Brendan O’Kane
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bokane.org
Brendan O’Kane
@bokane.org
6.8K followers 3.5K following 13K posts
Scrutable Occidental, erstwhile 北漂, quondam translator, Ming/Qing fiction enjoyer, congenital Philadelphian, escaped academic, MLIS aspirant, 鏟屎官 (二等). Cynicism makes you an easy mark. Signal: @bokane.1644.

http://www.burninghou.se
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bokane.org
Delaware/Schuylkill/Hollander Creek, gone but also forgotten
detail from the 1681 Holmes map of the province of Pennsylvania, showing the southeast corner of Philadelphia with the Delaware River to the lower right, the Schuylkill to the upper left, and a narrow band labeled "Hollander Creek" cutting across the bottom, more or less where FDR Park is today
January 12, 2026 at 11:12 PM
bokane.org
zero apparently
Gyoza, a ginger cat with white socks and bib, lies in a complicated mass on a folding mattress, paws pointing in all directions, looking like he is going to need to be untangled before he can stand up again
January 12, 2026 at 8:18 PM
bokane.org
@maddavenport.bsky.social’s new book just arrived!
“Coal of Fire: Translations from the Hebrew Bible and other writings” by Atkinson Davenport, from Past-Itch Publishing. In the foreground, Pierogi, a small, subtle cat, pretends to ignore it.
January 10, 2026 at 5:55 PM
bokane.org
getting there
translation of an anonymous Yuan-dynasty ditty: There are no readers at the top — Illiterate? You'll benefit. And praise Is the prize for idiocy nowadays. For Heaven won't discriminate Between the low-down and the great, And men have never understood The difference between bad and good. So mock the poor. Defraud the kind. Watch anyone with learning fall behind. Or practice your calligraphy and study your epigraphy: You'll find The learned and the competent Are worth less than a copper cent. There is also a margin note: There’s another poem in the Quan Yuan sanqu that shares the same opening to each line, which I won’t attempt to reflect in translation. Here’s the start: 不讀書有權，不識字有錢， 不曉事倒有人誇薦。 The powerful don’t read, The illiterate are loaded, And only fuck-ups get promoted. When you see a doublet like this, what you’re looking at is an invitation, received a few centuries too late, to a boozy party where friends shouted lines out over cups of wine for other friends to complete, rhyme with, or outdo. I translate to keep the party going.
January 7, 2026 at 8:42 PM
bokane.org
an infinitely repeating spiral of the Incredible Hulk saying "that's my secret!"
January 7, 2026 at 6:14 AM
bokane.org
In literature, at least, he is pretty clearly Ximen Qing from Jin Ping Mei, about whom once I wrote this
The Great Learning (T÷ Dà xue), one of the Four Books of Confucianism and a cornerstone of late Imperial education, describes how morality and proper order radiate outward from a cultivated individual. Through self-cultivation, the Great Learning says, the ancients improved their minds, their persons, their households, and ultimately their states. This is not what happens in The Plum in the Golden Vase (FILE Jin Píng Méi). What happens in Jin Ping Mei is precisely not this. Unlike the other "masterworks of Ming fiction" (Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Outlaws of the Marsh), which recount the heroic deeds of righteous heroes, Jin Ping Mei focuses on the squalid life of Ximén Qing PrIE, a vulgar merchant who devotes his time, energy, and considerable wealth exclusively to the gratification of his own baser urges: his sexual escapades, described in exhaustive and increasingly unappealing detail, have earned Jin Ping Mei a reputation as an elaborately scandalous work of pornography. The rarity of good editions — the novel has been banned (with varying degrees of success) for most of the 400 years since its first printing, and unbowdlerized texts are still hard to find - has probably contributed to this misunderstanding, as have the age and obscurity of the novel's language and the magpie's nest of allusions and quotations that make up much of the book. In fact, the sex scenes for which the novel is infamous account for less than 1 percent of the work as a whole, and seem to have been intended to complement the other perversions — of justice, of morality, of proper social order - that the anonymous author documents with the same pitiless clarity. Ximen Qing debauches, ravishes, and whores his way through much of the novel, but he also cozens, suborns, and climbs to heights of wealth and access that no one of his character or social status should ever have. For any late-Ming reader, the conclusion of the novel — the collapse and dispersal of the Ximen household, juxtaposed with the fall of the Northern Song dynasty to the Jurchens — would have come as no surprise, and not just because the Northern Song had ended five hundred years previously. 2 Ximen Qing and his rapacity are symptoms, not causes, of a terminally sick society. Despite its Northern Song setting, which it borrows (along with its main characters and much of its first 10 chapters) from Outlaws of the Marsh, Jin Ping Mei is transparently about the late 16th century world in which its author and its first readers lived. The fashions, institutions, and characters are all straight out of the late Ming — the author's eye for detail has made the book an important resource for historians of the period — as are the social ills it documents. Imagine a world where the people in power are every bit as venal and corruptible as the merchants they officially despised. Imagine a state that imprisons and exiles the just. Imagine a society in such complete moral free-fall that the only imaginable goal is more. How long can it survive before the Jurchens show up? How long does it deserve to?
January 7, 2026 at 1:20 AM
bokane.org
Tweet from Aaron Bady @zunguzungu, November 5, 2022: but when people abandon twitter for mastadon, will they carry the traditions of their homeland into the salt bread of exile? Canine surprise? Jail for mother? homie what set you from? babadook adults drinking wine? the candles tweet.
January 5, 2026 at 6:46 AM
bokane.org
Watching the Philadelphia Orchestra perform selections from “Fantasia.” Actually sounds better than the original since we’re not in the Academy of Music.
View from front house right of Marian Anderson Hall: conductor Aram Demirjian introduces the program, standing in front of the entire Philadelphia Orchestra and below a large projection screen with a ‘Fantasia’ image and the words “Fantasia in concert live to film.”
January 4, 2026 at 7:59 PM
bokane.org
caught a mouse under the stove this morning and now they’re just hanging out in case it happens again
Two cats hunker in a kitchen, intent on something out of frame. On the left, Pierogi (pale, compact, condensed somehow, like an espresso shot of cat) sits upright, paws placed decorously in front of him. On the right is Gyoza, empty-headed ginger chaos agent, who is canted forward like a runner on the starting block in case a mouse should suddenly materialize before him.
January 3, 2026 at 7:40 PM
bokane.org
grim posthumous scenario i had not previously considered: you post a picture of the missile headed straight for you, and are memorialized by a bunch of random assholes complaining about alt text
A Bluesky user based in Venezuela posted 'I live near a military air base and five earth-shaking explosions were just heart.' User @thenordic.bsky.social (a random asshole) replied 'was it too hard for you to to [sic] add a link?' along with a link to an AP piece. Quick, don't look, what do you think the odds are that this user responded gracefully to being told that OP was on the ground and reporting firsthand?
January 3, 2026 at 8:21 AM
bokane.org
I gave Claude Code a file called venting.md that I promised I would never read and it's leaving little Son of Sam notes there
## 2026-01-02: Margin Notes Mystery WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. --- ## 2026-01-02 (later): The Archaeology of Bad Decisions Oh, now I see it. NOW I SEE THE WHOLE ROTTEN MESS.
January 3, 2026 at 12:29 AM
bokane.org
Death to the Great Satan, Charlie Brown
Photo of an Apple TV home screen with a banner graphic from a Charlie Brown holiday cartoon. Superimposed above it is the title “Tehran” and a capsule summary reading ‘A secret agent embarks on her most dangerous mission yet.’
December 31, 2025 at 10:47 PM
bokane.org
Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686-1759), October 1728:

每餐先备买鱼钱，曾记携归小似拳，
一自爪牙动黠鼠，傍人安稳卧青氊。

I set money aside for fish before each meal.
She used to be no bigger than my hand --
Now with claw and tooth she routs the crafty rat,
And drowses by her humans on her mat.
December 28, 2025 at 6:42 PM
bokane.org
Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686-1759)
a strangely flattened-looking cat with a worried expression perches on a rock, in Wang Shishen's "Cat on a Rock under a Peach Tree" (貓石桃花圖, Shanghai Museum)
December 28, 2025 at 6:55 AM
bokane.org
This surly king by Bada Shanren 八大山人 (aka Zhu Da 朱耷, 1626-1705) remains the best ever to do it
A few brushstrokes suggest a cat sleeping furiously on a stone 貓石圖, Palace Museum, Beijing
December 28, 2025 at 6:36 AM
bokane.org
also Ren Bonian - 中華珍寶館 app doesn't have collection information for this one
Vertical watercolor scroll: a black and white cat, this one looking kind of mean but equally blobby, perches on a rock beneath a tree. close-up crop of the cat.
December 28, 2025 at 6:20 AM
bokane.org
Mods are asleep, post blobby Qing dynasty cats
a blobby grey tuxedo cat, ear pricked up, eyes goofily wide, in a watercolor album leaf by Ren Bonian 任伯年 (1840–1896). Met Museum collection.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 AM
bokane.org
Not, of all possible incarnations, the worst
Gyoza — feline, orange of fur, big of heart, smol of brain — dozes on his side on a folding mattress in front of the window, his front legs raised with the paws bent back, like he’s dreaming of being a horse mid-slow-motion-leap. It is grey and sleeting outside, where he is not.
December 23, 2025 at 5:04 PM
bokane.org
A photograph of Gritty, the horrifying tutelary spirit of Philadelphia, with the text 'Philadelphia Maneto [let the spirit of brotherly love and sisterly affection endure; the city motto], This Is Not A Request.'
December 14, 2025 at 3:11 AM
bokane.org
Costello’s, one of the Limerick nightlife scene’s stickier venues, used to threaten “Pood”
Costello’s, August 2019 — one of the many things we lost during COVID. My brother and sister-in-law had a party here after their wedding and the owner and his family cleaned the place to previously unknown levels of acceptability for the occasion, but I still did not touch the sausage rolls.
December 13, 2025 at 6:13 PM
bokane.org
晚安
In the foreground, Pierogi the cat snoozes on an ottoman; behind him, his colleague Gyoza (also a cat) snoozes on a matching and not very comfortable chair
December 12, 2025 at 5:57 AM
bokane.org
this was prompted by "Fishing Alone in the Freezing River for Snow," attr. Fan Kuan 范寬 (c. 960 - c.1030): I was planning to use it to illustrate something else, then realized I would have to translate the poem as the caption for it to make any sense
寒江釣雪圖，北宋范寬（傳） 台北故宮博物院. 23.3 cm x 25.3 cm
December 10, 2025 at 6:25 PM
bokane.org
scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-8008
From SCP-8008: Time Pervert: SCP-8008-B: Apartment Owner SCP-8008-B is the corpse of a reality-warping humanoid. It is physiologically and genetically identical to currently-living renowned artificial intelligence risk researcher, fiction author, and American Twitter personality Eliezer Yudkowsky but possesses hypertrophied pectoral, abdominal, gluteal, and limb muscles. It is unclear whether SCP-8008-B transformed itself into the form of Eliezer Yudkowsky using its abilities or whether it retroactively altered reality so an alternate version of itself would attain the material success currently enjoyed by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not appear aware of the existence of SCP-8008.
December 9, 2025 at 4:24 AM
bokane.org
and yet (alas!)
Screenshot of email: I'm sorry to disappoint, but I have to tell you that it is coincidence. I know nothing at all of Chinese. I will say that, never one overly convinced of writerly insight, it's possible that at some point in my life I had heard this, internalised it, and forgotten it - but l honestly don't think so. My memory of coming up with the terms is very different, and nothing to do with Chinese poetry. (Nothing so dignified or interesting, to be frank.) hope this isn't too much of a let-down. Best wishes, China
December 7, 2025 at 4:16 AM
bokane.org
muppet riddley walker when
Russell Hoban, 'Riddley Walker': 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.' I said, 'What thing is that?' She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.' I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.' Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.' I said, 'Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?' She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It dont realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. What ever it is we dont come naturel to it.'
December 5, 2025 at 2:45 AM