Too soon?

I just thought of an awesome comeback to something a classmate said to me in 1982.

New title for my offline journal?

It occurred to me this morning to change the name of my offline journal, which I've been keeping for the better part of 20 years. Right now it's called "Thoughts and Frustrations," which comes from the original purpose of the journal, which was to be a place where I would brainstorm, draft, and reflect on the process of my dissertation. Looking through some earlier journals this morning (as I often do on the first of the month), I have to admit I was impressed by my ability to focus so well on my academic work. 

After I finished the dissertation and moved to the US in 2011, the journal's purpose has broadened and my "thoughts and frustrations" have extended beyond academic work to life in general. I also suspect that it reflects less focused thinking more generally. I'm reminded of a study from a decade or so ago that used text mining to look at the novels of Agatha Christie to determine whether they indicated the onset of Alzheimer's. I had the thought this morning to run my 20 years' worth of journals through AI to see what conclusions it might come to regarding my cognitive state, but I have no desire to have all my private thoughts subjected to whatever Claude might want to do with them.

At any rate, based on those reflections, I am toying with the idea of renaming my offline journal "A Record of My Decline." Catchy, isn't it?

No "new book(s) in the former native speaker's library" for a while

Since professional development funds in my college have been cut by 80% and the new purchasing/reimbursement system is unnecessarily baroque (no disrespect to Baroque--I actually like the period's art and music!), I've stopped buying books for the near future. 

It has been tough--I keep seeing books like Anna Beth Keim's Heaven Does Not Block All Roads: A History of Taiwan Through the Life of Huang Chin-tao that I'd like to get. 

On the other hand, maybe it will force me to read the books I already own. (Actually, all I'm reading these days is student work and drafts of my co-authors' chapters for the GHK biography.)

As for my professional development money? When "donation day" comes around, I'll tell them to donate it to the school...

[Update, 12/9/25: I received Keim's book as a Christmas gift from my brother and sister-in-law! Yay!]

Honest-ish question

How do you write about the cool things you've found in the archives without making your paper sound like it should be titled, "Cool Things I Found in the Archives?"

Scene from pandemic-era teaching

We had a virtual English Department meeting today. After we got off Zoom, we all ran into each other on the way to the restroom.

Summer writing grading project (Day Fifty)

Fifty days into my summer writing project and I feel like I've basically given up on it. I've got to do something, though, to try to jump-start this thing and force myself to make some progress on it, even if  it's just a few millimeters. (Did I ever tell about how when I was in elementary school, Jimmy Carter was president and wanted to convert the US to the metric system, so we learned the metric system instead of whatever the other system is called [the 'Murkin system?] So we learned centimeters and milliliters and all that sort of thing. Then, of course, Reagan became president, but I don't think we ever learned the other system in school, so I still don't know how many quarts there are in a mile. Anyway...)

[Update: Ah, I see now it was Gerald Ford who signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Well, it was probably expedient to blame the whole thing on Carter anyway.]

"Interesting times" redux

A Twitter posting from Ketagalan Media (why oh why am I still looking at Twitter postings?) reminded me that I started this blog almost 17 years ago in the context of Chen Shui-bian's win over Lien Chan, who called the election a fraud. As the Twitter post says, "Rioters set fire on the streets and rammed down the gates to Kaohsiung's courthouse." I recall that former KMT legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) was one of the instigators of that. Ugh. Anyway, the US seems to have outdone Taiwan by having a sitting president instigate a violent riot/coup attempt. Maybe this is what is meant by "American exceptionalism."

[Edit: Struck those words because I don't want anyone to feel like they have to give me a history lesson.]

I hope Richard Bush is making some royalties off of this...

If you are looking for a copy of Richard C. Bush's 2006 book, Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait, if you hurry you can pick it up at the low price listed below:

It looks like there are three copies available at these bargain-basement prices:

Glad I got my copy already. (But maybe I should put it up for sale...)

Ragesurfing

This is the term I came up with this morning to describe how I lurch from one anger-inducing news story to another about the intersection of politics and COVID-19 (and, sometimes, bad reporting).* I imagine I'm not the only person who does this. I've seen the term "doomsurfing," but that describes something a bit different--as Kevin Roose defines it, doomsurfing consists of "falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating [one]self to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep." Ragesurfing, perhaps a subspecies of doomsurfing, is characterized by the active pursuit of news articles that you know will make you angry and a descent into the rabbit hole of reading the comments on stories or social media posts with an emphasis on the ones that you strongly disagree with or that are dismissive or insulting to your perspective. "I knew there would be some idiots who would agree (or disagree, as the case may be) with this posting!" you say, vindicated in your belief that not everyone on the internet is as enlightened as you (OK, this is about me), at the same time growing more and more angry and despairing at how stupid and/or evil "they" are.

I'm not sure what motivates ragesurfing; Roose, in another article, argues that what he calls "machine drift" happens when our thoughts and emotions are influenced by our online experiences through "a combination of humans and sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence." He quotes the adage that "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." His objective is to explore how our tools shape us, which, if you believe that ragesurfing is a result of being manipulated by our tools, seems an important consideration. Maybe his podcasts will shed some light on this phenomenon (though he'll probably end up giving it another name that will stick better than "ragesurfing," which will probably make me even madder).

Note that ragesurfing doesn't imply engaging those other points of view, though I guess it doesn't preclude engagement. Personally, I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account, so my consumption of social media is strictly from the sidelines. This might enhance the feelings of impotent rage--Roose suggests that "using social media actively makes us feel better than consuming it passively," but I have no intention of diving into the volcano just because I'm burning my feet by dancing around the edge.

I suppose that ragesurfing, unlike doomsurfing as it's currently being used, does not have to be concerned only with coronavirus-related content. However, it makes sense that it would surface now, when I'm stuck at home, sitting in front of the computer or staring at my phone way too much.

I need to get back to grading right now, so I'm just going to post this as a "half-formed thought." I'll try to stay away from my usual grazing locations. Like a cow that eats too much lush green grass in the spring, I'm liable to start staggering around and fall over. (That simile probably proves I'm a suburbanite.)

*Update: I found the hashtag "#RageSurfing used once in a late 2018 tweet:

Doesn't seem to be exactly what I mean by the term, though... "Ragesurf" also comes up, as in this tweet:

Still doesn't seem to mean the same thing.

I'm supposed to be grading...

On the bright side (for me, anyway)...

I feel like Mr. Scott. Getting some reading done. Currently reading through some articles from the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. (But now will probably end up binge-watching Star Trek...)

Oh, and on a vaguely related note...

The pastors in the churches from my fundamentalist upbringing are saying, "Aha! I told you so!"

And when I saw this new item, I immediately thought of this:

(Don't think those pastors would appreciate the song, though...)

Judging from this email from LinkedIn, I'm a multitalented guy...

Jonathan: International Sewing Club, Inc., Nepris Inc., and National Security Agency are looking for candidates like you.

New book in the former native speaker's library

This should come in handy soon...

Upgrade

Just found out today that as of the next academic year (2016-2017), I'll be a Senior Lecturer. As I told a colleague, this mainly means I'll have to order a whole new set of business cards....

Well, and the fact that I have a new title. One that sounds kind of cool (if I were in the UK). A couple of years ago I was chatting on Facebook with folks about the term "non-tenure track" and how it defined us in terms of what we aren't. We tossed back and forth some possible alternative titles. I suggested "reader" would be most apropos, considering that reading is most of what I do as a writing instructor...

[Update, 6/2/16: Now they've decided to change our titles from "lecturer" to "teaching professor." So I'll be an Associate Teaching Professor. (Good thing I hadn't already ordered new business cards...)]

Hmm...

Judging from the picture, though, I seem happy about it...

There's a certain irony to the fact that at the end of the week that I decide writing for academic audiences is no longer my main interest, Academia.edu tells me that I'm now in the top 5% of researchers on their site.

[Update, 6/3/16: Well, it was fun while it lasted...]

Recent research/writing activities

Well, besides commenting on and grading student papers, I've tried to fit in some time for working on some projects. The urgent keeps getting in the way of the important, though (sounds like something Stephen Covey would say). I've got a conference presentation at the end of the month to work on and another conference paper due in early May. I've also got to continue reading through and annotating the archival documents for this summer's trip. But right now I'm working on revising an assignment that students will be working on starting next week, and after that I have to work on the merit eportfolio that lecturers in my program have to put together every year. I guess I shouldn't complain, though; most professors seem to need to do an annual 自我批评 self-evaluation.

I did get some work done on the conference presentation for the end of the month. I'm going to be talking about an opportunity I extended to some students in my business writing class last semester to write one of their projects in their native languages rather than in English. Of course they had to supply me with a translation and a "context memo" that explained the particulars of their document, but I wanted to give them the chance to write in another language since their intended audience were government officials in their home country. I've been thinking about this kind of opportunity lately because I have been getting quite a few students recently who don't intend to stay in the US after graduation (at least not for long) and who will need to write professional or scholarly documents in their native languages--a task that is not easy to do even if they're practiced in writing those kinds of documents in English. I know I can't teach them how to write all those kinds of documents in their native languages (it's arguably not even my job), but I can give them an opportunity to try if they want to... for one project... if it makes sense in terms of their intended audience... if they provide a translation... (I have a feeling I'm going to hedge a lot in this presentation...)

No typhoons on the way to Boston...

I just noticed that my first blog posts for October of 2005, 2007, and 2009 are all about typhoons. Don't take my word for it--check out the links...

Speaking of Tunghai...

I see that ten years ago around this time (the beginning of the semester), I was planning a Research Methods course for sophomore English majors in which I was going to have them "examine critically the history and politics of plagiarism while at the same time trying to teach them not to plagiarize." Hmmm... wonder how that worked out...

The fifth "John" who lost China

This is an old joke that people more educated about US-China relations than I am probably all know, but I got a kick out of it. In a review of John Paton Davies' autobiography, Roderick MacFarquhar writes,

In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John King Fairbank himself. What the McCarthyites had forgotten, Fairbank said, was to finger the fifth “John”: John Kai-shek.

FB on FB?

One of the projects that I've been working on for the past couple of years has been related to George H. Kerr's writings about Taiwan in the aftermath of the February 28, 1947 Incident (aka 228). If you don't know Kerr, he wrote a book entitled Formosa Betrayed that was published, for a variety of reasons, almost 20 years after the events of 228. I've dug up some information about why that was the case, but I've also been curious about the effects of his earlier activities related to 228--activities like the articles he wrote that were published in Far Eastern Survey in the late 1940s (including an article entitled "Formosa: The March Massacres"), the letters to the editor he wrote to local and national newspapers, the speeches about Taiwan that he gave to various organizations, etc. Besides the Far Eastern Survey articles, in the pre-Internet era those kinds of rhetorical activities (particularly the speeches) seem to have been quite ephemeral, if not in substance at least in effect. (In fact, the publisher of the Far Eastern Survey, the Institute of Pacific Relations, had its reputation smeared during the McCarthy era for an alleged pro-Communist slant.) The only ways I have found out anything about these activities have been through archival searches and reading through his letters. 

So in the past couple of weeks, ever since the student-led occupation of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan began--and especially after the events of March 24--I've had in the back of my mind this question about what the 228 Incident would have been like if George Kerr had had access to social media. In a sense the question is problematic because if Kerr had had access to social media, it's quite probable that the Taiwanese (or the "Formosans," as he liked to call them) would also have had access, and they wouldn't necessarily have needed him to speak for them to the American people. One of things we've seen (those of us who have been watching from abroad, that is) from this Sunflower Movement is that the students and their allies have made extensive use of the Internet and social media to try to make their ideas known to a wider audience. Just yesterday students were answering questions on Reddit in English, for instance. In the early days of the occupation of the Legislative Yuan (LY), a young woman was broadcasting nonstop in English for hours on end on an online video feed. CNN's iReport has also seen its share of video news about the occupation of the LY. Facebook and Twitter have also been used to spread information about the protests. Much of this online material has been produced by the Taiwanese themselves.

But, as Eric Mader Lin wrote recently in the Daily Kos, this story hasn't had much traction with the mainstream US media, and this fact has made me wonder if livestreaming 228 or Formosa Betrayed-esque updates on Facebook would've had much different results than what originally happened without the Internet. Perhaps it would have prevented many of the deaths, which itself would have been no small feat. But in my less optimistic moments, like right now, I feel that perhaps Taiwan is just fated to live--or exist--in the shadow of China (whether that China is the PRC or the once-and-future kingdom of the Chiang dynasty).

I see that The Diplomat also has an editorial on this; while it notes that the Sunflower Movement and its allies managed to organize protests in 21 countries, it concludes on a less optimistic note:

Despite their efforts, foreign media outlets have been slow to pick up the story. Headlines from the New York Times and BBC’s Asia coverage focused instead on the recent anti-PX plant protests in Guangdong. Continuing coverage of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the situation in Crimea has seemingly prevented media attention from focusing on the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan.

I'd add, even less optimistically, that even topics like Kate Winslet's wrinkles and the final episode of How I Met Your Mother have had better success with US audiences than the Sunflower Movement.