Golden West Review

RAND Report: Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences, and Strategies for Deterrence

Long day behind. Long day ahead.  Still can’t sleep. So watch I the street.

Dreaming of rest In my iron and glass nest Yet happy and calm And dreading the dawn

— Pudong, Shanghai 21 January 2014

Writer’s Friday: Advice from Great Modern Writers

What sleep and plagiarism have to do with the poetry of experience and the experience of poetry.

Source: Advice on Writing from Modernity’s Greatest Writers – Brain Pickings

It looks like I will get a little time to sit down and write this weekend, so I am getting my head into the game with a little advice from the greats, courtesy of Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings.

I’m ordering the books…

Today is the birthday of an icon in California, Cesar Chavez.

Eight years ago, I posted a link to an article in The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanigan reviewing Miriam Pawel’s exhaustive and thorough biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez. Pawel’s effort to tell the full story of Chavez’s life and work was rigorous, clear-eyed, and ultimately iconoclastic. The portrait that emerges challenges three…

How a visionary scoundrel created Woodland Hills in the 1920s

In 1922, Victor Girard set out to transform a cow pasture into a Moorish-themed country getaway with nothing more than a promise and other people’s money.

Source: How a visionary scoundrel created Woodland Hills in the 1920s – Curbed LA

  This explains SO much…

Newsom Begins to Kill the Future

Newsom cites costs, delays for limiting rail program to California’s central valley.

Source: Calif. Gov. Newsom Wants to End High-Speed Rail Program to Link LA and SF – TheStreet

There will never be a better time to build a high-speed rail network for state, and we should get it done. If the current project is poorly managed, we should either rethink it or replace it.

The only people who should…

In life, there are no minor characters: only other people, and if each of us is the protagonist of our own story, we are also the reader of others.

— Emily Allen, Ph.D, Associate Professor of English, Purdue University

Brilliant. Emily Allen’s lectures make me want to go back to college and study literature.

Going through my old tweets I came across this one from December 2008:

“Apropos of nothing: Is it me or has Gawker gone from funny to mean, boorish and rude?”

Now, two years after the site was dead and buried, The Guardian is reporting that there are plans afoot to revive it next year.

Here’s a thought: sometimes when something dies, it dies for a reason, and it is better to leave it dead.

The Ides of September: Ebbing Mao, Flowing Mao

The visage of Chairman Mao Zedong has hovered over my own three-plus decades of studying, working in, living in, and writing about China, and I have found myself deeply conflicted in my interpretation of the man. Neither the lickspittle propaganda panegyrics of Edgar Snow nor the splenic vitriol of Jung Chang managed to sway me. There was always something missing in the simplistic…

In Defense of Joy Luck

I read a review in Slate today that quoted a detractor of Amy Tan’s seminal novel The Joy Luck Club dismissing the work as “the Panda Express of Asian-American lit.”

As someone exposed to that particular sub-genre long before Amy Tan inked a deal with a publisher. I found that the more I learned about China and the more Chinese I spoke, the better I understood and appreciated Maxine Hong…

Sunset at the Academy

The Academy is worried about the waning relevance of its signature event. Based on the nominees to come and a way-too-early forecast, it may be right. But are the new changes the right fix?

Source: In the Year of ‘Black Panther,’ the Oscars Are in Panic Mode. Should They Be? – The Ringer

My favorite quote from this:

The Oscars are “not a meritocracy, it’s a subjective popularity contest voted on…

Take Me Out to the Bar Game

“The Dodgers suck!”

He’s all the way across the room, and he says it in a voice loud enough to quiet O’Tooles for a moment. This is a Chicago sports bar. It is Game One of the National League Championship Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers are in the middle of teaching the defending champion Chicago Cubs a lesson in humility. The bar – indeed, the whole city – is wound so tight the air thrums as…

I have at last finished my extended binge of all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The series has aged remarkably well, to the credit of its cast, its crew, and the legion of scribes who ensured an upward trajectory of plot-lines and issues that lasted almost to the very end.

The watch-through gave me a chance to understand and appreciate aspects of the show that I had missed…

Bonfire of the Narcissists

While it is disheartening to watch the hollowing-out of the Great American Journalism machine, especially in these dog days following the passing of an innovator like Tom Wolfe, there are moments when I must wonder aloud whether some of the culling might be for the greater good.

A few moments ago a colleague forwarded to me (and about a dozen others) a notice that GQ was laying off a clutch of…