Travelling the Silk Road of Pop
September 26, 2013 § Leave a comment
Verbally, that is. My Q and A with the director of this wonderful documentary about Uyghur music is now up at China File
Trailer:
Keywords: Zombies, Pynchon
September 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
In what will probably be my only publication as a literary scholar (i.e. I wrote it ages ago, when I was still doing my PhD) I have a chapter in a beautifully designed book: Thomas Pynchon & the (de)vices of global (post)modernity.
My chapter is ‘You can’t always blame zombies for their condition’: Utopian escapes in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice‘.
Also see my piece on attending the conference that the book is based on….
The many trials of Mr Horse
September 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
My new essay on knowing a Chinese James Bond is in the new issue of The Dublin Review
This is how it starts:
Everyone in Shaoyang Teachers’ College said Mr Ma had been a spy. If this was supposed to be a secret, it was badly kept. When I first met him, in 1999, Mr Ma was in his mid thirties. He wore black glasses with thick lenses; his hair was in retreat; there was frequently a look of astonishment on his face. He was bashful, polite, prone to excessive laughter. But the fact that he didn’t look or act like a spy only made the rumours more plausible. It meant that he had been a good spy.
Bo Xilai and ‘seeking truth from facts’
September 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
The nicest looking picture of Bo Xilai I could find
My take on the Bo Xilai trial, the biggest political trial in China for decades, now up at the LRB blog
