Thoughts about 《大濛》(A Foggy Tale)

My wife and I watched A Foggy Tale on Netflix last night, and I became my usual blubbery self, of course. I don't want to give away anything because I hope a lot of people watch it while it's available. But a few thoughts:

There were ways in which it reminded me of Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters, with the main character traveling from rural Chiayi to the sort-of big city of Taipei to retrieve something for her family. Unlike Li Liu in Sneider's book, who is going to retrieve his family's god, Ah-yueh (黃秋月) in the movie is on a mission to retrieve the body of her brother, Yuh-yun (黃育雲), who was executed--evidently for having the "wrong thoughts." 

The movie begins in 1953, which coincidentally is the year Sneider's novel was published--it was also the year that Ts'ai T'ieh-cheng (蔡鐵城) was executed. (Ts'ai also had a little sister he evidently loved a lot.) I saw that A Foggy Tale was filmed in various locations around Chiayi, which I guess were able to stand in for parts of Taipei in the 1950s. Coincidentally, Ts'ai had connections to Chiayi, as well. 

Without giving too much away, A Foggy Tale, like A Pail of Oysters, portrays its main characters as navigating the thin line between agency and helplessness. The characters do their best to act within the limitations and unpredictability around them. Ah-yueh is scammed almost immediately after arriving in Taipei and almost sold into prostitution, but she's rescued by Chao Kung-tao (趙公道), a rickshaw driver who's a former soldier from Kuang-tung. After being conned once, she's suspicious of Chao at first, but slowly comes to trust him. He's got troubles of his own, being suspected of having Communist connections, but he tries to help her raise money to collect her brother's body. This gets him into further trouble, unfortunately. It reminds me of how in A Pail of Oysters, Precious Jade's attempt to help her friends (who were, like her, trafficked into prostitution) escape eventually backfires on her--and her brother. In that kind of environment, it's difficult to predict the effects of your actions. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

I think I'll watch the movie again while it's still available, if for no other reason than to absorb its representation of 1950s Taipei before I visit 2020s Taipei this summer.

I don't know why this fascinates me...

Chat with Claude:

What time is it right now in Boston, MA?

12:31 AM

It's currently Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Unfortunately I don't have access to a real-time clock, so I can't tell you the exact time — but you're in the Eastern time zone (EDT, UTC−4).

How do you know it's Wednesday, May 27, 2026?

12:31 AM

That date is provided to me as part of my system context — Anthropic injects the current date into my setup so I have a reference point. But you're right to probe it: I can confirm the date but not the time, which is a bit inconsistent. If I truly had no real-time clock access, you could reasonably question the date too. I'm trusting what I've been told rather than independently verifying it.

Interesting--if I had asked you this at 11:59 p.m. and then at 12:00 midnight, would your answers be accurate?

12:32 AM

Probably not reliably. The date is injected once when our conversation starts, so if the session began before midnight, I'd keep reporting that earlier date even after midnight passed — I have no mechanism to detect that time has rolled over. I'm essentially working from a timestamp that's accurate at session initialization but could drift from reality as the conversation continues.

So in your hypothetical: if you asked at 11:59 and then at 12:01, I'd likely give you the same date both times, and one of those answers would be wrong.

[Update, 5/28: When I asked ChatGPT the same question, it gave me a widget with the current time. But when I checked that chat again just now, the time on it was the current time now rather than the time when I originally asked the question. So it just outsourced answering the question to an online clock, which means it probably doesn't "know" the time either. Does any chatbot really know what time it is? (I had to do that...)]

[Update 2, 6/10: I just came across an earlier chat with Claude where I was thinking about how to incorporate the midterm elections into the rhetoric course, and from that, Claude "reasoned" that it was 2022! Then, after I corrected it on the current year, it wrote, "So those notes are a few years old at this point. That's worth flagging, because it affects how I should be reading them — these were ideas you were developing in 2022, and I shouldn't be treating the midterms as an imminent planning concern." Umm... no...]

My college French teacher would be most disappointed

Just noticed that a footnote in my "Formosa Delayed" article (I'm already regretting the title) has the wrong date for Bastille Day:

Hope they don't issue a retraction! Apologies to all of my French reader(s)!

First week of summer classes--Canvas down!!

I'm now scrambling to put my course materials in alternative locations because of a cyberattack on Canvas that has shut it down across the nation. Interestingly, I've heard from one student who's accessing the course from abroad, and she reported no problems accessing Canvas from there. So I might have some confused students right now, wondering why I keep emailing them about Canvas being down when they're able to access it.

Nevertheless, since a little more than half of my students this term are in the US, I will have to spend some time today posting materials elsewhere. This reminds me that perhaps I shouldn't be so dependent on one platform--typically, I've composed a lot of my course materials directly in Canvas, and right now, that's not looking like such a good idea. 

[Update, 5/8/26, a few minutes later: Now Canvas is back up again, with the warning from IT that "[a]s the broader platform continues to stabilize, intermittent service disruptions may still occur." Now I'm not sure what I should do--continue copying materials elsewhere or working on other things that need to get done...]

Historical narrative, "society's rhetors," and AI

I'm going to have to sit with this for a bit to work out my thoughts about what's being suggested here:

 

The suggestion to create an app, an AI tool, "that makes a kid feel the weight of what already happened" has my mind spinning. In the context of talking about World War II, I know that directly communicating with the people who lived through the war is becoming less and less possible--I had four uncles who fought in World War II, and my father was in General MacArthur's Honor Guard in Tokyo after the war. They've all been dead for at least 10 years. 

However, there are documentaries, oral histories, histories, historical fiction and movies--probably even comic books graphic novels--many of which could be used to help "a kid feel the weight of what already happened." So while on the one hand, I applaud the idea of applying the latest technology to helping carry on public memory, on the other hand, I wonder if an AI app is really the best tool for this. Isn't what we want rather the voices of humans who experienced history or who have created nonfiction or fiction with the materials of history? If a machine can by itself manufacture something that can connect us empathetically with our past, our ancestors, I don't know if I should be impressed or scared. Perhaps as scared for what we've become as for what the technology has become.

I'm thinking about this point also in the context of the intro to rhetoric course I'll be teaching in the fall. This post brought to my mind something I read years ago by rhetorician Gerard Hauser from his book, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Citing Paul Ricoeur, Hauser points to 

the fragility of rhetoric in a context so overrun by alienation and difference that one has difficulty locating compelling terms that might anchor society in the silt of cultural memory. At the level of praxis, society's rhetors are custodians of history's story. By giving memorable form to distinctive episodes and persons, they evoke bonds of communal understanding and sympathy that can frame common commitments and motivate common actions. The question we face is whether the distance between the contracting relevance of the past and the fading horizon of an uncertain future precludes the possibility that we can still establish bonds of community. (p. 112)

I'd add that in addition to what he calls "the challenge of a past and future moving in opposite directions" is now the question of who or what will tell history's story--and what difference it makes. 

I'm not sure that we will get into this in our course--I'm still working on developing the course, and these questions, while interesting and important, are perhaps not as central as the issues that arise from teaching an intro to rhetoric course in the US during the midterm elections. But I want to follow this thread and see where it goes. 

It's late now, and I might come back to tinker with this post some more later. 

[Update, 5/7/26: This article puts the learning of history in terms of "historical empathy": "'The more we can put it in terms of everyday people, and help people relate to those individuals, we find, the more successful we can be,' said Michael Hensinger, who oversees K-12 education for the museum. 'It can be really hard to relate to a general, a king, queen, somebody like that, which is often the lens through which a lot of history was taught when I was growing up.'"]