Another "midterm" reflection on my "new year's resolutions" from August

I did this last year, I see, so I'm going to end the year with a note on my somewhat unambitious resolutions for the 2025-26 academic year. Mainly, I resolved to get more sleep. As I recall, however, although it might be said that I got more sleep, I didn't really do it at the right times. A lot of my sleeping was done during the day (like between classes), and this resulted in--and resulted from--trouble sleeping at night. I hope that I can start sleeping through the night now. (I'm working on that.) 

I am still working on the GHK biography with my colleagues; that's quite a bit of work. I'd like to read more books--over the break I've read two so far (three if you count the Hardy Boys book I bought that was ostensibly for my son). Maybe I'll have time to finish a third before classes start. We'll see what happens. 

So we'll stick with the unambitious sleeping resolution, I suppose. Maybe fine-tune it to say that I'll sleep more when I should be sleeping.

I can just imagine the ads I'm going to end up seeing pop up after posting this!

Heaven Does Not Block All Roads

Just finished reading Anna Beth Keim's Heaven Does Not Block All Roads: A History of Taiwan Through the Life of Huang Chin-tao. I really enjoyed it; although it has a lot of endnotes, it doesn't read like a dry academic book (apologies to writers of dry academic books!). It reads like a novel or a work of creative non-fiction. 

I especially appreciate (again, as a writing teacher) the epilogue where the author takes us into the interview setting where she had the opportunity to talk to Huang. As reader(s) of my 2007 paper on Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters will know, I have a strong interest in how scenes of translingual, intercultural interviews are portrayed, both in fiction and non-fiction. So I was pleased to get a view of the scenes of Keim's interviews with Huang.

I don't have much time today to discuss the book in more depth, but if I have time later, I'll come back to this.

Formosa Delayed: George H. Kerr’s Struggles Writing About Taiwan

My article about the pre-life of Formosa Betrayed has just come out. Here's the abstract if you don't feel like clicking on the link:

George H. Kerr did not publish Formosa Betrayed, his 1965 book about the Guomindang’s early rule over postwar Taiwan and U.S. inaction during the 1947 massacre of thousands of Taiwanese people, until almost twenty years after those events. While scholars and pundits hold various theories about the reasons for the apparent delay, few have paid attention to Kerr’s attempts to write about Taiwan for the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in the early years of the Cold War. Between 1947 and 1952, Kerr worked on two books, one arguing for the importance of Taiwan to postwar reconstruction in the Western Pacific, the other a more “polemical” study about the 1947 massacres that he had witnessed as a diplomat in Taiwan. Correspondence between Kerr and IPR Secretary-General William L. Holland reveals that several factors prevented Kerr from publishing an account about postwar Taiwan when it might have made the most difference – his inability to meet the IPR’s scholarly, objective expectations; his concerns about the IPR’s reputation during the McCarthy era; and the developing consensus in the United States that Taiwan was no longer a contentious issue. This article also explores why Kerr later constructed a different narrative about his failed publication efforts.

I'm glad that it's out, and I'm looking forward to any response that I get. Now back to the biography of Kerr...

On the essay

Saw this on LinkedIn recently. Reminds me of the "exploratory essay" assignment I've been doing in First-Year Writing for the past few years. It's tough for students because they're used to writing those more formulaic texts that the author discusses.