Hanukkah when the boys were four: Me: Eat your supper and then we can have some sufganiyot. Twin A: What's sufganiyot? Me: That's Hebrew for "malasadas."

Wow it is incredibly frustrating to put significant time into commenting on a student's paper draft in an effort to give them advice on how to improve it, only to find as I work my way through that significant parts of it were written by an LLM.

I get Lingely, Langley, and Longley pretty regularly, but this is a new one for me 🤔 (also, this is the *fourth* paper of the semester)

TFW your volcano webcam is destroyed by lava 😯

Stealth Buddhism alert! Started watching Whispers of Fate out of curiosity - I am not, on the whole, a huge xianxia fan, preferring my costume dramas to be more historical. It is so visually beautiful that I am sticking with it nevertheless, and I am struck by how covertly Buddhist it is:

Work-bathroom selfie. My kid calls this the “total art historian fit” and it bothers me professionally, because I think he’s right, but how does he know? (Slightly bohemian baggy pants from Target and top from Marshalls, purchased under duress in Sarasota when my luggage was lost.)

I mean I’m Jewish and we don’t celebrate Christmas at all, but I was also trained in the Royal School of Church Music and certain things are just hard-wired, like Advent and Christmas music. Himself (grew up Jewish, unlike me) is in Apia at a conference so the boys and I are indulging

The teenagers have gone out for hamburgers with their friends. What will I do with my one wild and precious Shabbat afternoon?

Now thinking about how to work a reference to Darmok into my paper on the uses of convention (and allusion) in sixth-century epigraphy 🤔

I made pie

What are the mitzves of Thanks Giving, a festive meal, to eat the turkey bird, to hear the story of thepilgrim, to watch the football game. And some say to argue with an uncle.

Except, of course, that my knees are 30 years older.

Art meets Life: I've been watching this series called 雪迷宫 (English title "The First Shot"). It's set in 1997 in a fictional northern city called Halan, and it's about a special police unit dealing with the first influx of meth into the city. In some ways it's a typical anti-drugs series BUT:

As usual Kody is thinking smart thoughts about art making. It reminds me of a throughline in my own current research, which I have worked through in several recent talks: the uses of convention and its significance, in contrast to the unconventional. A thread:

Third season of “Strange Tales of the Tang Dynasty” 唐朝诡事录之长安 just dropped, and I was going to wait, but gave in and it does not disappoint as far as the production having done its homework. The first story arc is called 康国之金桃 “The Golden Peaches of Samarkand” which, yes please

The level of pumpkin carving to which I aspire (By the artist Michael Cherney) 「忽肚痛不可堪，不知是冷熱所致，欲服大黃湯，冷熱俱有益。如何為計，非臨床。」

An auntroduction!

Wait, "Critical Aunty Studies"?!? I want in. My book manuscript is full of aunties. Heck, one of my chapters is provisionally titled "Big Auntie Energy."

I did not inherit the gene for sports fandom, much as I appreciate its power, but the sport I didn’t quite follow was baseball. Of late I’ve completely lost the thread thanks to the pandemic, a stint as dept chair, and my kid’s health issues, but tonight’s posts are really bringing me back.

@bokane.org my 师妹 who works at the Palace Museum (Beijing) occasionally reports on visits from the palace cats and apparently there is one named 饺子 who takes turns sleeping on everybody’s desks 😁 sadly not an orange cat but a pure white one, so maybe not Gyoza’s brother from another mother

Paging @wendyxu.bsky.social Bada Shanren plushies?!? 🤔

Meta AI offered me a “classical” version of my old phone case (with an early sixth-century empress on it) and I’m fascinated by the implied ideas about “classicism” here, which seems to mean… made of bronze and covered in vines? 🤔

Commenting on student papers which analyze the hunting scenes from the Jiuyuangang tombs, I am suddenly confronted with the problem of Bears In Early Chinese Art. So far the students seem pretty uniformly convinced these are rats, which is giving them an odd take on hunting in the late 6th century.

its a roguelike called samsara and there is only one way to quit

A local Chinese family gave me these paintings of the Tang general Xue Rengui 薛仁贵 and his wife Lady Liu 柳氏. They can’t be very old but I’m kind of fascinated to consider why they were made in the first place, where the little biographies come from, and why they’re shown wearing Ming-ish dress.

Wow, I usually make ma'amoul that masquerade as moon cakes for the great Sukkot/中秋節 convergence, but this is better

I’m about 3/4 of the way done with a large piece of Orenburg lace. Much more and I won’t be able to photograph it on the chaise any longer. I really like the pattern, especially the edge.

On the door of a classroom just now. Not sure I know what the right answer is tbh.

Also I made soup noodles on a very not-souptastic muggy day (I blame the hurricane currently giving us a miss to the north, but also September and October are the hottest months here).

Gift from a student who really has my number. I thought this was going to be tea leaves but it is yellow millet for making my favorite breakfast porridge 小米粥

I have said it before: the best food is often the unapologetic mashup, the unholy marriage of tastes. This is a great town for fusion cuisine, and I have just learned that a local Italian-Asian joint has a dish called Gnocchi Mapolognese (Mapo as in 麻婆), which has gotta take some kind of prize.

It is really fun to be on the sidelines while my children discover the music of the second half of the twentieth century. They don’t listen to quite so much Queen any more, but they’re now on a Fleetwood Mac and Dire Straits kick and it’s great to let them run the music while I’m driving.

Reposting so I can keep track of the replies, which are great. I'd like to listen to more good Mandarin music too, even though as a musician I spend most of my time in medieval/renaissance Europe. And I'm leery of admitting to what I do like, because I'm pretty sure it is kind of basic.

Medieval Buddhist of the Day: This is Lei Mingxiang, a donor I met at Yaowangshan this summer, and her late husband Tongti Qianchi, in 570. I guess by this point they are both late. Anyway the Yaowangshan stelae are all badly eroded so I drew their donor portraits from the rubbing.

THREAD - I stopped posting much about Chinese dramas because I haven't seen many with interesting historical connections, which is mainly what I want to talk about in this space (I haven't given up watching them, and am currently enjoying the Scooby Gang in "Seven Relics of Ill Omen"), HOWEVER:

Twin A makes bagels on a school night 🤩

I think my first choice would be an afternoon in the Northern Wei imperial palace at Luoyang in 510, featuring Lady Xie 謝氏, Wang Su's first wife; the senior princess of Chenliu 陳留長公主, Wang Su's second wife; Sengzhi 僧芝, a prominent Buddhist nun; and then-imperial concubine Hu Chonghua 胡充華.

My kids & husband watched “One Night in Miami” this weekend (Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown meet in the same hotel on a February night in 1964) and it got me thinking about a Chinese painting in an exhibition I organized a long time ago: it was a collective New year painting -

Somebody picked up a piece of palm leaf (the attachment of the leaf, which is like a fibrous sheet of bark) and doodled on it a bunch of little campus vignettes, then pinned it to a cork board near my office.

OMG now I want to see this 😆

New semester, new door card featuring a little guy from @dochackenbush.bsky.social [One word for pangolin in Chinese is… 鲮鲤 línglǐ]

My PhD alma mater. Crescat scientia, vita excolatur, huh? I mean, it's a private school; but education is a public good. We're not here to train workers; we're here to train citizens. Kudos to Clifford Ando for using his platform to great effect.

I successfully set up my courses in the new LMS (based on Brightspace). I know the people managing the transition are trying to do their best, but all the materials presuppose that you are teaching in the LMS and not in the classroom, even though the majority of our courses are face-to-face.

Living with teenagers, you get used to finding things in odd places, but I just found a yarmulke in the freezer and am still scratching my head.

My KID made BAGELS (from scratch). Also including some of his other recent hits (boule, fougasse, focaccia). He is fifteen. @seamus.bsky.social you are partially to blame, thank you for your service.

Actually I managed somehow to get to the finale of Nirvana in Fire, which I’ve been watching with @kateelliottsff.bsky.social and @aliettedebodard.com since January, and the finale of The Untamed, which I’ve been watching on my own since June, over the same weekend and WHOO BOY.

A near-perfect evening. @kateelliottsff.bsky.social came over and taught Twin A how to make aebleskiver, and then we watched the finale of Nirvana in Fire together. A++ 10/10 no notes 😁

Costco is selling the official salmon of the Qing imperial family (ok, it’s actually a Chilean company, but still).

A #TSUNAMI HAS BEEN GENERATED THAT COULD CAUSE DAMAGE ALONG COASTLINES OF ALL ISLANDS IN THE STATE OF #HAWAII. URGENT ACTION SHOULD BE TAKEN TO PROTECT LIVES AND PROPERTY. #TsunamiWarning #HawaiianIslands

Tuesday just got slightly more interesting. 🌊