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1 "Somewhere on the Mississippi River"
Yu Jian
Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House 2022-1
Somewhere in the Mississippi River is the poet Yu Jian's latest long essay and his first photographic collection. In the book, Yu Jian recalls and reconstructs his foreign journey with the eyes of a poet, recording the poets he met, the street scenes he watched, and the things in his memories. He heard a drummer playing in Washington Park, writing, "As soon as the drums sounded, a wasteland fell from the sky." He stopped in ambitious New York, but preferred the "unenterprising" Vermont, "In the United States, which is full of desire and generally advocating positivity, Vermont is an alternative, lazy, contented, and the hill is inhabited by the immortal Wang Wei." He said the reunion with Ludean was like two long-lost farmers walking into the 34th Street subway in Manhattan. He came to Ron Paiget's house and called his home like an antique shop where everything was old.
Yu Jian had already written in detail about the meaning of obsolescence and wandering in his previously published "Paris": wandering is equivalent to a kind of pulp on the street, and aimlessness and fruitlessness are inherently poetic. New and cookie-cutter buildings, streets and cities refreshed for efficiency have made the past disappear without a trace. Yu Jian, the white of the word. A native of Kunming, he began writing in the early 1970s and published several poetry collections. He is the author of "River of the Gods: From Lancang to Mekong", "Kunming: My Hometown, My City", "Jianshui", "Paris", etc.
Selected Poems of Li Shangyin
Written by Kozo Kawai
Phoenix Press 2021-12
The "Iwanami Bunko" Yasuzo Kawawai's Selected Poems of Li Shangyin was first published in December 2008. The book is a selection of 94 poems by Li Shangyin, each of which has detailed commentaries, Japanese readings, and Japanese translations, with five articles of "Ordinary Examples" at the beginning of the book and more than ten pages of "Commentary" attached at the end of the book. This commentary concisely and intensively describes Yasuzo Kawawai's basic views on Li Shangyin and even ancient Chinese poetry, and also includes Li Shangyin's chronology and a catalogue index of Japanese phonetic sequences.
It is difficult for Li Shangyin's poems to be taken apart sentence by sentence to explain, while Yasuzo Chuanhe translates each verse sentence by sentence to facilitate the reader's understanding of the meaning of the text. In addition, the "Commentary" also focuses on the difference between Li Shangyin's love poems and ordinary late Tang Dynasty love poems: Li Shangyin's love poems are voices emanating from the hearts of lovers, rather than one-way observation from the perspective of men. Now this "Selected Poems of Li Shangyin" has a Chinese version, which helps Chinese readers understand the "Li Shangyin View" of Japanese scholars. Yasuzo Kawawai is a Japanese sinologist, doctor of literature at Kyoto University, and former professor of the Department of Chinese Literature at the Faculty of Literature of Kyoto University, who has long been engaged in the study of Tang Dynasty literature and Chinese poetics, and has authored "Chinese Autobiographical Literature" and "The Transfiguration of Zhongnan Mountain: A Collection of Treatises on Chinese and Tang Literature".
52 Blue
[Beauty] Leslie Jamieson by Gao Yu Bing translation
Shanghai Bebet | Guangxi Normal University Press 2022-1
Leslie Jamieson is an American novelist and nonfiction author. Make It Scream was first published in 2019. Her nonfiction writing often combines external events with personal experiences, reflecting publicity with privateness.
"52 Blue" and the previous "Eleven Kinds of Heartbreak", spanning a variety of themes, the title of the same name "52 Blue" is about a lonely blue whale wandering in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and no second whale in the world can understand its voice. "We Tell Stories to Ourselves in Order to Live Again" is based on the lives of the families of boys in the United States with "past life" memories, Jamison is also pursuing the literary significance of "reincarnation" in the visit, for her, the legend of reincarnation is not just a mysterious hunt, but a belief in the self into "something that can be transformed and indestructible", our so-called soul may be immortal, but it never belongs to us, the self does not have strict boundaries, and our life experience is also a repetition of the past to some extent. The epiphany of self", "without boundaries", is like Jamison's writing style, her material and writing are eclectic and full of fluidity.
"Want to Do Anything, Don't Want to Do Anything: A Psychological Massage for Workers"
[English] Josh Cohen by Liu Han Translated by Su Shi
CITIC Spring Tide 2022-1
In the past, people thought that the meaning of not working was simply to better prepare for the next job, and rarely reflected on the value of not working itself. In The book Everything you want to do, you don't want to do anything, the authors divide the inertia into four types: burnout, slob, daydreamer, and slacker, starting with burnout, confirming the need to stop from the inertia of perpetual motion.
The weary begin to be driven to action by blind impulses, but they are caught off guard and sink into the ground, belonging to the Japanese family. Sloths are active in the children's cartoons we are familiar with, they are Snoopy, Garfield, openly lazy to do, shamelessly refuse to work. Daydreamers and idlers have more impulses to break away from gravity than the first two, pulled by geocentric gravity—daydreamers lock their doors, refuse to respond to social reality, and create their own alternative reality in isolation, like the American poet Emily Dickinson, who is the daydreamer defined by Josh Cohen. The idler withdraws from the regular life and lives at his own pace, of which the author himself is one. Josh Cohen is both a professor of literature at the University of London and a psychoanalyst, and the analysis of literature and the experience of treating patients give him the dual character of writing.
The Buzzword: The Misuse of Science by Postmodern Intellectuals
[Beauty] Alan Sokal [than] Jean Bricmont by Cai Peijun translated
Kaijinkan | Zhejiang University Press 2022-3
In 1996, imitating the writing style popular among postmodernist scholars, Sokal wrote an article on social issues using a large number of advanced scientific words, which was published in the journal Social Texts, which was one of the popular symbols of the intellectual world at that time. Subsequently, Sokal himself exposed this sophisticated and absurd method. The "Sokal Affair" has sparked widespread and intense debate in academia, and its impact is far-reaching.
Sokal then co-authored The Buzzing Empty Talk with Bricmont, in which he exposed the misuse of scientific concepts in the writings of popular postmodernist thinkers, from Jacques Lacan and Julia Christeva to Lucy Iligre and Jean Baudrillard, listing a series of glaring mistakes made by postmodernists in using science to support their arguments. In addition, they criticize the impropriety of intellectual relativism — Alan Sokal, professor emeritus of physics at New York University, professor of mathematics at University College London, and Bricmont, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, who, as a scientist, refuted the idea that scientific theories are merely narratives or social constructs. Noam Chomsky argues that the book shows how easily these self-evident principles can be ignored, and how devastating the consequences can be to intellectual life and human affairs.
Mr Smith to China: Three Scots and the Rise of Britain's Global Empire
[American] Han Jiexi, translated by Shi Kejian
Gravity | Guangdong People's Publishing House 2021-11
It is a micro-global history of how three obscure Scottish merchants stirred up anglo-Asian commercial trade. In the second half of the 18th century, prompted by Adam Smith's "free trade" economic ideas, three Scottish merchants of the same name , George Smith " , lured by high profits , bypassed the monopoly trade of the East India Company and set off a commercial storm in the Waters of the Indian Ocean , eventually causing a financial crisis , and the inherent instability of the financial credit system eventually led to the invasion and colonization of Asia by the British Empire.
Through the three Mr. Smiths and the "loose merchants" group represented, this book shows the inner workings of the British Empire's global expansion and the formation of a global trade network. With their own business activities, they filled the financial gap in the East India Company's trade in Asia, maintained close ties with the political elite in London, and even through this political connection, transformed their trade needs in the Far East into the country's political agenda, promoting the completion of Britain's first mission to China and laying the groundwork for the Opium War.
How Artificial Intelligence Plays Games
[American] Julian Tugilis by Zhai Wen translation
After the wave | Democracy and Construction Press 2021-12
If machines can beat humans in all games, has AI surpassed humans across the board? What can we learn from the continuous evolution of artificial intelligence? This book introduces the latest advances in artificial intelligence, and lists dozens of blockbuster games in the history of games such as Super Mario Bros., Angry Birds, DOTA, and The Legend of Zelda, clarifying the relationship between gaming, learning and artificial intelligence. We will see that by learning how to play games, how to design games, and how to use games for AI development, we can better understand how humans and machines think, and further explore new models of games, learning, and thinking.
According to the authors, the first digital computers appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they were quickly used to play games. In fact, after the advent of computers, someone wrote game programs and ran them, and this inventor was Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, who played chess with his friends with the algorithm he wrote, and the chess moves were manual, and they acted as a computer. The author of the book, Julian Tugelis, is a professor of computer science and engineering at New York University and co-founder of the New York University Game and Innovation Lab, where he studies the application of AI technology, especially in games.
Tokyo in the Movies
Sun: Written by Tadao Sato
Guangqi Bookstore | Shanghai People's Publishing House 2021-12
This is a work about the changing face of Tokyo in movies. The author is Tadao Sato, a Japanese film critic and honorary president of The Japan University of Pictures. As he says in the preface, in the works of Yasujiro Ozu, Akio Naruse, and Akira Kurosawa, Tokyo has acquired the status of a protagonist, been given personality, has an excellent personality and vitality, and has also refined the feelings that people maintain for the city on a daily basis. While emphasizing the characteristics of Tokyo, the film also deforms the scenery and geography of Tokyo, and people get the idea that "Tokyo is such a city, it should be such a city" through the film. The most bizarre variant is probably Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Lem's "Solaris Star" film "Flying into Space", which shows scientists driving from their homes to the city center, there is a Japanese display board blocked by xx kilometers in the direction of xx, which is the Akasaka Misuke Expressway, probably because tokyo's scenery is ultra-modern, so it is regarded as a futuristic city in science fiction works.
Tadao Sato analyzes the different regional cultures of Tokyo with his rich film reading experience, such as Naruse Mikio's depiction of tokyo civilian life with close feelings, and in The Tokyo Shimomachi, there is a part that has always preserved and nurtured a rich civilian culture inherited from the Edo period. It is a kind of back alley culture and alley culture that has been polished with a unique flavor, and the back alley culture and alley culture in Akio Naruse's film are slightly different from Akira Kurosawa's "Lower Class". And the masterpiece that regards Tokyo as a bustling city and shows its raucous charm is to see Akira Kurosawa's "Nora Dog".