User Comments - Tal
Tal
Posted on: Sina's Microblogs
June 7, 2010 at 9:14 AMThe bottom line is, people love gadgets and gimmicks. And communicating. And 'sharing' trivia about their lives. I'm not a user, but I'd guess that microblogging (?) sits well with the modern penchant for distanced communication and short attention spans.
Posted on: Insecticide
June 4, 2010 at 1:31 PMWell maybe Mottephobia is a Japanese thing, but only if Alfred Hitchcock had made 'The Moths' instead of 'The Birds' could I imagine myself worried by them. They're just nocturnal butterflies surely, and as far as I know are not dirty, wily, carnivorous, disease causing parasites, who should be consigned to extinction. Oh wait? That might be us? No, forget it, I'm goofing...
Posted on: Insecticide
June 4, 2010 at 10:24 AM有意思，有一些推荐吗？
I love prose poems, here's a quick attempt from me.
The cockroach that drowned overnight in my glass of half-finished apple juice remains in my memory of my first morning in Guangdong. When the furniture and the bedding and my English shoes sprouted mildew in the Spring, an extended family of scuttlers moved in, taking up residence in my cheap dressing table, perplexing me with their copious defecation, black peppercorns deposited in a single upper drawer. Back home I would spurn insecticide, but China converted me. I became a holocaust and didn't even spare the babies when the penny finally dropped and I pulled out the drawers and looked up one day. I heard a story about one living in a three-year-old's ear in Xiamen. I was still checking the flights back home back then.
Posted on: Insecticide
June 4, 2010 at 7:11 AM
yeah Jason I was talking about the audio review, and yeah catherine, I guess I was enjoying Robert's rendition of the English translation (and the words themselves) so much that the sentences began to seem like snippets from unwritten literature! You know how a classic novel will often begin with a line like that. Henry Miller did tend towards the yellow of course. 
Posted on: Nothing More Than Only and Just
June 4, 2010 at 4:10 AMI guess you'll know when you put 在 in front of a verb it kind of means you're 'in the process' of doing it. I'm pretty sure you could use either 只 or 就 in such a sentence.
Posted on: Nothing More Than Only and Just
June 4, 2010 at 3:46 AMActually no you can't. You're referring to a location, so 就 is natural and correct.
Posted on: Insecticide
June 3, 2010 at 8:45 AM今天地铁出事了，还好你没坐地铁。
(There was a problem with the subway today. Good thing I didn't take the subway.)
Surely some mistake? But never mind, sometimes the expansion sentences have a poetic quality methinks. When I heard the incomparable
我喷了很多杀虫剂，可是蟑螂还没死。
(I sprayed a lot of insecticide, but the cockroaches still didn't die.)
I longed for it to be the first line of an undiscovered Henry Miller novel, newly released on Recorded Books and voiced entirely by... must be Jason right? Dig yer diction old sport, rock on.
Posted on: Seeing off a Monk, Returning to Japan -- 送僧归日本
June 7, 2010 at 9:39 AMApropos of nothing, A Timelapse Journey through Japan.