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Nov. 22nd, 2010 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiants![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
genarti, who is my one-woman nonfiction dealer, lent me Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi. This book is basically the work of an author who ran around for a while collecting as many fragments of Emperor K'ang-Hsi/Kangxi's letters and edicts and so forth as he could find, and then jigsaw-puzzled them into something resembling an autobiography. I'm fairly conflicted about this treatment - on the one hand, it's a cool idea to have a whole book in K'ang-Hsi's own words! On the other hand, it's really distracting to constantly be reading passages and wondering about editorial bias and created context and what a statement might have looked like in its original setting, even moreso than in your usual sort of biography. So there's that.That said, K'ang-Hsi's Thoughts On Random Stuff are nonetheless fascinating. He seems to have been a fairly hands-on kind of guy, for an Emperor - there's a lot of comments about all the times he ends up drowning in the hundreds and hundreds of memos he deals with per day, and how to handle civil service exams to make sure there's no cheating or favoritism (which, awesomely, seems to imply that he actually proctored and graded some of the tests himself; if you thought your GREs were scary, try taking a standardized test GRADED BY THE EMPEROR!) and how to make sure you have all the supplies you need for a campaign and so on. Overall he comes off as very conscientious and very human, with a lot of concern for human life (there's a whole section on the death penalty, and when you should use it and when you should consider mitigating circumstances. Which, obviously, his idea of what should be mitigating circumstances are very different from mine, but interesting nonetheless!) I'd actually really recommend reading it if you're planning on writing anything from a monarch's POV, just because it provides an awesomely detailed perspective of some of the day-to-day concerns of a theoretically absolute ruler.
And speaking of writing: Yuletide! Once I stop flailing about the fact that I have NO DETAILS, NONE, NO LETTER, NO NOTHING, I think I will be pretty okay with my assignment. (This is actually the first year I have had no details at all to work off of! Which I guess I should count myself lucky for.) The difficulty is going to be not writing something utterly generic for the canon and characters, as generic would be very easy to do for this particular assignment and is for all I know exactly what my recipient wants, although it is difficult to tell because there are NO DETAILS, NONE, NO LETTER, NO NOTHING, etc. So we shall see! That said, if anyone else with no details wishes to commiserate, LET US INDEED COMMISERATE.
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Date: 2010-11-22 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:36 pm (UTC)My next attempts
post-therapywent much smoother.no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:43 pm (UTC)AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
What did you do? Friendship?
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Date: 2010-11-22 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:53 pm (UTC)I once got an incest request which, I will say, was waaaaay less squicky than most since the characters were not human, but I still couldn't go there. Instead, I layered on sensual detail so if she liked, she could read in some shippiness.
My other terrifying request was for Godchild, for Cain/Crehador. The problem was that I had forgotten who Crehador was (he's the medium who certainly does seem to have a crush on Cain) and thought he was the circus performer whose brain has been transplanted into the body of a ten-year-old boy. I was so thankful when that turned out to be Cassian and I realized that at least everyone was over-age that I wrote a six-page sex scene involving bondage, Tiger's balm, and erotic asphyxiation.
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Date: 2010-11-22 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:42 pm (UTC)(Well. Depending on the story, I guess.)
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Date: 2010-11-22 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 10:29 pm (UTC)XD
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Date: 2010-11-22 10:15 pm (UTC)SHRIEK.
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Date: 2010-11-22 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 10:20 pm (UTC)This sentence improves my life. :D
The book sounds cool! Though I understand your feelings of conflictedness and share them somewhat. The assembler also translated the text, I assume?
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Date: 2010-11-22 10:27 pm (UTC)Yeah, I am pretty sure he did - though, to be fair to him, there were a couple places in the appendices where he included straight letter exchanges to show what some of the bits looked like in context, which I was glad of. (There was also a really interesting part at the end where he compared the first draft of Kangxi's Valedictory Edict and the final draft put out by his ministers . . . which made it clear that on the minister's part, there was a lot of jigsaw-ing the text and taking bits and pieces of his thoughts out of context!)
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Date: 2010-11-23 02:06 am (UTC)GRADED BY THE EMPEROR!
AHAHA. I'll bet that idea really stressed out the candidates back then. XD
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Date: 2010-11-23 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 06:57 pm (UTC)*twirls mustache*