Buffoonery.

Part 2. Critical motives.

4 min readSep 10, 2017

In cinema, we see the Self. No, not your Self…The preverbal Self who hates mommy and doesn’t know how to hold a fork.

I gave up for another reason as well. I had been revising the article for a special issue of (what I will call) JOURNAL X. Another Chinese-Italian film scholar had put me in contact with the editor of that journal in the summer of 2012. At that time, the journal editor was keen to see my work:

I am really interested in your proposal “From Antonioni to Bertolucci: The Awkward Cinematic Gaze” and would ask you to send me an abstract.

I obliged.

A few weeks later, I received a relatively harsh review of my 500-word abstract. The reviewer suggested that I include a newer film along with the older ones:

How can we ignore a recent award-winning film that tackles Chinese-Italian relations such as Io sono Li by Andrea Segre (2011)?

I absorbed the reviewer’s comments, attempted rewrite the abstract, and wondered: who is this royal “we”?

A few months later, I received an email from the editor at JOURNAL X:

I am so interested in these conference papers indicated in your bio. I wonder if you have already found a publisher for these essays. If not, would you consider JOURNAL X?

One of those papers had already been integrated into my book on Taiwanese cinema, and the other was a slightly altered version of my Intermingled Fascinations essay.

In the end, I felt that the editor and myself had reached a basic agreement: I would have to rewrite the Intermingled Fascinations essay almost entirely and add content included in a relevant book proposal I had written for the another press.

Throughout the writing process, the editor admonished me several times not to repeat any material from my already-published chapter in Intermingled Fascinations. At one point, oddly enough, the editor insisted that I cite myself under the separate heading: “suggested citation”. I obliged and rewrote the article no less than 5 times.