Kate Lingley 龍梅若

Kate Lingley 龍梅若

@klingley.bsky.social

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Posts

Art historian of medieval China; Assoc Prof, UH Mānoa. Feminist; foodie; early-music nerd; Jewish mother; SF/F fan; knitter; Maine native. She/her. Buddhist monuments and women's history in early medieval China. IG @kate.lingley for lace knitting etc

Posts Replies Media

A and the twins did likewise. It was amazing.

Brendan O’Kane

It’s meant to make the reader wonder if there even is such an exotic luxury, somewhere out there … it’s like “underwater basketweaving” as the ultimate fantasy liberal-arts course. A thing which doesn’t actually exist but which epitomizes a certain extravagant idea.

Come to think of it, I had to stop calling out “underwater basketweaving” as an idea in my advising, even as a stereotype I wanted to debunk, when I realized that if there were in fact such a course, it would certainly be in our department 😆

Brendan O’Kane

“Shrimp whiskers?” 🤔

Xueting C. Ni 倪雪婷（she, ta)

Sounds fun - where are you accessing it?

I mean obvs 😁

There was a point in the 90s when I would have told you it was “Those Were the Days, my Friends,” which seemed to have a completely different set of lyrics in every Asian and European language I encountered while traveling, but it seems to have passed off along with the Cold War.

Out back of my office. I have questions.

samuelwade.bsky.social

I always wondered, why Clapham?

Brendan O’Kane

There's a proverb, 生居苏杭，死葬北邙 - which suggests that the axiomatic best place to live is Suzhou/Hangzhou while the best place to be buried is Mangshan; but I don't know how old it is, and a quick search is getting me nothing useful.

Brendan O’Kane

The shell cup makes me think of this one, from the tomb of Wang Xingzhi 王兴之 (d. 340), uncle of the great calligrapher Wang Xizhi. It was doubtless in better shape at one time, but shows its age now (Top that, early modern cabinets of curiosities). More: www.njmuseumadmin.com/Antique/anti...

Once again, the program notes for my madrigal concert are overlapping with my professional and personal lives and I Have Questions. In this case, about the universality of Joe Schmo and his relatives. For example: if you sing English madrigals, you will get to know Phyllis pretty well (1/8)

The corpus of madrigals is pretty broad but it seems safe to say that the male gaze predominates, even though there are a few written in a female voice (though not necessarily by female poets). Its conventions remind me of reading Victorian and Edwardian literature in childhood - (2/8)

- (from my rural Maine hometown library) and encountering a book whose plot was only comprehensible if you understood that a “lover” must be male and a “beloved,” female. I feel sure there was some major eyerolling when I finally figured this out, but I may be flattering myself. (3/8)

Phyllis and Amaryllis appear regularly in the role of the beloved in English madrigals, while on the other (heteronormative) hand, the female voice of “Mother, I will have a husband” invokes “John a Dun” as a name to stand in for the nice boy in the village whom she’s ready to marry. (4/8)

[Interlude: I’m not sure how heteronormative “Mother, I will have a husband” is, since it and “Sweet Suffolk Owl” come from a collection of madrigals presented to George Villiers, the lover of King James the I and VI, after he was created Marquess of Buckingham in 1618. But I digress.]

These are placeholder characters just as much as John and Jane Doe (legal), Joe Schmo (comedic), John Q. Public (journalistic) and the others. But such characters aren’t neutral. Note how the legal and journalistic placeholders are determinedly Anglo, but the comedian is probably Jewish. (5/8)

My kids are big fans of the SCP Universe, which is a kind of sci-fi/horror fiction collective writing project. The relevant character there is a scientist named Placeholder McDoctorate, although there is lore about him and devotees of the ficton might object that he’s something different. (6/8)

So this makes me wonder about placeholder characters with names in other languages and literatures. Every tradition has its stereotypes, but they don’t always come with names. I can’t think of any from classical Chinese - the modern language has our old friends 张三 Zhang San and 李四 Li Si. (7/8)

There’s even one cross-cultural placeholder I’ve invoked in class before, while teaching about China: your average Zhou. But who else is out there? (8/8)

Does anybody know anything much about this organization? Any experience with them? It seems like a US branch of CCTV, but I'd like to hear more. They contacted us about a documentary. www.chinatvcorp.com/main/index.p...

Very Very Common Mike Dunford

I saw TWO this weekend! One in Kaka’ako yesterday and one in Hawai’i Kai today. Can’t help hoping it was the same one twice, because WHYYYY?

Brendan O’Kane

I’m just mad that I was busy making chili and refereeing the teenagers while this was going down. Li Bai as Tom Waits character has really got my wheels turning, but I also have to serve the chili, so more later?

Brendan O’Kane

YOU GUYS 😆

Brendan O’Kane

See, I knew I could count on you 😁

Early-morning Selenicereus blooms on the way in to work (These are S. undatus, iirc, from the famous Punahou hedge, which is well over a hundred years old.)

Ironically enough, I don’t, because I don’t usually read Chinese poetry in translation and it’s not central to my teaching either; I refer you to @bokane.org who has the right attitude toward the whole business and may have some tips

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Chinese blue and white porcelain was developed for export to Western Asia and initially catered to an Islamic artistic taste, hence its visual complexity, vegetal/floral patterns, and color palette.

(At first it was made with cobalt ore imported from the Muslim world as well, and only later with locally sourced cobalt.)

ROCK ON Congratulations! 🍾🎉