User Comments - Tal
Tal
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse
June 15, 2009 at 12:43 AMzhenlijiang - 好球! (Is it not wonderful though how these seductive digressions can begin and then snowball?!)
Posted on: Dubai
June 15, 2009 at 12:28 AM哈哈！I thought you were going to say they took cows on board ship so they could have a milk shower! Egyptian queen Cleopatra is said to have enjoyed bathing in milk, but then the Roman historians wanted to portray her as decadent. But today Cleo, like any savvy supermodel, is in the business of beauty product promotion, (China users will need to proxy that last link.)
Posted on: Dubai
June 14, 2009 at 7:14 AMHere are some pictures of 迪拜 I've just been looking at. The first one shows the "main street" in 1990. The second shows the same place in 2003 and the third shows it in 2008.
Posted on: Saying Good-bye at a Tavern in Nanjing -- 金陵酒肆留别
June 14, 2009 at 3:21 AMHow I hate goodbyes! And I feel somewhere inside pete that this is only the beginning of yours. Anyway I want you to know that I do love poetry, (in spite of whatever impression I may have given!) and I sincerely intend to return to all these fine offerings of yours when I feel my Chinese is ready.
And so I offer you one goodbye poem which has forever stuck in my mind, if only because it always for some illogical reason reminds me of a short story by J.D. Salinger, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, which I read as a teenager and will be forever etched on my memory and heart.
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
Clinical Sonnet; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"
instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of a long,
neat-scripted letter demolishing
the pre-Raphaelites:
I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had
of trying to guess which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say what I thought was the truth
in the mildest words I know. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, would tingle
in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses
to write.
Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns - Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell -
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.
Posted on: To do
June 14, 2009 at 1:40 AMWow, QW gets better and better these days, and the activity here in the comments is so lively! There are so many interesting points and questions I can't decide where to begin!
Well done and thanks to you guys compiling vocab lists and study aids! Great to see the community 热闹!
Posted on: Dubai
June 13, 2009 at 12:13 PMAs is my habit now, I've put together a rough transcipt of the podcast for this lesson. You can view it here if it's the sort of thing that might be useful to you.
I'll also be posting it in this group I just started. If you want to pick me up on any mistakes I've made, make comments or whatever, join the group and either post in the relevant thread or start a new one.
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse
June 13, 2009 at 8:42 AMchangye, 可能你应该多出去玩儿！反正我这个人很佩服你的知识。你说的太对了，这个博客真精彩，那是我们幸运有你这个人的用户！
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse
June 13, 2009 at 4:30 AM哈，很好的句子啊！Good to see you around these boards again changye!
Posted on: To do
June 15, 2009 at 1:24 AMxiaophil, if I wanted to say: "This problem drove me crazy!" I think I'd say:
我被这个问题逼疯了！(Wǒ bèi zhège wèntí bī fēng le!)
I'm pondering your other sentences! I think some of them sound odd, especially the one about making the car red.
And I think the burning lunch one is completely wrong, you just don't need a verb for 'doing' there, I think it would be much more natural to simply say:
她烧午饭了。(Tā shāo wǔfàn le.)