really terrible AI animation)

I occasionally kvetch about Chinese historical writing that insists on going back to the beginning of history - the history of widgets in China that begins with the oracle bone character for “widget.” But I just put on a CCTV documentary on Tang metallurgy that begins with the Big Bang…

I often wind down before bed by folding laundry or knitting while watching Chinese archaeology documentaries on YouTube. It’s very soothing to watch nerdy people digging things up, and occasionally there’s someone I know. However, tonight I had to laugh:

No, but doubtless that’s where the title of that book comes from. Sounds fascinating.

I learned this following up on some slightly unclear references in a student paper on Li Hua, so - you really do learn something new every day. The image is easy to teach because it says so much so legibly, but I might have to add Tretyakov and Hughes the next time I talk about it.

But also, the great poet Langston Hughes apparently spent the summer of 1933 in Shanghai, meeting literary lights and jazz musicians, and in 1937, shortly after the Japanese invasion of China, he published a poem called "Roar, China!" So Li Hua's woodcut is part of this greater arc.

It turns out that "Roar, China!" is the title of a 1924 poem and later play by Sergei Tretyakov, a fictionalization of the 1926 Wanxian incident (in which British gunships bombarded civilian buildings), which was performed internationally, including on Broadway, in Europe, China, and Japan.

The 1935 print "Roar, China," by Li Hua. A woodcut print of a nude man tied to a post, blindfolded, his head shaved and his mouth open in a cry. His right hand reaches for a knife on the ground at his feet. In a moment he will grasp it and cut his own bonds.

The 1935 woodcut "Roar, China" (怒吼吧中国) by Li Hua is probably his most-reproduced work, being incredibly eye-catching and easy to unpack. It sums up a great deal about the 1930s and the historical role of artists. Today I learned that it is part of a larger complex of works, not all Chinese:

This is not far from my house, but we are safe in a concrete high rise on relatively high ground. The flooding is catastrophic, especially on the North Shore of the island. More rain to come in the next 48 hours. Feeling a bit helpless - all we can do is stay off the roads and out of the way.

By contrast what's a little flash flooding? (We're supposed to get at least 5 inches of rain tomorrow during the day.)

Just got the notification of campus closure tomorrow due to severe weather, followed shortly by the kids' school (which is right next door). Thinking of this day six years ago, another Friday the 13th in March, when I held the faculty meeting at which we announced the shutdown of the university.

Oh dear 😯 Solidarity from another frequently flooded art building with an oncoming storm.

Woot congratulations!!!

Woot congratulations!!!

I know there are babushki out there who could pull this off in a month, but to be fair I was doing a few other things too