User Comments - WillBuckingham

Posted on: Tea Tasting

Tea occupies a curious place here in the UK. It is considered to be the cure for anything - from a hard day at work, to the utmost depths of human misery. A Swedish friend of mine was deeply confused after coming to the UK that, whenever anything went wrong for her, somebody offered her a cup of tea. "But I'm not thirsty!" she used to protest. In vain.

The Yorkshire tea plantations are indeed magnificent; but they are also a closely guarded secret.

Posted on: Thinking of my Brothers by Moonlight -- 月夜忆舍兄

Thanks, Pete. And it's nice to see those geese back again: a potent symbol, as you say obitoddkenobi, and in Western poetry as well. Here's Mary Oliver

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

There's a commentary on the Du Fu poem here, which is worth reading (albeit truncated a little).

Posted on: Podcast Language 1

Thanks for this. This is useful stuff, and I look forward to the next in the series, which should help me ease my way into more of the intermediate lessons.

Will

Posted on: Funny Rice

Better than the onion joke? I'm not so sure...

But I like the termite joke, Carolynh. Here's another feeble word-play joke...

Two birds sitting on a perch. One says to the other, "Can you smell fish?"

Posted on: Springtime on the River -- 次北固山下

Crazy UK rustics talk about wild goose chases as well. Where I come from in Norfolk, there are probably still villages where they actually hold wild goose chases during the summer months...

I noticed on Wikipedia that wild goose chases are mentioned in Robert Burton's 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, where he has the following list of activities that can stave off melancholy (but also leave you out of pocket):

Many other sports and recreations there be, much in use, as ringing, bowling, shooting... leaping, running, fencing, mustering, swimming, waster, foils, football, balloon, quintain, etc., and many such, which are the common recreations of the country folks; riding of great horses, running at rings, tilts and tournaments, horse races, wild-goose chases, which are the disports of greater men, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by that means gallop quite out of their fortunes.

The first reference, I think, may be in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Whether the goose is the chaser or the chased, I have no idea...

But if poets don't have time for wild goose chases, then who does?

Posted on: The Brocade Zither -- 锦瑟

Stimulating stuff, Pete!

You take a fifty string zither and break it in two, because the music it plays is too melancholy: does that make the music on your new, twenty-five string zither less melancholy? Or does it make it more melancholy?

I love the intangibility of this one. There's something here (just out of reach) about the way we invest memories with substance that they do not have; and what I love about it is that Lǐ Shāngyǐn apparently refuses to do that. We look back to the past as an place to anchor ourselves... only, back then, things were as baffling and intangible and insubstantial as they seem in the present.

But, anyway, I'm off for a cup of tea, hoping that this won't lead - as Mike suggests it could - to an overload in cognitive bandwidth.

Posted on: Seeing off a Monk, Returning to Japan -- 送僧归日本

I've just installed mdbg, and it works very well, so I may fork out for it. When using it to work through this poem, I noticed that - entertainingly - it reads 鱼/魚 and 龙/龍 together, to give 鱼龙 / 魚龍 or ichthyosaur.There's something pleasing about ichthyosaurs listening to Sanskrit recitations...

Thanks for the poem - and the link to LibriVox, which looks great.

Posted on: Zombies: Deader than Ever

okckeezee: the question of real-life zombies is an interesting one, and a few years back caused something a storm in the teacup that is the world of anthropology. The zombie myth comes out of Haiti (via Hollywood...), and in the 1980s, the anthropologist Wade Davies, author of - you couldn't make this stuff up... - "The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie", travelled to Haiti to explore if this myth was at all well-founded. Davies suggested that "zombification" was the result of toxic cocktails of drugs and wrote a couple of books on "zombification". Since then, the science has been questioned.

There's an overview of the controversy here:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm

Posted on: Zombies: Deader than Ever

Great lesson. In my view, no vocabulary is a waste of time when language-learning, and it is curious that when you learn something apparently obscure, it crops up when you least expect it. Just like the living dead, in fact.

Does anybody know if contemporary Chinese philosophers talk (as their Western counterparts do) about philosophical zombies (哲学僵尸?!!)?

Posted on: Watching the Sun Go Down -- 登乐游原

Thanks again, Pete, for further melancholy poetic pleasures! Perhaps the sunset wouldn't be quite so 无限好 if the 黄昏 wasn't quite so close at hand. Anyway, this one puts me in mind of a great poem by UK poet Helen Farish:

My habit of late-light walking
will mirror my life, how in its twilight
I'll rush out saying, how beautiful -
has it been like this all day?

(See the link here)