The Spirit of the Whortleberry; or, aspects of Iroquois culture I propose we revive

Ages ago now, sometime in late August, I happened upon a copy of Minnie Myrtle's The Iroquois; or, The Bright Side of Indian Character (1855) at a garage sale. The man presiding over the heaps of stuff said that he had found it when "clearing out an old friend's log cabin," and I was intrigued enough by the friend, and impressed enough by the patterns of molding and water damage, that I forked out a dollar and brought it home. The book itself is that curious mix of celebratory anecdote and naive Eurocentrism that is common to the 19th century, though it does end damningly enough by presaging the downfall of those that cause the extinction of 'the Indian'. Humbly, and in the spirit of Victorian delight with the 'other occidentals', I propose we seriously consider adopting the following customs:

1. Returning to some sort of frame of mind in which the haecceity of spearmint, as much as a mountain, is of value.

"Not only they themselves, but every thing in nature, that was beautiful to the eye or good for food, had a protecting spirit. There was the spirit of fire, of medicine and of water; the spirit of every herb and fruit-bearing tree; the spirit of the oak, the hemlock and the maple; the spirit of the blackberry, the blueberry and the whortleberry; the spirit of spearmint, of peppermint, and tobacco; there was a spirit at every fountain and by every running stream, and with all they held communion- personifying every mountain river and lake" (pp. 46-7).

2. Strawberry worship and strawberry festivals.

"The strawberry was one of their delicacies, and one which they believed they were to enjoy in another world. Some of them indeed expected the felicity of Heaven to consist in one continual strawberry feast, and this is something from which the most cultivated palate will not revolt, and is proof that there was a great degree of refinement in their taste!" (p. 50).

3. Communal dream interpretation in which the best interpretation is handsomely rewarded.

"Another diversion was the guessing of dreams. Some person went about from house to house telling a wonderful dream he had had, and requesting any one who pleased to relate it. Whether those attempted, guessed rightly or not, the dreamer after a while acknowledged that the true interpretations had been given, and then he was obliged to pay a forfeit, and whatever was required, he cheerfully performed, however great the sacrifice" (pp. 59-60).

Things we like III

1) This beautiful and inspiring TED talk by Zainab Salbi on Women, wartime and the dream of peace. Salbi grew up in war-torn Iraq and is the founder of Women for Women International, which works to help women in post-war zones rebuild their lives and communities. She’s a passionate and eloquent speaker, and she quotes Rumi, so of course I love her.

2) Fereshteh Najafi, who is like an Iranian Paul Klee. I particularly like her series Tara, The Princess, and Searching for Free Human. The image below (her most Klee-esque) is from Tara.

3) Wikipedia! For two reasons: 1) for having audio samples of Finnish, an absolutely wonderful language that unfortunately I don’t speak at all; 2) for having long been my source for accidental poetry and unexpected syntax, most recently in the message from writer Kartika: “I started writing Wikipedia to take away the sad feeling I had whenever I searched for a general and important article that didn’t exist yet in my language.”

4) The fact that Jim Carrey and I are entirely agreed on what constitutes a dream come true.

The Last Ride of the Wee Yeasty Rider

We've been writing intentionally bad poetry for many years now, but have only recently begun to impose restrictions on content and form. Today, we challenged ourselves to write a 12-line poem containing:

1. racehorses

2. recent evolutionary developments

3. a German literary reference

Below is the result. If the requirements strike your fancy, please, send us your own interpretation!

Ezmerelda's hooves beat the track like a baker kneading challah

Magnificent flanks, but zero propulsion

it mattered little to her rider, who had ceased

himself to grow (before Ezmerelda was born) at the age of 3.

But Jörg was not small, only highly evolved

the hats were being made smaller and smaller, you see.

And his blond hair grew brighter, like challah

The aristocrats in the stands yawned away their educations

tragic, when neurons give way to wee yeasty riders

rising to such proportions only to be beaten down again

This was what was running last through her synapses, Ezmerelda,

as her hooves under Jörg's direction left the track, the cliff -- to death.

Things we like II

1. Frank Bölter’s fully functional origami boat, which would be perfectly at home in The Science of Sleep, and which I think should be available for conversations that neither wholly take place in dreams nor in waking life.

2. Elephant shrews: the manner in which they wiggle their noses to search for grub makes them look as if they are permanently a fixture of a stop-motion film.

3. Marcel Mauss lamenting the loss of the squatting position in the adults of the Western world. Tomorrow's activities involve attempting to reclaim this both humble and incredibly useful posture.

4. Whale calls that sound like bird's songs when sped up, and bird's songs that sound like whale calls when slowed down.

5. Diaphaneity as mineralogical category, and minerals that exhibit all types of it at once.

Things we like

The predilection Lauren and I have for lists is probably obvious by now. Nearly all our lists are infinite, and foremost among them are the lists of things we like. And since I have tentatively decided to post more here, having purged my life of Facebook, but not of the impulse to share random information, voilà une sélection de la liste des choses aimées:

• the Wooster Collective, especially when they post things that highlight the similarities between people and sheep
• Louis Malle, Charlie Chapman, Ingmar Bergman, and the Criterion Collection’s page of quotes
• Jean-Luc Godard's (and Fritz Lang’s) Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), which is even better than I’d remembered
• Zadie Smith, at least when she writes things that highlight the differences between people and software
• David Sedaris and Dutch Christmas traditions
• Three-line novels. More of these to come.

What the Beatles have in common with sandwiches

There are only two things that a person can say that will immediately convince me that he or she is lying:

1) “I don’t like the Beatles.”

2) “I don’t like sandwiches.”

It would be understandable for some people not to like sandwiches if there were only one kind of sandwich. Or only one kind of Beatles song. But the infinite potential of sandwiches and the actualized potential of the Beatles are both so varied and multifarious that it is, I am convinced, simply impossible to categorically dislike one or the other.

And if a person claims to do so, then the poor thing should be properly introduced to baguettes, focaccia, and John Lennon as quickly as possible — or they should stop lying.

My lovely friend Ashley and I had discussed this over lunch, and then we went to the bookstore she promptly overheard the man who worked there shrug nonchalantly, “I just don’t really like the Beatles.”

Obviously, we fled to the stacks, and got distracted by poetry and Chekhov and the universal law that every bookstore must have at least one used copy of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française.

I ended up with A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (which I’d already read), and Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt (which I hadn’t). When I went to pay for them, the clerk (the one we were eavesdropping on earlier) commented, “These are both really good books.”

I was distracted by some plastic alien finger puppets, so I said, “Indeed.”

He held up Eichmann. “Make sure you have something funny on hand when you read this one, though. It’s amazing, but, you know ... super depressing.”

In the movie version of my life, I will say, “I appreciate that, but I can’t take advice from a man who pretends not to like the Beatles. How do you feel about sandwiches?”

But in actual life, of course, I said, “Yeah, will do. Thanks.”

Santa Fe, or where we saw the future catastrophe of the social in the geology

Nearly a month ago now, Madeleine and I journeyed to Santa Fe searching for epiphanies, free donkeys, unparalleled breakfast burritos, and work. We were only successful on one front (I'll let you puzzle out which), which presented somewhat of an obstacle to writing. How, after all, do you convey the feeling of a failed quest without failing in the writing of it?

We prayed to Bertha, our über-androgynous patron saint (frozen, photographically, in 1893, and placed on our dashboard)- but to no avail. Traditional prose would not help us, not when we had canyons like Mars, wild horses, mirages with which to contend! At last, however, we found that a list, a modest enumeration of the portions of the trip which resonated uncomfortably with our (collective) state of mind, kept most of the angst at bay. The original text is as follows:

a list, a list that never stops, not even when it appears to:

1. trees that emit a cheesy garbage smell
2. light-up maps of africa
3. v. accommodating drivers.
4. black sheep that become white with age (proof that one cannot always remain a black sheep, despite one's best attempts to)
5. a convergence of chalk farms
6. women who claim to be six months pregnant, but who probably aren't
7. day old pastries (sweet for 99¢, savory for $1…maybe)
8. oil men (slick) who search and rescue (stick)
9. soup from china (maybe?)
10. vicarious eating
11. cartography
12. Yellow mustache's woman
13. apartments that are far too big for the six bugs that inhabit them
13. a foot in need of surgery (in albuquerque)
14. dissatisfaction
15. five distinct editions of Augustine's Confessions
16. murdered plums
17. upstairs jails
18. "art in public places"

Yes and No and the New Yorker

My brother recently informed me that everything I love is pretentious. This includes, I suppose, The New Yorker, which I do love — except for the annual fiction issue. In principle I like the idea of a fiction issue; I like discovering new writers, I like being reminded that living people also write (I have to be reminded of this because, as a truly pretentious person, I only read dead writers), and I like to fantasize about one day having a short story of my own in The New Yorker. I think if I were ever published in The New Yorker, my pretentious instincts would be satisfied and I could go on to, I don’t know, watch American Idol unabashedly, instead of abashedly, which is what I currently do.

The most recent fiction issue’s theme was “Writers Under 40.” A brilliant theme, a perfect theme for fantasizing (I am also under 40!), marvelous choice all around, and as a bonus, featuring Jonathan Safran Foer, who has also been accused of pretension, and whom I also love. So I attempted to suspend my usual skepticism about the fiction issue and discover some great young contemporary authors.

Here’s what I discovered. The majority of their stories could be subtitled in one of two ways:

1. “The Death of a Meaningless Person”
2. “The Sexcapades of a Meaningless Person”
   

I don’t mean to be flippant, but really, it’s a little bit exasperating. And somehow it reminds me of a discussion Lauren and I have been having recently, about our literary tastes. In addition to our joint preference for works by the deceased, she has also declared that she likes flashy writers (e.g. Nabokov and Gombrowicz). And after reading this particular New Yorker, I have discovered that I like flashy plots. Three of my favorite books are The Brothers Karamazov (featuring murder), The Magic Mountain (featuring tuberculosis), and Mrs Dalloway (featuring autodefenestration). Any of the three could be subtitled: “The Death & Sexcapades of Very Interesting People.”

These are also, admittedly, sad books, written by authors whose world was about to end, who were writing in a gathering storm. They are sad, but not bleak; and this distinction is crucial. As John Berger wrote, “The despair of an artist is often misunderstood. It is never total. It excepts his own work.” That is: you are sad, you write, but by writing you create a space to dissolve your sadness. In Deleuzian terms, you write to flee, but in fleeing you seek your weapon. I read dead writers because it is easier for me to sense their inner resistance, their affirmation, in that space between despair and art. I don’t object to despair; it is easy to feel agony, particularly when writing, so my only objection is to making this despair total, to the point where writing languishes in and glorifies boredom and disillusionment, simply because it can find no way out. (Writing itself is the way out, but only a potential one; it must be chosen and employed as such. )

The phrase ‘way out’ always makes me think of Kafka, and Kafka always makes me think of Beckett. I associate them with each other because they both strike me as people who were writing to save their lives, people who were sad and disillusioned, but against their will, who were surrounded by boredom and who fought back. The theatre director Peter Brook said of Beckett, “he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn.” The ghost of affirmation haunts his writing, laughing; despair and boredom are never total. (Beckett and Kafka are also masters of the tragicomedy, one of my favorite genres and one which I would love for these writers under 40 to revive.)

So, this, I suppose, is what I was hoping to find in The New Yorker: this longing for ‘yes.’ Instead there was, for the most part, only ‘no,’ or rather, ‘I don’t care.’ So what?, I wanted to say, after Meaningless Person slept with Other Meaningless Person and then drowned. I don’t care either.

I don’t mean to condemn contemporary fiction. It’s not a homogeneous bloc and I know that some of it’s wonderful. But the world is always falling apart, and it is so easy to be bored and unremarkable. In writing it is possible to produce an alternative, to carve out a little space of freedom. I will own my vice of being a pretentious reader, if it gives me the right to demand agony in writing, if I can demand that something be at stake.

It makes your nose itchy

What to do? I am no longer in Taiwan; Lauren is no longer in the U.K. So our claim to be an east/west blog is now rather suspect. We apologize for our (now unintentionally) deceptive title; we might change it later, but maybe not. We are both exploring miniature limbos and reading Deleuze at the minute.

…

How was Taiwan? We’ll have to start with Henry Miller. He was thinking about firecrackers and the Fourth of July:

One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.

(from Tropic of Cancer, whose namesake bisects the island of Formosa exactly)

…

In fact, I have two Taiwans. One of them is densely populated, like Taipei, with everyone I knew there: my students; my fellow teachers; the street vendors who grew to memorize our faces and our unvarying orders; and my friends, whom I love so much, who are the reason it was wonderful. This Taiwan speaks Chinglish; it is young and energetic and in a constant state of delight. It exists in the hundred tiny and often nameless streets where we spent our nights meandering, eating, getting lost, laughing, and usually eating again. This Taiwan I feel I could fold up and carry with me wherever I go.

At certain times — the Lantern Festival in Pingxi; daybreak in Ali Shan — this Taiwan brushes up against the other one. The other one, my other Taiwan, is Miller’s China, the one that has infiltrated my veins and settled under my skin. This one is quiet, like a Chinese ghost. Its landscape is the Taiwanese mountains, which are insubstantial piles of green, damp and breathing. It is old and vast. It is not sad. It is this Taiwan that makes me, now that I am back in America, look over my shoulder, for a ghost with long feet.

…

Dame Margot Fonteyn says, “Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.”

For every American tree, there is one in Asia. Whenever I sneeze or sleep, somewhere in Asia you are brushing your teeth or tying your shoes.

How to recognize a Chinese ghost

There is a Ghost Month in Chinese tradition, the time when the doors of the underworld are opened. The spirits who still have attentive families on earth are happy to stay where they are, but the orphan ghosts — those without descendants — are jealous of the living and come to haunt them. So during the Ghost Month, everyone puts offerings on the street outside their home or business (even international banks) — plates of pineapple, flowers, incense, etc. — to soothe the ghosts and persuade them to leave their families in peace.

My roommate had been warned not to swim in the mountain lakes because there were ghosts in them. I was told not to enter a temple during “that time of the month” because the ghosts could follow me inside.

Finally I asked one of my students, “What does a Chinese ghost look like?”

“Hmm. They have very long feet,” she said. “And they are everywhere.”

The Taipei Public Library

[This is a piece I wrote as a kind of guest contributor to my father’s library-related column in our local newspaper. You can see that Borges really is always on my mind in Taiwan.]

About a year and a half ago I read an essay by George Orwell called “Books vs. Cigarettes,” in which he defends of his habit of buying books by systematically proving that it is not, in fact, as expensive as other hobbies, such as smoking. I don’t smoke, and thank God, because I, like Orwell, already spend the majority of my paycheck on books. Since moving to Taiwan this has become problematic: all English-language books here are imported, and therefore astronomically expensive.

After a month or so in the country — by which time I had finished the books I’d brought with me from home and determined that the books at school, full of sentences like “Biff cannot open the door. She is angry!” would not quite satisfy my intellectual appetite — I began to worry. And then, luckily, blissfully, and with the help of a friend of mine, I discovered the Taipei Public Library.

The library has eleven floors and five or six elevators, none of which actually go anywhere. The foreign language collection is housed on the fourth floor — an ironic fact, since in Chinese culture the number four (and by extension the fourth floor) is unlucky. The collection consists mainly of English books, though occasionally a French, German, or Russian volume will crop up.

Like the libraries in the stories of Borges, the Taipei central branch has its own order of things, which is utterly incomprehensible to mortals. There are mysterious and delightful labels in the non-fiction section such as “Institutions Governing the Relation of the Sexes” (which turns out to contain books on wedding planning and marriage counseling) and “Breakfast Foods and Animal Husbandry.”

The section labeled “American Literature” is the largest, made up of British authors and Danielle Steele. Alphabetical order is nonexistent; the Dewey Decimal System is unheard of; books are classified according to the order in which your eyes find them. For this reason you cannot browse with intention; you can only wander and wait to stumble across an unobtrusive treasure.

The first thing I found was The Complete Poems of Cavafy, which I have since renewed twice and will probably refuse to give back at all; the second was Mrs Dalloway, which both prompted and resolved an existential crisis in me. The library’s collection of translated Chinese, Japanese, and Korean classical literature is impressive, and I have my eye on some Japanese fairy tales, including the very poetically-titled “Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Flower.”

In order to avoid the spurious elevators, I take the stairs between the first and fourth floors. One wall of the stairwell is glass, and looks out on to Taipei’s vast central green space, Daan Park. Another wall is decorated with posters, which are in Chinese except for the cheery yellow order, “Have a question? ASK A LIBRARIAN!” In the stairwell I often encounter other foreigners. We rarely speak, but we often exchange little embarrassed nods and guilty smiles. We are here ostensibly for the same reason — to indulge our addiction for books while ensuring that our paychecks remain firmly in our bank accounts.

And that’s what I’d tell everyone, Orwell included, but the truth is: I love the Taipei library for reasons that have nothing to do with money. I love it for its randomness and its good intentions, for its eager offering of calculus textbooks and outdated travel guides, and for its unintentional arrangement of itself into a microcosm of my experience in Taiwan. In the library, familiar things seem slightly foreign and surprising; yet at the same time, that foreignness suddenly reminds me incontestably of home.

The Original London Underground

Why is it that so many British place names sound like parodies of British place names? I imagine that I can put together any combination of roughly old-worldly sounding saxon, old norse, norman french, and middle english words and come up with something inevitably ridiculous but vaguely plausible. south kinswaite. aberswick-upon-casterthorpe.

I suppose they all have long and rich histories which I should not mock (does anyone else encounter disapproving toponymysts in their dreams?), but that is precisely why they are mockable: they are usually composed of various recognizable units that one encounters again and again, each one endowed with specific meaning. They also tend to seem rather obvious once deciphered.

(Not so with American place names, which are too often new or just unimaginative. The practice of assigning numbers to blocks in cities might be effective, but is really rather lackluster. The neighbourhood in which I grew up featured streets named after various native american tribes. Most weren't even indigenous to the area, and the ones who were had been long forced out by my neighbours' ancestors. I suppose these sorts of things happen when you build streets before you have people to live on them.)

But I digress, slightly. Today I journied to the southeast London suburb of Chislehurst (Chisle from the Saxon word Cisel, or gravel, and hurst from the Old English hyrst, or wooded hill), which is indeed a gravelly wooded hill, but perhaps most well known for what is under the hill (beneath the name). It's home to the Chislehurst Caves, which are not caves at all (perhaps the fact that they are misnamed already tells us something about them), but 22 miles of passages created to mine flint and chalk. They're old- the earliest historical evidence for their existence is sometime in the 13th century, though the tour guides at the caves claim that the Druids and Romans had been mining there well beforehand, and that the Saxons were relative latecomers. Indeed, the whole operation is much more about transmitting a kind of creative history of the caves than an actual one. It's not as if the documented history of the caves is dull; on the contrary, they served during WWII as a massive bomb shelter (harboring 15,000 people for 22 months), later as a mushroom farm of epic proportions, and most recently (though sadly no longer) as a music venue hosting the likes of David Bowie. It's just that their version of the history is better, mostly because they've had a hand in making it up, constructing fake Druid altars, ghost stories, bad models of former inhabitants, etc. You can call it cheap and dishonest, or you can see it as their attempt to not simply bow down to what history has given them for raw material. I like that mentality, I think.

What is it with this passionate insistence on fidelity to historical fact, anyway? Yes, yes, I know- it allows us to view Holocaust deniers as terrible people and enemies of truth, which isn't a bad thing. But what happened to this tendency to season history, to spice it up with a few tales here and there that are not expressly factual? This territory has become solely the property of grandparents, and the ocassional tour guide. I want it back.

Until I forget to remember

Getting up late in the morning and having a cup of coffee
dark and strong would not be a lazy distraction.

It is just my least struggle to endure the time
without you, the indelible you, until my heart forgets to
remember you from my past, my old habits.

Let us possess one world: each has one, and is one.


This was written on the cover of a notebook I did not buy, but only photographed, another example of the haunting and inevitably sad dialect of Asian English that seems so ubiquitous and marketable. The photo I took turned out, appropriately, furtive and blurry. I’d taken a lot of photos that day — we went to the Nougat Museum, a peculiar and haphazard little place that sold candies called “milk cake plateaux” and “heart crisp fresh milk volumes” — and on the way there I was thinking about Louis Malle.

Two summers ago I started watching Malle’s film L’Inde fantôme, a six-hour documentary first released in 1969. The problem with Louis Malle in India was that he was incapable of living in the present. Every beach reminded him of an earlier beach; every street in Calcutta was an echo of Paris. Time had ceased to exist for him, and so when he looked through the eye of his camera there was no boundary between what was happening and what had already happened. The camera was the crux of his alienation: he was a westerner with a camera, and so a westerner twice over. When India gave him too much — too many colors, too much noise, too many eyes and voices — he became mute, and deaf, and blind, and set up his camera as a facsimile of a human being, to watch and hear and speak in his absence.

I am very jealous of Louis Malle, because he trusted his camera so much. I have a little video recorder now, a fantastic device that looks like an iPod and has enough memory to hold at least six hours of Taïwan fantôme (if I ever make it). But still I use it suspiciously, blushingly, and it’s even worse with still cameras. Quite simply, I feel it is impossible for me to both live in and photograph Taiwan. What can I photograph here? National Geographic moments; east/west confrontations that would be cliché if they weren’t so everyday; things that are foreign to me.

What can I not photograph? Everydayness and memory; the coexistence and nonchalance of grandeur and kitsch, plastic and puddles and pineapples; the overwhelming sensation of being here, and its counterpart of not being here. I cannot photograph the fact that I am simultaneously here and in Paris, and in Germany, in America, in my books, on the moon. The camera removes me from my always-already uncertain process of integration, suspends my current negotiations with Asia, and makes me again a Westerner twice over.

Hemstede

Those places in the city that remain untamed and uncivilized (though not unsullied) after the passing of years are always the most interesting. We experience them as little rebellions, even though the city sometimes preserves them precisely because of this impression.

Take Hampstead Heath, that wilderness smack dab in the posh residential order that is northwest London. Famed by day for its role in inspiring many a Romantic poem and some excellent studies of trees, as well as providing a lovely backdrop for Marx's Sunday picnics with his family, one's first associations with it are utterly respectable. But eventually one learns that it is no less notorious by night as a cruising ground (this history is equally absorbing, although not nearly as well documented). That it is a pleasure ground in more than one sense is established sometime during the first meander- one is far more likely to tread upon an empty condom packet than some discarded verse.

Those who despair the Heath's duplicitousness seem to do so not for moralistic reasons, but on the grounds that the knowledge of its night life somehow infringes upon the sanctity and peace of the grand trees and the tall grasses during the day. What they neglect to remember is that even before the discovery of that first discarded remnant of passion (only the 20th century allows us to describe it in this fashion) there was something suspicious, something (exhilarating?) in the air that the glory of the landscape did not quite account for.

So perhaps Keats did only wander peacefully around the meadows of the Heath and contemplate Fanny in the shade provided by the great chestnut trees. Then, again, who are we to say that she didn't accompany him?

The order of things

A few weeks ago I dreamt that I had dinner with Michel Foucault at a Chinese restaurant in Paris. As I was talking to him, I was feeling increasingly guilty for not having finished The Order of Things yet, though I’ve been carrying it around for four months.

And for two out of those four, I’ve been in Taiwan, and my Chinese is still execrable. This will all change, I hope, as of next Friday when I start taking bona fide lessons, but until now I’ve been picking my friends’ brains for vocabulary words and grammar rules — and I bring up Foucault because whatever I learn about Chinese grammar reminds me of him, and Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia that prompted so much laughter from him. For example: measurement words. There are certain words in Chinese that don’t have direct counterparts in English, but are necessary to indicate what kind of object is being talked about. Instead of saying “I want a guava,” for instance, you must say “I want [measurement word, meaning roughly ‘of those things there’] a guava.” There are measurement words for: people, books, things you can point to, and things that are small and stick-shaped (including pencils, chop sticks, and I suppose probably syringes and golf tees as well). Such a taxonomy! Straight out of Borges!

Also: two particularly fabulous pieces of Chinese lexis:

1) Astronaut: tài kōng rén, which literally means something like “great space person.” My students taught me this word and find my pronunciation of it hilarious.

2) The characters for “sun” and “moon” put together mean “light”; “light” in combination with the character for “book” means “instruction manual” — literally, sun-moon-book.