[This space has  been quiet because I've been fact-checking and otherwise researching my Unsucky Gilgamesh chaptersso far (which I hope to publish as a book when finished) and, since school started two weeks ago, writing for my students. The below is one such piece for my History of China students. There's no reason other students [...]

[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.] ~     ~     [...]

A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes: I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators? And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. [...]

[S]peaking about his own spiritual development, Confucius said: “At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I could stand. At forty I had no doubts. At fifty I knew the Decree of Heaven. At sixty I was already obedient [to this Decree]. At seventy I could follow the desires of my mind without [...]

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind. John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about [...]

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the [...]

I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been swimming, on alternating days throughout this closing semester, in the history of China and the history of “Western Civilization” (irony quotes due to the fact that it really starts in Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, none of which are “Western”), and what [...]

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), [...]

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]

A different kind of wealth. [I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.] *     *     * It’s probably [...]