General Resources and Reading Suggestions

[x_los]

This is a post to drop titles of and links to relevant reading material, be it nonfiction, poetry we might want to collectively hit up in future or read on our own time, or fiction (including trying to hustle up fresh blood for your latest reading/watching obsessions, and information as to where one can find such titles).

We'll talk about poetry and nonfiction as a group before adding it to the Great Plan. 

This post will be made public once the privacy discussion is resolved. 

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Classic of Poetry wiki article

[x_los]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry

Kind of a basic beginning, I know, but gotta start somewhere. Just some notes and questions on this:

'Whether the various Shijing poems were folk songs or not, they "all seem to have passed through the hands of men of letters at the royal Zhou court".[13] In other words, they show an overall literary polish together with some general stylistic consistency.' This is interesting bc it really parallels what happened with the collection of fairy tales&folk songs during the big heyday of 19th century romantic nationalism in Europe, the collection and streamlining/prettification (sometimes outright invention) of texts, with a 'vox populi' authority attached to them.

'Characteristically, the parallel or syntactically matched lines within a specific poem share the same, identical words (or characters) to a large degree, as opposed to confining the parallelism between lines to using grammatical category matching of the words in one line with the other word in the same position in the corresponding line; but, not by using the same, identical word(s).'

I'm not exactly following this?

'Disallowing verbal repetition within a poem would by the time of Tang poetry be one of the rules to distinguish the old style poetry from the new, regulated style.' okay, so this is a change we should see as we move from this to the Tang material. I wonder if in part it's to do with a transition from collected sung Odes to primarily-written/encountered first in writing poetry?

'The works in the Classic of Poetry vary in their lyrical qualities, which relates to the musical accompaniment with which they were in their early days performed. The songs from the "Hymns" and "Eulogies", which are the oldest material in the Poetry, were performed to slow, heavy accompaniment from bells, drums, and stone chimes.[9] However, these and the later actual musical scores or choreography which accompanied the Shijing poems have been lost.' interesting to keep in mind for fic in canons like MDZS where music is super important--though the Fantasy China, BCE with Potatoes timeline does make locating anything in this tradition kind of a crime of opportunity.

Oh cool--basically as early as the Ming dynasty Chinese scholars realised phonology changed significantly over time due to Classic of Poetry no longer working quite right.

So mostly it seems we don't know who wrote these, but a lot are in female PoV (which may or may not indicate female authorship).

The 'textual history' stuff is particularly interesting.

The Confucian allegory section is VERY interesting, kind of similar to the baroque 'how many angels on the head of a pin' over-reading I associate with some scholastic and kabbalistic interpretive practices. Since we've had 8 centuries now of '...really?', maybe we won't even run into these readings in nonfiction materials.

Should maybe comb this bibliography later for good guides/broadening texts.