Summer writing project, 2022

I'm not going to write daily notes about my summer writing this year (probably won't, anyway), but I wanted to post this to mark the beginning of what I hope will be a more productive summer of writing. I won't be teaching at all this summer, and I have a conference presentation in July, so I have more opportunity and motivation to work on at least one of the two papers I want to draft this summer. 

Unfortunately, I also managed to get Covid right at the end of the semester, so although I am somewhat better than I was last week, I'm still feeling some of the brain fog that seems to result from this virus. Hopefully, I'll be able to write my way out of it.

Today I did a few hours of writing in the morning, including reconnecting with my fellow Kerrdashians. We've been out of touch a bit during the past year, but I hope we will stay in touch now. Every time I hear from them, they've published something or are finishing up something for publication. It makes me feel like such a slouch... Anyway, I'll try to use that feeling to push myself to finish something this summer!

Wish me luck!

L'esprit de l'escalier

I just figured out a response to a question a professor asked me after a conference presentation I did 18 years ago. Should I try to find his email to give him my answer?

New book in the former native speaker's library

柳書琴主編，《日治時期台灣現代文學辭典》聯經出版社， 2019

Liu Shuqin, ed. Dictionary of Modern Taiwan Literature of the Japanese Period. Lianjing Publishing, 2019.

I bought this through Google Play, so it's an online book, though I sort of would prefer the physical book in my hands. I guess this will be a good format for me, though, because I will need to search through the text to find the information I need. It's always easier to do that with an online book. But it would look so cool on my bookshelf! Look at it...

I came across it when I was searching Google for information about a certain text written during the Japanese period. This is for one of my summer writing projects. I'm going to take off from teaching this summer and (I hope!) do some writing. After I finish grading, I'll try to write something up here about my plans.

Saturday trip to the Quincy Shipyard to look at trains

This afternoon my son and I were looking for something to do while we were in Quincy, and of course his thoughts turned to trains. He wanted to find some kind of abandoned railway or something in the area, so I was googling around for something that wouldn't be too far away. We came upon some information about the Fore River Railroad near Braintree and decided to go there. 

I guess I didn't look at the information on that link very carefully because on our way to where the GPS was taking us, I was surprised to pass the Quincy Shipyard.

After driving around a little, I thought we might as well go into the shipyard because we had seen some tank cars on railroad tracks there, as well as a diesel engine or two. I'm always a little hesitant to poke my head into one of these kinds of industrial sites because I'm not sure I belong, but I didn't see any "no trespassing" signs.

We parked the car near a couple of cabooses (caboosi?) that were sitting on some tracks.

I saw a sign about the USS Salem, which sounded like it was a ship you could visit, so I aimed my son in that direction. As we walked to the ship, we passed some more tank cars.

My son studies a tank car with fascination.

I nudged him along until we got to the USS Salem, a Navy ship built in Quincy that is now a museum.

We went aboard, equipped with a guide, and wandered around the ship for as long as my son's attention span would allow (about 20 minutes, though I successfully kept him on board a bit longer). 

I had to explain "Kilroy" to my son, who thought this was a picture of Squidward. 

I took a lot of pictures of the ship and its guns, etc., but since my son was more interested in the trains, we'll turn back to those briefly. He was interested in this diesel engine, which he explained to me is a switcher (a kind of engine that stays in the rail yard and shunts cars around--also called a "shunter").

He enjoyed looking at the engine, but fortunately he didn't try to climb on it, since an employee came by to warn us not to climb on the trains.

The engine above is, I think, out of service (though I might be wrong). The engine below is, I'm pretty sure, still in service. My son is admiring it safely from afar.

So he got to see his trains, and I got to see my ship. A good way to spend the last afternoon of April.

New book in the former native speaker's library and a book I want to get...

It's been an incredibly busy month; even last week's spring break was spent just trying (unsuccessfully) to catch up on work. I did manage to find some time to do a little writing on one of my decades-long projects, but as I said in my journal as I was working on it,

The problematic part is trying to figure out how to fit this stuff together. And how to write it in a way that I’m not going back into that old text and getting stuck in its rhythms and ideas and wanting to just keep everything. It’s really my fear that I’m going to look at that text and get drawn too much into it and become paralyzed so that I don’t know how to put the new ideas to use. I feel like I want to write as much of this as possible in a fresh way so that while I’m drawing on old ideas and information, I’m not getting stuck in that like you get stuck in quicksand. That’s an interesting problem. I don’t mind blowing the whole thing apart, so to speak, but I feel like even just a little contact with it is going to get me so utterly mixed up that I won’t be able to move forward.

Anyway, I bought another book that might be of use to me for this project (or for some other future permanently unfinished/unfinishable paper):

Shu-mei Shih, Lin-chin Tsai, eds. Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond. Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 1. Springer, 2021.

I managed to get a hardback edition at about half the price it's going for on the Springer website, but that was still expensive! 

I tried to order another book (or actually a set of books) through the NU library, but I haven't heard from them yet, so I'm not sure if I should just wait or order the books myself:

劉維瑛, 黃隆正, 六然居資料室, eds. 【現存臺灣民報復刻】. 國立台灣歷史博物館, 2018.

Maybe I'll just wait until the end of this week to decide, since last week was spring break. 

Wednesday walk

Today was fairly warm, up to the upper 60s (really the calm before the storm, since they're predicting 6" of snow for Friday). So this afternoon the little guy and I drove out to Millis to take a look at an old train station. 

There's some good info about this train station on this site. One thing it doesn't answer, though, is if the station was built in 1886, why does it say "1885" above the windows on the turret? 

Front of the Millis Train Station

Side of station

"All aboard!" shouts the diminutive would-be conductor.

Instead of waiting for a train that was clearly quite late, we headed southwest along the tracks. 

We came upon a number of levers along the way that controlled the switches. This switch stand was patented in 1930. (If you're fascinated by this kind of stuff, check out this PPT on switching and other equipment. Slide 8 contains more information about this particular switch stand.)

The tracks from the station go by a warehouse at 1073 Main St., Millis, a little over half a mile away.

End of the line

All in all, it was a nice walk on a beautiful afternoon. I found some more information about this train station here. Now the wind is howling outside, and the temperature has dropped 30 degrees. Love me that New England weather...

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Well, they're not "new," per se. But I did get new copies of them--and for pretty good prices.

• Politics of Difference in Taiwan, ed. T. W. Ngo and Hong-zen Wang (Routledge, 2011). This cost me only $10.57 + tax for a hardback edition. (Unfortunately, it's now back up to $165...)
• Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture, by Scott Simon (Westview, 2005). This cost only $6.02 + tax for a paperback. I see it's selling now for $4.99, but delivery for that is $5.99. So...)

I'm contemplating not teaching this summer, which would give me some time to read some of these books, which might just be a fantasy, like the one I had about finishing my dissertation and having lots of time to read my pile of books. The pile of books has grown, but the time for reading them hasn't. (The other worry about not teaching this summer is that I'm afraid we might have to 喝西北風.)

New book in the former native speaker's library

In lieu of telling you how my writing plan is going (badly), I'll tell you that I just received a new/old book: Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West by Shih-Shan Henry Tsai (M. E. Sharpe, 2009). 

I think I saw it cited somewhere and thought I should check it out. Unfortunately, since M. E. Sharpe's collection is now owned by Routledge, there were no copies I could find on Amazon for less than $50. As John Ross wrote in his succinct review, 

For the fun of it, I went to eBay and was happily surprised to find a copy for only around $22 from a shop called Zuber. So I ordered it, and it came today. It wasn't quite what I expected (the image they used on eBay was of the new Routledge edition), but I'm not going to be picky when the alternative is to spend up to $150 just for a fancier cover. (I do see there was a complaint a couple of years ago about Zuber's tendency to send different editions than what appears to be advertised. If that's the case, I'll have to be careful in my interactions with them.)

Anyway, I'll be sure to get into reading this book to further put off my writing!

Semester writing plan

Classes start tomorrow--I have to go in for one in-person class that I'm teaching. This time I'm taking the commuter rail instead of driving. I'll probably wear about 30 surgical masks on the train.

I'm in a writing group this semester. We meet virtually Monday mornings and tell each other what we plan to get done, then write for 2 hours and come back after that to tell each other what we did. One of the things I did during the two hours was to decide that I'm going to go back to getting up earlier in the morning, at about 5:30, for a half hour of writing as many times as I can in a week. I'll try to mention here when I've succeeded in doing that, just for the sake of accountability. Gonna try to get one of my papers done this semester, if I can get over my imposter syndrome. Wish me luck!

2022 New Year's Resolutions

This year I resolve to use fewer ellipses and to have fewer parenthetical comments in my writing. (I've decided to go for the low-hanging fruit this time around...)

Top post of 2021

Don't think this will change by the end of the day: I was amused (or is it bemused?) to see that the most-visited posting on this blog from 2021 was a one-word negation of the hope expressed on the last day of 2020 that I would be more hopeful about 2021 on the first day of the new year. I'm not going to link to that posting because I don't want to push up the hits more than necessary; you can just look for a one-word post.

Coming in a distant second, with less than a third the number of hits as Number One, was a posting from July about how to interpret supposedly graphically violent language in a speech by Xi Jinping. Not sure why that got more hits than the other stuff I posted. It's a big mystery. 

Anyway, I don't know what 2022 holds for us. I'm getting too jaded to be hopeful, though. I'm guessing it's more of the same or perhaps an accelerating downward spiral. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, though.

Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements page

When news of the death of China historian Jonathan Spence reached me yesterday, I immediately thought of the acknowledgements section of his massive 1990 book The Search for Modern China. 

It ends with what is to me a most memorable word of thanks:

This book was written, in just about equal parts, either in Yale's Cross Campus Library, or in Naples Pizza on Wall Street, New Haven. I would like to thank the entire staffs of those two admirable establishments for providing two complementary worlds in which to mull over, and then to pen, this record of the past four hundred years of China's history.

I visited Naples Pizza on a visit to Yale about twenty years ago and wondered where Professor Spence might have worked on his book. I imagine him sitting in a booth (though I can't remember if they had booths) "mull[ing] over" notes and documents as he literally "pen[ned]" his manuscript. For me, as for any writer or would-be writer, this image is both familiar and inspirational. Since reading that book in 1990, I have worked in a lot of eating establishments when writing my dissertation or other articles, though I have been neither as productive as Spence nor as faithful to one restaurant as he was. 

I wonder, too, what the staff of Naples Pizza thought of his thanks. It would be interesting to see in one of Spence's obits a quote from someone who worked there when he was frequenting the restaurant. Unfortunately, like Professor Spence, Naples Pizza (later known as Wall Street Pizza) is no longer with us.

[Update, 1/14/23: Just saw this on Twitter--it adds some good detail to what I wrote, like the facts that Spence wrote the book on legal pads and that the Naples restaurant staff called him "Johnny."]

Mary Louise Pratt on the relations of movers to "stayers"

Came across this seven-year-old talk by Mary Louise Pratt on "The Rough Guide to Geopolitics," about travel as relationship of people who are in place (the "stayers") with people who are displaced (the travelers or movers).

She takes this idea from a variety of perspectives. Maybe I can use this video in my travel writing class if I get to teach it again.

End of semester thoughts and questions

It's the end of the semester (grades were submitted yesterday), and I am thinking about how I'm going to teach my first-year writing (FYW) course next semester. I've got some ideas, based on this semester's events and on some related readings I did, for changing the grading scheme to a kind of contract grading approach that has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so. I more or less do contract grading anyway, at least in the sense that for major assignments, at least 50% of the grade is based on labor/process. This will take it even further, though, by making everything complete/incomplete, including final drafts of papers. To me, it's a logical outgrowth of my feeling that final drafts of papers--at least in a FYW course--should not be treated as some high-stakes product that should be weighted more heavily than the process that went into it. So I'm cool with trying out the contract grading approach for FYW and seeing how that goes.

The problem (as always) is in figuring out what to do in the class--whether to adapt stuff that I've done before or go in a really different direction (or in a different old direction). This semester I let students do research on their own topics that they developed in consultation with me. It was a diverse batch of topics, but very enlightening in some cases as to what is on the international students' minds. A sampling of topics written on this semester:

• Boston (public transportation and Chinatown)
• various aspects of social media and technology (pros and cons of social media, internet and online gaming addiction, VR, social media in advertising)
• climate change and the environment (the Brazilian Amazon, climate change and crop production, air pollution, animal extinction)
• politics, race and media (anti-Asian racism, multiculturalism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hip hop and politics)
• mental and physical health (the uses of melatonin, factors influencing sleep, international students' mental health, Asperger Syndrome)
• various other topics (beauty standards across cultures, pet abandonment, online vs. traditional learning, and others) 

It's always a challenge to work with students on so many different topics, and though I learn a lot in the process about all kinds of things, the process was rather exhausting. So I was thinking, for next semester I might narrow the range of topics they can write on and use some common readings for the research so that I can help them more efficiently with issues such as source usage, critical reading strategies, and other issues.

But then in my course evaluations, I saw this sentence from a student: "He let us choose topics by ourselves which is very good in facilitating inclusive learning." So now I'm back to the drawing board. Fortunately, we don't start classes until January 18, so I have some time to think about this. 

Guess I'd better write something before the month is over

The semester's not over yet, but it has been a tough one. One of the challenges has been teaching in-person again for the first time since the fall of 2019. Another is that we've all had to stand or sit around in masks, which hasn't made the interpersonal part of teaching (where you actually get to see others' facial expressions) particularly effective. Another is that I think we all were trying to come out of our caves this semester, and I don't know how the students felt, but I felt a lot of sensory overload as a result of being on campus again. I tended to spend my time between classes huddled in my office with the door shut. (I didn't curl up on the floor crying, as I had predicted, but I did nap on my chair a few times.)

I didn't get much writing done on those projects I mentioned back in August. I had switched my attention to my Kerr project, but after a conversation with my department chair a couple weeks ago, I felt encouraged to look again at my other project (until I looked at my draft and threw up my hands). Anyway, I noticed a cfp for the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference next June, and I think my paper is at least partially relevant to the theme of the conference. Maybe writing an abstract and a conference paper--having a clear deadline--will motivate me. Will have to see if it gets accepted, of course. If they're interested in hearing some guy pop in every 8 years to talk about George Kerr! (Actually, I wasn't really there in 2014; my paper was presented in absentia--at least I hope it was!)

Saturday morning trip with the little guy

My son and I had some time this morning while my wife was teaching in Quincy, and I had seen something about the Granite Railway Incline Plane on Atlas Obscura, so we decided to check it out. 

As they say on the website, the railway ruins are located in a neighborhood near the highway. Google Maps took us right there.

Entrance to the Granite Railway Incline

Sign providing a history of the Granite Railway Incline Plane (Click to enlarge)

Plaque introducing Granite Railway

Looking up the incline from the bottom of the hill

Looking downhill from near the top

When we got to the top, we walked for a while along a pathway for awhile. We came through the woods to a clearing and found out we were in the middle of an old quarry (see this description on Atlas Obscura). 

The scene from the clearing (apologies for the jerky video!)

The little guy, running as usual

View from the top of the quarry

As we were leaving, we ran into a group of men who were headed into the quarry from another direction. They were either going to film something there or play musical instruments (one guy had drumsticks, I think), or maybe they were going to film themselves playing musical instruments. We didn't hang around to see what they were up to, though. (Maybe we should have!) 

We'll have to go back sometime, perhaps before it gets much colder out.

A belated RIP to Gary Blankenburg

My brother sent me Gary Blankenburg's obituary this evening. Dr. Blankenburg, who died last year, was a poet and high school creative writing teacher who could be said to be the reason I'm a college writing teacher. (In my darker moments I'd say he's partly to blame for my career...) I didn't go to Catonsville High School where he taught, but I met him through my brother, who worked for Dr. Blankenburg's wife Jo at a Waldenbooks  (remember those?) in Towson. At the time, I thought I was a poet, or I was trying to be a poet, and I must have run into him at one of the Maryland ArtScape literary festivals--I went one year when a young poet named Millie Bentley (a former student of his), who had just published a chapbook, gave a reading. This article from the Baltimore Sun gives a better review of his career than I could.

When I was a freshman in college, I started out majoring in communications, and a professor in my introductory class assigned us the task of interviewing someone in the career we'd like to have (presumably in communications). I thought I wanted to be a career poet, so I got my brother to ask his boss to ask her husband if I could interview him. We met at an IHOP one evening, where he drank coffee and I drank tea, and he told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should become a college professor. High school English teachers, he explained, don't have time to write because they're spending all their time grading papers. But college professors, they have time to write. I guess that started me on this track. I've discovered, though, that "having" time to write and "making" time to write are two different things. He seemed to make time, which I haven't been as good at doing.

A few years after that interview (can I call it life-changing without sounding maudlin?), Dr. Blankenburg generously published a couple of my poems in the Catonsville Times (hopefully copies of that issue are lost to history) and invited me to give a reading to his creative writing class at Catonsville. I think my reading was terrible, and I couldn't really answer any of the students' questions about writing poetry. I never thought of it until now, but I guess I can say that was my first time in front of a writing classroom. Not a very auspicious beginning, considering my performance, but I would like to thank Dr. Blankenburg for the opportunity. He took my writing and career aspirations seriously, even though I was probably taking them too seriously at the time, and based on that Sun article, that was typical of him. A generous man. Rest in peace, Dr. Blankenburg.

CFP: 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies

Trying to decide if I should submit something to this. Due date: Oct. 20:

The University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program (UW-TSP) will host the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies from June 27 to 29, 2022.  The quadrennial conference is jointly organized by Academia Sinica and UW-TSP. The WCTS brings together the world’s leading Taiwan Studies scholars to share their research. The 4th Congress will pursue the general theme “Taiwan in the Making,” exploring the processes, forces, and dynamics that made and continue to make Taiwan. 

The 4th Congress will be the first to take place in North America. Previous congresses were held at Academic Sinica in 2012, at the University of London SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies in 2015, and at Academia Sinica in 2018. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4th Congress has been delayed by one year. 

We are now circulating our Call for Papers. We welcome applicants to propose research papers on Taiwan from the social sciences and humanities. The Congress will highlight a number of sub-themes throughout various panels and roundtables, such as (but not limited to):

• “Worlding” Taiwan: Taiwan in Global Context
• Contested Sovereignty: Taiwan in Comparison
• New Directions in Taiwan Studies
• Consolidating Taiwan’s Democracy
• Gender and Society in Changing Taiwan
• Environment, Ecology, and the Future of Taiwan
• Ethnic Identity and Diversity in Taiwan
• Taiwan History through Primary Sources

These topics are merely examples, and we encourage applicants to submit applications in any field or area of focus broadly under Taiwan Studies.

Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: October 20 (Wednesday)

Acceptance notification: November 30 (Tuesday)

Presentation paper (6000 words) due: May 16 (Monday), 2022

Abstract Submission

Please submit a one-page long abstract (no more than 600 words) and include the following information: Author(s) Name, Paper Title, Email, Current Position(s), and Affiliation(s) to: [twstudy@gate.sinica.edu.tw]

Accepted participants will be provided on campus accommodations for up to 3 nights from June 27 to 29. Accepted participants traveling from outside of North America will receive up to 4 nights (June 27 to 30). Breakfast and box lunches are provided, as well as dinners on the first two days of the conference.

For junior scholars (PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct faculty, and independent scholars) who do not have access to institutional funding, the WCTS may be able to offer a modest, partial subsidy toward airfare. Details will be arranged after proposal acceptance.

Please refer to the WCTS webpage for further details.

One Marine's War and the Robert Sheeks-George H. Kerr connection

I got curious about Robert Sheeks because of some correspondence he had with George H. Kerr over some materials he was helping Kerr transfer to the Shikiya Memorial Library at the University of the Ryukyus in 1958. The Asia Foundation, for which Sheeks worked, was in charge of purchasing the collection on behalf of the University. This correspondence is located in the Kerr collection at the Hoover Institute. (My thanks to Dr. Yukari Yoshihara of the University of Tsukuba for sharing these documents with me!)

Also in the Kerr papers is a note from "rbs" (probably also Robert Sheeks) to "Mr. Stewart" regarding a 1955 letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in which Kerr traced a history of US-Taiwan-Chinese relations up to that time and predicted "a violent crisis within Nationalist ranks at Taipei" that the US needed to be prepared for. In his note to Stewart, RBS characterized Kerr's letter as "a wonderful gift to the communists." He continued, 

His bitterness has grown, as much because the Department of State did not take his advice as for [sic] reasons connected with the uprising and its violence. Aside from this increased bitterness, he is back in Formosa of 1947 --- as he happened to view it in those days. He viewed everything for the I.P.R. at that time.

Kerr is supposed to be a scholar; he has the whole Hoover Library setup at his disposal. He omitted mention that Formosa was ceded to Japan as part of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese War.  I am sure that this is intentional, and it helps paint the kind of picture he wants to portray of the Formosan, Mainlander, and Japanese roles.

Incidentally, Art Goul [a reporter who worked in China and Taiwn] phoned me this morning to ask about Kerr's background. I gave him a few items of past history which are fairly well known. 

I am curious about the "items of past history" that RBS told Goul about, of course, so I looked up Sheeks and came across this website about him. (I should note that Dr. Stephen Craft of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told me about Sheeks and the website several years ago, but for some reason I never followed up on that, which will probably be to my eternal regret.) Anyway, the website about Sheets got me interested in the book about him by Gerald Meehl, One Marine's War, and I just finished reading it today after receiving it yesterday. (It's a quick read.)

The book mostly focuses on Sheeks' career as a Japanese Language Officer (JLO) during World War II and his attempts to convince the Marines to let him try to persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians who were holed up in caves on the islands where the Marines had landed to give themselves up rather than fight to the death or commit suicide. It's a fascinating story, but there was only a little in the book about his postwar years, including his time in Taiwan as director of the United States Information Service. That's what I'd like to know more about, as well as his work for the Asia Foundation in the 1950s. Well, I can't criticize a book for not covering what it wasn't intended to cover! Maybe I'll try to contact Sheeks now and see what he can tell me about his experiences in Taiwan (and about his memories of Kerr). 

Monday morning, week four of classes

I'm listening to workmen playing Steely Dan and tearing out some rotten wood from the soffit. ("Soffit" is a word I just learned a couple of weeks ago from my 94-year-old mother.) 

[Update, 9/29: They're now playing the Eagles, interspersed with other music primarily from the '70s. Still some Dan in the mix.

When I was in college in the '80s I was amazed at one administrator's knowledge of the music of the '50s. Now I'm in that administrator's position regarding music that's almost 50 years old rather than "only" 30 years old. Yikes.]