Gratitude:
Thank God for sunny
autumn days in Wuxi.
Acknowledgement:
I have been in China for nine
years and my Chinese is still awful. I need to study more than 45
minutes a day I have been doing.
Requests:
I would like verbal silence
from all around me and some correspondence
from any readers I might have. My email is andiskaulins@qq.com.
I need help with becoming a Catholic.
The
AKIC Week in Brief: The K
family's life had a burden officially finished this week. Andis
stayed verbally silent most of the week – no complaining or
bragging allowed.
About
AKIC: If you want to learn
what Andis & AKIC are
all about, you
can visit here.
If
there are things about AKIC you don't know
about, like places and people I mention in the entries below, you can
go here to
find out what they are all about.
AKIC
Weekly Features:
I
in in China!
在中国，
我没有朋友。
我觉得中国女人比加拿大女人很漂亮。加拿大人是很胖！
我孩子现在在学校第一年。
I
am Canadian!
The hockey season has started. From half a world away, I will cheer
for the Winnipeg Jets.
I
also heard that Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize
for Literature. When I first heard she had won, I wasn't sure if she
was Canadian. I was thinking she was some black American writer –
perhaps I mixed her up with Alice Walker who I am sure is a black
woman. One of the reasons I was unaware of Alice Munro being
Canadian is that I made a conscious decision to ignore Can Lit. As
far as I was concerned, Can Lit is a state imposed attempt at
creating a genuine Canadian literature. It probably started in the
Trudeau era (also known as the Can Obama era.) Can Lit was a symptom
of a Canadian jealousy of America's self awareness. So I don't have
an opinion of the merits of Munro's writing. Rex Murphy, in a
podcast I listened to this morning, said it was of a high calibre. A
Conservative blog I read said that Munro wasn't Margaret Atwood –
so that was faint praise. Atwood winning the Nobel would have been
as bad as Obama and Arafat and Krugman win the Nobel. I will have to
see if I can find some of Munro's work on the Internet.
BTW,
my favorite Canadian writers are Marc Steyn, Mordecai Richler, and
Stephen Leacock.
I
am Latvian (sort of)! Andis is
a Latvian name.
Wuxi
Peach Maoists Update: Visit here
to find out how if your Peach Maoists have finally won a match-up.
Politically
I am Conservative/Reactionary!
The shutdown of the U.S. federal government was (is) simply
political theatre. It really wasn't(isn't) much of a shutdown. To
commit psychic energy to it either side is a waste of time. The
whole rotten edifice of government with its overpaid workers is just
going to have to come tumbling down – too many people are stupidly
attached to things as they currently are.
I
teach English! “I ever done
that!” Who taught Chinese students to say that? I had a girl, who
has been with our school for six months,
use that phrase today. I could only shake my head.
I
am not a freak! I am rational
enough to know that I am irrational about certain things.
I
like to Read! Here
is what I had been working my way through the past week:
Don
Colacho's Aphorisms. There are 2,988 of them in this book
that I compiled for myself. I try to read at least one aphorism
a day. I cut and paste the better ones -- they are all profound
actually -- and I put them in my weekly blog entry. (See below)
Ulysses
by James Joyce. I am following along with Frank
Delaney as he slowly guides podcast listeners through
Joyce's hard-to-read novel. Delaney figures he will have the
whole novel covered in about 22 years. Delaney completed
episode #174 this week and is working his way through the chapter
that introduces Leopold Bloom. I am getting ahead of Delaney as far
as reading the book. I will be finished my reading of it, I
figure, in a year. I read the novel despite its many blasphemies.
It is best to be aware of this stuff because the world is full of it,
and the world will always find a way of slapping you in the face with
it
The
Holy Bible King James Version. I have finished
The General Epistle of Jude and am now reading the Book of
Revelations.
Columns
by Father Schall. I have been
able to take all
his archived writings and place them on the Dotdotdot app.
The
Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Like Father Schall's writings, I have been able to place its contents
on the Dotdotdot app.
Mao
Zedong: Man, Not God by Quan Yanchi. A Hagiography given to me
by a local.
Quo
Vadis by Henrik Sienkiewicz. One of the first Catholic novels if
my source on the Internet is to be believed. I put the book on my
Ipod, thinking I would read it when I didn't have access to my Ipad,
but now I am reading it on my Ipad.
Memoirs
of Life and Literature by WH Mallock. A
great book. I can't believe I hadn't heard of this writer till this
year.
Enoch
and the Gorilla by Flannery O'Connor. I
am reading short stories by O'Connor and from the Columbia Anthology.
The short story of a loner stealing a Gorilla suit is flush with
spiritual meaning.
The
Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature edited by Joseph S.M.
Lau & Howard Goldblatt. I
am reading stories at random from this book. There is a story called
Hands that I am quite taken with. I don't know why I didn't “pick
up” this book sooner. Reading the few stories I have has told me
more about China than reading a history ever could.
I
like to take photos
I
publish them in the following blogs: AKIC
wordpress , TKIC
blogspot,
TKIC
wordpress, Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Blogspot and Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Wordpress.
I
like to make videos
Here
is my
Youtube Channel and my
Youku Channel.
I
like to cut and paste quotations:
320
A Catholic should simplify his
life and complicate his thought. [My
Life is exceedingly simple.]
325
Solitude is the laboratory
where commonplaces are verified.
327
Neither
imitation of the past, nor of the present, is an infallible remedy.
Nothing saves the mediocre from their mediocrity. [Does
this mean that there is no hope for me? LECTOR: Yes!]
332
Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how
to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset. [Vulgarity, at
this stage of history is boring.]
334
Today more than ever man runs after any fool who invites him along
on the trip, deaf to the lookout keeping watch on the ruined roads
and the collapsed bridges. [I want to cease being that fool and
somehow play the role of the lookout. I could be the lookout now but
I don't relish the prospect of being ignored. I want to stay in the
paradise of reclusiveness where no one ignores you.]
335
The prophet who accurately foretells the growing corruption of a
society is not believed, because the more that corruption grows, the
less it is noticed by the corrupt. [The people who complained
when Elvis and the Beatles appeared were right. They were suppressed
however.]
337
The basic problem of every former colony – the problem of
intellectual servitude, of impoverished tradition, of subaltern
spirituality, of inauthentic civilization, of obligatory and shameful
imitation – has been resolved for me with supreme simplicity:
Catholicism is my native land. [As a Canadian, I feel the same
way. Colacho was South American.]
A
more interesting question than whether the collapse will take place
is why it has not so far taken place. The answer is the mutually
assured rottenness of all currencies, which is a little like the Cold
War’s mutually assured destruction.
David Warren:
David Warren:
Lest
gentle reader be alarmed, I want first to assure him (or her!) that I
do not doubt the world may be coming to an end. It would be
un-Catholic to reject this constant possibility. But if only for the
sake of argument, let me put it to you: What if the end doesn't come
soon? What if, rash as this may sound, many living at this hour are
fated to die in their beds of old age? [Warren's and Dalrymple's
quotes deal with a question I have been wondering about lately. Is
this collapse going to happen? And why hasn't it happened yet?]
W.
H. Mallock. “Memoirs of Life and Literature.
To
praise others was a pleasure to him as natural as that of being
praised himself. [I am not like
that. I should learn to be.]
Kingsley
Amis:
“There’s
little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody.”
[I have annoyed some people I am proud to say with my blogging. I
have to get back to lampooning Wuxi Expat Perverts.]
Slavoj Žižek (From an interview in the News Statesman):
1)"What
Americans don’t want to admit… is that not only is there not a
contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for
us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an
extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral
rules and so on."
2)Žižek
sees the controversy over Obama-aid in the US - and the
Republican-forced government shutdown - as emblematic of Obama
touching "the nerve of what is false in American everyday
ideology of freedom."
3)...he
claims, many Americans see universal healthcare as a restriction on
their freedom to choose a doctor: "well f*ck it, I feel much
more free if I simply don’t have to think about that. Like with
electricity. I’m very glad to renounce the freedom to choose my
water or electricity suppliers: because can you imagine having to
make all these choices?"
4)On
The Clash: "I like their activity … they were engaged
[politically]. So I like everything about them … except their
music."
[Slabo
Ziwicked, or whatever his name is, is some sort of Leftist. I found
the interview with him linked in the Arts and Letters Daily. I have
numbered these four quotations so I can deal with each in turn. 1)
This looks like a straw man form of argumentation. Who are these
Americans who don't believe there must be an extremely elaborated
network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on? 2)
This Ziwicked is ignorant of what the controversy is about. That is
all I take away from this statement. 3) What other freedoms is this
Ziwicked willing to renounce? What other choices would he rather not
have us choose to make? And just because he doesn't want the
inconvenience, what gives him the right to not let others deal with
in their own way? Is he okay with renouncing the choice of how we
should deal with the poorer and more unfortunate among us? It would
be nice if we didn't have to think about people in poverty and whoop
it up and have a good time. You give up freedom, you give up
responsibility and your conscience. 4) I always thought it was a
shame that the Clash were engaged politically. I
only liked their music and their aesthetic. But as I look at music
videos of the Clash, I see they were hacks musically. So I will
agree with Ziwicked that the music of the Clash wasn't so great.
I
fashion myself to be a 21st Century Pepys
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