presentation day

Not a good mood to do presentation today. It was not a disaster. I talked very slowly, trying to expose my weakness. The questions raised were expected. The problem is that I don’t know how to solve them. I am not sure whether I should pursue this idea anymore. A bit disappointed.

After the presentation, Karl invited us for dinner. It is quite common in China but very rare here that a professor invites students for dinner. I talked little but drank a lot. Karl told some jokes, one of which was about Slavoj Zizek. The last book I read when I was in China is ‘everything you always wanted to know about Lacan: (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)’. But I don’t remember anything. A related joke from Karl is about a comment by some philosopher who claimed that economists only write incomprehensible papers with complex mathematics whereas they philosophers can write incomprehensible papers only with words.

What I learned today is that I should try to be constructive as a discussant. It's easy to point out problems. What's difficult is to be helpful in solving them.