Odd dream. Woke up and could only feel it’s irksome touch. I was earnestly navigating something dissonant. What was it? Walking down the hall towards the bathroom, I remembered just been in close proximity with Chairman Xi. We were on a bus. There were some official handlers as well. I was speaking with them about U.S.-China relations. It wasn’t appropriate to speak to Jinping directly, but rather I spoke audibly so that he would hear. I said something anodyne about needing humility on both sides. I was very conscious of needing to talk and of not talking to him, but atmospherically to his staff that he would also hear. The Chairman gave one of his, enigmatic cherubic smiles of his which says nothing and got off at a stop with is staff.
Dreams discharge the tension of the day, presumably. This dream must have been catalyzed by witnessing my wife’s frustration over an article she wrote comparing Nomadland with China’s new unlikely fifty-six-year-old all-star, Su Min who took to the road after having enough of house work and an abusive relationship and the obligatory quality of parenting and grandparenting. Wechat promptly blocked my wife’s article, as illegal. Then you need to undertake the cat-and-mouse archeology to discover just what word or combination of characters has triggered the meta-minder's concerns.
Seeing as how my musings on the dream-bus weren’t going to actually have an impact on U.S.-China relations, I lay back on a rainy Sunday morning to see if I could spend time with Aristophanes. I’d purchased a collection of Euripides and another of Aristophanes as my younger daughter was to read them this semester in school. And though I’ve read "Lysistrata" and “Frogs” before, as I recall, I hadn’t really encountered “The Acharnians” before and I wasn’t prepared for how vaudevillian it all felt. “Bah-doom Koosh” goes the imaginary drum and cymbal as Dikaiopolis takes his seat in the assembly and starts yelling out offensive lines. I suppose I reckoned that gag-n’-guffaw humor with something that sprung from a Yiddish shtetl, or an Irish bog. I’d assumed legal protections for making fun of leaders as something the American Colonists were early to fight for. The Acharnians was first produced in 425BC . Snickering as I read through, I tried to let that seep into the historical glaze that otherwise covered by general glance backward through the west to the axial age. Gazing eastward I don’t know of examples of public buffoonery at the emperor.'s expense Veiled allusions to poor precedent, stylized couplets, sure. But takin’-the-piss of the Yellow Emperor while he was still astride the throne? I don’t think so. Close as I could think of until you get Lin Yutong in the 19th century was Warring States Zhuangzi and his irreverent sarcasm towards the Confucians.
Mother’s Day. I sent a thank you to the moms at the company where we work. I made some muffins and brought them over to my stepmom, and later to my mom, as well. My wife picked flowers. Oddly while China does seem to celebrate Mother’s Day today, the Hallmark obligatory did not find such an easy crossing of the Atlantic. The folks in the UK say they celebrate it earlier in the year. All my wife wanted was to show the kids around her garden. The younger one indulged her but older one, who, to be fair did get her mom a mood ring, was still recovering from the second vaccine she’d received yesterday. I got my wife some wine, as she’d requested. Driving back WFMU was playing “Momma Said Knock You Out” by LL Cool J. Took me a verse or two to get the reference.
Sunday, 05/09/21
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