I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.
“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 20th, 2012 · Uncategorized, Writing
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“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 19th, 2012 · Uncategorized
You could find anything you wanted here. CDs, with a hole punched into the middle by customs. VCDs and DVDs of old classics like The Goddess with Ruan Lingyu, Zhao Dan’s Crossroads, even the 1940s film Spring in a Small Town. And so many foreign films. Mamma Roma. Central Station. The Lost Weekend. Plus films by Takeshi Kitano and Shunji Iwai. All piled on top of each other like firecrackers at Chinese New Year. I loved piracy. It was our university and our only path to the foreign world.
“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 19th, 2012 · Uncategorized, Writing
Have you ever heard this: “Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan – till the first draft is finished”?’
‘Who said that?’ ‘Tennessee Williams.’
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“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 19th, 2012 · Uncategorized
YOU CAN CHECK ANY CHINESE DICTIONARY, there’s no word for romance. We say ‘Lo Man’, copying the English pronunciation. What the fuck use was a word like romance to me anyway? There wasn’t much of it about in China, and Beijing was the least romantic place in the whole universe. ‘Eat first, talk later,’ as old people say.
“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 18th, 2012 · Uncategorized
When I left my village, it was like I took a step with my right foot and, by the time my left foot came to join it, four years had passed.
“Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth” – Xiaolu Guo
January 18th, 2012 · Uncategorized
MY YOUTH BEGAN WHEN I WAS 21. At least, that’s when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life – some of them might possibly be for me.
Means and Ends – “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” – Christopher Hitchens
January 18th, 2012 · History, Human Rights, Means and Ends, Morality, Security Policy, War
If one can demonstrate that there was such a plan (to remove the President of Cypress), and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically and naturally that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis – as he self-pityingly asks us to believe – but for a solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for Cyprus and the region, does not change the equation or under the syllogism. It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the ‘solution’ depended, was in practice a failure. But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
I found this to be an interesting quote, given that the last sentence in particular could be equally used to condemn Hitchen’s position on the Iraq War…
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“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” – Christopher Hitchens
January 17th, 2012 · Uncategorized
Some statements are too blunt for everyday, consensual discourse. In national ‘debate’, it is the smoother pebbles that are customarily gathered from the stream, and used as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even when they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-edged remark will inflict a deep and jagged wound, a gash so ugly that it must be cauterised at once. In January 1971, General Telford Taylor, who had been chief prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, made a considered statement. Reviewing the legal and moral basis of those hearings, and also the Tokyo trials of Japanese war criminals and the Manila trial of Emperor Hirohito’s chief militarist, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Taylor said that if the standards of Nuremberg and Manila were applied evenly, and applied to the American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed the war in Vietnam, then ‘there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the same end [Yamashita] did.’ It is not every day that a senior American solider and jurist delivers the opinion that a large portion of his country’s political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and dropped through a trapdoor at the end of a rope.
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“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” – Christopher Hitchens
January 17th, 2012 · Uncategorized
I’ve noticed, time and again standing at the back of the audience during Kissinger speeches, that laughter of the nervous, uneasy kind is the sort of laughter he likes to provoke. In exacting this tribute, he flaunts not the ‘aphrodisiac’ of power (another of his plagiarized bon mots) but its pornography.
International Law – “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” – Christopher Hitchens
January 17th, 2012 · History, Human Rights, Policy, Politics, Power, Security Policy, War
Many if not most of Kissinger’s partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anarchasis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong.
I can’t see how this isn’t the perfect description of ‘International law’…
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