“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Humidity


65% humidity today in Taichung, much more than I'm used to. It's an ambient bath and it heightens the way things smell and feel. I'm going to tour the campus and town today. Typical Chinese market street with thousands of stalls just round the corner to the left.

Ironically, to be displaced is to experience how uncanny objects envelop you like skin. It would take thousands of pages already to describe the qualities of the place I'm in—and they wouldn't be the right ones. I can only hope that something will rub off.

I watched several Japanese pop videos on the plane yesterday. I figured that a good way to find out about what was going on was to watch how people were translating—what songs they chose for the plane; how they videoed them; how people in them hold their bodies and their voices.

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