Reading Friday: "Ethnography of a Chinese Essay"

Wang Meng at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2009. Looks like his voice is still projecting! (From wikipedia)

Scoggin, Mary. Ethnography of a Chinese Essay: Zawen in Contemporary China. Dissertation: University of Chicago, 1997.

One way to take great heart for one’s dissertation-in-progress is to consider what successful dissertations have done before. After reading Mary Scoggin’s chapter profiling how three different writers use zawen to make political statements, I realize that a dissertation chapter can be short, can leave stories unfinished, and will most likely have parts that are confused and need reworking still. Further, literary considerations seem completely pushed to the side: Scoggin’s writing is often inelegant. And why shouldn’t it be? As an anthropologist, she takes her work more as a report than as a literary project.

Chapter 6: Zawen and Ideology.

Chapter six begins with one example of a parable that is often used for political criticism:

Confucius was traveling through the Tai mountains when he came upon a woman weeping at a tomb. He had his disciple ask her why she wept so bitterly. She said that in the past her father, husband and now her son had all been killed by a tiger. Confucius asked her why she did not leave this place. She replied, “because there is no harsh government here.” Confucius turned to his disciples, “We can see from this, harsh government is more ferocious than a tiger.”

Zawen writers like Liu Jia, Lan Ling, and Wang Meng all manipulate a system of such literary allusions to express social and political content with varying degrees of irony. When we observe closely how these writers work, we can see that all along China’s newspapers and literary journals have been places for them to participate in just the kind of political critique that seekers of civil society in China have called for:

In a typical contemporary Chinese scenario, when a part-time free-lance writer composes and essay and sends it to the literary department at a major paper, the writer is ordinary, while the literary editor is “official.” Then, when the editor submits the essay to her boss, the chief editor, for approval to print it, she is an ordinary office worker, while the chief editor is the “official.” Then again, when the Provincial Committee member picks up the paper just to read it like any other ordinary reader, and sees that an incendiary essay has been published by a writer who also happens to be, or have ties to, a rival in government...as we come full circle we may have outlined a significant political event....The practice of writing and publishing intentionally provocative zawen operates as effective social criticism and a builder of moral communion--”friends” -- and rivalry -- “enemies” -- in newspapers and journals: precisely that public sphere where social analysts often look for “civil society.”

Following, she gives three brief profiles of such writers and the circles of friends and enemies they create.

Liu Jia took over the editorship of the “literary supplement” to the People’s Daily from Lan Ling at the beginning of the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in 1957. This leftist ideologue carried forward the highly ideological, non-artistic mode of zawen writing that dates to Lu Xun, Mao’s 1942 “Talks,” and Liu Jia’s own theoretical essays from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. During the 1980s, in his retirement, he helped establish a community of leftist zawen writers to advocate for essays in a “New Tone,” “the tone of people who have turned themselves around and taken the power of their own role as masters (Liu Jia 1987: 2)” The main characteristic of this “New Tone” is what Scoggin calls “a base-line emotional state” (236, Scoggin reminds us that music and emotions are deeply connected in traditional Chinese aesthetics); this emotion is one of restraint: do what you can, don’t criticize too much.

Lan Ling actually started the “literary supplement” to the People’s Daily in 1956, during the “Hundred Flowers” campaign; he fell victim to the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in 1957. Also influenced by Lu Xun’s zawen, Lan Ling favored earnestly critical pieces, such as one of his own against a Qingdao City nursery school that sheltered the children elite officials (243). “The task of zawen, according to Lan Ling, is not to conduct investigative reporting, but rather to reflexively respond to the normal affairs that anyone may encounter in daily life.” After his years of suffering and exile, he emerged in the 1980s to attack “ultra-left” politics, tracking their intensity against the cycle of flowering and withering of zawen publication: his point is clearly that a critical public sphere depends on diverse and sociable zawen production. Unlike Liu Jia, Lan Ling believes that zawen are properly literature, not simply “mules” for politics, though political content is very important.

Wang Meng’s few 1980s zawen reveal an ambitious, even cocky, craftsman of insinuation; Scoggin seems to observe his work only very briefly so that she can establish the great emotional range inhering in the term “tone.” In recent years, the more diverse set of approaches favored by Lan Ling and his followers (and which Scoggin calls “Lu Xun-style zawen) has gained more popularity than Lu Jia’s “new tone” idea.

These profiles are all of ambitious, major political participants; one wants to contrast this with the deliberately reserved Yang Jiang. Can Za yi yu za xie be considered zawen? It is short, impressionistic writing. It does contain literary allusions. It often takes the form of portraits -- I really wonder to what extent Lu Xun, Liu Jia, Lan Ling, Wang Meng, Deng Tuo and Wu Han wrote portrait-style zawen that I might compare to, say, “Granny Lin” or “Lucky and Nimble.” As for political content, we may heed Scoggins warning that “We may look at a sample of social criticism and not see it,” often because of its dense literary qualities.
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What are Poets For? : On John Haines

Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays by John Meade Haines

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of essays is a long-term consideration of the writing life and all its aesthetic and critical potential. John Haines will stand out from now on to me as a voice from the wilderness, speaking of the need to consider all that has been lost as human beings cover the globe in an endless cycle of production and consumption, construction and destruction. The wisdom of the aging Haines of the 1980s and 1990s lies in his realization that this perspective on humanity at first seems to pit it against nature, but actually it is only ever a part of nature. Something in this idea may have helped Haines attain the acceptance, or at least resignation, for the onslaught of human progress, though at the same time he would never stop speaking for the wilderness, for an ancient world where poetry had mystic power, for “a certain attention” that is born only in such states of quietude, detachment, and thoughtfulness as were once common elements of our life, but increasingly less so.

I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

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I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

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Preliminary Dossier: Mao Xiang, Memoirist

Mao Xiang (1611-1693), the Handsome Shadow. Mm, dashing, eh?

Preliminary Notes on a figure I've just learned about: the memoirist Mao Xiang:

According to a profile on the website of Oberlin College, Mao was a talented disciple of the calligrapher Dong Qichang 董其昌, but left few examples of his own calligraphy behind (Oberlin has one though -- note to self to look at that if ever in Ohio). As with predecessors Dong Qichang and Yuan Hongdao, the younger Mao was a "bon vivant". C. Mason, author of this piece for Oberlin, goes on to describe the progress of the mind through learning a craft that is a linking narrative among many lovers of beauty, Chinese and otherwise:

The calligraphy of Waiting for the Moon at Six Bridges is not written in the imitative hand of a student; rather it reflects a mature style in which Mao has synthesized elements of Dong's calligraphy with his own. In thus passing through the stages of emulation, divergence, and synthesis, Mao reveals that Dong's influence upon him was not just stylistic, but theoretical as well. Dong, like Yuan Hongdao, felt that tradition was most valuable when mastered and transcended. That belief is embodied in this important scroll, and thus creates a special harmony between form and content that goes beyond stylistic comparisons and resonates on a much higher philosophical plane.

That Mao was a Ming loyalist and a lover of the famous concubine Dong Xiaowan is only briefly mentioned.

Mason refers us to one other source for the life of Mao Xiang that might be worth checking out:

Hummel, Arthur W., ed. Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period. Washington, D.C., 1943, pp. 566-67.

I don't know that I've ever read one of these entries, which is odd and slightly embarrassing.

A short note in hudong.com (which also contains the portrait I placed above) gives his original home town as Rugao 如皋 in today's Jiangsu. There are also some critical comments in the entry:

笔锋墨秀，玄旨微情。俱在有意无意、可想不可到之境。
-- Chen Mingxia 陈名夏,《重订朴巢诗文集序》

清音奔赴，灵想超忽 ; 一笔一洞壑，一转一绝境
-- Du Jun 杜濬《朴巢文选序》, comparing his travel writing to that of Liu Zongyuan

诗律深细，葩采滟发
-- Chen Hanhui 陈函辉on his poetry 《寒碧孤吟序》

婉转以附物，惆怅而切情
-- Ni Yuanlu 倪元璐 on his poetry 《朴巢诗序》

The Hudong author calls Mao's work "Shadow Plum Reminsicences" a classic of biji literature 笔记文章, but offers no critical comments specifically speaking to that.

Baidu.com has a much larger biographical entry that dwells at surprising length on his affair with the courtesan Dong Xiaowan.


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Montaigne in the New Yorker

Montaigne a la New Yorker (Thanks stevereads)

KRAMER, JANE. “ME, MYSELF, AND I..” New Yorker 85, no. 27 (2009): 34-41.

"Suspend Judgment"

A tourist visits Montaigne's tower in Bordeaux

Friend in a high place

New Edition

Étienne de La Boétie

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Tiananmen memoir: Yu Hua 余华

I guess the memory literature of Tiananmen is probably it's own subgenre, one that characteristically combines personal memories of the days surrounding June 4, 1989 and more general reflections on the prospects for political reform in China.


I'm a writer, who cares if I wear plaid with stripes?

One that is going around this year is Yu Hua's op-ed in the New York Times, translated by Allan Barr (he of the Pu Songling fame!).

Yu Hua wasn't really close to the action of the 1989 crackdown; for him, watching the television is a good trope to connect personal memory with general political critique:

Every day the television repeatedly broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody. Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.

Then one day, the picture on my TV screen changed completely. The images of detained suspects were replaced by scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. The announcer switched from passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students to cheerfully lauding our nation’s progress.

Yu Hua's point is clear: using mass communication, China's leaders were able to repress the feelings of revulsion, fear, and indignation that the memory of the 1989 actions tended to inspire.
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Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen 沈從文 and Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和.




Shen Congwen, ca. 1931?

So I'm reading the Panda books edition Recollections of West Hunan. An interesting question comes up: what Chinese texts are these English translations made from?

You'd think that would be printed somewhere on the book, but it isn't. Clearly, Foreign Languages Press never viewed these books as pathways back to Chinese texts. All the prefatory note says is

This volume of his [Shen Congwen's] early essays comprises eleven chosen from four collections written between 1931 and 1937.

Great. Let's just track those down. Here's the 11 stories' English titles, matched against Chinese titles I've found on the internet in places like here:

I Study a Small Book and at the Same Time a Big Book
While Continuing My Schooling I Stick to That Big Book
A Night at Mallard-Nest Village
An Amorous Boatman and an Amorous Woman
Chest Precipice
Five Army Officers and a Miner
The People of Yuanling
Fenghuang 凤凰
After Snow
Qiaoxiu and Dongsheng
Truth is Stranger than Fiction


Fenghuang, Hunan Province, Shen Congwen's hometown
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