Book of Odes: Decade of Lu Ming

Poetry Club is at last done looking at the Lessons from the States and into the Minor Odes of the Kingdom back-half of the Shi Jing. Decade of Lu Ming has a couple poems about military campaigns against the invading Xianyun people, consisting largely of soldiers bitching about having to be here. 

University of Washington Press's Asian Studies Catalogue

The University of Washington Press's Asian Studies Division has a 40% off sale, and I combed through all 700ish titles on offer to make a list of some of the fun Chinese history offerings:

- a really interesting response-novel to JttW: Further Adventures on the Journey to the West (if I were a dumbass guy academic I'd call it fanfic, but as I'm not, I'll suggest it interestingly shares some strategies)
- Some very interesting-looking titles in women's history: Arranged Companions
- Empress in the Pepper Chamber: this is the FIRST I've heard of this famous figure being controversial for her class status, bit embarrassed to have failed to question the Catherine the Great of it all.
- Healing with Poisons: this could be useful to academics working on Western medieval magical theory re the body, as a counterpoint.
- The Edge of Knowing: This could be useful to people wanting to work on danmei/isekai-derived titles like SVSSS, which features both layered realities and important dreams: what is the wider body of c-lit doing with dreams outside of this corpus of examples?
- And these are the two I'd want to read if I had the energy: The Social Life of Inkstones
- The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel
- Transforming Monkey: This seems super neat, on presentations of Sun Wukong over 1000 years
- Many Faces of Muilan: this is doing something similar for Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell
- Women Playing Men: *steepling fingers* whatever happened here is going to be very gay
- Sexuality in China
- The Scholar and the State: every time some book tries to make me read about this period/phenomenon I'm just like no thanks lol I have to live my life already i don't want any echoes across time get that outta here. I don't want reminders other people in the past had similar causes for depression eughhh.
- "This book explores in detail the little-known system of ancient bird-shaped weights from Northern Thailand and Burma." I don't need a whole book, but that's cute
- 'Earth to Heaven: The Royal Animal-Shaped Weights of the Burmese Empires' this was some kinda whole thing, I see
- 'A Siamese Embassy Lost in Africa: This long-forgotten tale of the shipwreck off the coast of Africa of a Siamese embassy to Lisbon in 1686 lay buried in the text of a French book printed 300 years ago.' this is Gilligan's Isle shit. Like 'i guess we'll just set up the embassy--where we're stuck? *clears throat* anyone want to do some--trade with Siam, or--'
- "Aspects of the Embassy to Siam: The Chevalier de Chaumont was the devout and unbending ambassador of Louis XIV to King Narai of Siam in 1685, and the Abbé de Choisy, famous for his gambling debts and transvestite exploits, was his unlikely coadjutant." 

...walk me through why YOU thought this was a good idea, Louie.

- Shanghai Love: "Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public--"

There was this thing in early Victorian London where people paid to play *in* a famous play for a scene, like karaoke? So it's not without any contemporary analogue. But this is so interesting.

- Meng Jiangnu Brings Down the Great Wall: another really neat complit project, 10 versions over 2000 years of this legend, and how the versions serve different moral/political projects.
- The Story of Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal
- Chinese Painting Style: Media, Methods, and Principles of Form

And now, having finished, have exorcised the weird compulsion to read through their whole list. x_x I often do that to get a sense of like, the shape of the field atm tho, when one of these big sales/conferences happens.