工作要认真，态度要谦和

今天我还在实习中，项目要结束了，能不能留下is a big problem。不过这段时间学习到很多东西，如何作英文报告，如何作ppt,如何分配工作时间等等。感谢一直在帮助我的vita,和恩师游刃。
今天我对面的gg被头儿骂了，这GG于是一上午都用公司的电话跟一个朋友发牢骚，第一次领教了一个男人话这么多。我不太认同这种态度，人只有有积极学习、努力的心态才能进步，不应该抱怨，更不能在工作时间用公司电脑抱怨。每一个进步，是要靠自己的努力的，不然只会饿死。工作了这么久，也不知道头儿对我的看法是什么，snow这个人很活泼，但是只跟他说了一次话，怕怕。可能怕上司是一个通病吧，希望我能有继续实习的机会。

为昨晚在台南地震中的死难者默哀

听到这个消息的时候，心里很难受，这种难受不是同情，而是感同身受。我的家乡，非常著名的就是常常地震，我总是跟人开玩笑说，要是你想在世界地图上找到海城，就找份地震地图，一找一个准。我的童年是在地震的摇篮曲中长大的，有一次地震以后去学校，发现满地都是玻璃，还有一个我还以为会被广播事业献身在地震中呢。最近的一次地震是8月份北京地震，当时我跟我的美国学生在6层做一对一，桌子突然晃得厉害，我跟他（谭浩文）说earthquake !他居然很兴奋地真的吗？晕倒。
其实，我是幸运的，海城在20多年没有很大的地震，只是没事儿小震下儿，我也只当是摇摇床，没有谁在地震中伤亡，据说只有东山农村的一只狗被破墙砸死了。台南地震，很多人失去家庭，失去亲人，失去事业，我的心里说不出的痛，同时也在上帝那为他们祈祷，希望他们生活早日回归正常，找回自己的幸福。
哦，今天还是有一件高兴的事要说的，我那个出版专业资格考试过了，但是很险
科目 分数 合格标准 合格与否
出版专业基础知识（初级） 101 100 合格
出版专业理论与实务（初级） 112 110 合格
谢谢上帝，也谢谢关心帮助我的人们。活着就是一种幸福

硕博词（转自才女张新）

三年硕士五年博，霜染青丝纹上额。十年寒窗难破壁，一朝毕业讨生活。
东西外企疑无路，南北国企人也多。忍看私企门不入，笑闻牛人进院所。
无头苍蝇空扑翼，丧家之犬进油锅。一骑红尘心暗笑，错把据信当offer
汗透重衣梦难醒，一进一退失所措。自思年年求学事，无花无酒亦无歌。
红袖冥冥无觅处，象牙塔中难造车。两处茫茫皆不见，四面碰壁无逃脱。
未经悬梁刺股痛，悔把岁月空蹉跎。今朝有梦今朝作，莫待无梦呼奈何。

三年硕士五年博，身变皮骨腰变驮。昨日豪情遭磨难，今朝两鬓见斑驳。
囊中通货常恨少，腹内草莽日渐多。墙上芦苇浅根底，山间竹笋空外壳。
有心飘洋求深造，无奈拦路有G 托。终日昏昏书中死，彻夜迷迷网上活。
人依电脑哥俩个，情寄足球心一颗。偶有红袖添香事，南柯梦醒愁更多。
不毛之地空求雨，梧桐树矮愧凤落。寄言诸位同窗友，莫效小子这般活。
轻浮小舟难下海，空虚岁月易蹉跎。此中言语皆肺腑，敬请大家细琢磨

the Christmas is at the corner

今天是中国的圣诞夜，全天我参加了北京公务员考试，很娱乐。晚上跟朋友去了后海，见了一位很久不见的老朋友，在她的店里拿了件自由风格的裤子，很舒服。唉，我这种人，在穷时候还这样，但是因为很久以前就跟她订了，所以得讲信誉。
昨天本来打算看公务员考试的书的，可是在网上碰到了我最爱的美国学生，我们聊天聊了很久。他学社会学、心理学和摄影，在杜克的时候我跟他特别谈得来，跟他说起了《暗恋桃花源》，他很感兴趣。最近德国汉学家顾彬对中国现代作家群的评价引起了中国作家的骚动和群殴，不管是不是说中了中国作家的心病，这年头引起注意就算成功。我的这个学生则给了我一篇他写的关于中国女作家陈染的评论，还不错，没准这是将来的汉学家。希望他能更好地了解中国文化，了解中国作家

James Pangilinan

ALIT 233

“Breaking Out”: (of) Space, Time, and Ideas

The literature of Chen Ran has been deemed by many critics as experimental, feminist, exploratory of human nature and marginal psychological states (bianyuan xinli), avant-garde. Her works often are polysemous, multivocal, practicing their own multivalence, and open to external criticism from all sources- state, professional literary, academic, and moralist. Formally, her work reflects influences from western modernists such as Kafka and Woolf. Ideal-wise, her text’s thoughts draw from classical Chinese philosophy to Freud to contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist and gender theories. Needless to say, her works exhibit complexity and depth that play nicely to particular tastes but perplex many, critics and censures included.

This leaves the task of understanding her writings to critics of the moment who stay open to transnational, panhistoric trends. As a critic herself, she actively engages in discourses regarding her own work. Prominent in her critical project and literary work is her theory of gender-transcendent consciousness (chaoxingbie yishi), which she outlined in her 1994 talk in England entitled “Gender-Transcendent Consciousness and My Creative Writing” (Chaoxingbie yishi yu wode chuangzuo). Sang articulates this clearly:

Her definition… in fact straddles two distinct notions. One is the notion of transcending gender, which refers specifically to the ability to choose a partner of one’s own biological sex instead of being limited by the social imperative to procreate and hence, to choose a partner of the opposite sex. The other is the notion of a radical indifference to anatomical sex and social gender that downplays sex/gender altogether” (203).

For her, heterosexuality in its “always already” praxis and consciousness restricts the individual too greatly to the point of infelicitous disharmony, resulting from socialization’s production of negative normative masculinity. This latter premise leads her to idealize lesbianism for its offerings of “real communication” and “mutual understanding,” ideals often more significant than the “essential utilitarianism” of normative reproductive economies (203). In other words, what she values most greatly is love irrespective of sex or gender, just as she claims (her) art exists as and articulates.

In addition to her autocriticism, which grants insights to some extent, others have been busied by her writing. Wendy Larson has argues Chen Ran, while a professed writer in modernist traditions, still engages in contemporary postmodern literary discourses. This should come to no surprise upon considering that some of her masters such as Kafka and Borges, who wrote in experimental ways, as did Joyce, could be defined as antecedents and innovators in postmodernity. However, even accounting this, interpretation of their works as well as Chen Ran’s remain central to this claim. And looking at Chen’s case more closely, as Larson claims, her version merely fashions an awkward postmodernism (i.e., a Chinese simulacrum of western-originating postmodernity, where “Chinese culture still finds itself trapped in interpretations that impose on it older ideas of cultural essence and authenticity,” thereby making pure assimilation of that Other doctrine unfeasible). In practice, Chen’s work is “aware of the imported nature” and its consequent distance from totalization. Instead, it parades “before us semiparodic references to the contexts and paradigms of postmodernity, often to the point of absurdity” (Larson 213). Following suit, Chen creates narratives, which often include (quasi-) postmodern tropes and techniques, uniquely acknowledge and participate in the literary present.

“Breaking Open” offers a pivotal point in her oeuvre, because of its departure from her usual prior “intensely melancholic” thematics. As an exception it voices more optimism and ends more affirmatively, but like her other work this piece is equally experimental, actively pursuing of her theory, and awkwardly postmodern. While critics have commented on this particular story’s importance regarding gender-transcendent consciousness, they by this tendentious reading miss many of its highlights in form and ideas. In its special handling of space, time, and ideas, “Breaking Open” articulates in awkward postmodern fashion its author’s problematic theoretical vision, and thereby signifying more than even former interpretations.

A straight reading founded along lines of Chen’s gender-transcendent consciousness claims that the story’s couple of Yunnan and Dai’er, the first-person narrator, seeks a “breaking open” by constructing a space for female intimacy within their urban milieu. Here, Sieber adds by claiming that the kind of desired space is intellectual, cultural and intersubjective, where “women” as they contest its meaning, occupy a location away from past and prevalent oppression. In sum, this text envisions a positive new space. Yet, despite this interpretation’s instructive power (or utter verity), others posit different definitions of new space. Lauretis conceptualizes gender as representation, as well as self-presentation, that can be enabled, defined, or effected by implementing various social technologies, such as cinema (mass media), critical practices, epistemologies, and mundane micro-level practices (714). Continuing this thread, as representation always go, their creation necessitates abstraction and framing, and as in the cinema the framed representational space presupposes an existing space known in film theory as space-off (i.e., a “reality” external to it; 720). Applied to sexualities and gender, when put to use in avant-garde art, the seamlessness of cinematic representation dissolves, pushing framing limits by including (or recognizing) space-off, the articulation mechanism itself, and the audience. In Chen’s story, transcendence affords more than newly constructed space; rather, more interestingly, the representational space can include space-off-ed gender, sexuality, and the unrepresented/unrepresentable, this being previously and presently excluded. In practice, this latter category of heteronomous spaces, forms, contents and ideas remain predicated on Chinese culture and historic flux. In sum, this story expresses more than mere fictional gender transcendence and narrative end, the positive representation, but also what remains excluded, silenced or yet to be represented- the negative or null. In this regard, the space of feminism as Chen and her contemporaries conceive it have simultaneously actualized previously unrepresented limits and narrative extents while contradicted this inclusive representational space by reconfiguring space-off. This advanced interpretation is complementary with- to some extent- or manifest in the third space of female homoerotic fiction in post-Mao China. This space consists in new inclusive representations from “socially marginal perspectives and/or with a strong diasporic sensibility” (173).

In addition to the representational and its epistemological space, Chen’s text explores the diasporic sense of home- or homelessness. Of its many experimental features, its story space, neither solely representational nor transcendent, is composed as restricted and abstracted. Directly accountable, the female couple only occupies four physical spaces: the airport waiting room, Yunnan’s village, the city of N, and the airplane. Even of these, Yunnan’s village seems to be material only through indirect description. What can this signify? I argue that this dislocation of actual space reflects the influence of Kafka,[1] hence the city’s single-letter name, and possibly Woolf, much like in To the Lighthouse’s spatial limits, but in no way is expressivity curtailed, rather it permits Chen’s, like Woolf’s, use of inner monologue, stream of consciousness, and psychological narration. In effect, space is secondary to the primacy of thoughts, associations, and subjective meanings.

However, space does accrue significance, particularly in relation to historical narratives (discourses) and the postmodern present. The story’s formal exposition can be limited to the first few paragraphs. Space-wise, characterization of the airport’s waiting room immediately addresses the main couple’s alienation from the babble and crowd (i.e., their need for their own space), the prevalence of cross-gender dissatisfaction, socialization’s capitalist material basis, and a concept of time- to be returned to later. This room is revisited throughout the text, to the points of doubling, tripling… over its significances of dislocation and existential space’s uniformity, therefore space’s banality.

An important dichotomy between Yunnan’s village and the narrator’s native city N reenacts and reconfigures preceding modernist narratives during pre-socialist and Maoist times. Comparison comes in the forms of repeated reference to traveling both ways when accompanied by comparing Yunnan and Dai’er. Yunnan’s village, as in Maoist narratives, is made out to possess lyrical, emotional power such as when described as “a mountain town of lingering rain in the lower reaches of the Yangzi River… In this gray, hazy, little town by the side of the river, even the sunshine is dripping wet…”- natural vitality and magic seem infused in this impressionist canvas (54). Or, it out rightly is idealized, such as, when the narrator dreams of their intimate creative space, a vision distilled into Tao Xian’s couplet; in contrast, she downplays N as “an emotional wasteland full of people chasing after fame and fortune” (62). This dichotomous evaluation, a reversal of some modernizing discourses, does not however come into full agreement with a socialist one: absent are instructive peasantry, character-building labor, reeducation. Substituted for that, is an idyllic vision that in its fullest expression translates into an intimacy with rural space through Yunnan’s manifest sense of home, a sharp difference from Dai’er’s dispossession.

Chen, through the narrator’s view, offers a surreal, postmodern perception of urban space. In order for her to experience the city of N, she must expose herself to the surges of frenetic energy, noise oppressively set in harmony by a “male rhythm that has become a public standard,” architecture in the extreme, white noise- or- in a word, a labyrinth of “contradictory feeling in which there is ambiguity and resistance at the same time” (70). As a result, she lacks deep feelings for her hometown. To her, N like its signifier is empty and could only be lived as a consumer experience: “It is a bottle of perfume, brand Love, stored away for the longest time, which, with increased age and experience, has completely lost its potency. It is a person waiting without hope” (61). Yet, against her better judgment, despite absence of feeling, she resolves, in facticity, to attempt to inhabit this superficial space by carving out their third space: “My mother is always awaiting for me with her door ajar. It is decreed by fate that I cannot sever my ties with this city” (71). Like in preceding narratives, the city becomes common signifier or discursive metaphor for explaining China in midst of rapid development. Comparing the present narrative to the past’s, occupying the city comes at a diasporic price.

Beyond the historical dichotomy of rural-urban space, this diasporic sense of home finds its greatest signifier in the airplane’s metaphoric space. In accordance with the early twentieth century modernizing discourse, this transportation technology and physical mechanism embodied China’s modernization, as lucratively exploited in advertising campaigns such as calendar posters. At that time it was used a positive sign- a signifier of progress- as well as in its advertising form integrated within consumer capitalism. Chen borrows this latter idea, except applies it with contemporary pessimism against late capitalist consumption: “They all had struggled forward to have their tickets inspected as though it were a matter of rushing to purchase a special amnesty certificate” (49). Like the Love perfume of branded home intimacy, analogy makes parody of salvation-purveying consumption, travel, and cosmopolitanism. This criticism through parody is contrasted by Chen’s silent, sparse description of the plane’s interior; the plane merely serves as minimal surface to the deeper disjunctive psychological narration. In effect, when the plane is used repeatedly, the plane’s nondescript space- in addition to Chen’s general usage of space- contributes to her nonrealism, experimental aesthetics, self-reflexivity (or ever present cognizance of writing as artifice). However, the plane as space transcends this; it develops its own significance as diasporic metaphor. When considered conceptually, the plane’s space manifests the very vicariousness of space- its contingency and instability. While seemingly of substance (i.e., self-existent), in motion the plane possesses no specificity, being constantly spatially in flux. Towards the story’s end, before Dai’er’s dream, the plane is torn apart: “Without coherence or order, objects emerge in riotous profusion… All of a sudden the plane starts to shake… Sounding as if possessed by demons, they seem to say: Run away from here, quick, run away from here, as fast as you can” (66). Clearly, these impressions and this orientation towards spatial incoherence, the plane’s spatial concept delivered to its Borgesian extreme, express both a burdening sense of dislocation and an ever-present distance from uniform finitude.

As traveling requires traversable space, it also assumes time expenditure and change. The plane not only invariably imposes an infinite, differential configuration of space but also it implies resetting temporal ordering, in a similar historical (or social) manner as well as existentially (or as an individual). Again the first paragraph offers pan-narrative input; besides purchasing amnesty, the crowd engages in a mad rush to board, in a manner that contrasts distinctively from the main couple (49). This first instance signals the variability of time. Three times exist in this passage: the crowd’s, the plane’s and the couple’s. As well as these, historical time, namely that of Post-Maoist China, is present, suggesting a time for change, synthesis or creation of new from old. Notably, this Other time seems to be articulated throughout the narrative in the couple’s. Their time to some extent seems to be intertwined with an existentialist conception of time (i.e., that of the very immediate, fleeting but disjointed present, availing anything’s occurrence). This understanding, for Chen’s characters as well as the generation of Chinese they signify, is very empowering and affirming of potential. However, this conception comes not in purity but is hybridized when mixed with the couple’s concern and partial dependence on its maternal forbearer’s approval. Key instances of both temporal conceptions occur during the narrator’s proximate placement of ruminations on Neil Armstrong and Dai’er’s subsequent dream. The former exemplifies semi-historical personal reflection on solitude (discrete individualism) and its attendant discontents, whereas the latter offers means and approval of defying that solitude. Strikingly similar, both feature a sense of mortality: mortality, an ultimate and exclusive solitude, where the decedent (or as its Dasein) can dash to death, escapes the mundane, and finally encounters authenticity and truth. In other words, death offers a form of transcendence. The plane as unstable as its sense of space offers an equally variable, non-uniform conception of time.

Time is less philosophically dealt with throughout its narrative. Preoccupation with the historical present, with its urgency, and its potential- thematically set in the story’s exposition- combines with a consciousness of the relatively recent history through Chen’s frequent use of situational encountering. This technique, where the couple seek out or chance upon situations with implicit historical references or explicit allusion, enables her narrative to participate in generational, retrospective discourses, and this inscribed consciousness that usually includes critiques, thereby qualifying her writing as actively responsible. Concretely, one situation of this form is born out of the couple’s impulse to visit Zhazidong Prison, the place where Sister Jiang, an idealist fighter against the Nationalists, was incarcerated. This occasion that resonates deeply with nationalistic as well as state feminist sentiments is commented on as not just through a pure expositional account, rather the situation’s light is refracted through feminist concerns, spatio-temporal distance manifest as disgust, and the couple’s romantic cares; making the situation an encounter. In other words, both the discursive experience and immediate situation qualify the experiential totality. For example, they become befuddled by the question of justice:

“With all our acute intelligence, we could not grasp the dialectical relationship between human nature and justice. We could not understand how two words like ‘honorable’ and ‘ridiculous’…could now come within an inch of each other” (63).

What they question are the Maoist nationalistic narratives that before seized hold of Chinese citizenry but now must cope with the past. Those narratives, now discredited, perplex persons of the present; that is, personal narratives play into experiencing past narratives. Furthermore, they are reinscribed in these personal ones but in ways productive of a historical account. This strikes an (awkward) postmodern chord, where history no longer is a total account, rather it reads as a totalizing metanarrative, a representation framed by/in the situational circumstance.

Personal situational encountering reoccurs throughout “Breaking Open”; there are talks of qipaos, Mei Yanfeng and bodily skylines, Neil Armstrong, and President Nixon. This latter example offers another striking example of an awkward, playful postmodernity present in Chen’s writing. Humorous shock value is composed through withholdedly telling an anecdote about Nixon. First mention comes before the narrator’s expressed intention of creating “Breaking Open,” their women’s association, and continues after this brief but important diegetic information. Chen’s narration cuts back to this semihistorical turned personal account of her relation to a generation. Besides its comedy, what is interesting is Chen’s use of celebrity as point of departure for her addressing history. One receives the feeling that while not modernist in future orientation- “An old clock hangs on the wall. She [Yunnan] is reluctant as usual to wind it up, as if she did not believe in time and in the future”- an apprehension, and therefore critical distance, in perceiving the past exists (56). For her, which Chen executes through a shift to third-person narration, looking at the past, both with its oppressive childhood home setting and its revolutionary ideological excess, requires associative use of the present-day signifier of celebrity. Effectually, the meaning and value of the signified is lost to semiotic play: in sum, this use of surface replaces deep involvement with the past.

Engagement with the past, an ineluctable factor or a priori in all cultural production, manifests itself in the gender-transcendent dream sequence through its inclusion of Yunnan’s mother. A special relationship is shared between the narrator and this maternal figure. Regarding history, it maintains partial linear continuity by allowing an intimacy and exchange across generational gaps of experience. This bond, according to Sieber, furthermore produces and constitutes maternal approval between mother and daughter, thus dissolving any psychological hang-ups or complexes that posit conflicting interests (21). She also proposes that maternal wholehearted approval contrasts with former narratives’ aggrieved breaking of mother-daughter links experienced during the Republican period. The product of this emotionally, intellectually, historically reconstructed bond is gender transcendent female self-determination; mothers and daughters and lesbian lovers unite.

With maternal sanction, Chen’s concept of gender-transcendent consciousness is not yet fully a carving out from former of a new ideal, actual, temporal space. This (re)configured space finds again ample articulation in the airplane. In a comic compromise, reflecting a deferral of meaning and distance of idea systems (awkward postmodernism), the narrator invokes an ideal of gender illusion in relation to sexual difference:

“I am not using the restroom in the sky. Up there one is too close to God; earthly matters- regardless whether they concern us women or them men, especially everything connected to the sex organs- are best taken care of on the ground, because God has no sex, and we should not disturb such a being” (58).

Chen uses this to express her ideal of gender/sex difference erasure, or irrelevance. She continues when she discusses the Edenic myth of human origin. In the former, actual spatial elevation, mechanically enabled by the plane- a sort of existential metaphor- suggests the earthliness of sexual/gender difference. And in the latter, in the narrator’s reflection on origin as a representation, she denies reproductive economy, the procreation drive. Both in Christian and existentialist terms, this escape from the fall in the worldly (or) quotidian affords for self-determinacy/ salvation. These concurrent soundings, applied by Chen Ran, afford gender-transcendent consciousness.

As Sieber and Sang argue, this theory that Chen puts forth in her criticism and fiction, possesses its own theoretical limitations through irremediable self-contradiction. Simultaneous to advocating genderless love and downplaying of the social imperative to procreate she idealizes lesbian sexuality and love. In “Breaking Open” her characters frequently recall or meditate on masculinity, proffering negative examples, such as their assessments of murderous male poets, false male intellectuals, and -most facetiously- punctuation-mark-named dogs engaged in power contestation embodied in their romantic intrigue. As concomitant to this, idealization of their self-constructed space, love, and sisterhood, reiterated in their affirmations of love, is inscribed plentifully throughout the text’s body. Herein lies the paradox of Chen’s theory, as Sieber words it: “a desire to transcend gender difference and desire to imprint that transcendence with female specificity” (21). Additionally as problematic as this contradiction, Sang points out the theory’s “uneasy relation to the logic of transgenderism” (206). While her theorized consciousness claims the gender/sexual unimportance, this consciousness takes gender/sexual differences as always already identities, thus threatening more peripheral identities and neglecting variable genders and sexualities.

These criticisms cast gender-transcendent consciousness as contradictory, limited, and productive of its own issues. In the end, she must as in the story invoke, albeit attended with critiques, so-called universals or transcendent principles like love and humanity, which as she considers them are like art: apolitical or depoliticized. Following this reasoning, perpetuates the invocation of ideals, leading to questionable claims upon further questionable claims; in other words, leading to infinite regression, of sorts. If this is not the case, then in the least the author by offering her own theory merely contributes her own personal myth (ex, of love)[2] or vision to broader social and cultural discourses. This proposition conforms nicely with her avowed modernism, which as argued above, actually performs itself as engaged in and reflective of an awkward postmodernism.

In conclusion, Chen Ran’s “Breaking Open” truly works multivocally, multisemously, and multivalently within itself. To read it is to experience a representational play of space and time and ideas themselves. As experimentation it demands extended representational boundaries; boundaries that create, crush and cave in on themselves. In story form it mediates in an existentially timed manner on the very present historical moment, rife with its conflictions and ambiguities.

Works Cited

Chen, Ran. “Breaking Open.” Trans. Paola Zamperini. Red Is Not The Only Color Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Ed. Patricia Sieber. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield pub., 2001. 49-71.

Chodorow, Nancy. “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation.” Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities. UP of Kentucky, 1994. Rpt. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell pub., 1998. 769-774.

Larson, Wendy. “Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary China: The Awkward Postmodernism of Chen Ran.” Boundary 2 24, no. 3 (fall 1997): 201-223.

Lauretis, Teresa de. “Technologies of Gender.” Rpt. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell pub., 1998. 713-721

Sang, Tze-lan D.. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. U of Chicago P., 2003. 163-174 & 200-222.

Sieber, Patricia. Introduction. Red Is Not The Only Color Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Ed. Patricia Sieber. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Inc., 2001. 21-22.

Bibliography

Inwood, Michael. Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

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[1] Germane to Chen’s usage: Kafka’s allegories and parables also feature spacelessness that makes them (seemingly) unbeholden to particulars while still proffering significance of both universal and larger specificity.

[2] This idea of “personal myth,” culturally producing and performing of usually compulsory heterosexuality but also sexualities in general, refers to an idea used in Chodorow’s “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” (771).

博客？博士？

最近一直在实习，发现硕士是个很尴尬的角色，好在已经结束了。曾经挣扎地想读个博士，认为这才是我应该走的路，把自己的研究继续下去，但是一个多月的实地演练，发现重要的还是实践，回头想想研究生们作的论文创新性很少 ,而且有实践意义的也很少。博士，在一段时间还是远离我吧，先来作个博客，这个比较实践。
昨天被Vicky问起，能不能作一个AE，她说觉得硕士不一定愿意作很琐碎的事情。Indeed，我从来没把自己当个硕士，一切都从大学毕业小本开始，在PR领域，经验比学历更重要，我没有实践经验，我就要从最底层做起。这种想法是我在大学期间学生会工作学到的，要想进入更好的水平，要从基础做，看到实际存在的问题，才能在策略阶段有更好的Idea。
唉，工作依然很难找，尤其是硕士。还是作个博客，资源共享，思想共享的好。
－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－
我是一个网络游行侠，哪里有乐趣就到哪里去，世界就是我的家（这是麦克卢汉告诉我的，呵呵)

找呀找呀找工作

最近在一个国内前十的公关公司做part-time，收获很大。前两天跟我们的team－leader聊天，说这个公司已经跟宏盟合作了，突然我一不小心进了一家梦寐以求的4A，开心中。在这个地方，我觉得自己快速地成长，每天工作都很兴奋，以前一直很茫然，不知道找个什么样的工作，现在觉得找到了，就是PR。我做的是digital group，是公关业目前的前沿业务，大家也都是在探索中，我的leader和partner教会了我很多东西，很喜欢跟他们在一起。在这段日子里，我渐渐地开始喜欢写作了，想把自己工作中的点点滴滴记录下来，以备后用。今天我们公司来了一个宏盟跳槽过来的女孩儿，问我学了中文的意义是什么，我想了很久说，可能三年硕士对工作没有什么明显的帮助，这种影响是潜移默化的，我从创意型思维到逻辑性思维，跨度很大，但是受益匪浅，这样的益不是一时看得出来的，是一种文化的沉淀。去蓝标的二轮面试中学到一个思想，认为做公关最重要是能沉下去，飞起来，我想三年中文练就了我沉下去的心吧。
对了，今天，接到了蓝色光标的第三轮面试通知，听说还是群面，但是是终面，估计是5：1。熬了一个月，终于到了出结果的时候了，心里七上八下。不过能走到最后一轮面试，已经出乎意料了，毕竟跟我同面的人都是北大、人大、中国传媒的优秀人才。希望能进入蓝色光标，本土公关业的老大。
还有，最近电脑无数次中毒，让我深受折磨，真希望身边有一个电脑高手呀。我的工作是公关，不是网络安全，这样下去，我可以去公司做个IT了。

学术腐败要从娃娃抓起——21岁外企美女副总吴莹莹真相 （忠祥原创，必属佳品）转自天涯

　　21岁的北师大“才女”吴莹莹，不久前成为美国企业Topcoder的“亚洲区副总裁”。一轮新的造神运动又兴起了，这个还在上大三的女生，成了北师大和教育部力捧的新一代张海迪似的人物。　　　　
真相如何呢？　　　　
从新闻报道中，我们大约可以知道，这个女生有“一百多项发明和三项国家专利”，在人民网的“2006年全国大学生年度人物评选”是这样介绍的：　http://stu.people.com.cn/GB/65534/4736353.html
　“北京师范大学心理学系的2003级学生吴莹莹同学，用她二十年的青春生命奏响了一曲动人的旋律。十五年的发明历程，她创造了一百项发明和三项国家专利；十二年的竞赛道路，她为师大实现了国际大学生程序设计竞赛历史上奖牌零的突破…”　　　　
“用十年的时间，吴莹莹同学在发明创造的路上，不停地向前迈步，然后取得了累累硕果。这些硕果是：100项发明。在吴莹莹同学的100项发明中，“OPEN书系快速检索装帧技术”、“速查字典及其检索方法”以及“动态计数印章”三项发明已经获得中国国家专利，同时还有更多的作品在不断完善和申请国家专利的过程中，一些作品已经开始申请国际专利。”　　　　
可以说，这“100多项发明和三项国家专利”就是吴莹莹造神运动的核心材料，这100多项发明都是什么呢？什么可以称作发明呢？我们小时候就试着尝试一些小手工艺品，风车，小桔灯，是否也可以称为发明呢？至于到底有多少“发明”我们无从考证，只能凭着吴莹莹一张嘴，说是啥就是啥了，不过在最近的一次搜狐访谈中，吴莹莹这样谈自己的“发明”：　　http://news.sohu.com/20061209/n246922261.shtml　我所有的发明都是源于生活”　　　　主持人：那么在你做的这些多发明里面，你还记得你当时做第一个发明的时候，你是基于什么样的一种想法做了这样的发明？　　吴莹莹：其实我觉得我所有的发明都是源于生活的，都是对于生活所得出的，像我的第一个发明，自吸水花盆非常的简单，小的时候跟我爷爷住在一起，爷爷就经常一早一晚拿着一个小水壶浇花。那个时候我问爷爷，为什么需要每天都这样浇花呢？爷爷告诉我，必须要一早一晚的浇，才会让它的土壤随时的保持湿润，然后我牢牢的记住了爷爷对我说的，要湿润，而且要随时湿润，然后我就想，可不可以用一种办法，能够自动的达到这样的效果，我爷爷就不用那么累去每天一早一晚的浇花了，然后那个时候正好在《十万个为什么》里面看到了一个有趣的小实验，《十万个为什么》就说，你拿一个脸盆，装满满的一盆水，在脸盆壁上搭一块毛巾，那个小小的毛巾就会把整整的一脸盆水引到外面去，那个时候我突然想到了爷爷花盆的灌溉，然后就想可不可以用类似的方法达到一个同样的效果。当时做了很多的实验，开始在旁边放了一杯水，之后经过多次改进，做成了这样的形式，里面一个小花盆，外面一个大花盆，两个花盆之间填满了水，通过一根线连结其他，这样的话就可以保持随时的湿润。’’　　哦，我们明白了，原来这就算是“发明”了，接下来吴莹莹开始大谈她的舞蹈事业，她的读书事业，再也不提所谓“一百项发明”了。　　从“100项发明”难下结论，不过“国家专利”总有案可查吧？诸位不了解专利的可能不知道，什么人什么东西都可以申请专利，只要没有跟以前的专利重复，一个创意，一个想法，一个外观，都可以申请国家专利，只要交几百块钱申请费，我就是把我本科的毕业论文申请个专利也无不可。　　　　在中国国家知识产权局专利检索“吴莹莹”作为专利人，我们得到如下结果，真是大开眼界：　　http://211.157.104.66/sipo/zljs/default.htm　　
序号 申请号 专利名称 　　
1 00113090.0　　 字典检索方法及其速查字典 　　　　
2 99233230.3　　 带钩的勺子 　　　　
3 00223593.5　　 速查字典 　　　　
4 01275751.9　　 洗衣、洗澡、洗碗水回收再利用装置 　　　　
其中“带钩的勺子”是湖北省的一个吴莹莹的专利，“带钩的勺子系一种日常生活用品，由勺柄（１）、勺瓢（２）、勺钩（３）组成。勺柄（１）与勺瓢（２）固定连接成一个整体，勺钩（３）连接在勺柄（１）上。其优点突出，能方便地挂在碗口上，防止勺子滑落碗中，没入汤里，有利于清洁卫生。其结构简单，容易制造。”　　“ 洗衣、洗澡、洗碗水回收再利用装置”是北京海淀的一个吴莹莹的专利，我们可以认为并非我们所关注的吴莹莹。　　所以，吴莹莹同学有案可查的专利，仅有两项“字典检索方法及其速查字典”，和“速查字典”，都是四川省成都市文庙西街106号的吴莹莹的专利。实际上仅能看作是一种专利，描述如下“摘要： 本发明属于一种字典的速查方法及其速查字典，特别是适合汉语字典和英语字典的应用，也适用于词典和带章节的教材、文献等。通过设置在字典侧面的更换码、字母标识和音节标识查找单字或词的第一和第二个字母确定单字或词在字典中的具体页码位置。采用本发明的字典检索方法及其速查字典不但能提高字典和文献的检索速度，而且字典不容易损坏，便于携带。“　　大家看明白了吧，其实就是一个小检索字符，用来查单词的第二个字母的页数的！所谓“OPEN书系快速检索装帧技术”、以及“动态计数印章”无案可查，也不知道是什么东西，这个字典检索专利申请时间是2000年，即吴莹莹在15岁的时候，而据称，这个OPEN书系专利曾“2004年获得第四届“挑战杯”全国大学生创业计划大赛金奖”。2000年的专利有记载，而2004年的却无记载？是不是很奇怪？　　“夺得第二十九届ACM 国际大学生程序设计竞赛亚洲总决赛银牌，实现了师大在国际大学生程序设计竞赛历史上奖牌零的突破”，更是奇哉怪也了，请看：　　http://www.sjtu.edu.cn/newsnet/newsdisplay.php?id=2971　　
29届ACM国际大学生程序设计大赛总决赛是上海交大一举夺冠， 上海交大主页总不会很无耻地窜改事实吧？“上海交通大学是唯一获得此项大赛冠军的来自亚洲的大学，而且今年是他们第二次夺冠。”参加比赛的复旦大学、北京大学、香港大学分列第6、11、12位，何来北师大？　　　　“当年11 月15 日，她当选ACM 亚洲助理主席，成为了第一个进入ACM主席团的中国人，继而应邀出席第三十届国际大学生程序设计竞赛世界总决赛及其最高首脑会议RCDS.”,哈哈，这就更荒唐了，ACM是跟IEEE齐名的学术机构，还没有中国籍教授能够进入主席团（美籍华人有），一个大三的小毛丫头，就可以进入ACM主席团，何况她的专业并非是计算机。事实真相在Topcoder主页说的很清楚了：　　
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=pressroom&d2=pr_102506　　
" is a member of the American Psychology Association and the Association for Computing Machinery” ，member 的意思就不用说了吧，每个人交一年的年费几十美元就可以享有会员权利，收到会刊，看这帖的人说不定很多都是ACM会员或者IEEE会员。　　　　　　

总之，透过吹得天花乱坠的新闻稿，包括这个重头吹嘘的“2006年全国大学生年度人物评选”，没有几句话是真的，我们可以看到一个真实的吴莹莹，一个有点小聪明，从小喜欢鼓捣个小发明的，长大后有些活动能力的女孩，被一个名不见经传的螺丝壳公司聘用的仅有一个人的“亚洲区副总裁”，经过包装之后，成了一个100多发明的女科学家，ACM主席，国际知名大企业的副总裁，ACM编程大赛的银牌得主，简直就是神童在世。　　　　朱涵大家还记得吗？在学术上，我不相信神童的存在，更不相信在中国会出现，吹得越高，将来打破真相的时候，跌得就越惨，我相信，吴莹莹的神话，持续不了多久了。　　　　


水按：新闻的不实性在网络中变得无处可藏，不知道这则新闻是否属实，至少引起人们对日常信息的重新关注

论文笔记

最近常常写博客写到中途戛然而止，有客观原因（比方刚才，我已经写完博客，但是掉线了，我只能重新写。）但是更重要的是心理原因。写博客需要很大的勇气，就像我开博一开始就贴的帖子，你要不断的更新，同时也要写出自己的思想来。在找工作的忙碌中，我开始忽略自己的心灵，不敢面对本初的我，于是写博中途停止，最后放弃，这跟我不敢对上帝祷告是一样的。
博客，结束了信息流掌握在少数人手里的时代，开始了真正的公众传播，但是这样的传播形式是好是坏目前还无法下定论，但是博客乐观者们，比方方博，在奔走四处，为媒体源代码的解放运动而摇旗呐喊。博客带来了媒体源代码的开放，而麦克卢汉很早就提到“媒介是人体的延伸”，博客恰好成了人体的延伸，成了人们虚拟主体自由施展的场域。