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T&Cs
Danmei Society for the Study & Egregious Misuse of Chinese Poetry & Literature
I sincerely hope he doesn't lash out at me with sick floetry
--Josh Groban, performer of the lyric odes, ‘The Tweets of Kanye West’
Purpose:
A rag-tag international group of people loosely aligned with danmei fandom(s) (I think mostly MDZS/CQL folks, but I don’t know everyone yet?) wants to study classical Chinese poetry. There are a few reasons: for something to do, to write more informed fanfic, to rectify a lacunae in our poetry knowledge, to practice Chinese, or due to graduate-school over-education poisoning lingering within us like Mei Changsu’s terminal woobie illness.
New members: Right now, we’re a smallish group of under 15 people, I think about half and half diaspora-Chinese and US/UK-based Western fandom. I’d like to keep it small for a while, so we can feel out a format that works for us/get momentum going. So at least initially, let’s collectively discuss additions to the group before just telling friends?
Materials:
I’d like to preface this by saying this is not my specialism, at all. I’m neither a poetry nor a Chinese cultural studies expert, and I’d be really interested in firming things up with input from people who are more informed about either!
I think it might be nice to start with:
Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry, or http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?l=Shijing
This body of around 300 poems is sometimes called the “oldest collection of Chinese poetry”. (The second site is a bit difficult to navigate.)
After that, maybe:
The Poetry and Prose of Wang Wei, free pdf, Chinese and English: https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/534167 , and/or
the Tang Shi: http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?l=Tangshi&no=0 (“The most popular Tang Poems collection might be the so-called 300 Tang Poems compiled by Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu. It is so popular that many poems in it have been adopted by Chinese language text books of China's primary schools and secondary schools. Some of the poems in it are normally regarded as must-recite ones.”).
I’d eventually like to cover, additionally or instead of poetry, reading the Six Classic Novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels), but that’s something to work towards if we can make it through poems, and if there’s interest.
PLEASE SUGGEST ANYTHING ELSE WE MIGHT WANT TO COVER! I’m particularly interested in stuff we can find in both Chinese (for those of us more comfortable with that, or looking to improve in it) and good English translations (for those of us with no Chinese). I’d LOVE a good general stylistic overview of change over time, if there is such a thing. I prefer to locate stuff in context if possible, because that helps me retain information/engage with it.
If the content we’re reading deals with themes of sexual assault or self-harm, we’ll attempt to CW that accordingly. No TERF shit, homophobia, racism, Trump voting--exercise best judgement/no slurs/don’t be an arse, and we’ll leave it at that until there’s emergent need to nail down specifics. Please let me know if you’d like to revise this--it’s not my forte, but let’s make a reasonable effort not to ruin anybody’s day in the poetry club, ffs. Just because Ezra Pound was a big fash does not make it cool.
Other Material:
It’d be nice to have optional relevant journal articles or whatever, maybe a couple a month, or one nonfiction book over two months, to discuss. Forestofglory has been doing some great on-topic material culture/sociology reading, for example.
Speed:
I don’t want this to be a nightmare graduate seminar wherein everyone feels pressured to read 400 pages a week to keep up. I also don’t necessarily want to spend an entire year reading a slender volume of 300 poems.
I’d suggest we work through a chapter or two of this a week (so week one: Zhou and the South, possibly also Shao and the South), so about twenty poems in these two chapters? We could revise up or down from there, if we find this isn’t the rhythm for us. There are about 31 chapters total in collection, so we’d be looking at around 15 weeks.
Please let me know if you have other suggestions regarding speed.
Format Considerations:
The Discourse: We want sortable tagging, navigability/browsability and searchability. We want ways to group texts together by author, collection, genre, etc. We want to be able to comment on individual poems, and to thread discussions. We want language support for Chinese and English. We want a platform that doesn’t require a blood sacrifice to join, which is also easy to keep using.
Privacy: Some people may prefer to have all these discussions be totally unviewable to people not in the group. For my own part, one of the things I find super annoying about Discord-era fandom is the way information gets squirreled away in someone’s private friends-group, the online answer to a middle school cafeteria lunch table, and so fandom has the same repetitive isolated conversations 30 times when doing so once would have been more salient (and then we could have collectively moved the fuck on). So I can understand not wanting to Expose Yourself being possibly wrong about poems because everyone is a personal brand now or whatever, or wanting varying privacy settings. But a) if we don’t spread this around, no one will come search out a small community, and b) I think it ‘generates value for the stakeholders’ (kill me) to have such content searchable/readable for interested people joining the group later, or just looking to learn. I am open to other perspectives here--just salty about Discord, sometimes.
Browsability for later members: See above. It’d be good if someone who hops in in three months has any way of looking back at what we said about earlier poems, if they want to catch up/see a point someone made about idk, horses in Tang poetry.
Language: Ideally, people would be able to have discussions in Chinese or English on this platform, without either language dominating the proceedings/making people feel like there’s not space for the other.
Bear Porridge Temperature, or flexible participation: No one likes feeling like they’re talking too much or feeling pressured to hit a minimum participation level. Given the week or poem, people may vary in the amount they’d like to say. We’re looking for a format that accommodates both chatters and lurkers, preferably in such a way that the habits of one group don’t strain the patience of the other. There should be no obligation to say you’re taking a hiatus/stepping back from the group if you don’t have time or spoons at present (like the sort of class where no one has to ask permission to use the bathroom, because we’re all adults). Equally, it should be fine to jump back in if that changes for you. If people only feel like reading/have time for a few of the week’s poems, I want a platform that enables them to just talk about the material they got to--no gods no masters no homework.
Time: Members are based in a wide variety of timezones with widely variant schedules, and arranging discussions which depend on any shared meeting time is thus not very workable.
Oscar the Grouch’s Trash Can: There should be a place to say any AU thoughts that occur to you/apply this to your fandom(s), because we love both litcrit and Mess.
Format Options:
Twitter:
Pros: lots of people have one, easy to use images, hashtags, variable privacy settings, a good way to get attention/joiners
Cons: hard to moderate, not everyone’s twitter is a fandom space, time sensitive, anyone can jump on your hashtags, character limit could get awkward, clumsy threading, awful searchability, a good way to get attention/joiners
LJ/Dreamwidth:
Pros: many people still have one, variable privacy settings for groups (though not individuals so much), sound tagging/curation/threading mechanisms, definitely easy to pop fandom material in a corner for that, has an app (though a kinda wonky one), not too time-sensitive, easy to moderate, DW at least has chinese posting functionality (we checked), browsable (the search function exists but is meh)
Cons: old school/legacy platform, hard to drop images, setting up an account takes 5 min but this may be an access barrier, which of the two would we go with? (one member says: “DW is more stable and I think nearly all of fandom has moved off LJ at this point, while there are at least some active people/comms on DW”)
Email Chain/ListServ:
Pros: very invite-only, very private, not too time-sensitive, limited DIY kinda threading, searchable but not browsable
Cons: old school as hell, hard on newcomers, threading is ONLY what you make of it, no great way to stream conversations for content or language, meh with images, hard to moderate
Private Reddit:
Pros: “would have threaded comments in perhaps an even easier format than dw, has a functional mobile app (unlike dw; however, i think they try to push you to the app which is annoying), can be invite only, but once access is granted all the history is there”, possibly slicker interface than dw/lj, easy to moderate (?)
Cons: “i assume for most people it would be a separate account / new medium (though survey would show if this is true)”, I know Reddit is a vast ocean but somewhere on that ocean there’s a *lot* of Nazi pedophiles so--it has kind of a bad rep, I’m really not at all familiar with it?
Discourse/Slack:
Pros: private, good searchability (though difficult to browse back-content), some comment threading on slack but not discord, indefinite information storage on discord but not slack, good with images, can have Channels, easy to moderate, can use Chinese
Cons: time-sensitive, searchable but not really browsable, not very welcoming to joiners or legible to passers-by, piss-poor threading, not really designed for conversations about set topics people go back to over the course of a week/drop several sentences on, which platform do you go with
Please contact me if you have additional ideas on this.
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Anyway, I thought I'd ask before clicking the 'join' button! I don't want to just come kramering into your comm, especially if you're trying to keep things small/ manageable still. 8)
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