No, no, just thought I'd taunt you with it. (Check your email in a second or two. Also, I will get back to you -- just having to space stuff out because I'm not getting on well with screens at the moment.)
Yes, I, er, do know that people move around. I was thinking of people who can't see their identity because they're in the middle of it -- vague thoughts of stuff like 'the English only become English when they meet Americans'. But in a way I'm the wrong person to try to talk about this, because I've never had to. I do believe that one's ideas only began to have proper shape and strength after one has spent a lot of time expressing them and exposing them and letting them get beaten around a bit.
I suspect people are probably only equally comfortable everywhere if they have a lot of power. Unless it's having learnt by necessity to have to adapt to everything, which isn't what I first think of as comfort.
No, my goodness, I've barely read any theory, and what I have, not in a long time. I spent a certain amount of time in my late teens around -- er, I suppose you'd call them Chinese intellectuals, although that (incorrectly) sounds awfully exciting. There was someone who'd published a bestseller in English, and someone who wrote poems in Chinese, and then they were good friends with an artist whose family still lived in China but who'd gained some recognition in France (I think), and so on and so forth, so you can probably imagine the kind of conversation I was suddenly exposed to. And when I started thinking about buying and selling. And then, I suppose I was also devouring a lot of postcolonialist crit and flicking through everything that looked interesting in a big academic bookshop I used to visit. But now I just have directions for enquiry, a headache, and whatever I've caught on the World Service. And, uh, apparently, a fearsome ability to make stuff All About Me. Oh dear.
no subject
Yes, I, er, do know that people move around. I was thinking of people who can't see their identity because they're in the middle of it -- vague thoughts of stuff like 'the English only become English when they meet Americans'. But in a way I'm the wrong person to try to talk about this, because I've never had to. I do believe that one's ideas only began to have proper shape and strength after one has spent a lot of time expressing them and exposing them and letting them get beaten around a bit.
I suspect people are probably only equally comfortable everywhere if they have a lot of power. Unless it's having learnt by necessity to have to adapt to everything, which isn't what I first think of as comfort.
No, my goodness, I've barely read any theory, and what I have, not in a long time. I spent a certain amount of time in my late teens around -- er, I suppose you'd call them Chinese intellectuals, although that (incorrectly) sounds awfully exciting. There was someone who'd published a bestseller in English, and someone who wrote poems in Chinese, and then they were good friends with an artist whose family still lived in China but who'd gained some recognition in France (I think), and so on and so forth, so you can probably imagine the kind of conversation I was suddenly exposed to. And when I started thinking about buying and selling. And then, I suppose I was also devouring a lot of postcolonialist crit and flicking through everything that looked interesting in a big academic bookshop I used to visit. But now I just have directions for enquiry, a headache, and whatever I've caught on the World Service. And, uh, apparently, a fearsome ability to make stuff All About Me. Oh dear.