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Welcome to our NotAPodcast NotAClass Saturday chats on #ReadingTheStone - an experiment in collectively reading the 18th century Chinese masterwork Story of the Stone, aka Dream of The Red Chamber 紅樓夢 (Hongloumeng). Episodes are unedited and recorded live on TwitterSpaces or Zoom - follow Twitter account @ReadingTheStone or hashtag #ReadingTheStone to participate. To listen in chronological order, please take note of 'season' and 'episode' number. Additional materials housed at readingthestone.com. With Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Wai-Yee Li, Ann Waltner, and friends.
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We didn't quite manage to chat at length about Persuasion as we had planned, but we definitely shared a few stories for Kate! Original grapes Eily, Jen, Yazmin, and Eileen were back, but a few of Kate's favorite Lowellians also joined us: Tina, Ona, Ned, and Howard! We gave Howard a bit of grief for not having seen us in so long (and we gave him a lot more grief for his freakishly youthful Dorian Gray self). We shared tales of Mass Hall and Lowell House and freshman expos and sophomore tutorial and water polo and lemon chicken and Howard almost burning down Lowell House (I totally forgot that).To quote from the assigned reading that we didn't quite get to:'My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.''You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.' Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
The grapes return for another episode of 'Stories for Kate.' This time we do a deep dive into Martha Coolidge's 1983 indie classic Valley Girl, starring a young Deborah Foreman and Nicholas Cage. We talked about aspects of the film that we still love (eileen: still the way NC kisses, swoon; Jen: the storytelling; Yaz: the character of Julie), and aspects that make us cringe now; and, a surprising revelation from Eily. Plus the music! the music! Still one of my all-time favorite soundtracks, from The Plimsouls to Modern English to Josie Cotton to Psychedelic Furs.Listen to the end for some bonus Kate love life content!Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
#ReadingTheStone Season 3: We have ventured a bit far afield from Story of the Stone and 18th century Chinese mansions for now, as Season 3 will be stories for (and about) Kate - in which we talk about her favorite books and films and men - and eagerly await her emendations and rebuttals. Episode 1 Our Foundational College-era Romances, from Room with A View to Valley Girl to Pride and Prejudice to Dirty DancingThanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on March 25, 2023]"The Fellowship of the Stone" (thank you to one of the episode guests for our new sobriquet!) reconvened for a post #ReadingTheStone wrap-up episode. We welcomed a panoply of new-to-the-group friends - all Hongloumeng scholars and teachers - Paola Zamperini, Canaan Morse, I-Hsien Wu, Carlos Rojas, Emily Wu, Steve Durrant, Scott Gregory who dropped in to discuss their own origin stories and current research interests in Story of The Stone. We heard from several members of our group, too - and their experiences reading The Stone together this past year. Ann, Waiyee, and Eileen concluded by discussing future thematic episodes that we'll be hosting in the coming months, now that we have come to a conclusion of reading the story proper. Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 3-11-2023] We recorded our first #ReadingTheStone Saturday chat on April 2, 2022, and now nearly 12 months later, we say farewell to Story of the Stone, as we reach Chapter 120 together. In this episode we explore the various 'happy endings' presented at the end of the fiction, and wonder how and if they responded to the questions posed by the text at the very beginning.But we're not quite done with #ReadingTheStone! - next Saturday we will livestream from Boston, and we'll also be continuing with occasional future episodes on thematic topics - check back in with us, and we'll also keep you posted!Thank you to all who have joined us in this adventure - Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen are deeply grateful.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 3-4-23]“Before one disaster is over, here’s another!” Pretty much sums up all the chapters lately. - DaniOur heroic trio Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen are reunited (thank you Shelly!) for the penultimate episode discussing Chapters 110-115, alongside the rest of our #ReadingTheStone community. A wide-ranging conversation today from Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness to Everything, Everywhere All At Once - but also a deeper dive into the notion of qing 情 as we encounter it in this story and in Chinese philosophical discourse, thanks to Wei and Waiyee. Several character deaths explored - Faithful, Xifeng, Grandmother Jia, and Adamantina - as we head to the end.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 2-25-2023]Waiyee and Eileen had other commitments this week, but Ann led the #ReadingTheStone group in a rich discussion of Chapters 105-109, on the dual plot strands of Baoyu's marriage and also of the Fall of the House of Jia, and whether, even for those with power and money and connections like the Jia family, there might be an limit-point to their ability to evade the justice system of their time. Many fascinating and overlapping strands this week on the exorbitant price of sea otter pelts in the early 18 century (thank you Kate!), the family's list of corruptions and Xifeng's culpability, personal messiness and public prominence (Stephanie's early work experience with Ted Kennedy informed her thoughts here!), whether Baoyu's trajectory might make for an anti-bildungsroman (thank you Shelly), and why it seems impossible to contemplate harmonious polygamy as an outcome for Baoyu Baochai and Daiyu in this fictional world, despite its acceptance in the 'real world' and in other instances in this story (Steve and Ann and Elena all weigh in here). Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 2-18-23]As #ReadingTheStone enters its final dozen chapters, we find ourselves ruminating over the postlapsarian state of things: the scattering and banishment of most everyone from Grand Prospect Garden, Xifeng's decline and Baochai seemingly being groomed to be the next Xifeng, the ethics of appeasement in a large social structure, and the desultory state of the Jias after Daiyu's death and Baoyu and Baochai's coerced union. We also finally give the paterfamilias Jia Zheng 賈政 his due - and the group has a lively discussion about all things Jia Zheng, and ponder the story from his point of view.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 2-11-2023]The theme of this morning's #ReadingTheStone live chat began earlier, with Kate's Twitter poll on where readers fell on The Baoyu-Daiyu-Baochai ship, and whether Daiyu's quiet off-stage demise in the midst of a wedding was unbefitting the exit of a central character. Some other forked paths of conversation centered around Chapters 96-100 of Hongloumeng: Daiyu's final utterance, the business of Baoyu's lost jade, idealized polygamy, destroying traces of oneself as gesture of moral purity or willful self-destruction, bowderlizing sad endings to please one's audience, and of course, muzak. Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 2-4-23]#ReadingTheStone discussion centered around Chapters 91-95, though we began the conversation where we left off the previous Saturday, on Daiyu willing her own demise by refusing to eat. The group discussed how Daiyu is absolutely the main character of the final 40 chapters, and whether this is yet another element that marks the difference of the Gao E sequel from the Cao manuscript, or whether this Daiyu-centric narrative was there all along. We also chatted about Xifeng's daughter Qiaojie (and Grandmother Jia's view of how girls should be educated), Baoyu and Daiyu's "Zen koan" exchange, and the great reversal of fortune for the Jia family in Chapter 95.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
In last week's episode we agreed that the last 40 "Story of the Stone" chapters were giving final season wrap-up-all-the-loose-threads vibes, but perhaps our #ReadingTheStone chats now do that too.We circled back to the topic of one of our first conversations - on failure as generative of creativity, a theme that begins this novel and also structures a particular ethos of reading the text.Discussion of Chapters 86-90 ranged today from the impending doom of Baoyu's marriage, the "impossibility" of Daiyu and Baoyu as a good match, sharpening depictions of officialdom and venality; to the transition from the lyrical to the melodramatic in HLM; to some thoughts from Steve's prison class, to incomplete narrative or linguistic understanding as a mode of learning ("falling in love with things in layers, before you fully understand them" - Elena's beautiful phrasing); to finally, this insight from Shelly: "Today's #ReadingTheStone (Chapters 86-90) was even richer and more heart-warming than ever. Sometimes digging deep into old classic texts is the most contemporary, and necessary kind of mental and moral activity one can muster." Indeed.Join us next week as we soldier onwards to Chapters 91-95. Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
The #ReadingTheStone community forged ahead into Chapters 81-85 today, and we encountered so many callbacks to earlier moments to the point that some of us felt that they were giving final-season wrap-up vibes. Many threads and characters' fates are resurfaced, in anticipation of all coming to a head: Baoyu's return to studying for examinations, further mentions of the Jia family's financial excesses and the precarity of their fortunes being wrapped up in Yuanchun's place in court, and of course, the Baoyu-Daiyu-Baochai love triangle. Thanks to Elena, we spent some time pondering the details of Daiyu's dream - prognosticatory and Freudian avant la lettre.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
#ReadingTheStone had our first Saturday chat of the new year, on January 14, 2023. Last we left off, we had read up to Chapter 80 - and in this first session of the new year, we discussed the textual history of Story of the Stone, how readers and scholars have differentiated between the first 80 chapters (understood to be definitively penned by Cao Xueqin) and the remaining 40 that make up the entire text. Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen are joined by our stalwart reading group members in a wide-ranging conversation on authorial vision, definitions of fanfiction and fan sequels, consistency of tone between the two sections, canonical authority, and English-language translation choices for the book's title - as well as our own personal encounters with Story of the Stone over the past year of reading together.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on July 2, 2022]After a lovely first #ReadingTheStone (virtual) face-to-face meetup as part of the Duke APSI Book Club in late June, we returned to our Twitter Spaces live chats in early July, and also dove back into reading the text proper. Eileen revisited one of her favorite moments of multimodal reading at the end of Chapter 23 - Daiyu's encounters with snippets of famous stories of love. The group also had a lively conversation about where Cao's narration of youthful emotion might be placed on the spectrum from Proustian nostalgia to Goethe's depiction of Young Werther's in-the-moment fervid passions. Other threads begun on that week's Twitter threads and continued in the live chat include: Bao Chai's cattiness, how Hawkes' decision to not begin the English translation with the authorial preface changes our perception of the text, magical hexes and our understanding of them, and Xue Pan fanfic potential?? Early summer was a time for readerly fancifulness, it seems!Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Originally recorded on 6-11-2022]Episode 10 saw us ranging widely, though we nominally discussed Chapters 17 to 21. First, we chatted about all the buzz over the 2022 PRC college entrance examination (gaokao) essay question on Dream of the Red Chamber - over tweets and in our live chat this week, we discussed a) whether one needed any knowledge of HLM to answer it, and more important, b) if the question was a fair one to pose to 17 year olds under extreme pressure. The #ReadingTheStone community mainly saw it as a question of translation - literal or interpretive? Conversation about translational choices of course led us back to David Hawkes and his rendering of the poems in these chapters - does the author (and translator) calibrate the quality of the poems to the varying poetic skillsets of our young fictional characters? And as ever, Baoyu and his slightly dubious distinction between love and lust was a topic of discussion, too.Please note: as our first zoom meetup on June 25, 2022 was not recorded, this was our last recorded #ReadingTheStone chat for June 2022.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Conversation originally recorded on 6/4/22]Our 9th week of #ReadingTheStone was lively and wide-ranging both on Twitter and during our Saturday live conversation . Now that the imperial consort's visit has concluded, Chapter 19 seems like a narrative refrain, in showing us the maid Aroma's return visit to an albeit far humbler natal home. We talked about HLM's frequent doubling of characters and narrative beats; the way the author often presents genre tropes - scenes of flirtation and seduction - but circumvents them; and 'incipient but unfulfilled desire' as central to how HLM proceeds. Finally, we picked up the lively Twitter discussion that week of translation choices that David Hawkes makes - see readingthestone.com for some screenshot excerpts of the Battle of the 'Watercress'![Episode 9's image is of the young David Hawkes in Beijing]Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
[Conversation originally recorded on 5/28/22]Our eighth #ReadingTheStone conversation took us into the construction and naming of every nook and cranny inside Grand Prospect Garden, aka 大觀園 Daguanyuan, the future home of Baoyu, Daiyu, and all the young people in the story. We talked about naming as possession and naming as care, temporal fluidity and compression in the world of the novel, and the aura of danger and alterity within and without the Garden. Including special guest Prof. Emily Yu of Barnard.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
#ReadingTheStone Episode 7 was supposed to be a continuation of our discussion of the education of Baoyu, the young scion of the Jia family - but Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen were diverted by questions about the 'creation' of the extraordinary Jia daughter-in-law Wang Xifeng. From her keen knowledge of maths and household economy, to her minimal literacy (certainly in comparison to the other high-status young women in HLM), to her casual cruelty – Xifeng properly stole the show this week.Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
#ReadingTheStone Saturday live chats are back after a week's hiatus, and in this episode Waiyee and Eileen discuss the history of interlinear & eyebrow commentary in Chinese fiction and possible resonances with 21st century online fanfiction community practices; crossover fic potential with Pride and Prejudice; fiction as pedagogy - what is a bad reading? who is a misguided reader?; sexual transgression in the private schoolrooms and in the family mansion; and whether the hapless Jia Rui and his fatal obsession with the mirror is the ultimate stand-in for the hopelessly addicted HLM reader. Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
Our fifth Saturday chat continues the past week's conversation on Baoyu's sexual initiation - both in dreamland at the end of Chapter 5, and in the 'real world' at the beginning of the following chapter. Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen chat about Granny Liu 劉姥姥, narrative spaces as seen by outsiders and interlopers, and reader/writerly identifications. Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.
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