just jess 🍵

@jess-bluesky

social media diaspora

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YouTube Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir jess-bluesky.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 19

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Oct 5

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photographic competition that invites the global community to document and preserve historic sites around the world on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. [event register] Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2025 in the US] commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons...

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Aug 28

[highlight] Here is the authoritarian checklist: The more that a political leader has ticked off this checklist, the less democratic and free a country is👇 (full article) donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

Here is the authoritarian checklist: The more that a political leader has ticked off this checklist, the less democratic and free a country is.

- control the government bureaucracy
- control the military
- control internal security
- control the legal system
- control civil society, including businesses
- control higher educations
- control the media
- control elections

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Aug 14

😑 human world sucks (timeline cleanser) 😻 Opus puts on his finest tuxedo for the love of Mozart 🎶

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Aug 6

here, on blusesky, his posts are mix of daily hike naming wild flowers spotted in his neighbourhood, and frequent commentary on hot topics among CN social media and his critique of CN-MAGA

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 30

Being amateur I prefer black & white because I don’t have filters kit or photo-editing software. All there is is light & color temperature chanced by that environment as my eyes see in the frame. Simply for experiencing a moment in life, a personal meditation. #streetphotography (c) 2017, Taiwan

(c) 2017, Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan

color image of a heron sitting on a wooden fish-catching device in an early dawn at Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 30

(c) 2005, Bali Indonesia

color image of tourist surfers and local guide watching sunset under the palm hut at beach

(c) 2005, Bali Indonesia

color image of local diving guides charting a wooden fishing boat over the seas against the early dawn

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 30

being an amateur traveler I don’t have gears, but only pack a Leica and a mobile phone in my pocket to use simultaneously whichever battery lasts longer for that day.. #streetphotpgeaphy (c) 2011, Avignon France

(c) 2011, Avignon France

black & white image of a street performer dressed up as a WW1 French soldier talking a cigarette break sitting on a doorway

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 29

(c) 2011, Avignon France

black & white image of a teenage boy breakdancing back-flip on one arm, in front of a paralysis boy in wheelchair accompanied by his caretakers nearby

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 29

(C) 2011, Avignon France

black & white image of a teenage tourist napping on his backpack waiting for the nightfall of summer solstice musics festival at the Avignon Cathedral Plaza

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 27

(hi, me again 🙋🏻‍♀️ one more fascinating coincidence) In Chinese & Asian mythology and literature, similar form of holy creature 麒麟 /qilin/ legendary hoofed and sometimes flamed body, chimerical creature that is said to appear with the imminent arrival, birth or death of a sage and illustrious ruler.

An illustration in the Prose of Gulistan “The Rose Garden” — a landmark of Persian medieval literature, perhaps its single most influential work of medieval poets.

The illustration depicts:

Simurgh (a benevolent bird in Persian mythology — it bears some similarities with mythological birds from different origins, such as the phoenix). And,

Qilin (Chinese mythological dragon-like beast — similar head with antlers, eyes with thick eyelashes and beards, mane that always flows upward, body is fully or partially scaled and often shaped like an ox, deer, horse, or more commonly a goat, sometimes similar to a unicorn).

Porcelain figuring of Qilin (Qing dynasty, mid 18th century) — head and scaly body of a dragon, tail of a lion and cloven hoofs like a deer, its body enveloped in sacred flames.

Embroidered Qilin (Qing Dynasty, 18 century China)

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 11

👏 [Lesson 5] Remember professional ethics

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jul 8

👏 [Lesson 10] Believe in truth

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Feb 17

Fascinating. There’s a similar form in ancient Chinese mythology: 贔屭 /BiXi/ one of the nine sons of the Dragon King - depicted as a dragon with the shell of turtle. BiXi sculptures were used as decorative plinth in funerary grounds of emperors. Bixi are found throughout East Asia and Eastern Russia.

Fascinating coincidence: there’s a similar form in ancient Chinese mythology called: 贔屭 /BiXi/ one of the nine sons of the Dragon King - depicted as a dragon with the shell of turtle. BiXi sculptures were used as decorative plinth in funerary grounds of emperors. Bixi are found throughout East Asia and Eastern Russia.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Feb 5

Irises - Vincent van Gogh, 1890

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Jan 18

厚黑學 {Thick Black Theory} (aka. Thick Face Black Heart) is a philosophical treatise by Li Zongwu 李宗吾 (1879–1943) a disgruntled politician and scholar born at the end of Qing dynasty. Published in 1911 - the year the Qing dynasty was overthrown, and the Republic of China was born

Thick Black Theory (Chinese: 厚黑學; pinyin: Hòu hēi xué) is a philosophical treatise written by Li Zongwu (李宗吾, 1879–1943), a disgruntled politician and scholar born at the end of Qing dynasty. It was published in China in 1911, the year of the Xinhai revolution, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown.

Li was a scientist of political intrigue. He wrote: "When you conceal your will from others, that is Thick. When you impose your will on others, that is Black (Dark)."

According to Chin-Ning Chu, the 'Thick Black Theory' describes the ruthless and hypocritical[1] means men use to obtain and hold power: "thick faces" (shamelessness), "black heart" (ruthlessness), according to author's view of history. It went through several printings.

Li argued that "A great hero is no more than a person who is impudent and wicked." According to Li, the wickedest of all was Cao Cao. "I would rather betray someone than be betrayed." It shows how black Cao Cao's heart was inside. Li picked Liu Bei (king of one rival kingdom competing with Cao's) as the highly skilled person with a "thick face". He never thought it shameful to live inside another's fence. He was also a frequent crier, appealing to others' sympathy. There is even a humorous saying, "Liu Bei's JiangShan (kingdom) was obtained through his crying."

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 31

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books 📚 #BookSky 📌 Day 20/20 • On Beauty • On Ugliness -by Umberto Eco

On Beauty: A History Of A Western Idea (2004) is both a history of art, and a philosophical journey on the subject of aesthetics by Umberto Eco—an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. Illustrated in full color throughout and produced to the highest standards, On Beauty is an indispensable book for an intellectual readership with one of the world’s most acclaimed thinkers.

What is beauty? Umberto Eco among Italy’s finest and most important contemporary thinker, explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture. The profound and subtle text is lavishly illustrated with abundant examples of sublime painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from literatures and philosophers.

In terms of form and style, On Beauty has been conceived for a vast and diversified readership: taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it.

On Beauty is Eco at his most captivating and eclectic; we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how the fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, and how ancient Roman and 18th-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant new light on the unfamiliar. Eco draws on the histories of both the disciplines of history critic and philosophical discourse to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.

On Ugliness (2007) by Italian thinker Umberto Eco, is a continuation of 2004 book, On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. Like the previous work, this book combines literary excerpts and illustrations of artworks from ancient times to the present to define the concept of what it means to be ugly.

An exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder?

Eco begins with an introduction trying to define the idea of ugliness, to verify that it is a polysemic concept, and that is associated with emotional expressions such as rejection or disgust which impede a rational approach. The first chapter approaches the ancient Greek conception of beauty, trying to discern by opposition what is ugly, and ugliness is associated with the lack of harmony.

Ugliness is not only in the physical but also in the moral sense, that Christianity denies to some extent the existence of ugliness, since the whole universe is a divine work. Only sin and suffering are ugly because they move away from the precepts of faith. That is why everything monstrous or disgusting links to hell, the art of death and demon exaggerates the horrific features of this sphere to instill the fear of the believers, to prevent them from being tempted.

A second topic on the association between ugly and obscenity/absurdity, which can make people laugh. Humour thus indicates the aesthetic measure, as seen in the costumbrist descriptions or the art of caricature, where women and enemies are easy targets of jokes about ugliness.

In the present day, new aesthetic categories are added to the traditional dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, such as kitsch and camp. This book ends with a review of the current polysemy of ugliness, in line with postmodern relativism.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 30

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 19/20 • Mythologies • Camera Lucida -by Roland Barthes

Mythologies (i1957) by Roland Barthes—French literary theorist, essayist, culture critic, semiotician, and photographer. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of cultural sign system, mainly pop culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields, and influenced the development of many schools of theory including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Barthes examines the tendency of contemporary social value systems (specifically that of bourgeoisie) to create modern myths. He also analyzes the semiology of the process of myth creation itself, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth (signified).

Barthes refers to the tendency of socially constructed notions, narratives, and assumptions to become "naturalized" in the process, that is, taken unquestioningly as given within a particular culture. Barthes concludes the book by examining how and why myths are established by the bourgeoisie in its various manifestations, in which a series popular mass culture products (such as advertisements and magazine articles) are exhibited and critically analyzed.

There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.

Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, and happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked.

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) is a short book by the French literary theorist and culture critic, Roland Barthes.

A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida is a commentary on artists such as Avedon, Clifford and Mapplethorpe. Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977); neither writer writer was a photographer.

The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of “studium” and “punctum”—studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

Barthes's analysis of photography develops more detail and insight through a structuralist approach. the treatment of photography in his book Mythologies is by comparison tangential and simple. There is still in this structural phase a strong political impulse and background to his theorizing of photography. Barthes connects photography's ability to represent without style (a 'perfect analogon': "The Photographic Message", 1961) to its tendency to naturalise what are in fact invented and highly structured meanings. His examples deal with press photographs and advertising, which make good use of this property (or bad use of it, as the case may be).

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 29

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 18/20 • Blindness • Seeing -by José Saramago

Blindness (1995) is a novel by the Nobel-winning Portuguese author José Saramago.

Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.

Credited as the most gifted novelist alive in the world today, Saramago’s works, some of which have been seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic. In 1998, Nobel Prize committee noted Blindness for Saramago’s parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony, with which he continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.

Seeing (2004) is a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago. It’s the sequel to Saramago's most famous works, Blindness (1995).

Seeing is set in the same unnamed country featured in Blindness. The story begins with a parliamentary election, in which the majority of the populace cast blank ballots (70% in the first round of vote, and 83% in the re-cast vote). The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the unmanned city 4 years before.

The first half of the story focuses on the struggles of the government and its various nameless members as they try to simultaneously understand and destroy the amorphous non-movement of blank-voters. Some of the characters from Blindness appear in the second half of the novel. What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 28

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 17/20 • One Hundred Years Of Solitude -by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a novel by Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.

It tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family whose patriarch founded the fictitious town of Macondo - a glass city that comes to the patriarchic character’s mind in a dream. It is the reason for Macondo's location, but also a symbol of its fate. A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time.

Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history.

The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. A place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and ordinary facts become uncertain.

García Márquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used and symbolize imperialism. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth. Yellow represents death, change, and destruction. The novel can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 27

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 16/20 • Song Of Solomon -by Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon (1977) is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison

This novel was cited by the Swedish Acade in 1993 Nobel Prize award. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's popular book club. In 1998 the Radcliffe Publishing Course named it the 25th best English-language novel of the 20th century. In 2015, Robert McCrum's chronological list of the 100 best novels written in English, named Song of Solomon at #89.

The story follows a teenager Milkman Dead who was was born shortly after neighborhood eccentric man who hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of Milkman’s life he, too, will be trying to fly.

With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

The novel has faced several challenges and bans in schools throughout the U.S. since 1993. As recently as 2010, the novel was challenged and later reinstated at Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 27

• Masumiyet Müzesi is a museum in a 19th-century house in Istanbul created by novelist Orhan Pamuk as a companion to his novel — The Museum of Innocence 📚 (museum official website) www.masumiyetmuzesi.org/en

The Museum Of Innocence (2008) is a novel by the Turkish Nobel-laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk.

The book, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, is an account of the love story between a wealthy businessman and a poorer distant relative of his.

One of the key themes throughout the novel is the role of women in Turkish culture. The novel describes the ostracism of women who have lost their virginity before marriage, despite the fact that many claim to have a "more western" attitude toward this in 1970s Istanbul. Pamuk describes this as the taboo of virginity that is part of an old system in Turkey.

In an interview Pamuk blended all of these themes as he commented on how the role of the museum is also one of ownership, as the male protagonist looks to own his female muse - object of desire - as a trinket in his own museum, rather than allow her autonomy in her own life.

Pamuk's work often deals with a clash of culture between East and West, which was cited as part of the reason for him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This novel continuously references the influence of the West (Europe and America) on Istanbul's culture, through both the idea of museums and the film industry, which becomes a large part of the novel.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 26

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 15/20 • The Book Thief -by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief (2005) is a historical fiction novel by Australian author Markus Zusak.

Set in Nazi Germany during World War II, the novel follows the adventures of a young girl. The act of stealing books during the tumultuous times marks her connection to the chaotic worlds around her and a passion for storytelling.

Narrated by Death, the novel presents the lives and viewpoints of the many victims of the ongoing war. Themes throughout the story include mortality, literature, and love.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 25

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 14/20 • Creatures Of A Day • The Schopenhauer Cure -by Irvin D. Yalom

Creature Of A Day (2015) is a collection of psychotherapy tales by Irvin Yalom, an American existentialist, psychotherapist, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, and author of both fiction and nonfiction.

Creatures Of A Day is written in fiction-nonfiction codification tales. Yalom describes his patients’ struggles, as well as his own, to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable end. Creatures Of A Day is all about clients and all about death, although in the 10 case studies, the fear of the end of life is often initially hidden in seemingly unrelated behaviors and thoughts.

In these pages, we meet a nurse, angry and adrift in a morass of misery where she has lost a son to a world of drugs and crime, and yet who must comfort the more privileged through their own pain; a successful businessman who, in the wake of a suicide, despairs about the gaps and secrets that infect every relationship; a newly minted psychologist whose study of the human condition damages her treasured memories of a lost friend; and a man whose rejection of philosophy forces even Yalom himself into a crisis of confidence. Their names and stories will linger long after the book’s last page is turned.

This is an erudite book, profound yet straightforwardly conceived and captivatingly executed. It is well worth reading by the general public interested in humanity, personal motivation, and change.

Like Momma And The Meaning Of life, and, Love’s Executioner which established Yalom’s preeminence as a storyteller illuminating the drama of existential therapy, Creatures of a Day is funny, earthy, and often shocking; it is a radically honest statement about the difficulties of human life, but also a celebration of some of the finest fruits—love, family, friendship—that life can bear. We are all creatures of a day.

The Schopenhauer Cure (2005) is a novel by Irvin Yalom, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, an existentialist, and psychotherapist.

The book centers around a psychiatrist with cancer and the change of dynamics in his therapy group, when he brings one of his former patients he believes he failed. The novel switches between the current events happening around the therapy group and the psychobiography of Arthur Schopenhauer. But with mere months left, life may be far too short to help or to compete with his former patient for the hearts and minds of the group members. And then again, it might be just long enough.

“Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.”
―The Schopenhauer Cure

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 24

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 13/20 • The Dying Animal -by Philip Roth

The Dying Animal (2001) is a short novel by the American writer Philip Roth. It tells the story of senior literature professor David Kepesh, renowned for his literature-themed radio show. Kepesh is finally destroyed by his inability to comprehend emotional commitment.

The Dying Animal is the third book in a series portraying the life of the fictional professor, preceded by The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977).
In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 23

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 12/20 • The Unbearable Lightness of Being -by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog, and their artistic and intellectual life in Czech society from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw Pact countries and its aftermath through the lives of two separate pairs of people and those around them.

Challenging the concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the story's thematic meditations posit the alternative: that each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again – thus the "lightness" of being. Moreover, this lightness also signifies freedom; Tomáš and Sabina display this lightness, whereas Tereza's character is "weighed down".

In the novel, Nietzsche's concept is attached to an interpretation of the German 'one occurrence is not significant', namely an "all-or-nothing" cognitive distortion that Tomáš must overcome in his hero's journey. He initially believes "If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all," and specifically (with respect to committing to Tereza) "There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison." The novel resolves this question decisively that such a commitment is in fact possible and desirable.

Kundera considered himself a writer without a message. But literature critics suggested that Kundera conceived his fiction with regard to the overall body of his work, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time, his themes and meta-themes traversing his entire œuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes include exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as a continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 22

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 11/20 • Love In A Fallen City 傾城之戀 -by Eileen Chang 張愛玲

(Chinese language version published in Taiwan)

Love in A Fallen City 傾城之戀 is a 1943 Chinese-language novella by Chinese-born American novelist Eileen Chang 張愛玲.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland China and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.

Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Love in A Fallen City tells about a love story that triumphed during the wartime Hong Kong. Scholar Nicole Huang suggests that Eileen Chang's "most important literary legacy from the 1940s is her construction of an alternative narrative of war, one that contradicted the grand narratives of national salvation and revolution that dominated the wartime literary scene."

One of the dominant theme in Love in a Fallen City is the anxiety of self-identity. Due to the persistence of traditional forces, ethical-moral values, various domestic and international conflicts and wars, a bourgeois self-identity becomes difficult to establish.

Another thematic focus of the story is matrimonial anxiety in the traditional social institution. In the novel, middle-class women such as characters in the novella aim to grab any opportunity to increase their class status in order to secure their financial security. The anxiety generated by marriage and love is a response to the social-political dilemma. Under this robust womanhood, “in its core, it harbors a profound cultural and historical nihilism.”

(English translation by Karen S Kingsbury)

Love in A Fallen City 傾城之戀 is a 1943 Chinese-language novella by Chinese-born American novelist Eileen Chang 張愛玲.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland China and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.

Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Love in A Fallen City tells about a love story that triumphed during the wartime Hong Kong. Scholar Nicole Huang suggests that Eileen Chang's "most important literary legacy from the 1940s is her construction of an alternative narrative of war, one that contradicted the grand narratives of national salvation and revolution that dominated the wartime literary scene."

One of the dominant theme in Love in a Fallen City is the anxiety of self-identity. Due to the persistence of traditional forces, ethical-moral values, various domestic and international conflicts and wars, a bourgeois self-identity becomes difficult to establish.

Another thematic focus of the story is matrimonial anxiety in the traditional social institution. In the novel, middle-class women such as characters in the novella aim to grab any opportunity to increase their class status in order to secure their financial security. The anxiety generated by marriage and love is a response to the social-political dilemma. Under this robust womanhood, “in its core, it harbors a profound cultural and historical nihilism.”

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 21

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 10/20 • The True Story of Ah Q 阿Q正傳 -by Lu Xun 魯迅

A towering figure in the literary history of 20th-century China, Lu Xun 魯迅 has exerted immense and continuous influence through his short stories, which remain today as powerful as they were first written. While echoes of these stories can still be heard in the fictional works from both sides of China and Taiwan in the 80s and 90s, The True Story of Ah Q 阿Q正傳 has long become an intrinsic part of the Chinese vocabulary.

The True Story of Ah Q is a novella first published as a serial in 1922, later was included in his first short collection Call to Arms 吶喊 in 1923. The novella is generally held to be a masterpiece of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun believed that the purpose of literature was to transform the minds of and enlighten fellow Chinese.

Ah Q, a Don Quixote- type character, has a literary metaphor of national character of his time. Ah Q became a recognizable symbol that expanded the intellectual discourse of national character into the popular consciousness. Originally, the name Ah Q represented a negative Chinese national character (国民性). A negative example, it served as a warning to urge Chinese to change for the "better". After the publication of The True Story of Ah Q, the Chinese themselves used the term to label those who are complacently ignorant, indolent, unhygienic, backward, slavish, and parochial.

The story of Ah Q weaves together nationalism, modern Chinese literature and modern Chinese history. In modern Chinese language, the term the “Ah Q mentality" (阿Q精神) is used commonly as a term of mockery to describe someone who chooses not to face up to reality and deceives himself into believing he is successful, or has unjustified beliefs of superiority over others. It describes a narcissistic individual who rationalizes every single actual failure he faces as a psychological triumph ("spiritual victory" 精神勝利) - a term further showing how Ah Q's traits of evasion of reality and self-consolation have permeated contemporary language.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 20

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 9/20 • Don Quixote -by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote (full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. Considered a founding work of Western literature, it is often said to be the first modern novel.

Don Quixote is one of the most influential works of literature from the Spanish Golden Age in the Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published. It has been the inspiration for a wide array of cultural adaptations.

In 2002 the Norwegian Nobel Institute conducted a study among writers from 55 countries, the majority voted Don Quixote "the greatest work of fiction ever written".

The book had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) as well as the word “quixotic”. Mark Twain referred to the book as having "swept the world's admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence".

Beyond literature influences, Don Quixote has inspired many illustrators, painters and sculptors, including Gustave Doré, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Antonio de la Gandara. The French artist Honoré Daumier produced 29 paintings and 49 drawings based on the book and characters of Don Quixote, starting with an exhibition at the 1850 Paris Salon, which would later inspire Pablo Picasso.

(on this post) This vintage book cover illustration is one of the drawings by Picasso. On 10 August 1955, Pablo Picasso drew an illustration of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for the journal weekly Les Lettres françaises. Widely reproduced, today it is the iconic image used by the Spanish government to promote Cervantes and Don Quixote.

just jess 🍵@jess-bluesky· Dec 19

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky Day 8/20 • Midnight’s Children -by Salman Rushdie