Will Buckingham's Blog, page 22

Historical Novel Society: Review of the Descent of the Lyre

I was delighted to see that The Descent of the Lyre has just received an excellent review from the Historical Novel Society. Here’s a brief extract:

Do not mistake this for a mere retelling. This is masterful storytelling, such that one cannot help but sense the ancient thrum, the pulse quickening, and deep down the feeling that the music really has been there all along.

You can read the complete review here.

The Dark Arts

This morning I have been preoccupied with two things: firstly, baking bread (having made myself a frisky little sourdough starter); and secondly working on the final edits of my Yijing (易經) book. This has involved shuttling between the kitchen and my desk, as I attend to the both creations. Anyway, as I was looking after the loaf in the kitchen, I flicked on the radio to hear an economist talking about the mysteries of global finance. When I returned to the book in front of me, and stumbled serendipitously across the following section, which I thought was worth sharing:

The complex science that in ancient China was known as shuxue 數學 — a term that, when applied to the numerological speculation that surrounds the I Ching, is only inadequately translated as “mathematics” — is no less abstruse than that most divinatory of practices, economics. Indeed, if one wanted to seek out the contemporary equivalents of those ancient diviners, they would be found not amongst the religious, nor amid those strange, otherworldly figures who spend their days enveloped by incense clouds, but instead amongst those other mystics who, schooled in economics and the dark arts of finance, are passionately convinced that in the manipulation of number there might lie the secret of our future destiny.

Blogging Changes

I’ve been making various small changes to this website, as I’ve decided that I am going to convert this into my primary blog site. What this means is that I’ll no longer be blogging over on my other site, The Myriad Things. The point of The Myriad Things has always been that it should just be “stuff I’m thinking about” (rather than being a blog focussed on any one theme); and I realised recently that, given that this is the case, there was no need for it to have a separate existence from this site. At the moment, I’ve got a lot of writing projects on the go, and a full-time job as well, so in terms of time and juggling these various bits and pieces, it seems more sensible to keep most of my content in one place.

I’ve imported some of the posts from over there onto this blog (WordPress has very cleverly imported the comment threads as well), and I’ll be making a few changes over the next few weeks over here to tidy things up a bit and make the blog here more hospitable and elegant. After that, new updates will largely be taking place here! The Myriad Things will stay as an archive for a while, and the site may transform into something else down the line, although I’m not sure what: after all, who can anticipate the many transformations of the myriad things?

Uncertainty, Divination and the Book of Changes

I’m very pleased to say that Aeon Magazine have just published a piece I’ve written on the Yijing / I Ching / 易經, the Chinese Book of Changes, and the cultivation of uncertainty. Here’s a quote.

More recently, I have started to ask a different set of questions about the I Ching. I am no longer so worried about what the book means, about what wisdom, if any, it imparts. Instead, I have started to content myself with asking about what it does. In fact, I have come to suspect that perhaps the book has no wisdom to impart, that perhaps it means nothing whatsoever, and it might be in this that it is possible to find the secret of its power.

The link to the full article is here.

Uncertainty machines

I’ve just had a new piece published on Aeon Magazine about the I Ching, or Book of Changes, and about uncertainty machines. Have a look at the link here.

Sanmao on Not Writing

Next week I’m going on a short holiday, and taking a break from all the writing I’ve been doing of late (various articles and book chapters in the works).

So it is timely that I came across the following little quote today from Taiwanese writer Sanmao (三毛) in her wonderful travelogue and memoir, “Stories of the Sahara” (撒哈拉的故事), a quote that I thought worth sharing.

Writing is important. But sometimes putting down the pen and not writing is actually more important.

寫，是重要，而有時擱筆不寫，卻是更重要。

So I’m looking forward to a week of not writing, somewhere in a yurt down in East Anglia. More when I get back!

Sanmao (三毛) on Not Writing

Next week I’m going on a short holiday, and taking a break from the large quantities writing I’ve been doing of late (various articles and book chapters in the works).

So it is timely that I came across the following little quote today from Taiwanese writer Sanmao (三毛) in her wonderful travelogue and memoir, “Stories of the Sahara” (撒哈拉的故事), a quote that I thought worth sharing.

 

 

 

Writing is important. But sometimes putting down the pen and not writing is actually more important.

 

寫，是重要，而有時擱筆不寫，卻是更重要。

 

So I’m looking forward to a week of not writing, somewhere in a yurt down in East Anglia. More when I get back!

Lucretius, Liu Xie 劉勰, and Literature

Those visitors who are interested in comparative approaches to creativity may be interested in the paper that I have just had published over in the excellent Taiwanese journal, NTU studies in Language and Literature. The paper is about different models of literary creativity in Liu Xie’s early 6th century Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龍) and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. I’ve long been frustrated by the odd claim—made by a surprising number of scholars—that there is something inherently uncreative about Chinese approaches to literature, and so this is to some extent an answer to this, as well as an attempt to set out a more modest and universal notion of what it might mean to create literary works.

You can find a link to the article here: Participation, Pattern and Change: Literary Creation in Liu Xie and Lucretius

Creativity, Writing, Atoms and Carving Dragons

This is almost certainly something of a minority interest, but if you are interested, I’ve had a paper published in the excellent Taiwanese journal, NTU Studies in Language and Literature on Liu Xie (劉勰), Lucretius and different models of literary creativity. This is part of a bigger project, looking at Liu’s “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons” or Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龍) as a creative writing text—rather than as a text about literary criticism.

Anyway, the link to the article is here. Participation, Pattern and Change: Literary Creation in Liu Xie and Lucretius. I hope you enjoy it.

Thoughts on Illness

Some time back in November last year, things were looking pretty exciting. I had been offered a university job in Hong Kong, my partner Elee was well on the way to finishing her PhD, and we were looking forward to a change of scenery. Having been teaching in higher education in the UK for about six years or so, I was feeling in need of a change; and being in Hong Kong seemed like a good way to move forward my growing research interests in China.

But then things took an unexpected turn. Simmering away in the background for the couple of weeks during which I was going through the interview process for the job (it was a Skype interview, so it was—as a friend pointed out—theoretically the only job interview that I could have done without wearing any trousers), I was also going back and forth to the hospital with Elee as she went through various tests. Then two things happened within twenty-four hours of each other: I was offered the job, and half a day later, Elee was given the diagnosis of breast cancer.

So I turned down the job, Elee put her PhD on hold, and very quickly we found that our lives were overtaken by medical matters: appointments and consultations, chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy. It turned into a very long winter, followed by a very long spring. And I won’t go into details about the whole course of treatment and so on, except to say that we were lucky, in many ways. Friends and colleagues were extraordinarily kind and supportive. The cancer responded very well to treatment. The standard of care in the hospitals in Leicester was breathtakingly good. Elee weathered the horrible business of cancer treatment with remarkably practical and good-humoured stoicism. And one of the things that really gave me the strength to go on, as I stumbled into my classes at the university bleary-eyed with sleeplessness and worry, wondering how I’d struggle through another day, was the energy, good-will, thoughtfulness and commitment of my students. I have never felt more privileged and grateful to be teaching than I have over the past year.

Generally speaking, I’m not a particularly confessional blogger, and so many times over the past months, I have wondered whether I should write about what has been happening on this blog, but have pulled back from doing so. I simply haven’t wanted to end up giving a running public commentary upon all of this. And if I’ve blogged less than I would like on other topics, it is because my energies have been involved elsewhere.

But now that Elee’s treatment is more or less complete, and has gone well—the prognosis is good and now we’re beginning to turn our attention to other things— I thought I’d say something about what has been going on. Elee’s PhD is back on track. I’m plunging back into my Chinese studies, starting with an intensive course in advanced Chinese at LSE in London over the next two weeks. And although both of us, in different ways, are battered and bruised, we’re regaining some sense of ongoing life.

On thing that I have been thinking about over the past few months, in the light of all this, is illness. I recall one conversation with a friend earlier in the year, around the time that we were beginning to talk about prognoses and other matters, when we were coming to terms with the fact that there was a possibility (much smaller than we feared, it has turned out) that the cancer could turn out to be fatal. It was horrible, I said to my friend. We were weathering the storm, but it was horrible. Ah, my friend said, you should remain positive. Maybe, I said, but it was still horrible. You can’t think like that, my friend said. Why not? I asked. Because, she said, you have to remain positive. And although this was all very kindly meant, I couldn’t help wondering then why I had to remain positive, for whose sake, and what it meant to remain positive. I was worried by the speed with which my friend wanted to move away from the thought “it is horrible” (it is—I do not recommend cancer to anyone) to another, happier thought. And I was reminded of Barbara Ehrenreich’s wonderful book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.

Ehrenreich, who herself went through treatment for breast cancer, noted that after the diagnosis, “The first thing I discovered… is that not everyone views the disease with horror and dread. Instead, the appropriate attitude is upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” In this, what Ehrenreich calls the “The Bright Side of Cancer”, cancer (as with disease more generally)* is considered to be somehow redemptive, offering the “intangible benefits of spiritual upward mobility”. And positivity is necessary not only because it makes life more liveable, but also because it is believed to have some effect on the cancer itself, despite the fact—as Ehrenreich has pointed out—that there is no decent scientific evidence for this.

But then, as now, I’d like to hold out for the notion of illness as illness, rather than seeing illness as some kind of move in the perpetually self-overcoming game of personal development. To see  difficulties as moral teachings provided by the universe, or as moral challenges to which we must rise, is  to refuse to see these difficulties as what they are. It is a way of pushing difficulty away because it is, well, difficult. It is a melancholy fact that, rather than enriching life, illness very often diminishes it. And the refusal to recognise this is a refusal to really recognise the effects of illness on human life. A phrase has been rattling round my head over the past few months: illness is life’s diminishment. And it is not unreasonable to say that life for both of us has been, of late, significantly diminished. How could it not be?

Now that we are coming out the other side of this, I genuinely don’t feel that I have any great wisdom to impart as a result of these difficulties. I resist the notion that this has been some kind of improving experience. Cancer is not night-school. Mostly, I’m just glad that it is more or less over and grateful to friends and colleagues and my wonderful students and the help and support we have both received. As the shadow of illness recedes, we are beginning to regain some broader sense of life and its possibilities. I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to what comes next. Who knows? Now that we are no longer so caught up in all of this, I might even find myself writing more frequently on this blog…

*Though perhaps not all disease: for reasons that are perhaps too complex to go into here, there are few who argue that Gonorrhea, for example, is redemptive or that it makes you a better, kinder person…