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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

The CCTV New Year’s gala broadcast, known in Mandarin as Chunwan, is probably the most massive media event you’ve never heard of: with an audience of 700 million, it has few rivals for sheer reach A China Central Television institution since 1982, the show provides an annual bromide of light-hearted comedy, music, and choreographed patriotism on the eve of the country’s most important festival In a nation reeling from frenetic development and riven by social tensions, it’s a reminder of the cultural ties that bind (most of) China together This year, Chunwan rings in the Year of the Rabbit on the evening of 2 February But even in China, this throwback to a bygone era of modernist spectacle is not immune to larger shifts in the way we consume media The show is losing its younger viewers: according to a recent online poll on Sinacom, 50 percent of respondents who saw the show called it ‘bad,’ while only 13 percent said it was ‘good’ It seems that colourful ethnic minority maidens singing about social harmony just don’t cut it any more for the post-‘80s generation Alarmed over declining ratings, broadcasters have turned to the internet for the first time this year to infuse new life into the old Chunwan beast, planning to draw several musical performers from the online ‘grassroots’ CCTV and other Chinese media have long had a troubled relationship with the 380 million ‘netizens’ who comprise China’s online population Of course, this comes as no surprise to those familiar with the overall status of internet speech in China A small army of censors regularly scrub references to sensitive topics like Falun Gong, Tibet and Liu Xiaobo from bulletin boards Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, among other social networking platforms, are blocked: in this visualisation of global Facebook connections, there’s a conspicuous hole where China should be Historically, censors have also intervened to halt the careers of apparently harmless internet celebrities, which China produces in spades With a massive online population isolated by the so-called Great

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Role Play

Naomi Frisby

Prize Entry

April 2016

Your right hand is the first to go. One Sunday afternoon as you’re sitting on the sofa reading the...

poetry

June 2011

Beautiful Poetry

Camille Guthrie

poetry

June 2011

‘Being so caught up So mastered.’ Yeats     I was too shy to say anything but Your poems...

 

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