Recent content on Jasper's books blog
From 中国哲学的特质, it is plain that Prof Mou has a good grasp of issues in both modern European Philosophy and Christianity. This is unsurprising. While Prof Mou studied in Beijing (and never lived in Europe or America), his academic speciality is in Western Philosophy broadly conceived. His undergraduate institution, Peking University, was a leading university of his time, likely the most prestigious…
I published my blogs as a 300-odd-page paperback last week. The process is almost trivially easy: just get ChatGPT to convert the webpage to a Word document, print it as a PDF, and use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to obtain a proof. From research to receiving a proof, the whole process took around two days (with 5 hours of work put in). Printing is done on demand so there are no upfront costs:…
我認為應該。因為時代環境變了，經典需要和其他媒介競爭。堅持要正襟危坐慢慢讀的話，只怕越來越少人會有心機打開經典著作。速讀總比不讀好。 我最近喜歡現代文學，其中的一個主要原因，是因為我認為現在自己的閱讀和寫作都要將貨就價，才真正是表達到我想表達的東西。 無論古典一開始是如何寫成的，研讀古典一般來說都需要一個合適的環境，例如大學或者修道院等等。 但現代文學的創作環境往往是非常不理想的。卡夫卡就是一個典型例子：作為一個普通人來說，他是生活得很不得志。至於其他的作家，成名前往往也十分潦倒，需要在狹窄的生活環境之中擠出一些時間和空間去表達他們想表達的想法。 但調轉頭說，我覺得他們的作品往往是對於現代人不太穩定，以及意義未明的生活的一個合適的回應。…
What is the key difference between writing a great poem and merely thinking of writing one? Before the age of computers and large language models, we might just say “In one case you wrote it; in another you didn’t”. But clearly in your mind there were some internal representations going on even when you are just conceiving of a great poem. Turns of phrases; feelings you want to convey; even…
I picked this up after Chesterton’s Thomas Aquinas. From the distant past, when I was reading a lot of Herbert McCabe, I had heard of Turner: but this is the first time I was reading anything substantial by him. There were some negative Amazon reviews: one complaining of Turner’s idiosyncratic use of the term “materialist”, and another complaining that the book is not as described because it…
Re-reading Smullyan now, I realised the enduring appeal for American Taoists like Smullyan for me is their alien perspective on contemporary Chinese society and culture. In the imperial era, Confucian and Taoism functioned in a closed cultural system where Chinese language and thinking enjoyed unparalleled and implicit dominance. Generations of invasion, migration, and even outright conquest did…
There is something glamorous but even light-hearted about the setting. In the fictional city of T, investment bankers work day and nights to push through an import funding round for a tech company. They may have all fancy degrees, but in the end, the work boils down to Excel sheets (on the junior end) and wining and dining clients (on the senior end). The material rewards are significant, but…
In many ways, crypto enthusiasts are trying to turn the clock back to the era where using computers was itself an exciting and valuable activity. Both a means and a means to an end. Long before Bitcoin and AI, Dung Kai Cheung’s writings have revolved around the use of tools and how it changes the way people see the world. 天工開物•栩栩如真 (2005) is structured around 19th and 20th century inventions that…
DUNG Kai-cheung is a type of author that only colonial Hong Kong would produce. A star student across the board, he chose to focus on the academic study of literature, winning a place to study a BA and MA at the exclusive Hong Kong University, first in classical Chinese literature and then in comparative literature. At the beginning of his career, Dung’s work was academic to a fault. Experiments…
我在一間九龍城的小店裏面發現這本書，覺得作者的經驗很特別，不知不覺就看完了。 從很多方面來說，作者在30歲前後工作假期簽證去澳洲窮遊不是一個舒適的經歷。 根據作者說，她在香港面對了很多嚴重的情緒問題。因此這不是一個Gap Year這麼簡單，而是一個治療自己的旅程。 作者經歷的種種辛酸，不少是常人都可以想見的。 在Hostel的同房鄰居晚上的一番喧鬧； 錢包被人偷偷拿走三分之一的現鈔； 找不到工作，被迫在街頭賣明信片，耍太極賣藝賺錢； 遇上無良劏房房東，把三個人擠進一家只有一張床的房間裏。 但反過來說，作者孤身一人窮遊，有很多經歷也是其他方式不能得到的。例如， 在她賣藝的時候，有一個衣衫襤褸的清潔工人居然給了她一張20澳幣的鈔票。 在不同地方她在sofa surfing的時候，在一位樣貌凶神惡煞，但為人處事極為細心和體貼的大叔家中留宿。…
My impression was that Jack Dorsey was the founder and inventor of Twitter. The reality seems to be a lot more complicated. In Nick Bilton’s telling, the story is broadly as follows: Ev Williams started Blogger.com in his bedroom. When it got bigger he hired a few friends to work on it together. One of these is next door neighbour Noah Glass. Williams then sold Blogger.com to Google for…
Cultural prestige is associated with political and economic power. China and Britain had established traditional high cultures largely due to (1) their historical dominance over much of the world; (2) the fact that learning to speak the language of the elites was important to advancing within society. America is the new super-power, with a high culture that is influential across the world. Apart…
“A balance sheet must balance because what a Business owns must equal what it owes” I always found this puzzling until I realised there is an unspoken assumption: there is an owner to the business that is separate from the business itself (cf. Accounting a Very Short Introduction OUP p.31). This is why retained profits are treated as (positive) equity for the owner. And also how (assuming an…
My memory of attending Moral Science Clubs talks from 10 years ago was that the atmosphere was often aggressive. The audience would be keen to poke holes in the talk and the speaker would come up with ways of fighting back. It was basically a Spanish bullfight with words. It was pleasant to discover that Hallvard Lillehammer’s talk on moral praise and moral performance wasn’t quite…
When you see Bertie “hail a salaam” at someone, you know Ben Schott has got everything under control and could just toy with the reader.
What makes people want to write something that is not for immediate practical use (e.g. school/work report, letters of invitation)? Part of it, especially for literary and philosophical types, is no doubt fame, fortune and the possibility of immortality. Who could resist the thought that perhaps, one day, one’s writing will be pored over by scholars like any little scrap of paper by…
I remember coming across Nozick before as a cardboard libertarian philosopher. My impression of Anarchy, State and Utopia (“ASU”), its main arguments and weaknesses were more or less consistent with what Dworkin mentioned in his Magee interview: Nozick starts from the proposition that individuals have rights and there are things no state may do to them without violating their rights. His arguments…
I only read the beginning and the end of this book in Chinese translation. But I enjoy a central tension it explores. On the one hand Confucianism as a matter of history relied on the absolute power of “the Son of Heaven” for legitimacy and propagation. On the other, Confucians have always emphasised the need for benevolence and tolerance. One resorts to law and force only as the very last…
One of my friends from university joined the Society of Jesus after graduation, and I was privileged to be invited (with A) to join their community in London for dinner. The meal was simple but delicious, and we were given a very warm welcome. It reminded me of my days staying and studying at St Deiniol’s Library (now Gladstone’s library): a community of scholars gathered together at…
The characters in these stories may be drawn from the upper-crust of the English society. But they have one thing in common with 21st century start-ups: everyone is desparate for money. Both plots are driven by the need of hard cash: the leading men needs it to marry the women of their dreams. Founders now need the same to escape the 9-5 and make their lives complete. Even the side plots are all…
[These notes are jotted down long after I read the actual book; the details are more likely than not to contain errors.] In the University in Ruins, Professor Bill Readings(!) argues that the origins of the modern research university lies in Germany, where the idea that a Culture can unite disparate polity polities took hold. In his interpretation, the reason why there are so many influential…
From the time of 詩經, Chinese poets have compared people as passing guests in a wide world that does not age or care for human feelings. According to 吉川幸次郎, 蘇軾 turned this lament on its head: 吾生如寄耳，寧獨為此別。 The world is wide and in no hurry to disappear. We part today; but why think this is the last time?
1 My take is that there is no way one can prove the existence of a Judeo-Christian God by logic or science. In fact, I am not interested in this approach. The writers of the Bible cannot have any idea of modern logic or science, and this approach seems to be shoehorning clear-cut ideas into a complex term with much historical baggage. Instead, the most we can do is to show that the concept of a…
Both women characters, Emma and Lucy, are very likable, each in their own way. I enjoy the idea of Lucy being a 20th century Marie Kondo with an Oxford Maths Starred First: there must still be people like her to help the super-rich enjoy their riches. The book is also a reminder on how modern Agatha Christie was. Even though there were still (some) porters at her train stations, there were already…
I picked up this book when visiting a bookshop with a professional research mathematician. Because of nothing much other than the serendipity, I decided to get it and have a read: haven’t read much popular mathematics in a while. The prose flows well, even if many of the examples the author gives are somewhat familiar even to the interested layman. Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine…
The pen portrait of a top-of-the-line single sex boarding school rings true to me. The girls, the teachers and the headmaster are all convincing, realistic characters. Of the three reveals, I anticipated one, missed the other and am unhappy with the third. But the clues are just the excuse: it is the atmosphere that counts.
Soon after attending a friend’s wedding in Yorkshire, I found and enjoyed Bill Bryson’s “Body, a User’s Guide” in a few days. So when I saw this Bill Bryson classic on the bookshelf, I couldn’t resist taking it down. I had first come across “Notes from a Small Island” some 20 years ago. I hadn’t visited the UK then; re-reading it now feels very…
Detective novels by a chancery barrister where the hero/heroine is a Professor of Medieval Law: I have been hankering over Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar series ever since coming across the blurb. “Thus was Adonis Murdered”, the first of the series, did not disappoint. In some ways the setting is similar to “Friends”: the central characters are 3 men and 2 women, all…
This work of fiction focuses on the political intrigues around cybersecurity and hacking. The author was a cybersecurity reporter and draws inspiration from the (mostly anonymous) sources she interviewed. There are two main stories. In a fictional NOW bank in America, a serious outage has taken place. The top management, paying attention to the issue for the first time, hired an ex-General to head…
Miss Marple is wonderful. After Poirot, it is so refreshing to have a hero that is self-effacing. I also enjoy how the story is narrated by Rev Clement, an elderly clergyman with a young attractive wife. The implicit authority of a COE priest; the slight insecurity of someone marrying a woman 20 years his junior; the gentle self-deprecation of a sensible clergyman; everything is done exactly…
A friend of mine, also called Isabel, is a fan of Alexander McCall Smith. So when I saw “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” in a book corner, I picked it up without much thinking. Isabel is an unusual heroine. She is an independent academic philosopher, just like Schopenhauer: inherited wealth permitted her to pursue the busy editorship of the fictional “Review of Applied Ethics”…
I read the book on a phone screen, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Unlike some readers in “Agatha Christie: 100 Years of Poirot and Miss Marple”, I didn’t try hard to work out the puzzle. It felt early on that many of the clues were just too specific to the time and place: they rely on technologies (letters; chemists’ vials) and a society (class divide) that I don’t…
The film was not what I expected at all. There was not a lot of Tetris and a lot of cold war. Every line from the Robert Maxwell character seems to be as obvious as can be. I wonder whether it was deliberate: either way I enjoyed the comic value! The fact that I watched the film with a Tetris enthusiast added a lot of pleasure to the experience. I wonder what corporate/intellectual property…
I first tried Paradise Lost as a student, eager to dig into all the references and understand the greatness of the great work. That didn’t last very long. The gathering of Demons had too many references and allusions, and soon I was lost in the reeds and lost interest. Yet somehow or other, Paradise Lost came back to my life. One of my colleagues studied English at university and had a habit…
In this short book, Brown seeks to turn our contemporary ideas of happiness on its head. Brown’s target is a certain brand of modern self-help, where an alleged “law of attraction” is put forward to suggest that the more you desire something (money, status, power), the universe automatically responds to your desire and the object of desire materialises. In other words, you need…
I had picked up Fergus Butler-Gallie’s hugely enjoyable “Field guide to the English clergy” when it first came out in Hatchards bookshop, Piccadilly, London. It was the perfect book for the Anglophile. One of the many charming aspects of English elite institutions is the continued presence of the Established Church. Most Oxbridge colleges boast a beautiful chapel, the…
1 How I fell into this rabbit hole (In what comes below, out of convenience I will refer to Ziwei Doushu (紫微斗數) as “Astrology” or “Chinese Astrology”.) I came across Ip Hon Leung’s books about Ziwei doushu, a school of Chinese astrology, quite by chance. I had just started moving from Hong Kong to the UK, but still had a lot of chances to return from time to time. One…
This is a place to collect my long spiels on various subjects, so that I don’t drone on about them with friends.