a list of common and uncommon collocations, encountered in my reading of the last couple of weeks

measures for the prevention of accidents
men of worth
invariably declined
extensive insights
chains of association
restless capital
prevailing sense
neurotic restlessness
disorganized capitalism

primary ghost
resident specter
unplanned sadness
violin curves of the church
ragged claws
the republic of translation
practiced insomniac
subliminal recesses
linguistically biodegradable
ontological heart condition
the shadow of God
the hidden world
uncertain step
tempting comestibles

In defense of winter

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. 

By contrast

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

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.

‘The most lamentable comedy and cruel death’

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.

Yes and No and the New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Taipei Public Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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