#ReadingTheStone S2 Episode 5: On Love and Death in the House of Jia
[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 ones...
11 Feb 202357min
#ReadingTheStone S1 Episode 11: On Goethe v. Proust, Private v. Public Reading, and Hexes
[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 youthf...
10 Feb 202355min
#ReadingTheStone S2 Episode 4: On Daiyu's Near Demise and Recovery, and Zen Koans
[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 ab...
7 Feb 20231h 3min
#ReadingTheStone S1 Episode 10: On Poetry in the Garden, Gaokao exam questions, and is Baoyu a F-boy?
[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 com...
7 Feb 20231h 1min
#ReadingTheStone S1 Episode 9 On Embedded Refrains and Incipient Desire in Hongloumeng
[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 sedu...
1 Feb 202357min
#ReadingTheStone S1 Episode 8 On Grand Prospect Garden, and The Functions of Naming
[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. E...
28 Jan 202359min
#ReadingTheStone S2 Episode 3: On Tragedy, Failure, and Creativity - and Daiyu, of course
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 "impossibili...
28 Jan 202355min
#ReadingTheStone S2 Episode 2: On Daiyu's Anguished Dream, and Final Season Vibes
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 cou...
23 Jan 202346min