Are Caizi Jiaren 才子佳人 Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances By Way of Example (~3000 words) #Booksky

Are Caizi Jiaren Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances By Way of Example | kmichaelwilson

Are Caizi Jiaren Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances By Way of Example by kmichaelwilson on Patreon. Join kmichaelwilson's community for exclusive conte...

patreon.com

Dungeon Crawdads Carl Where the Crawdads Sing Where the Crawlers Carldad Where the Carldads Craw Dungeon Crawldad Singer Where the Carldads Crawl Where the Crawdads Carl Crawler the Crawdads Sing

Are Caizi Jiaren 才子佳人 Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances By Way of Example (~3000 words) #Booksky

Are Caizi Jiaren Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances By Way of Example | kmichaelwilson

Are Caizi Jiaren Novels Akin to Knight-Errant Romances? With Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances By Way of Example by kmichaelwilson on Patreon. Join kmichaelwilson's community for exclusive conte...

patreon.com

"clouded brows" is more beautiful than "cellar door"

Not only is there slavery in imperial China, arguably the risk of at any moment being enslaved was greater than in many societies. Not just poor people and the indebted, even high officials who ran afoul of court intrigues could suddenly have their whole family sold into slavery

cooking up some thoughts on comparing (but mostly contrasting, smh) caizi jiaren romance novels with knight-errant romances tired: the pen is mightier than the sword wired: the pen has nothing to do with the sword; what are you, twelve years old?

based Su Dongpo (derogatory)

It's a shame that the sub-disciplines of the humanities that perform professionalism (sociology, history) all do better for hiring and funding than literature departments, because at least there's a real sense in which one can actually become an expert on literature

That instinctual resistance to academic journal articles is a sense that, citations or not, these works aren't really in conversation with anything, not even with themselves

There are a lot of indy artists on this website who are visibly itching for "consequences" for the lossless distribution of their works. Left-liberals yearning for the surveillance state to take their IP seriously, and then you read between the lines and find out they're losing maybe $50 a year...

Toronto Man@fucklandlords.com · 2d ago

What's funny about the Swartz thing is that you can tell that a good chunk of the userbase on Bluesky would be supporting the companies if Bluesky was around back then. They'd be complaining that what he did was illegal.

People will destroy themselves meeting these unreasonable expectations, and if they happen to win the game & get the position, their minds will already be too compromised to know how fake they've become, how any possibility for real intellectual pursuit they've sacrificed for a job & an empty title

Rebecca Colesworthy@rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 2d ago

ffs I just read a European job ad that explicitly requires TWO PUBLISHED MONOGRAPHS for an asst prof position. yes, yes, I knew it was like this but it's truly startling to see TWO required. it's official: unis have zero respect for books & the ppl who write & publish them. Nothing affirms it more.

if you ride with a cart-driving dwarf in medieval times, they'll never let you hear the end of it

wonder if I should reread the accursed share

you'd hope scholars would be intelligent and honest enough to eschew "Great Man Theories of Scholarship," but hierarchies actually activate select for scholars whose politics are deeply in dialogue with this particular intellectual shortcoming

Scholarship is not about individual egos. It's a collective, communal project, or it's nothing at all.

if Chavannes were alive today, he wouldn't get a position and those who beat him out would immediately pretend that he's a lesser scholar instead I'm hearing that he's "superhuman," which has a very unpleasant ring given the current rise of fascism

That moustache is awful, though. And his ears are weirdly shaped. He's got sort of a pinhead going on, as well. Maybe I should have omitted the picture. But, no, the picture only reinforces the idea of his banality. 有才無貌, as they say in caizi jiaren novels 😅

Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was born on this day. He's an ordinary guy who translated Sima Qian. He's not a "sinologist," as that's a fake category. Any scholar of Chinese history could approximate his work, but that doesn't make it any less important.

those two blue sections are supposed to be the same length 🤔 😅 oh well... I'll figure something out

讀書破萬卷，下筆如有神。 漫道謙為吉，才高不讓人。 (knocking people over in the grocery store) 才高不讓人! (cutting in line at the DMV) 才高不讓人!

if/ when I read every single Ming and Qing novel in its original Chinese, that's going to be cool and special (and not something most tenured bureaucrats can manage), but it'll be downstream of the vagaries of history and time, and only incidentally related to my intellect and ability

it's pretty wild how much the history of interactions between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking peoples is premised upon completely false Sapir-Whorf-adjacent fantasies of incommunicability and mutual incomprehensibility

Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was born on this day. He's an ordinary guy who translated Sima Qian. He's not a "sinologist," as that's a fake category. Any scholar of Chinese history could approximate his work, but that doesn't make it any less important.

Have you considered, though, only writing one (1) novel, having it be 120 chapters, and leaving it unfinished?

the feeling when you're the most unfortunate Ladie, that ever lived

Still catching strays insinuating that physical books are better than electronic versions for evading censorship? This is *not at all* the case. One could maybe argue the exact opposite, and it would be a better argument, but still not as good as embracing a materialism rooted in social struggle

It's Banned Books Week! Go read a book they don't want you to read!

Jordon Greene@jordongreene.bsky.social · last yr.

It’s Banned Books Week! Go read a book they don’t want you to read!

The "formula versus formulaic" distinction is important, I get it but still, there seems to be a conflation of "appreciation for variations in the formula" with just... diminished expectations, the degrading effects of market production, underfunding of the arts, underinvestment in public education

I would be a lot more sympathetic to all the lengthy explainers of how romance is "not formulaic per se but nuanced articulation of a formula" if 99.9% of the contemporary stuff being defended were not so, so much worse than what Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer were writing

this is such a good troll, you can't deny it American educators: "Woe is me, it's technically illegal for us to assign a whole novel to read, here's more testing slop" Chinese educators: "_Jane Eyre_ is now mandatory" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/w...

What China Sees in ‘Jane Eyre,’ Now Required Reading for 9th Graders

The Victorian heroine has long been celebrated in China for her independence and insistence on equality.

nytimes.com