Colin McPhee (1900-1964), a Canadian composer and musicologist who lived in Bali in the 1930s, was one of the first Western scholars who study Balinese gamelan as a research topic. He was forced to leave Bali in 1938 at the onset of WW2, and spent the next 20+ years working on Music in Bali - a monumental book in ethnomusicology published posthumously in 1966. In his memoir A House in Bali, McPhee wrote that during his life in Bali, he delighted (or maybe amused?

1 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is my favorite story by Jorge Luis Borges. Every time I read it I find something new to think about. The premise of this story is sheer absurdity: the narrator claims that his writer friend Pierre Menard had accomplished an unparalleled feat in literature, but this magnum opus was invisible to most people, because it was identical to selected chapters of Don Quixote by Cervantes.

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped.

In Chapter 64 of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, there is a humorous telling of a story about ancient Chinese astronomy. In this story, two imperial astronomers, Hsi and Ho, embarrassed the Emperor by failing to predict a solar eclipse. For this neglience, they almost got themselves executed. A quick Google search found several western references to this story. The Pynchon wiki, for example, cites a French source. So