Things I remember learning in college about the Far East:
That attachment is a disease [though of course Dylan would be worth it], via about 100 trains of thought, such as : Zen: Japanese; Ch'an (Chinese); a branch of Mahayana Buddhism which developed in China during the sixth and seventh centuries after Bodhidharma arrived; it later divided into the Soto and Rinzai schools; Zen stresses the importance of the enlightenment experience and the futility of rational thought, intellectual study and religious ritual in attaining this; a central element of Zen is zazen, a meditative practice which seeks to free the mind of all thought and conceptualization. [Later, I go ga-ga for this guy who is like the ones I fall into, both without a solution and difficult besides, and who advises that we herd an ox over a cliff to get over all forms of desire, and the ox is our own minds. (pause) oy vei]
That the Cultural Revolution was a bitch. But there was something a wee bit compelling in the fantasy of chopping any talking head right off. Cranky then, I remember often having guilty identifications with the bad guys, from Lex Lurther to Mao Zedong.
The Yellow River. The Yangtze River.
Night Soil.
Empress Dowagers. A couple of them were real hardasses, one in the 1600’s and another at the end of the 1800’s. One was Ghengis Kahn’s grandkid or something like that and she ruled wedged up her heir’s ass like a toggle.
That in China even a peasant could advance to higher education, during some of the dynasties anyway, by scoring well enough on Confucian exams, and that a person was judged on all sorts of rote knowledge repeated to perfection and that the handwriting was also to be aesthetically perfectly representative. (Like black fascist boots, i.e. loved that despite myself while simultaneously wallowing in The Closing of the American Mind.)
The myth of Mulan. Maxine Hong Kingston’s version. I particularly liked the part when her parents tattoo their list of existential complaints all down her back back back.
Madeleine Peyroux - Blue Alert (highly recommended—ying/yang balance droll/sexy.)
