summercomfort | (no subject)

Today was ... okay. The Kiddo is sick, so I stayed home from work in the morning. Thankfully it's mostly work periods this week, so I don't have to prep any classes, though I *was* hoping to get some grading done and go into the break a little more prepared. Oh well. The 9th grade essays aren't coming in until Thurs/Friday anyway.

I'm teaching a new elective this semester, called Chinese History through Material Culture! It's been super fun, being like "Hmmm.... I feel like talking about Mawangdui today, lemme look up some videos. Oh, and this means it'd be a good day to talk about lacquerware!" Unlike the other classes that I teach, I've actually taken more than 1 college class about it in the past, so I'm not like... scrabbling for understanding in a panic, which has been... basically my entire teaching career lol. Is this what my colleagues feel like all the time? (They're all PhDs so when the guy who is an American labor historian teaches the class called "Capitalism and the Apocalypse", he knows what he's talking about. Meanwhile I'm like "oh shit the other 10th history teachers want to do Neoliberalism for the last 2 weeks of this semester. What the heck is that, and why does everyone keep saying the words Breton Woods?") But anyway, yeah, getting to talk about bronzes has been awesome, and prepping for the class, while hectic, has also involved me scanning a lot of giant art books. The class is small and cute, and I'm definitely winging it as I go, but the kids seem to be enjoying it. :) Hopefully they'll have good reviews about the class and more people will sign up next year so that it becomes a sustainable elective. (Thus far my Asian American history elective has been ~12 people, and this class is currently 10. I think electives really need to be >14 to be considered "healthy" by the school.)

Spouse has been very thoughtful and helpful tonight, re: having dinner ready, and taking the child so that I could retreat upstairs at 8:30pm. I should deffo do more evening/bedtime tomorrow.

Currently trying to decide what to do tonight. I should probably do the prepwork that I didn't do this morning, and maybe start grading the WWI paragraphs. But also I kinda wanna start a new crochet project, or maybe poke at a fic or smth. And I haven't drawn in sooooooo looooooooooong

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I want to take that class. It sounds awesome.

haha, thanks! It's definitely been a fun ride -- trying to walk the line between too much art history vs too much history (me: should I nerd out about my favorite Han emperors? Or just look at beautiful tomb art?) :DDD

I second this! I ended up taking two Chinese art history classes while getting my master's (not through any particular plan, just a matter of what sounded the most interesting/useful of the three courses on offer each semester) and really enjoyed them. One was on Chinese art through the lens of Western collectors and the other was a special pandemic class where we read six new books in Chinese art history and got to have Zoom conversations with the authors.

that's so cool! Any particularly good books that you enjoyed?

The one that stuck with me the most was The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World by Anne Gerritsen. I'm not particularly interested in pottery, but she tied it in to so many other aspects of Chinese history and life that she made it interesting.

One that I didn't like so much but that occupied a lot of my attention because I had areas of contention with the author was Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China by Li Yuhang. The author took at face value accounts of women splitting their hairs to make finer strands for embroidery. I spent much more time than I should have researching this and was unable to find any proof that this ever actually happened.

The other books from that class, which I thought were good but didn't really make so much of an impression on me, were:
- Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry by Lara C.W. Blanchard
- What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming by Aurelia Campbell
- Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman
- A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing by Rachel Silberstein

aaaah! That's super helpful, thank you! I love porcelain and chinoiserie and that book sounds fabulous! The Gender and Interiority one and the textile artistry one also sound intriguing -- I'm trying to build a collection of good secondary sources for the students to read/explore! :)

*sends kiddo healing vibes and reads with delight about your teaching*

That class sounds so awesome! I wish I'd gotten a lot more education about Chinese art and history in general. I've started doing my own self-study for Asian American history as well.