(Another Friday Focus – Monday Edition due to my addled brains)

Today’s Friday Focus blog is Absurdity, Allegory and China, a creation of Jim Gourley, a blogger, author, and and amazing photographer. I met Jim many years ago on a mailing list of writers and editors and have been vicariously following his travels and admiring his photos ever since. Jim has been living in China for more than a decade, and his blog provides a rich perspective of China’s people, culture and politics from an outsider on the inside, as it were. Absalletc is fascinating reading for anyone that should be required for those of us who talk about China as if we understand it. It’s particularly enlightening to read Jim’s perspective on shared (or wrongly assumed shared) places, media and events, such as the recent Olympic games and the reality and illusion of Tibet and protests. Jim’s blog exemplifies one set of qualities that can make a blog interesting enough to stand out from the rest: he takes an unmistakably personal, contemplative perspective and presents it in an engaging formal style… it’s not a dispassionate attempt at “objectivity” nor is it “The Jim Show”– he speaks to and for the subjects but also lets them speak for themselves.