Because they publish writers like Eliot Weinberger.
Because one learns, in its pages, things like:
The T'ang invented toilet paper, which was viewed with disgust by foreign visitors. They invented gold plating, true porcelain, and the magnetic needle; they excelled, as might be expected, at cartography. During the T'ang, the Chinese acquired their taste for tea, which quickly—and typically—became so refined that one connoisseur wrote a treatise on the sixteen ways of boiling water and their particular effects on brewing the leaves.
And can find quoted, in the same Weinberger
The wind in the wu-t'ung startles the heart, a lusty man despairs;
Spinners in the fading lamplight cry chill silk.
Who will study a bamboo book still green
And forbid the grubs to bore their powdery holes?
This night's thoughts will surely stretch my guts straight:
Cold in the rain a sweet phantom comes to console the writer.
By the autumn tombs a ghost chants the poem of Pao Chao.
My angry blood for a thousand years will be emeralds under the earth!
And can revel in perceptions like:
And [T'ang] Beauties rode, dressed in men's clothes or in what must have been Nomad Chic, with wide-brimmed or cascading hats and riding boots. (It was later, during the Sung Dynasty, that foot-binding was introduced and languorous inactivity became the feminine erotic ideal; the T'ang aristocratic male apparently preferred equestrian and acrobatic women.)
And save up remarks such as this one for the next conversation about poetry with fellow Blockheads:
What remains is a kind of presence: . . . most great poetry . . . is always on the verge of being understood and is never quite understood
Rush on over to the New York Review of Books and read all of Eliot Weinberger's "China's Golden Age."
—David
