(no subject)

[skygiants]

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.

Comments

[skygiants]

Oh, haha, I think I remember that assignment of yours. Good to know - thanks! (I am not in quite as bad a boat as you were that year - I do have two non-related characters, and I am fairly sure, thanks to AO3 tags, that the recipient wants them shipped together! So that's something.)