I made this website http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.php for mystory, entertaiment discourse. Ulmer's assignment in this chapter is to do a website that documenting a movie or a TV that one watched during his/her childhood. It seems that by doing this, he tries to use a potential analogy to connect entertainment discourse with cerntain periods of memory. Is it a way of doing a conceptually spacial conversion like what virillio do in his book? I could sense what he is trying to make his students feel here when I was doing this assignment. My entertainment discourse documented a Chinese TV series, which has a special postition in my childhood memory:Dream of the Red Chamber, which was adapted from the novel with the same title. As one of four China's great classical novels, Dream of the Red Chamber has been adapted to movies and TV series many times. But the one I introduce is generally acknowledged as the most successful one which created great sensation in the 1980s in China.
This TV series was produced in 1985, and it almost has the same age as me. When it was first shown on TV, I was too young to understand it. The only vague memory is my family sitting before TV together, having snacks while watching it, a cozy picture. Then the memory jumps to the middle school. I had a lecture of this novel after school one day. I was moved almost into tears.I set up my mind to read it. It has five volumes and almost 200 chapters. Plus, it is written in classical chinese (before 1919, all the chinese writtings use classical chinese). It is a challenge for me at first and I spent alomst a year to finish it. Then I found that it is such a brilliant work that you would never feel boring no matter how many times you read it. It is like a deep hole, you can never reach the bottom. The research of it has become an independent field (called redology). The whole book includes 30 main characters and 400 minor characters. Each of them has distinct features and detailed psychological description,which makes you feel like they were live people around you.
There are hundreds of brilliant poems in this book. One of my favorites is "Song of the Burial of Flowers" (葬花吟). I found the English translation of it (Please see the second subpage of mystory web http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.ph) I do not think this translation accurately reflects the poetic imagery it describes, but I still want to express some of my own feelings based on this translation. I especially like this sentence: "I hold a burial when you die today, But there’s no telling when I pass away.Others laugh at me that have buried thee, Who will be the one that shall bury me?". Sadness, everything around us is "Nichts", no matter how glorious they once were. I did not understand this when I first read it. But as time goes by and my experiences get enriched, I find that many shining things are like shooting stars, shifting fast and finally are not there anymore.Like flowers, they bloom and wither, or the earth, the galaxy and even the whole universe has a day to end. People's life, compared to them, is nothing but a moment. Humans, from this sense, have nothing different from other beings. I see an obvious Daoist spirit from this poem.Chinese Daoism pursues "Nature and Man in one". It believes that humans as a part of the nature would return to the nautre when we die.All the rules of the nature apply to us no matter how strong our self-awareness are. Thus, nature was positioned highest (even higher than gods), unlike western culture, which stresses the importance of spirit, such as Descartes's "I think, therefore I am", Nietzsche's will to power, Hegel's absolute spirit,etc.
Actually, when I was doing this assigment, I suddenly realized what Ulmer wants us to feel. I was recalling my past with my present thoughts, but my present thoughts are based on my previous memories. I was documenting the memory about a digital formed TV series, but I was storming my mind by the undigital formed mental action, and the sparking point could be anything including an entertainment work. Thoughts can run through the time and space,
like shadow, the further you are from the light source, the longer the shadow could be.
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