Word: porcelain
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...when Nien Cheng's harrowing Life and Death in Shanghai was published in 1986, the bamboo curtain was just lifting on the decade of madness that had seized the People's Republic beginning in the mid-1960s. Cheng was an improbable survivor of Chairman Mao's brutal campaign, a porcelain-boned diplomat's wife who spent the precommunist years swathed in silk. Yet as she recalled in her best-selling account, she would learn to "fight, whatever the price...
Jason E. Sandler ’12 is hunched over a toilet in Pennypacker, explaining the best way to reach every stretch of porcelain, chrome, and tile in the bathroom. He pauses to describe his summer molecular biology research that could aid in early detection of atherosclerosis, before pointing out how best to eliminate soap scum from shower walls...
...Louise is caught in a daydream.It is the reader most of all who feels caught in a daydream, shuffled between the novel’s ever-changing “I”s and shifting versions of events. Goethe is a smiling dog who eats sandwiches. Goethe is porcelain statue. A suitcase is packed by Randi. A suitcase, topped with the woman on page eight’s ubiquitous white hat is packed by Bet. And by Sampel. These recursive moments extend throughout the book, resonating with the more formal structure of poetry or music, which so often relies...
...Chinese élites, we often forget, have had economic and cultural links with Europe for 300 years; by the 18th century, the Chinese were producing porcelain for the European market and avidly studying European art and architecture. In particular, says Mitter, the first half of the 20th century - that period when Shanghai was at its peak, but which is routinely dismissed in the thumbnail history - is "really important; the questions about their society that Chinese are asking now are very similar to the ones that they asked in the 1920s and 1930s." (Read "Why China Keeps Picking on Sarkozy...
...almost nothing more boring than listening to somebody describe his headaches. (See first paragraph.) But it's a challenge to which Levy rises. He collects headaches like rare butterflies, and he has a rare, possibly singular gift for fitting words to them: "The clear one that feels like cracked porcelain around the rim of the nose. The wriggling one that feels like torn fiber optics under the left temple. The strange, empty one that makes me feel like the front upper left part of my head has completely disappeared and been replaced by crisp...