As many who know me will be aware, I’ve spent a good deal of the last three or four years trying to make some inroads into the Chinese language. This is, in part, related to my various research interests, and in part related to the book I’ve been working on exploring the Yijing, or Chinese Book of Changes, as a kind of Calvino-style literature machine. And although progress has been perhaps a little slow, Chinese being—as China scholar David Moser once famously pointed out—damn hard, I’m fairly happy overall with how it has all been going. I’m terribly rusty on conversation, to be sure—living here in the UK, I don’t have as much practice as I would like—and my reading ability goes up and down, but I can pick my way through academic articles in Chinese, at least on a good day, or if I do it in the morning when my mind is fresh; and I’m finding the experience of getting to grips with Chinese immensely fruitful. And, more to the point, fun.

With apologies for cross-posting from my personal website; but I’m very pleased to have received this morning two copies of the Spring Issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities journal, which includes my essay on “What the Snorgh Taught me about Emmanuel Levinas”. It’s a fairly personal essay/paper about the questions around children’s literature, creative writing, research and philosophy. The paper started out when I began to realise that the process of writing my children’s book, The Snorgh and the Sailor was (whatever Martin Amis might say about children’s literature) one that fed back into my philosophical writing, opening up new questions and lines of inquiry.

Every summer I try and make a point of launching into a Big Fat Philosophy Book that I have, for some reason or another, not got round to reading before. My ideal holiday reading, in other words, is not a thriller or an airport blockbuster, but instead is something appetisingly dense like Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty is my choice for this summer, because this is a book that I have made use of, talked about and skirted round for years, but one that I have not actually ever read from beginning to end.

I’m very happy to have just signed a contract with Bloomsbury for a book about Levinas and storytelling called Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling. The book comes out some time early next year, all being well, and it’s been a long time in the making. It aims to read Emmanuel Levinas, the French-Lithuanian philosopher of ethics, both as a storyteller of ethics, and as somebody who calls storytelling to ethical account. There is an intriguing tension here. On the one hand Levinas talks about ethics (almost despite himself) by recourse to the telling of stories; but on the other hand he raises all kinds of interesting questions about the ethical dangers of certain kinds of storytelling.

Well, it looks like I’ve been found out and my cover as a writer of romance novels has at last been blown. This morning I headed over to LibraryThing.com, where I saw the following:

Dixon’s Bluff, 1993 Sally Tyler Haynes

Now, my German is far from excellent, but if I were to translate Rüssel und Hase, the title on the cover in the picture, I would probably not translate it as “Dixon’s Bluff”. Instead, I would translate it as “Trunky and the Hare”; or, taking artistic license, I might decide that it should be translated as “The Snorgh and the Sailor.” I can’t help fearing that those hoping for intimate moments will find themselves disappointed by the tale of the seafaring Snorgh, in German.