Posts Categorized: Podcast

Thinking of My Brothers on a Moonlit Night

  Today, we’re looking at one of Du Fu’s poems. We covered one of his works before, but his oeuvre is massive. Here is the poem for the day:       月夜憶舍弟   戍鼓斷人行,秋邊一雁聲。 露從今夜白,月是故鄉明。 有弟皆分散,無家問死生。 寄書長不達,況乃未休兵。   Thinking of my Brothers on a Moonlit Night   The drums of war have cut the roads […]

Zhang Ailing’s Love in a Fallen City

In this podcast we discuss the writer whom Lee asserts is the single greatest Chinese novelist of the 20th century: Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang). In particular, we take a closer look at one of her most famous stories, Love in a Fallen City (《倾城之恋》), and its depiction of the Japanese bombing of Hong Kong.   […]

Junkyard Poetics: Ouyang Jianghe’s Phoenix

One of the more interesting poetry projects in recent years is Ouyang Jianghe’s opus Phoenix, an attempt to capture in print the Xu Bing sculpture, which is a pair of massive phoenixes composed entirely from things found at Beijing construction sites. Lee and I welcome a guest, Brandon Folse, as we talk about how to […]