Brendan O’Kane

@bokane

Scrutable Occidental, erstwhile 北漂, quondam translator, Ming/Qing fiction enjoyer, congenital Philadelphian, escaped academic, MLIS aspirant, 鏟屎官 (二等). Cynicism makes you an easy mark. Signal: @bokane.1644.

3694 Siguiendo7232 Seguidores15.135 Publicaciones

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writing

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Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 10

sleepy little speed lines coming off his Eadweard Muybridge ass

zoomed in action shot: Gyoza, ears back, paws outstretched, captured in the act of sleeping

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 10

how does he do it, folks

on a blue bedspread, an orange cat lies stretched out in a sort of exploded diagram displaying both sides of the cat

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 6

The eighth-century dictionary ‘Simplex and Compound Graphs from the Five Classics“ 五經文字 defines “cat” as “a ferocious beast.” 「貓，猛獸」

gyoza, a ginger cat looking rather dapper in his new blue harness, vusstigates the back yard

the leaves of this one pepper plant are a favorite object of vusstigation

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 5

“here they serve coffee in cups and a good mood,” I post from my iPhone and a narrow sliver of the Venn diagram

A cafe called “Zeugma Mediterranean Cuisine,” Sai Kung, Hong Kong, February 2018.
They did not in fact serve coffee, because the machine and the social contract were broken.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 5

'epic handshake' meme where the left hand is 'Sima Qian', the right hand is 'Suetonius', and the thing they're shaking on is "I TOLD U BRO I FUCKIN TOLD YOU"

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 5

god, no; dragons in early modern china, yes

from the start of Timothy Brook’s excellent “The Troubled Empire”:

Shen [Defu] is able to align every sighting with a precise moment in that emperor's wobbly career, including the man's death. Zhengde died of a fever some weeks after falling drunk out of a boat while fishing in the Yangzi valley. Water being the dragon's signature element, Shen dared to suggest that dragons must have been responsible.

From here on, dragons are regular
accompanists to the Ming emperors as they stumbled from one constitutional or environmental crisis to the next. The reign of Zhengde's successor, the Jiajing emperor (r I522-I566), was heavily troubled by dragons, especially in the I55os. Eighteen spottings can be precisely dated, but many more have been recorded that cannot. A Yangzi delta writer who collected local dragon stories from the Jiajing reign tells of one appearing in the home of a Hangzhou veterinarian, a second tearing up massive pine trees as it crossed Fang Mountain outside Hangzhou, a third and a fourth destroying dozens of houses outside Suzhou in a fiery heat, and a fifth roiling about over Hangzhou's scenic West Lake, where it toppled an iron pagoda, overturned

pleasure boats, and smashed a Thousand Buddha Hall in a monastery to smithereens.

The Wanli emperor's reign, from 1573 to 1620, was as dragon-prone as Jiajing's.
Particularly spectacular was the second
sighting, when 158 furious dragons tore out of the skies over the countryside west of Nanjing on August 29, 1586, leveling hills, destroying fields, and drowning thousands. Dragons continued to appear right through to the final reign of the Chongzhen emperor (r.
1628-1644). Two dragons were spotted in autumn of 1643, the end of a brutal phase when it was impossible to pull political, economic, military, and environmental crises apart. The dynasty fell the following spring.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 4

b’gawd is that the Wet Nurse Office’s music I hear??? (奶子府, which looks like it means “Lactorium” or “Booborium” in Mandarin, was a casual name for the 禮儀房)

HDC definition:

為皇室征用乳母的機關。
東安門外稍北，有禮儀房，乃選養奶口以候內庭宣召之所。一曰奶子府，隸錦衣衞。
明沈榜《宛署雜記·奶口》
都城內禮儀房者，俗號奶子府。
明沈德符《野獲編·禁衛·禮儀房》

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 2

Always down to talk evil eunuchs! I was just distracted by the arrival of this fine fellow’s new harness

Gyoza, a handsome ginger cat in a rather dapper blue Kitty Holster harness, investigates one of the backyard pepper plants toothily

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jul 2

Actual Wikipedia:

Possible causes:
The cause of the explosion has never been conclusively determined. Although there are multiple sources of detailed historical records, the incident happened well before the proliferation of modern science in China, and contemporary interpretations are compounded with superstitious speculations.
There were also suspicions that the official account might have been exaggerated with tints of yellow journalism. Throughout the ages, various hypotheses have been put forth, including a gunpowder explosion, a meteor air burst, a natural gas explosion and even a volcanic eruption. 2] Despite some being regarded as scientifically plausible, no academic consensus has been reached.

Gunpowder
Due to the epicenter of the disaster, the Wanggongchang Armory, being a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days", an accidental gunpowder ignition was blamed as the culprit from the very beginning. The cause has been suspected to be poor handling during manufacturing and transport, electrostatic discharges or even sabotage by Later Jin spies, and is sometimes cited as proof of the decline in the Ming government's administrative quality.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 30

I'd love that! I've got some pictures from a birthday dinner at Sang Kee, 2015 I think.

Victor's birthday dinner, March 2015 I think. Victor sits at a table at Sang Kee, flanked by his PhD students Tim Clifford and Zhenzhen Lu. Behind them stand ?? (sorry), Xiuyuan Mi, and me. I think the photo was taken by Fangyi Cheng.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 29

schlubby Pooh, in a t-shirt like a dumb-dumb, captioned in Comic Sans: The Six Sacred Techniques
dapper Pooh, dressed in a tuxedo as befits a gentleman, captioned in an elegant serif: The Secret Seventh Technique

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 23

yessssssss

Mister Punch leers from the cover of Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker'

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 19

I got you

Entrance to a church in West Philly: red-painted doors set into a stone archway. In gold-painted relief above the lintel are the words ‘I Am The Door’

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 11

someone pay me to do what i'm good at

From ‘Classical Chinese for Cats,' which does not exist, Chapter 1: 'The Cat is Important.'

貓黑。貓美。貓強。

These three sentences work the same way — which looks close enough to the way English does it that we will have to slow down and look more closely so as not to be misled. Any English translation will treat the words 黑, 美, and 強 as if they were adjectives, but they are actually verbs: “Cat blacks,” “Cat handsomes,” “Cat strongs.”

Compare:

貓眠。貓餓。貓鳴。

They work the same way, with a simple underlying structure that will be common to every Classical Chinese utterance we see from here on out.

The basic shape of any statement is

Topic + Comment

The most common way of saying “Thing A is Thing B” in Chinese is simply to say “A, B”:

貓，萌交反，猛獸。
 ‘Cats,’ m- + -au, are ferocious beasts.

Often, these constructions will be signposted with a 也, as “A, B 也”:

吾，貓也。 I am a cat.

Now your turn. There’s a gloss on the next page, but you can read it yourself already.

貓黑。貓美。貓強。貓眠。貓餓。貓醒。
人常言。人多言。人常言人言。人言多。
吾寡言。吾言「貓」。
吾名明兒，貓也。
人言貓，曰「黑貓非貓。」明兒，固貓也。
人愚。人甚愚。

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 10

贈貓詩 For My Cat 執鼠無功元不劾，一簞魚飯以時來。看君終日常安臥，何事紛紛去又回？ You haven’t caught any mice. I let it go. The fish and rice were set out at the appointed hour. I watched you drowse the day away — so now What’s got you galloping madly everywhere? --Lu You 陸游 (1125-1210)

Pierogi and Gyoza snooze in flagrant breach of contract

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 10

18th century "cat contract" (納貓兒契式; based on a Yuan-dynasty original), laying out the cat's duties and responsibilities: tirelessly guarding the grain, repelling the "mousey bandits" (鼠賊), not messing with the livestock, not stealing numnums "of any kind whatsoever" (不得偷盜食諸般).

Scan of a two-page spread with an illustration of a rather pissed off-looking cat and the text of a 納貓兒契式 'Cat Acquisition Contract Template' surrounding it in a spiral. From 銜蟬小錄 Xianchan xiaolu, "A Record of Cicada-Nommers," a Qing-dynasty compendium of all things cat.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 9

Bus stop ad in Flushing, Queens, a couple years ago: a photograph of partners at the Jerry Werlin Law Firm labels them 猶太律師 ("Jewish Lawyer"), 哈弗法學院畢業大律師 ("Major Lawyer, Harvard Law graduate"), 43年豐富經驗猶太律師 ("Jewish Lawyer with 43 Years of Rich Experience"), etc

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 8

top men are on the job

Gyoza and his colleague Pierogi monitor the situation from their command center at the window

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 8

the bird dies today

Narrow bands of sunlight cast between slats into a darkened room onto the face of Gyoza, mighty cat, feROcious boy and best predator, who is looking up intently at something and preparing to brekekkkkek

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 5

Friday night, time to go wild.

Screenshot of the Hucker dictionary entry for “Confectioner,” tángjiàng, where the first character is a pain in the ass to type. (I’m guessing it’s the same word as 糖?)

Screenshot of the Hucker entry for “Dough Pantry Supervisor,” my favorite Sui-Tang office, showing that it has incorrectly (or at least borderline - it’s wrong in my book) simplified the first character, and the second one is using a variant form that doesn’t get correctly found by a search for the more common 麵 or 面.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 2

not quite ready for prime time yet, though.

Hucker again, this time with an entry where Chandra OCR has incorrectly recognized a headword character, this time in the entry for Dough Pantry Supervisor, whose correct title was 麴麵倉督

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 2

noice

Pleco 4 showing the entry for 神威軍 in Charles Hucker’s ‘Dictionary of Official Titles,’ which I’ve also updated (though not yet entirely cleanly) to use Pinyin instead of Wade-Giles. Because it amuses me, especially the ending, here is the definition:

TANG : Army of Inspired Awesomeness, 2 designated Left and Right in the Imperial Armies (jinjun ) of the Northern Command (beiya ) at the dynastic capital; also known as the dianqian (palace) shenwei jun because by 800 they were under the control of palace eunuchs with such grandiose titles as Supervisory Commissioner (jian ... shi ) of the Left or Right Army of Inspired Awesomeness, Palace Protector (zhong hujun ) of the Left or Right Army of Inspired Awesomeness, etc. Initiated in 787 by a renaming of the Left and Right Armies of Bowmen Shooters at Moving Targets (dianqian shesheng jun ; see yaqian shesheng bing ); terminated in 813, when all their troops were absorbed into the increasingly dominant Armies of Inspired Strategy (shence jun ). RR: armée de la majesté transcendante . P43.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· Jun 2

niiiiiiiiiiiice

Pleco 4 beta displaying the entry for 空頭 in Shi Rujie’s ‘Dictionary of Ming and Qing Wu,’ just one of the way-too-many scanned dictionaries that I have been meaning to convert into some more usable form

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 25

Suzhou, March 2009.

Back street in Suzhou: a grey concrete utility pole partially blocks the view of a blue pickup truck carrying a load of startlingly bright oranges. Behind it, a line of southern-style houses with whitewashed walls and black tile roofs.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 24

Philadelphia dialect speakers: What do you understand this ad to be saying

Wall ad from SEPTA at City Hall: ‘When you get on, that backpack jawn comes off.’

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 24

Visiting a friend in New Haven and I know it’s only New England but “bagel with schmear” really should be enough of a context clue for a student at Yale

Bagel with Schmear menu item, from a very good bagel shop in New Haven. There is an asterisk next to the word Schmear, with an explanatory note saying that it is ‘a Yiddish word for a spread that goes on a bagel.’
I find this a lot funnier than I probably should.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 15

George Costanza wearing a t-shirt that reads 'I Lost My Virginity At Shen Yun 2022 Performing Arts Show'

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 15

sometimes you just have to do a quick late-night draft (from 續墨客揮犀)

Text message, sent at 12:25 AM:

Cute Song-dynasty story!

鄱陽龔冕仲自言其祖紀與族人同應進士舉，唱名日其家眾妖競作：牝雞或晨雊，犬或巾幟而行，鼠或白晝群出，至于器皿服用之物，悉自變易其常處。家人驚懼不知所為，乃召女巫徐姥者使治之。時尚寒，與姥對爐而坐，有一貓正臥其側，家人指貓謂姥曰：「吾家百物皆為異，不為異者獨此貓耳。」於是人立拱手而言曰：「不敢。」姥大駭而去。後數日捷音至，二子皆高第矣，乃知妖異未必盡為禍也。

Gong Mianzhong of Poyang used to tell a story about his ancestor Gong Ji, who sat the imperial examinations for the title of Presented Scholar with another member of his clan.

On the day examination results were to be announced, their household erupted in devilry. The hen crowed at daybreak; the dog went walking around on his hind legs wearing a kerchief; mice swarmed in broad daylight; and none of the pots or pans were where they were supposed to be. Not knowing what else to do, the frightened family called for a witch, Granny Xu, to set things right.
It was still chilly when the witch arrived, and Gong Ji sat in front of the brazier with her, a cat drowsing beside them. He pointed at it.
You see that cat, he said. Every last thing in this house has gone wrong except for that cat.
The cat stood and bowed politely. *Awfully* kind of you, it said.
The witch ran off in a fright.

A few days later came the happy news that both men had placed highly on the examinations -- so you see, all the mischief and devilry may not have been a bad sign after all.

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 13

Jerry asks 'Kramer, what's going on in there?'
Kramer explains: 'They're standing facts on their head and juggling black and white, Jerry.'

Brendan O’Kane@bokane· May 4

saw this incredibly cursed artifact the last time I was in Midtown