Accidentally Occidental / Intentionally Oriental

Things we like X, or, suggestions for staying animate

2012-01-21T21:17:00.006+01:00

1. Dancing around a burning orange, or, rather, a burning orange candle. I know it is totally possible and not an internet myth because I tried it out (successfully) tonight. Why are pith-wicks so utterly charming?

2. Project Nim, a 2011 documentary directed by James Marsh. Like Man on Wire, Marsh's previous film, this is poignant, and entrancing, and more than a little heartbreaking, but it's also a lovely meditation on what's worth emulating in our closest evolutionary relatives, and what's worth leaving behind.

3. Speaking of animals, they make excellent film collages. I like the bears especially, in this old piece by Joseph Cornell.

4. Gotye's 'State of the Art', a song about a Cotillion electronic home organ gone mad. It's a cautionary tale, I suppose, but I want one for my flat. I give you all full license to dance around the burning orange whilst listening to this very song.

Things we like IX, or, why I'm willing to stick it out till the apocalypse

2012-01-16T19:43:00.000+01:00

1) Edward Gorey’s AMAZING ENVELOPES;

2) The sensation of not having died in a plane crash;

3) When aforementioned yet still relatively obscure Hungarian authors try to suddenly go all hipster on you (“I’m sure I could name ten new rock groups from 2011 that you haven’t even heard of”), and you can retort (at least in your head), “With all due respect, Mr. Krasznahorkai, two erotic gay photographers from Berlin introduced me to Joan as Police Woman in 2007 when we [my friend and I] were circumstantially obligated to share a group train ticket with them,” and not be exaggerating.

4) Charlie Chaplin AND Buster Keaton IN THE SAME FILM.

4) The beautiful things Robert Downey, Jr.’s hair must be doing under that hat:

Anybody want a peanut? or, Email Exchanges Part I

2012-01-15T22:32:00.002+01:00

We both subscribe to, and are sometimes overly obsessive about, a certain tumblr that posts magnificent scientific illustrations. The author, or compiler, or whatever title you'd like to assign to someone who uploads things to the tumblr, periodically answers requests for certain types of material. Usually they are not very funny, but one reading "Do you have an illustration of a peanut by any chance it's for a tattoo" I found inexplicably hilarious. I sent it to Madeleine, and the following exchange ensued.

Madeleine: HAHAHAAA! lauren, will you get a peanut tattoo with me? i realize now that i've subconsciously always wanted one.

Lauren: YES. the question is....where? i say behind the ear. because i've always wanted peanuts behind the ear.

Madeleine: i think the natural correspondance between the shape of ears and the shape of peanuts is a sign from god.

Lauren: if my ears were placed together (without brain!), and made whole again, they would be indistinguishable from a very large peanut.

Madeleine: our brains are, then, by analogy, merely unshelled peanuts! i've long suspected as much.

Lauren: but usually you get two peanuts out of one shell...what does this mean? are we reviving aristotelian visions of love?

Madeleine: but — as no human brain is perfectly symmetrical (oh the price we pay for our fine motor skills and abstract reasoning!), no two peanuts can truly be 'two peas in a pod.' they are attached to each other only tenuously!

All of which, combined with the abnormally large amount of peanut butter consumed today, makes me wonder-- how often do we eat these (however-tenuously-connected) peanut pairs? Are none at all kept together in the production process? Even faced with smooth peanut butter, no paste can asimilate everything perfectly. We shall never really know what it is we spread.

In defense of winter

2012-01-15T22:17:00.001+01:00

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants. ~ Dorothy Parker

To be fair: I like birds, and I like plants. And, to be fair: it is January, and spring has yet to rear its fool head. But every year I start to get nervous with the first sun rise after the winter solstice, because it means that spring is coming, and spring means summer.

There is a character in the book I’m reading now (The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai) called Mrs. Eszter. Early in the book, she has an unnerving encounter and afterwards she walks through her village, in the dead of winter, growing stronger and more herself with every step, because she

genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror . . . for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats.

YES, I shouted to myself as I read this, FINALLY THERE IS SOMEONE LIKE ME. The next hundred pages or so had me hoping that my resemblance to Mrs. Eszter (a rather sinister character) ended with this predilection for winter, but still — in this respect we are remarkably similar.

Winter, for those of us in the north, is our own little taste of Antarctica: blissful white emptiness. No one is going to harass you with shrieks of “It’s such a beautiful day!” and no one is going to criticize you for feeling quiet and indoorsy. Winter is a relief.

It is also an enhanced awareness of the breath, of the texture of protective things: woolly mammoth sweaters, spiced apple cider, soft voluminous blankets and fires to bake gingerbread. Winter encourages introversion (people, at least the ones around me, are infinitely saner in winter), and with it compassion — ‘the season of giving’ finds its natural home in the snowy months.

Last semester I was translating a small, lovely book all about winter, December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter. Each day in December gets its own short story, with a few (like the 6th, 10th, and 18th) getting more than one; each story takes place in a different year, though most revolve around WWII or German Unification in 1989. My favorite story is the 30th of December, 1940, in which the son of a rabbi and his friend, who have escaped from Germany to England, sit on the banks of the Cam in the middle of the night, discussing the death of Abel. In the course of this discussion, they introduce the idea of two incompatible wills: the Sommerwille (the will of summer) and the Winterwille (the will of winter). They agree, in a roundabout and Talmudic sort of way, that what it is possible — and perhaps inevitable — to want in summer evaporates in winter, and vice versa. They also agree that evil is nothing but a displaced or “untimely good.”

Their conversation is in many ways a strange tangle, and actually there are large chunks of it that I don’t understand, but I merely want to use this reasoning to defend winter from its gloomy reputation as the dark and deadly season. There is a good in winter, even if it seems a misplaced one (a misplaced turning of the year, or a misplaced celebration of light); more importantly, there is a type of thought — the kind that requires an intact, that is to say unmelted, brain — which is possible only in winter.

It’s that lack of yapping. That’s what does it for me.

What sees me through December

2011-12-07T22:25:00.008+01:00

In Germany, December is dark. In December, Germany is dark, too, but that makes the whole thing sound much more sinister than it really is. Anyway, you may think that the 8 hours and 3 minutes of light between sunrise and sunset sounds like just enough, but then you assume all sorts of things about the quality of light that are simply unrealistic (for instance, that one may experience two days in a row without rain). My instinct is to ingest an unholy amount of gebrannte Mandeln and hibernate, but the powers that be will admit no such thing. I AM NOT A BEAR, I repeat to myself each morning. But I am not yet fully convinced.

And so, dear readers, I give you yet another list, this time of my December survival strategies. It is not overly-lengthy, but, then again, neither is the time until cookies become the mainstay of my diet.

1. SWEET POTATO!! the concept, the smell, and the pie. I recently learned that China grows 80% of the world's sweet potatoes, which lead me to declare that I was moving there immediately. I subsequently read that they feed 60% of this 80% to pigs, which means that 48% of the world's sweet potatoes are eaten by even-toed ungulates. No matter, the humans are winning.

2. Elaborate fantasies in which I am seduced by Ernst Haeckel in the Canaries. None of these involve him drawing my nasal flora in exquisitely beautiful detail. Of course not. That would be perverse. Nor would it involve playing house in a cave and playfully throwing loquats at one another while watching the sun set over Teide. Absurd! But who am I kidding, really? I would settle any day for his assistant in the photo, Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay. Can't you tell from his swagger that that man's an abolitionist?

3. Last, but very much not least, embracing rejection! Or shall we say refusées? Why is 19th century modernism so much more charming than the twentieth century variety? I say we go back to embracing this productive loser dynamic, or at least use all of the hideous wallpaper of the world to say a thing or two.

The Questions that I Exorcise

2011-11-17T17:08:00.012+01:00

The curse of reading widely is that all sorts of questions that only tangentially relate to the subject at hand constantly knock at the door to the mind and, oftentimes, forcibly enter. You first detect this mental burglary when you see that you've read a paragraph, sometimes an entire page, without absorbing any of the content written. And yet you cannot simply recognize this and go on-- you know these webs of distraction are sometimes as fruitful as they are inhibiting. I've taken to writing questions down as soon as they come to mind to force them out of my system, into the future. These were today's questions, and some of them were even answerable:

1. Why does the air smell metallic when it gets very cold?

Verdict: Unknowable or not yet known- the internet could not tell me a thing, but perhaps you, dear reader, can. Am I the only one with this affliction?

2. How does cinnamon simulate heat?

Verdict: Apparently there's something called 'cinnamaldehyde' or 'cinnamic aldehyde,' which reacts with the censors in your mouth that normally detect heat, called trigeminal nociceptors. I find the name of the receptor somewhat lacking, but I'm reconsidering names for my first born after thinking through the myriad of nicknames one could have for 'cinnamaldehyde.'

3. How much does the heart of a blue whale weigh? (A fact I had learned in grade school, and promptly forgotten, only to have it surface [ha!] years later)

Verdict: An awful lot- over 1000 pounds, at least. I particularly liked this formulation of the question. 'How heavy is the blue whale's heart'? sounds to me like a delightfully terrible folk song. When I recounted this fact to my boyfriend, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, "Just one heartbeat could kill you!" Indeed. And according to the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a human could even crawl through a whale's aorta, though the fantasy that we could endlessly circulate through a whale is probably entirely untenable. Pity- no matter how obese we become, we'll never know what it's like to be giant.

4. What does mold look like to ants? (I had been reading about the leafcutter ant's magnificent mold gardens in the amazon)

Verdict: It turns out the gardens of the leafcutter ants are mostly just amorphous and fuzzy, though they're impressive agriculture feats. In the process of researching this, though, I came across a couple of magnificent pieces by the artist Stacy Levy. The image above and the one below feature images of magnified mold (penicillium and aspergillus respectively) which have been sandblasted onto glass plates. Cultures of these very molds are then grown on the plates themselves, to fill in the crannies. Does everything that is moldy twice over acquire such beauty? It makes you wonder what would happen with a third iteration, a third level of moldiness...perhaps everything would just become disgusting again.

A-roving

2011-11-01T22:21:00.006+01:00

Immer Was Los, a publication detailing all kinds of noteworthy events in and around Gießen, Hessen, Germany, where Lauren currently makes her home, had informed us that there was a big to-do in Hungen.

What, precisely? A Krämermarkt, or ‘stuff market’. Address? Hungen. The entire town, apparently. We realized that this would either be sublime (i.e. a Christmas market in early November), or dreadful. So we decided to go.

We spent the 24-minute train ride admiring German animals and planning our futures living happily in Lich, a seemingly v. pleasant neighbour of Gießen. We emerged from the forest, the charming brick and reassuring fields, to find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic junk yard. Like much of Germany on a cloudy day, it smelled like poo. This wasteland was Hungen.

Oh mein Gott, we said. What have we DONE.

We trudged towards civilization, after checking the schedule for the next train out of there. Along the path were what may or may not have been trash compactors, bulldozer tillers, and various piles of yellow and orange things, whose purposes remain a mystery probably even to themselves.

But then we smelt the waffles cooking. And we saw a Turkish restaurant. And we turned the corner and saw a stand that sold nothing but eight thousand varieties of candied almonds, and another stand that sold nothing but alpaca socks, and dozens and dozens of stands that stretched all the way down the street (which was a very charming, seventeenth-century German sort of street), and shortly afterwards we began our careers as supermodels.

It was freakishly cold. Spotting some choice knitwear, we proceeded to gleefully try on what, by German standards, would be considered far too many hats. We attracted the attention of numerous vendors. DIE SIND ALLE HANDGEMACHT! [These are all handmade!] insisted the sales lady (who never said anything else afterwards). HOW FANTASTIC, we said with our eyebrows, and crowded around the mirror to admire our marvelous taste.

Then suddenly there was a jolly man with a giant camera bag, asking if he could take some photos of us trying on hats for the local paper. We said yes, and then promptly realized that it is impossible to look candid and photogenic at the same time. So we were trying to make happy shopping faces and nonchalant faces and in the meantime this man was taking about fifty pictures a second, and it was all a bit confusing after a while. We felt we really should buy some hats then, so Lauren got a beautifully cozy white one with brass buttons and Maddy got a slouchy blue one with a secret geometric design on the back. These were not the hats we were wearing in the pictures. But some level of anonymity must be preserved.

(Full disclosure: we spent quite some time trying to track ourselves down in the slideshows of the Allerheiligenmarkt that we found on the websites of Hungen's local papers. It seems we were passed over in favor of the very young and very old. Are we not yet suffiiciently German?)

We wiled away a few hours in this fashion, always discovering new delights- exotic succulents, flammkuchen, FREE SHRIMP. The succulents were particularly memorable, because the succulent man (it's not what you think!) was very stern about us watering our LEBENDIGE STEINE [LIVING STONES] every 14 days for 30 minutes at a time. He also refused to sell us a specimen in a hanging pot, claiming that if he let it go, nobody would ever believe the species capable of blooming. We certainly wouldn't have.

When we move to Hungen, and I'm certain we will any day now, we will live in the Schloss (which is also the synagogue). We originally thought it was a gymnasium [fancy high school], but it seems to have been turned into some sort of apartment complex for Hungeners/Hungers. We want the roof apartment (WITH FOUR TURRETS!). We will play in the leaves in the back. We will have friends in the houses nearby, which are made from curvy beams and mud and straw. Though you might expect these friends to have dirty faces, they will not. This will be our life in Hungen.

It's a good thing that our life will be so pleasant, because escaping Hungen is nigh impossible. We tried, thrice, and were thwarted the first two times. Why? Our zug was simply ausgefallen, a word whose exact meaning we're not precisely sure of (though we always know it spells inconvenience), but we were not alone in our strandedness. We were joined by two helpless Slovenian transplants, a mother, who referred to Madeleine as a gutes Mädchen, and her daughter, who took a special joy out of crossing train tracks rather than using the subterranean stairs. They didn't take kindly to the delay, and, suspecting strikes, ranted about poor people, to our shock and delight. The old woman found our hangman game, which we played whilst waiting for a train to come and which must have been entirely unintelligible to her, hilarious.

What follows is a list of our hangman words, in order: split-pea soup, allspice, echidna, balustrade, incongruous, toreador, pamplemousse, antifreeze, strumpfhosen, laissez-faire, mise-en-abîme, flohmarkt, australopithecus, expressionismus, megatherium, vulcanologist, chaos, vestige, so we'll go no more a-roving, pluck, why, om, and kulturindustrie.

On taxonomy

2011-10-21T19:27:00.004+02:00

I think every biology teacher I’ve ever had has rolled her eyes at the thought of taxonomists. They are necessary people, yes — they speak Latin — but they are (apparently) kind of a drag to be around.

Hence my (slight) reluctance to admit my fascination with taxonomy and my own catalogic tendencies. I’m obsessed with Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia, for one thing, in which animals are fitted into categories like “belonging to the emperor,” “fantastic,” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” Also, I have recently discovered the OED Historical Thesaurus — a taxonomy of every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary — which is incomprehensible but astoundingly poetic. Here, for example, is how you may reach the word ‘shell’:

the external world > abstract properties > existence > substantiality or concreteness > unsubstantiality or abstractness > [noun] > unsubstantiality or lack of substance > superficiality or hollowness > superficial or hollow thing ►shell (1791)

How is “unsubstantiality or abstractness” a sub-set of “substantiality or concreteness”? Why is it “unsubstantiality” instead of “insubstantiality”? Can’t a shell also be a tangible thing, and if so, why is it considered an “abstract property”? Dare I question the methods of the OED?

One of my professors recently asked us to make a list, from memory, of every book we’d ever read, and to then somehow organize this list. How to organize everything I can ever remember reading in my life? Right now, my categories are kind of boring — “books from childhood,” “poetry & drama,” that sort of thing. But might it not be more accurate to have categories like:

books I read when I was probably too young for them;
books I refuse to travel without;
books whose titles I have lost;
books I wish I had more opportunity to quote from;
books I claim to have read but haven’t exactly read read ... ?

And — since this is an assignment for a translation class — shouldn’t I also include “books I tend to think about in German” or “books I tend to think about in French” or “books whose original language I will probably never be able to read”?

But actually translation and taxonomy seem to me to be natural partners. Taxonomy is merely the art of making distinctions, and therefore every language is a kind of taxonomy; every language makes different types of distinctions. In Latin or Russian, for example — languages with complex case systems — it is important to distinguish the role of each noun: is it singular, plural, masculine, feminine, a direct or an indirect object? The case ending will tell you. In Chinese, par contre, what is important about nouns is not what they are doing, really, but what they are. Each noun is accompanied by a “measurement word”, which indicates a sort of category: “long soft things,” like fish and feathers, have one measurement word, and “long hard things” like pencils and dogs (?!) have another. Books have their own measurement word, and so do people, and so do cups.

What do these taxonomies tell us? More about the culture than about the objects themselves, I suspect. To go back to my list of books: what would happen if I organized them, not into piles, but into a continuum — based on color, for example, or length, or by when I read them or how much I love them? Would the way I organize my reading material — that is to say, my past — determine my relationship to it?

Translation is: difficult; music.

2011-09-23T19:50:00.004+02:00

Taped on the wall just above my desk in my apartment in Paris are a picture of Darwin and a picture of Leonard Bernstein. Darwin is there because G.G., a professor of mine once printed it out for me, saying, “I’m not sure why I’m printing this for you, but I think you should have it.” He has enjoyed pride of place ever since. And Leonard Bernstein is there because I’m obsessed with him.

However, I have come to realize that these two serve a metaphorical purpose as well, and I’m keeping them there to remind me about the ethics of translation. It seems to me now that Darwin was a kind of translator, observing nature meticulously, obsessively, in order to re-write it, its genealogy and present state, in another language: a human one. Another of my professors has asked whether translation can be defined as “writing under constraint”; I think that’s really not a bad definition — and Darwin was certainly constrained.

So he reminds me, basically, to just keep at it: keep observing, keep reading, agonize if you must, and then produce something, even if everyone thinks you’re crazy (and they probably will).

The photo of Bernstein I have is my favorite picture of him: conducting, head thrown back, arms upraised, eyes closed, as if at any moment he will transubstantiate and simply turn into music. He once said that his engagement with music was “a total embrace,” that knowledge of a work makes you belong to it, and not it to you.

He was also absolutely fanatical about loyalty to the composer, and remains remarkable among conductors for sounding noticeably different with each composer he conducts. Conducting, he said, is exactly like breathing: the preparation is inhalation, the music is exhalation.

So Lenny, eyes closed, is winking at me and reminding me to be loyal to the composer (or in my case, the writer), and not to engage except by total embrace; the work must live inside you; you must be inhaling and exhaling it.

(For in fact, literary translation is very much like musical interpretation: Bach as played by Perahia is not the same as Bach by Gould, but Bach is always there, and music is always the goal, the necessity.)

Paris: la belle, la bête, et le what now?

2011-09-12T19:05:00.004+02:00

Amazing things about Paris:

1) WARM BAGUETTES: The best things ever. Somehow I’ve had incredible luck for three days running, and have never yet walked home with a less-than-piping-hot baguette.

2) Chocolate éclairs: OH. MON. DIEU. The best things ever, after warm baguettes. Didn’t realize they were chocolate when I bought them — I mean, they had chocolate on top, of course — but they had chocolate mousse inside, and I bit into one and almost died right then and there of happiness.

3) Daily life in Paris can be rather complicated and difficult, which means that even tiny victories (e.g. food) can be celebrated all out of proportion. Perfect example: learned today that my super-fancy, cutting-edge contact lens solution is available here, albeit it for €18/ginormous bottle. Danced all the way home.

Less-than-amazing things about Paris:

1) The national telecom company blacklist, which I have inexplicably found myself on. (Now, true, I have had fantasies about getting into some sort of political trouble in a foreign country, but I was hoping to be able to say something more along the lines of, “Ah, Liechtenstein! Yes, I was once deported from Liechtenstein,” and less, “I was blacklisted by every phone company in France for a while.”) After paying an exorbitant fee, I have freed myself from this blacklist, but only after “twelve to fifteen days” of processing time. Because they who control the blacklist don’t have computers, I guess, and so need to inform each other of my acquittal by carrier pigeon.

2) Not nearly enough executive transvestites hanging around with mice, cats, and monkeys.

Incredibly weird things about Paris: there’s only a need for one: Marie Antoinette’s dulcimer-playing android. Android, as in Data, only in the eighteenth century.

You say goodbye, and I say hello

2011-09-11T20:35:00.004+02:00

I wrote before about the death of one of my former professors; I’m back in Paris now, which meant I was able to attend her memorial service yesterday, on what would have been her birthday, in one of the rooms that used to be part hers. She would come in — tiny, blonde, often in a red coat and usually dragging a wheeled suitcase — say, “Okay,” and then lecture for ninety minutes, without ever once looking at her notes.

I loved hearing people talk about her. They all said the same things — she was brilliant, she had a terrifying reputation but was a genuinely kind person, she held everyone up to rigidly (but not impossibly) high standards. One of her colleagues, another of my former professors and still a dear friend, said that he was so happy that he was able to teach with her and not be graded by her! I was crying by then, but that phrase made me laugh out loud.

I wish I’d known her better, or at least longer; even so, something about her death has made me deeply sad and I notice her absence on campus and in my life, somehow. Forces of nature don’t go missing; but she has.

A couple of strange things about funerals (or rather, memorials), and this one in particular: (1) I always feel incredibly hungry afterwards. It’s probably just a desire to remind myself that I am still alive, but I devoured two glasses of grapefruit juice, half a pain suisse, and some kind of strange lemon poppyseed cookie right after the service, and in a way this was also part of saying goodbye. (2) This service gave me a chance to see several people I hadn’t seen yet since arriving in Paris, very dear people, old friends, old professors, etc. Having to greet old friends on the occasion of someone’s death is very odd — there’s a slight awkwardness at the joy of it, but the joy is also intensified by the reminder of its fragility.

Afterwards my very dear friend Lily and I spent a long time on the Champs de Mars (the park near campus and directly in front of the Eiffel Tower), catching up and processing each other’s lives, talking about our old and new homes, old and new relationships, and ending up, as always, with Virginia Woolf.

And all of this was, in a symbolic and particularly poignant way, representative of my first two weeks in Paris: made up of goodbyes and hellos.

I’m just starting my MA and realizing (as usual) that I don’t know ANYTHING, that academically I am pulled in about fifty-seven different (and opposite) directions, but that everything is exciting and thrilling, I love my professors, my classmates are v. interesting, intelligent, and fun, and Paris seems like a brand-new city, not at all like it was two years ago, except for the quality of the pastries, which is and always has been exceptional.

Not that anything particular has changed about Paris; minor things only; but I have changed, and all things are ready, if our minds be so.

geometry, currency, holography; or, everything is so much more real in winter!

2011-07-28T20:53:00.000+02:00

Out of the illiteracy of summer (to which not all are susceptible, but I most certainly am), comes other, more volatile, obsessions. If I were in 18th century France, this might mean seduction and heresy, but here in the boonies, where our egos are kept in check by the lightning and alien rock formations, summer obsessions take on an altogether more inhuman character. At the moment, I cannot relinquish thoughts of:

1. Crystals- quite literally the ordering of flows. the science of how you get something geometrical to emerge from something which is not is clear, but this doesn't make the act of finding a crystal in the dirt any less astounding. The experience always has an extra-terrestrial tinge to it, as does everything, really, which reminds you that the earth is first and foremost a geological entity. Björk and Gondry, are, as usual, extremely adept at capturing this sublime strangeness.

2. Money- not the accumulation of it, but its endless, irrational coming and going. My current line of work puts me smack-dab in the middle of infinite arbitrary exchanges, and I have tried to explain to Madeleine time after time how hypnotic this becomes. I wonder, really, if this, and not the promise of reward, is what drives gamblers. For this reason I have also developed an unhealthy interest in the 2-dollar bill, which is rare enough these days that it seems to create jams and blockages whenever used as legal tender. This summer I have received two, a suitably clunky number.

3. The secret behind our pixelated reality! If only tabloids would run this kind of story. Come winter, doubtless, I will find this completely ridiculous and untenable. But, for now, I am a hologram.

By contrast

2011-07-28T05:23:00.010+02:00

There are things that make me ashamed of America, like this inane and infuriating piece about why the world would be safer with more guns; and things that make me proud, like Roy Harris’ Symphony No. 3, parts I and II.

There are delightful examples of graphic design with minimal fuss, like these posters by Christian Jackson for children’s stories:

And examples of graphic design with minimal soul power, like this collection of default profile pictures. I want to know: why there are multiple hipsters and robots (not to mention the wailing baby), and (more importantly), why the defaults always seem to be male. Oh, that robot is a woman, you say? My mistake.

Aaaaaand: most exciting (but not necessarily obvious) list of books ever; most outrageously obvious scientific finding ever.

Things we like VIII

2011-07-25T06:19:00.006+02:00

1) Superhero movies!! At least the ones that don’t suck, like Captain America (and unlike Thor, though it pains me to say it, as someone who considers Norse mythology her comfort literature and worships Branagh’s Henry V). Am also now super-excited for The Avengers next summer, since it will apparently involve inter-dimensional travel, eyepatches, requisite mad scientists, and, most importantly, more Tony Stark.

2) The way that manatees a) walk along the sea floor with their flippers and b) sleep. Also, whenever they aren’t eating up to 10% of their body weight, they’re sleeping. I would make an excellent manatee.

3) The Once and Future King by T.H. White. I’ve probably started this book five or six times in my life, always loved starting it, but never got around to actually finishing it. This time am utterly resolved. Currently 100 pages in and adoring it.

4) Proper nouns that sound like adjectives (why are they inevitably British?): e.g. Cavendish; Standish.

Things we like VII

2011-07-21T02:43:00.007+02:00

1) Ataraxia, which is absolutely not my current state, and which therefore seems like a worthy goal;

2) English words of Anglo-Saxon descent:

3*) the fact that most anagrams of my name have to do with destruction and disease: Malady Rued, Lauded Army, Mauled Yard, Dreamy Dual.

* doesn’t really deserve to be included in “things we like”; would do better in “things we find amusing and mildly disturbing”

4) this incredibly sad letter from Marilyn Monroe to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson;

5) Leonard Bernstein’s birthday card to Aaron Copland, 1967:

Dear A:

It’s two days before your birthday, but I’m already thinking hard and tenderly about you; and this note is your birthday present carrying with it such abiding love as I rarely if ever get to express to you in our occasional meetings. I don’t know if you’re aware of what you mean, have meant for 30 years, to me and my music and so many of my attitudes to life and to people. I suppose if there’s one person on earth who is at the center of my life it’s you; and day after day I recognize in my living your presence, your laugh, your peculiar mixture of intensity and calm. . . . I hope you live forever.

A long strong hug —
Lenny

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan

2011-06-16T19:11:00.009+02:00

In honor of Bloomsday, a small collection of amusing things that I don’t understand:

that do WHAT?!

(also ... it really should be “dudes who”...

not that I have an unhealthy obsession with grammar, or anything)

In San Francisco, people like robot porn.

Is this true, O California friends of mine?

the magnificent six-legged grizzly bears of 1865.

P.S. We can’t have a Bloomsday without Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.

Things we like VI (I think? I've lost count)

2011-06-14T20:01:00.003+02:00

1) Sarah Vowell: for many many reasons, like: having the same passionately ambiguous relationship to America that I do; for expressing said relationship much more eloquently than I could; for being a frustrated idealist; for being a nerd; for being the most reliably witty live person I can think of:

Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was, and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio, saying, “Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell.” And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes. And after these things I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me, and lo, it will be a matinee, and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open, and out will cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh, and yea, I have an umbrella.
— “The End is Near, Nearer, Nearest” from Take the Cannoli

2) Yo-Yo Ma, especially in the most recent issue of Gramophone magazine, in which he is interviewed by Lang Lang, and proves himself entirely wonderful:

YM: Menuhin used to say that certain composers are less exportable than others. This reminds me of Chinese food. Do you know the Chinese delicacy, the thousand-year egg?

LL: The pidan! I tried to get my American friends to eat it and they told me to get lost.

YM: No one likes it int he West because it’s stinky. Yet Peking Duck is very exportable because it looks beautiful with its crispy skin. Someone told me yesterday that in Vietnam they drink a liqueur whose bottle contains a snake. I think it would be a little hard for me to do that. Certain things travel well, other things travel less well. I wonder if music is a bit like that.

LL: You choose the final question, Yo-Yo. Would you like to talk about Bach or about how Chinese culture has influenced Western music?

YM: Why not both? One of the things that I’ve learnt about Bach and about music in general is that there is no such thing as purity. ... It’s good for music that composers and musicians are exposed to different things, that people try to understand what they don’t understand. People need to get to a point where they feel that the thing that they don’t understand is part of them.

3) Snarky biographies, namely Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers (3rd ed.), in which the author demonstrates his apparent disdain (= jealousy!!) for certain composers near and dear to my heart:

If Bruckner’s music arouses fanatical devotion in many listeners, Mahler’s creates an actual frenzy. Again there are doubters, those who find Mahler’s music too neurotic and often too banal for enjoyment. The dedicated Mahlerian regards these unregenerates the way St. Paul regarded the heathen. It is hard to think of a composer who arouses an equal loyalty. The worship of Mahler amounts to a religion. Any music critic will attest to the fact that a response of anything except rapture to the Mahler symphonies will bring long letters of furious denunciation.

I, for one, was surprised to find out that Mahler heathens even exist. I mean ... really?

OK, Computer.

2011-06-01T18:56:00.006+02:00

I appreciate the reassurance, Computer:

but it’s not good enough anymore. There are too many things that exist that shouldn’t. For example:

1) this program Hidden, which allows you to spy on anybody who’s stolen your computer. How does it work? Well, they say:

When you activate tracking, Hidden will locate your stolen computer anywhere on the planet, collect photos of the thief and screen shots of the computer in use. (We also collect lots of nerdy network information, but we won’t bore you with the details!)

WAIT! Give me those boring nerdy details! Like: WHO ELSE CAN SPY ON ME? (In Soviet Russia, Hidden spies YOU !!)

Don’t tell me it’s for my own good, Computer. I’m on to you.

2) The Museum of Me, featuring the Facebook Collection: this just makes me sick.

Death, oh baby ...

2011-06-01T05:39:00.009+02:00

... you know that dying is fine, but maybe,

I wouldn’t like death if death were good,

Not even if death were good.

Things that are making me think about death:

1) One of my favorite professors, Feliz Eda Burhan, died last week; she was an amazing woman — a brilliant scholar and teacher. She was demanding and always v. critical of my writing (and I loved her for it). “This is good,” she would write on my essays, “but I know you can do better.”

A classmate of mine wrote to me to inform me of her death; she said that Professor Burhan had “passed away.” That’s what everybody said about her, actually: she passed away. I’ve always found this an incredibly strange phrase; I preferred the way another of my friends put it: that Professor Burhan had come to inhabit one of her own phrases, the “absence of presence and the presence of absence.” She is not here, but she has not passed away. In her absence is presence.

2) Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Mahler was obsessed with death his entire career, but he was particularly afraid of the curse of the ninth — to which, in fact, he ultimately succumbed. As he was writing the Ninth, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter suddenly died of scarlet fever; he himself was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition; WWI was rapidly approaching. So the symphony became his farewell to life — his own, and that of his entire world’s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — I was thinking of this line as I listened, especially during the third movement when the cracks in the structure are revealed and everything indeed begins to crumble. The second and third movements are intense and twisted, carnivalesque, ridiculous and sinister at the same time; the first and fourth are movements of the body: the symphony begins with an irregular pulse, a hesitant arrhythmia, and the final movement ends in much the same way; it is the heart-beat slowing down.

Herbert von Karajan said that this symphony is “music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”

I highly recommend both the program notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the performance I attended (the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the incomparable Marin Alsop), and the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas. It’s rather apocalyptic, but so is the symphony.

3) These recently-declassified photos from Hiroshima, 1945:

This one reminds me of the human body, a spine or a rib cage.

kinds of freedom

2011-05-02T19:17:00.003+02:00

I’m slightly in shock and don’t really know how to respond to this news about bin Laden — for one thing, I found about it from friends’ Facebook statuses, and that alone kind of freaked me out — and then there were the exhumed 9/11 memories to be dealt with —and then there was the fact that even though bin Laden was (to borrow a phrase from Eddie Izzard) a mass-murdering fuckhead, my country still assassinated somebody, and I can’t really accept the equation of that to “justice being served.”

So between feeling deeply confused about all that and anxiety about my show opening this week (The Odd Couple — do come see it, if you’re in the area!), I slept terribly and feel rather out of it, and am compelled to make lists.

Things that make me feel human:

1) I don’t care how many mediocre films Woody Allen has made, he is still my hero forever just for this scene: a minute and a half of Manhattan.

2) Mozart probably didn’t know this, but he wrote Don Giovanni for Cecilia Bartoli: Batti, Batti, O Bel Masetto.

3) Ai Weiwei (whose name [Ài; 艾] is a homophone for ‘love’ [ài; 愛]) is fighting for freedom of speech in China, has been censored and harassed by the government for years, and is now being held in custody for undefined “economic crimes.” Here is his TED video.

in honor of the last day of national poetry month...

2011-05-01T00:56:00.002+02:00

All You Who Sleep Tonight

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love,

No hand to left or right

And emptiness above —

Know that you aren’t alone

The whole world shares your tears,

Some for two nights or one,

And some for all their years.

— Vikram Seth

The South; or, Alles wird Trauben

2011-03-14T18:35:00.005+01:00

For the first time, really, I find myself in the southern part of the old world, and there is something peculiar about it. The quality of decay (equally of paint and morals) is entirely superior here.

Concretely, one may observe this is in the sugar packets that are three times the size of ones you would find in the new world or in northern Europe, the ubiquity and cheapness of drink, the succulents sprouting from collapsed roofs. Austerity is to be found nowhere, and particularly not in the church, where one may find the severed head of St. John the baptist and obscene gilt drapery (not painted, but carved in wood and now dripping with who knows what substance).

But, as many have observed, there is also a mental south, and this is equally irresistible and horrifying. Here, one does not dream, but is kept in a fever state. There is no future in the south, you see- only the occasional pleasure which entirely resists planning or deferral. This is why we view it as permanently youthful, despite the wrinkled facades and rotting infrastructure. The south is precisely the point at which thanatos meets eros.

It is also 'Jack on his Deathbed,' illustrated so aptly by Walton Ford:

She treads the path that she untreads again

2011-02-27T07:29:00.007+01:00

There is so much space to be reckoned with! And I spend so much of my time being transported — usually by car, which makes me nervous and/or sleepy — that I’m just about ready to revolutionize the whole system: change all the places to go and all the ways to go there. For example — in a perfect world —

I would go everywhere that Deutsche Bahn does not go by Gossamer Albatross, which is like a flying bicycle —

in 1979 the Gossamer Albatross traversed the English Channel and won the Kremer Prize (which is given to pioneers of human-powered flight).

And then I would fly to my houseboat — which would be round, and as much like a floating hobbit hole as possible.

My dearest ambition in life is to be a river rat like Johnny Depp in Chocolat.

And if the river got too rough, I would just go sleep in my bubble house on the beach.

Suggestions for reality shows ( ... mostly involving academics)

2011-02-15T04:04:00.001+01:00

One of the most disturbing but most entertaining consequences of living in America has been that both of us now watch much more TV than we ever have in our lives. It’s kind of a love/hate thing: it’s so vacuous... so soulless... so ADDICTING and BRILLIANT... Reality TV is, of course, the best kind, appealing perpetually to our fascination with the real vs. the un- or hyperreal, and really our only complaint is that reality TV doesn’t feature enough academics (what, who says pasty professors can’t be telegenic?!).

To remedy the situation, we propose the following shows:

1. Publish or Perish: Academics in the Ring (i.e. if a contestant fails to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, he or she must be ‘peer-reviewed’ by The Adjudicator)

2. Wax figure-sculpting contest: can you fool the audience?

3. Wax person contest: can you fool the audience?: this entails setting people on stage while the judges and/or audience attempt to guess if the person is a real person or a wax person; see our previous post on the wax person phenomenon.

4. The Next Best-Selling Teen Novel: must draw major plot elements/religious persuasions out of hat

5. The Apprentice: Ljubljana (with Slavoj Žižek instead of Donald Trump; his hair is anyway vastly superior)

6. Dance-ademic: is deconstructive criticism parasitic or isn’t it?! is there such a thing as universal grammar or isn’t there?! did Michelangelo sculpt Laocoön or didn’t he?! DANCE IT OUT! Showdown, bitte.

Short story collection

2011-02-03T05:32:00.006+01:00

Lauren has just shown me this v. amusing site, the Random Title Generator. It’s rather formulaic — one title is always [Adjective] + [Noun], another is always The [Noun] of the [Noun], etc., and the pool of potential words to be plugged in is relatively small — but still, if you play with it long enough, it yields some pretty entertaining results.

Here are my favorite titles, randomly generated by the internet, and their accompanying recommended plot summaries, randomly generated by my imagination:

The Cracked Person: a thriller graphic novel, about a man who, in a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, accidentally combines his DNA with that of a pepper grinder*;

Vacant Voyages: genre: photography/psychoanalysis — pictures of people staring into space, with scholarly commentary;

The Unwilling Name: starring Hortense, or Tiglath-pileser the Third;

The Girl of the Person: a vacuous tale, to be sold exclusively by Urban Outfitters;

Lovely Snake: an epic poem, narrated by Cleopatra, describing her thoughts in the moments before she puts the asp to her breast;

The Magnificent Doors: a coffee-table book for people who love both architecture and Jim Morrison;

Crying in the Ice: über-depressing — will undoubtedly win the Booker Prize;

The Consort of the Petals: an eighteenth-century drama of scandal, passion, intrigue, decadence — basically, Dangerous Liaisons, except with flowers instead of people.

* this takes place in the future, obviously, when inanimate objects have been discovered to possess DNA...

Simulating Summer

2011-02-03T04:21:00.004+01:00

What do you do when temperatures dip to a positively unnatural -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-29 degrees Celsius for the non-initiates)? If at all possible, board yourself up in your cave, put your samovar in overdrive, and do everything you can to trick your brain into believing it's summer. The following things have given me some relief.

1. The new Destroyer album, Kaputt, which is doubly-summery-- it's vaguely nostalgic in precisely the way August is, and it channels the 80's, which are eternal summer, in the best way possible. I showed a dear friend this video, and he asked me, "Is that guy Dan Bejar?" Only in my dreams...

2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which is suffused with all the sunshine that one could possible desire, enough perhaps to become somewhat stifling. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I have a soft spot for white dresses and inconceivably monumental rock formations, and this contains plenty of both.

3. Hallucinating elaborate and lengthy thunderstorms! For it is not just the sunshine that one misses in winter- the electricity simply is not there, and thundersnows are the rarest occurrence. I attempted to find a virtual substitute, and came closest with the 'virtual thunderstorm with a 3-d holophonic sound illusion' (I'll give anything a try that sounds like it could be part of a 19th century sideshow), but I think the science of artificial 3-d thunder is dubious at best. Still, it is better than the snow, which absorbs any sound at all.

Three kinds of love

2011-01-30T02:21:00.005+01:00

The first is love mixed with architecture: yellow hot-water-bottle windows, a tear in every one, and the red tower from Vienna Westbahnhof.

(Hundertwasser, Yellow Houses — it hurts to wait with love,

if love is somewhere else — jealousy, 1966)

The second is tiny, that shies at the hooting of cars, that adores the bells of horse-trams.

должно быть, маленький,

смирный любеночек.

Она шарахается автомобильных гудков.

Любит звоночки коночек

(Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers, 1915)

The third is contained in twelve billion words, beginning in ----, ----.

The first kind of love speaks German; the second, Russian; the third, English.

The Vegetable Lamb: Number 1

2011-01-29T00:09:00.003+01:00

The Vegetable Lamb, a little project of mine which Madeleine has been providing enormous amounts of assistance with (and contributing to!), is finally here!

The Vegetable Lamb Issue 1:

Number 1

By Lauren Greyson in Art

The inaugural issue of the Vegetable Lamb has arrived! Featuring everything from accounts of trans-species friendships to meditations on difference and repetition, this issue is meant to introduce the indiscernible in all its depth and breadth.

‘The most lamentable comedy and cruel death’

2011-01-26T05:42:00.005+01:00

First, the cruel death, i.e. my new favorite depressing poem:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

— Stevie Smith (1957)

And the most lamentable comedy: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by my new hero, Laurence Sterne. My cheek muscles are sore from having grinned and/or laughed out loud through 150 pages (which isn’t v. far in, but Tristram himself hasn’t even been born yet, or rather, hasn’t gotten around to telling the story of his birth, though he has covered his conception, the death of poor Yorick, the wounding of Uncle Toby, hobby-horses, and whether it is possible to baptize a child before it has been born).

For in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all my digressions (one only excepted) there is a master-stroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader [...]

The connection: these works are ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ which is what Marianne Moore says poetry should be.

Things we like V: undeniable trends [aka the year in review]

2011-01-04T22:29:00.010+01:00

1. An analysis of my reading habits in 2010:

Books that I read, cover to cover: approximately 30.

Books that I spent a good deal of time reading, but either started and didn’t finish, or read only lengthy excerpts of: approximately 25.

2. Norwegian men of the year (to qualify one must be named Edvard): Munch and Grieg.

3. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (one of my new favorite people) and his film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and, praise the Queen!, was showing in London, where I finally saw it and became entirely enamored. There is a v. nice summary of Uncle Boonmee here, though I also highly recommend putting the original Thai title into Google translate:

4. The difference between the real and the surreal, more specifically: my increasing inability to distinguish them. There is reality TV, for one thing, which shouldn’t be real but is, and then obviously wax people who are not made of wax, and women laughing alone with salad.

5. Hedonism, which often takes the form of a search for the perfect chocolate muffin (found, at long last, on Charing Cross Road). As we were snacking on the street, my friend whom I was with declared, “This is the best muffin in the entire world. I like that I can be v. hedonistic around you.”

6. Commemorating instances of cosmic unfairness and/or explaining medieval literature by writing limericks.

7. Ai Weiwei, his ethics, and his beautiful beautiful sunflower seeds.

8. Quantum entanglement, which sounds, like most things, better in German: Quantenverschränkung.

Things we like IV: the post-holiday decadence edition

2011-01-04T19:11:00.006+01:00

1. Sun sneezing (photic sneezing reflex if we're being technical) and the art it inspires. If Apollo were to sneeze, these sculptures would be the result.

2. Hand-colored daguerreotypes, particularly when they feature royals who knew the meaning of facial hair. English royalty could do with a new infusion of Teutonic blood.

3. Thai peanut butter cup bonbons from this lovely establishment. Who would have thought the sublime goodness of chocolate and Thai curry would be even more sublime together?

4. Micromosaic jewelery, popular from the 17th to 19th centuries, and enjoying a resurgence now. I'm collecting barely visible tesserae in preparation for my own 2 centimeter tall okapi.

5. Practical guides to lacemaking, particularly if they contain over 300 engravings. Why oh why can't lacework be introduced into the standard mathematics curriculum?

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

2010-12-08T16:44:00.005+01:00

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

2010-12-01T20:33:00.006+01:00

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

2010-11-27T23:58:00.003+01:00

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

2010-11-22T04:55:00.004+01:00

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

2010-11-17T20:34:00.006+01:00

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

2010-11-13T21:10:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-09T00:29:00.006+02:00

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

2010-09-02T19:11:00.003+02:00

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:

“The Death of a Meaningless Person”
“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

2010-07-28T23:04:00.000+02:00

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

2010-07-28T08:26:00.001+02:00

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

2010-04-18T05:14:00.000+02:00

[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

2010-02-14T19:04:00.000+01:00

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

2010-02-05T08:37:00.000+01:00

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

2010-01-25T11:36:00.000+01:00

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

2010-01-20T14:13:00.000+01:00

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.

Indeterminacy on the Underground

2009-12-21T17:16:00.000+01:00

There's a point (well, really a stretch) on the Piccadilly Line going South in which it is impossible to tell who is coming or going.

If you take the train bound for "Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3, & 4," you'll eventually reach all of them, but not before stopping at Terminal 4 for "up to 8 minutes." It is between terminal 4 & the stop leading to the rest that your existence as a traveler becomes entirely indeterminate (whether coming or going, no one is without baggage).

A woman asked me, "Been anywhere exciting?" (She'd been to a peace conference in Jordan.) I responded, "I'm going somewhere exciting, hopefully."

Though in my haste to respond I chose the obvious, I could have answered anything. If I were willing to give up the pretense of having more important things to do, I think that I'd be inclined to inhabit this apparent anomaly, and perhaps spin a few tales. I'd be neither coming, nor going, but could pretend all the same.

Is this stretch of ten minutes or so along the tracks not a dramatization of our everyday existence?

So much about public transport seems to be just that.

When you alight

2009-12-11T04:18:00.000+01:00

I must admit, my loyalties are conflicted. I came here to teach English (and not just any English, but the Queen’s own English, since our textbooks insist on such civilized phrasings as “If you become ill, you should go to hospital”), yet I adore the fractured and accidentally poetic dialect already in place. Taiwanese English in general inspires great affection in me, but I have an especially soft spot for MRT English.

At each station, a recorded female voice cautions us, “When you alight, please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” It’s grammatically correct, but it transforms us all effortlessly into little birds in someone’s seventeenth-century sonnet.*

[ * or picaresque novel: Don Quixote, part I, book 4: ‘Here comes a fair troop of guests, and if they will here alight we may sing Gaudeamus.’]

Those of us on the platform, moreover, are requested to allow passengers to alight before boarding the train, and this request is invariably honored. Taipei residents, when not driving, must be the most considerate people in the world. Everyone lines up v. properly to board or disembark (alight) from the trains, and then lines up v. properly to ride the escalator. (Beware, Great Britain — you’re about to be usurped as the monarchs of queuing!)

Inside the train are v. few seats, which are intended for “elderly, infirm, or passengers with baby” [N.B.: the baby may be either inside or outside the womb]. The reminder of this fact reads: “Let each and every seat be priority seat.” It struck me as a beautiful phrase, somehow, like the proclamation of peace after a war over blue plastic territory, and I could imagine the author of that sentence proudly recalling the phrase ‘each and every’ from his or her English class several years before.

P.S. Some of my favorite instances of Chinglish ( = Chinese + English) are those which have an unintentional but amusing compounded significance. At Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall yesterday, we saw a little dispenser of hand sanitizer labeled HANDY WASHER. Little handies, v. handy indeed, and in Germany it would mean a place to wash your cell phone. ;-)

New affection and noise

2009-12-10T08:37:00.000+01:00

Taiwan is absolutely full of stuff:

neon signs, advertising je ne sais pas
smells, including but not limited to: moisture, dumplings, stinky tofu, sewage, bonsai trees, perfume, plastic, asphalt, fried chicken, guava juice, disinfectant, fresh meat (fresh as in barely five minutes deceased), scooter and car and bus exhaust, occasional whiffs of mountain and even sea air...
monks on cellphones
buildings with totally dilapidated frames but shiny automatic glass sliding doors
women with eerily perfect hair (the first things I want to learn in Chinese all have to do with food, but as soon as I’ve mastered that I want to learn to say, “Excuse me, what hair products do you use?” [my hair has gone rascally and unwieldy in the humidity] Whenever I think about asking this question, though, I think of that bizarre segment of Paris je t’aime that deals with Asian hair products, and then usually get distracted and walk past wherever I’m going)
stray dogs and cats, particularly in my neighbourhood. The cats are high-strung and suspicious, but the dogs are surprisingly meek.
temples (Buddhist, Taoist, and syncretic)
scooters (motorized)!! And it’s astonishing what can fit on a scooter. Great Danes, 2-year-old children, enough food crates to load a small cargo ship, up to four mostly-grown people: these are relatively common sights, and everyone drives like a maniac.
jungly mountains that territorialize the city suddenly and unexpectedly
people in anti-H1N1 masks, many of which are designer and/or Hello Kitty-themed. People are taking the epidemic v. seriously; I sneezed innocently on the MRT (= the underground) yesterday and was immediately a cause of alarm. I smiled weakly and tried to look healthy.
7-Elevens: v. disconcerting. There must be more 7-Elevens in Taipei City than there are in the whole of the United States. They sell hot dogs, and also hard-boiled eggs marinated in tea, and exceptionally good soy milk in tiny little green cartons.
noise: imagine the smells, only auditory. And add to it Beethoven, who is omnipresent in Taipei thanks to the garbage trucks, which drive around all day playing “Für Elise” to advertise their presence. When people hear this they run sprinting out of their apartments to throw their trash into the back of the trucks, which wait for nobody.

Taiwanese national obsessions are: putting things in multiple plastic bags (in bakeries, for instance, each item you buy is put into a tiny plastic bag, and certain like items may be combined into slightly larger plastic bags [i.e. sweet things vs. salty things], and then the entire purchase is handed to you in a large plastic bag), buy-one-get-one-free offers, and being genuinely and exceptionally kind to strangers.

On my first or second full day in Taipei, I went to Longshan Temple, the oldest and one of the most sacred Buddhist temples in the city. I arrived just as the evening service was beginning — a v. beautiful affair with incense and chanting and gorgeously intricate shrines. It was v. crowded, so I was trying to stand somewhere unobtrusive, admiring but not really understanding what I was watching. After ten seconds, maybe, there was a tap on my shoulder and a girl my age-ish said, “Please, may I introduce you to this?” She started telling me the history of the temple and explaining the ceremony — the tables full of food were offerings to Buddha or the worshipers’ ancestors. Although various offerings correspond to various wishes (pineapples and oranges = good fortune; green onion = intelligence), people left all kinds of things — Oreo cookies, even, which I thought was delightful (Buddha likes Oreos!). The worshipers collect them again after the ceremony, but in the meantime they can pray at the main altar or at any of the numerous shrines around the periphery. This shrine is for medicine and health, my friend explained, and this one is for success in business, this one if you want to have a baby, and this one is to fall or stay in love — “this one is the most popular,” she grinned. Inside the shrines are hundreds of tiny little candles, each one representing a family who has prayed there and donated money to the temple. My friend said that she liked coming to Longshan Temple in particular because they were generous — they don’t charge for incense or candles, nor for fortunes, which are written on small scrolls of delicate paper by a monk calligrapher. I was in awe of everything there (spiritually and physically — the architecture of the temple is opulent and graceful, and there are exquisite gardens of orchids [as tall as me or taller] flanking the main altar), but mostly entranced by the unstudied kindness of this girl, who kept apologizing for her hesitant but elegant English, and who had to leave to get back to her university before I got a chance to ask her name. I know karma is Hindu, not Buddhist, but still — I wish her good karma.

Wie Goethe sagt ...

2009-12-08T17:25:00.000+01:00

Wer sich selbst und andre kennt
Wird auch hier erkennen
Orient und Okzident
Sind nicht mehr zu trennen

— West-Östlicher Divan (1819)

HELLO WORLD! What follows are the musings of two American girls who are slowly migrating east: Lauren is in London, attempting to study critical theory and find the holy grail of soups; Maddy is in Taipei, teaching English to hoards of adorable children and compiling a catalogue of strange fruit. Although physically separated by the Eurasian landmass, here on this blog, East does indeed meet West. HAPPY READING!