This blog is an attempt at mooring, at grounding. By day, I am a grad student hard at work at understanding medieval Chinese literature. The majority of authors I study have been dead for over a thousand years, and the amount of people in the Western hemisphere who read these authors does not exceed the same number. To put this in perspective, that's less than one tenth of the population of the township of
Bainbridge, Ohio (10,916), in which I spent the first portion of my life.
Thus, I need something to attach me to the world which surrounds me, the culture of the U.S.A. Only he whose home is the present can confidently plunder the past. Wandering is romanticized homelessness, and writing, sublimated unemployment. A connection to the present, a moment of fixity, is the first purpose of this blog.
But this blog is also an attempt at unmooring, at departure. The present culture which surrounds us is not to be taken lightly. Ideology, like paranoia, lurks in every corner, and he who moves not is a statue. The only resistance to
reification (fuller explanation
here) is critical appreciation.
And so, I intend to take parts of American culture as points of departure, objects to muse on, which will lead to larger issues. As John Milton wrote in his
Areopagitica:
Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv'd and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern'd, that those confused seeds which were impos'd on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt.
Or, to put it in
Neo-Calvinist terms, there are moments of creation, fall, and redemption in all things, and it our task to discern which from which. Or, to put it in
Hegelian-Marxist terms, "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."
To this end, I will write reflections and aphorisms at irregular intervals on contemporary cultural objects and phenomena. In the spirit of grounding, I'll restrict myself to low- and middle-brow culture, leaving such things as high/conceptual art, literary writings, politics, and major news to my betters.
My inspirations for this project are partly Theodor Adorno's
Minima Moralia and partly the writings of my New York friends over at
People Herd. Both sources have shown me that
strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, that is, the examined life.
And finally, a note on the title: 夫子
fūzǐ (the "i" being short, as in "in") is a title in classical Chinese indicating a philosopher, as in 孔夫子 Kǒng
fūzǐ, better known as
Confucius. The term is sometimes translated as "Master." Tom
fūzǐ is a nickname I earned in Taiwan for spouting off aphorisms and puns of the
Confucius say variety. I hope to land somewhere in between these two incarnations of Confucius - witless and witty, timeless and timely, moored and unmoored.
