Unhappy with "Happy"

Happy: A Memoir by Alex Lemon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"My new body. My girlfriend. My friends. My life. And I'm too afraid to let anyone see me. I've always been afraid people would think I was a pussy, and now, that's exactly what I am."

"Happy" is the story of the young American male. Probably it would be of great interest to anyone curious about what a wide range of ways to be angry really exist in this world. He loves his mother, but hates that love. His attachments to his friends are always ambiguous, and sealed only with sentences that contain "fuck" and "shit" more than once ("You're fucking bush league! BUSH LEAGUE HAPPY!"). His love for girls is hopelessly symbolic of his deeper desire for purity, pure attachments. He is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Alex's problematic attachments become the subject of close meditation when he discovers, in his freshman year, that he is suffering from brain hemorrhaging. His illness opens up a gap between him and the person he thought he was, which allows him to write. At least, so the reader must deduce, for this half-way lyrical look at the angry young man of today ("The world whirls when I crack open") contains no direct examination of the craft of writing, or its role in the protagonist's story. There's also only the clumsiest sense of direction to the narrative arc -- it's drafted out in 11 parts, but I don't have the energy to figure out why. Maybe there's a climax in parts 6-10, maybe not. I suppose the great victory of this book is that the boy learns to have a healthy attachment to his mother, but then, as Chris Rock would say, "What you want, a cookie? You supposed to respect yo momma, punk. Why is that so damn meritorious?"

PS to self: Now I remember where I heard about the book -- in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, when I was down for Grandma's funeral. They actually liked it, presumably for its realistic depiction of medical trauma, the experience of angry adolescents, and those aforesaid half-lyricism, e.g. "Over the ochre butte a blackbird wheels in the sky." But these lines come off as unnecessary, and therefore facile to this reader.

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What's My Philosophy of Language? 1. Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky




Note: I haven't actually read this book, but I just got through the excerpt included in Critical Theory Since 1965 and I wanted to set down my thoughts.

In the first section of his book, Chomsky develops the idea of a “deep structure” within the mind that helps us generate language. Only this essentially rationalist approach (modeled with mathematics) can explain how we produce and understand infinitely many sentences, for empiricist approaches oversimplify the complex, active agency of the mind in acquiring language. Chomsky’s theory of language thus figures a debate between two theories of knowledge acquisition. I’ll need to think a lot more on where I should take this idea in my own writing about culture.

Noam Chomsky’s central interest is in how our language abilities develop as the consequence of principles deeply inherent in who we are as human organisms:

[I:]t seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle. Thus it may well be that the general features of language structure reflect, not so much the course of one’s experience, but rather the general character of one’s capacity to acquire knowledge – in the traditional sense, one’s innate ideas and innate principles.

What is most surprising, and most compelling, about Chomsky’s opening chapter is that he derives this plan to study the “deep structure” of the mind’s language acquisition ability from 17th century rationalist philosophy. Chomsky’s impressive reading in this area shows the predominance of the thesis that what Chomsky calls “the acquisition of knowledge” is not a simple matter of perceiving external objects, but the active application of “the innate vigour and activity of the mind itself.” (Cudworth 1731, p. 49 of Adams and Searle). Descartes was far from alone, and thus not entirely original, in this line of thought.

Chomsky locates his own investigation in the deep structures of language acquisition in rationalism to contrast it with behavior scientific approaches the he correspondingly locates in “empiricism:” which models the mind as a rather simple “device:”

…it assumes that the device has certain analytical data-processing mechanisms or inductive principles of a very elementary sort, for example, certain principles of association, weak principles of “generalization” involving gradients along the dimensions of the given quality space, or, in our case, taxonomic principles of segmentation and classification…

Chomsky’s big problem is that the empiricist view makes dogmatic presumptions about these interior mental processes.

It’s clear that Chomsky’s line of thinking has implications far beyond the acquisition of language, which is now no more than a figure for an investigation of the human mind. Chomsky defends Leibniz’s wonderful metaphor of the mind, not as tabula rasa, but as veined marble, with the ideas of the mind, the mind’s output, shaped and determined in part by the veins of the marble.

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First Encounter With Can Xue's Grotesque Fiction

Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas by Xue Can

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Truth is often a tiny, dim star enveloped in thick layers of cloud and fog, quite beyond recognition by ordinary eyes. Only sophisticated yet simple and sincere creatures can "discover" it in meditation. - Can Xue, "Yellow Mud Street"

Readers need only set their imaginations free. Even if they do not always understand Can Xue, they will invariably be challenged, fascinated, and provoked. - Charlotte Innes

What is there to say about the art of the grotesque? One must taste it. Taste it:

Old Hu San was asleep under the eaves.It was particularly hot that day. Early in the morning Hu San had a dream in which a red spider with a huge belly and long, hairy legs kept crawling onto the tip of his nose. He whisked it off five times, but it crawled back a sixth time. He was about to whisk it off again when a loud tap woke him up. Opening his eyes, he found a big water drop hanging from the tip of his nose.***Lying still, Old Hu San listened to the rain. It beat on the tarred street like popping beans. Streams of black water poured from the eaves. The rain soaked his clothes, then flooded on to the step where he lay. His whole back was immersed. "The rain this year is a little sticky, and a little salty, too," he thought. "Very similar to human sweat." He recalled the year when there was a rain of dead fish. The rainwater then was also salty. He had even salted two big fish.

From out of death, comes life again, but if the trauma of death is massive, the returning life will be grotesque. There is something like a cathartic juissance, a vomiting up of the bile of soul which feels so cleansing and refreshing, that makes Can Xue's descriptive writing a sickeningly addictive performance:

Lying there, they heard the autumn wind skim over the roof. A child shot stones onto the tiles with a slingshot. When they heard the last tiny cricket groaning in the tile jar, they hugged each other in terror, then separated in disgust."Your T-shirt smells sweaty around your armpits.""I changed it this morning.""Maybe, but I smell it. You told me it was a sweet odor, but you were wrong. It's a sour smell. There can't be a mountain so tall that you could catch the sun even if you were at the peak. Can you be wrong about everything?""But I just want to tell about these things. I have to find something to say.""True. I love talking, too. Maybe we're both wrong. Maybe we're doing it on purpose, so we have something to talk about. For instance, you came just now smelling of sunflowers. Then we talked about sunflowers which do not exist in reality. You know that.""My father-in-law incites his daughter to steal things for his home. They think I don't know it. They just like to put on a show.""But you don't care at all?""I pretend not to have seen through their tricks and act greatly annoyed. And sometimes the funny way the old man eggs my daughter on, too, makes me feel like holing up and having a good laugh. Yesterday my daughter came and said she hates her mother bitterly and could no longer tolerate her. She claimed her mother constantly put pressure on her, hid rats under her pillow, stole and burned her letters to her friends, and forced her to dress like a beggar. When she leaves the house, she said, her mother follows her, spying to see if she flirts with anybody. While my daughter feels so humiliated, the mother boasts to her colleagues that her daughter is striving for perfection and will have a bright future. My daughter also told me that all the things that disappeared from my home were stolen by her mother and her grandpa in collaboration.""What did you say then?""Me? Definitely I won't be taken in! I gave her an angry stare and yelled, 'Beat it!' I scared the wits out of her. Only after a long time did she state her grievance: 'I've come to inform against others only to get shouted at.' 'Who asked you to inform against others?' I said fiercely. 'Spying on people! Learning such tricks at your young age!' She looked at me with terror, and ran away. As I expected, my wife flew into a rage that night, saying I suspected her of being a thief! I dashed into my daughter's roomand searched her bed. I found a paper box containing half of the cat's tail. I threw the tail at my daughter, and she started to twitch immediately. These people are crazy.""You make such a great show of being in earnest. Did you tell me you were standing at the other end of the forest at the same time? And you saw something?""When I was standing there, I saw long columns of smoke. The whole city was trembling in the red light. The sky was crackling. Something was crawling haltingly in the mud. Its back was cracked. Dark red bloodstains crimsoned the long path.""The sky full of red light?""It made me dizzy. I regretted that the thing could never crawl to its destination. The smallest stones tipped it over. Where did it intend to go?""Where did it intend to go?" she echoed.

Oh well, life goes on! It will crawl, crippled. It will drink its own pee and eat insects at the bottom of the vat, with the black water. But what might be irreparable are the attachments of human beings to each other, as of parent to child, with the accompanying sense of what these human beings owe to each other. The state of nature is ammoral, non-ethical. Human attachments degrade, are reduced, and may ultimately be lost, disconnected. Then each person is the same as the fungi growing under the floorboards, the spider waiting for the fly. Can Xue's early fiction as represented in this collection closes the gap between life and the mud, food and shit, the man and the rat. She makes one hope like hell that the human experience can recover the injuries dealt it, injuries in the past, ongoing now, and to come. Sometimes hope lies in imagining the worst.

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The Days of Salty Reading

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One day in the street, rattling off some story or other, she stopped and looked up at him, surprised, and said “I want to know everything!”

I respect very much the intentions of this book: to re-invent a wide range of historical readings, to activate the historical imagination, to envision a world where Islam might not seem attached at the hip to violence, intolerance and authoritarianism, and to argue for the human experience as a slow, blundering evolution towards higher moral and ethical consciousness. Kim Stanley Robinson aims for all of these lofty goals, and he aims to frame them all as hit adventure stories as well, starring a common cast of character-types as they live, die, and return to earth again as different people in different places.For me, though, a truly laughable writing style (seriously, lines like “One night can change the world” would make good drinking games for alcoholics of taste) makes it impossible to really enjoy Robinson. I say this with great sympathy, because I can all too well picture my efforts at story leading to such a train wreck. I leave two notes here in case I ever return to this book (thanks to AB for presenting me with a copy), to measure whether my taste will change or whether I might ever learn more from the book about the art of storytelling.
1. Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t understand tension, conflict and crisis. Book One of this 10 book monstrosity doesn’t have a clear protagonist. Bold Bardash, an incarnation of the Monkey figure, is allegedly the protagonist, but Robinson all too often conflates his third-person omnipotent narrator voice with Bold’s own voice, with the result that Bold only reacts to circumstance, and never seems to be making a decision that determines himself as a character.On the other hand, the character with a clear motivation and clear values is Kyu, the little African boy whose penis and testicles are severed in one clean slice by the Chinese sailor-eunuch acting as first mate to Zheng He. Why isn’t Kyu the protagonist? The buddy drama that this first book enacts asks us to care about Kyu a lot, but assumes we will identify with Bold as protagonist. The result is a crippled story, and I would submit that it effectively has no climax, because neither character is forced to make a crisis decision to conclude the story.2. Kim Stanley Robinson can’t write sentences. I submit a few examples:

A confused and often angry little girl, in fact, although clever in manipulating others, quick to caress or to yell, and very beautiful.Shaking his head at Bahram’s drunkenness, Khalid began going through the box, whistling and chirping.Strange the people who surrounded us in this life.The emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty.

KSR’s defense to both of the defects I point out would probably be that he is working with very large blocks of data to shape a ten-act epic, what one effusive newspaper critic calls “a meditation on history and humanism.” I would respectfully (okay, not too respectfully) disagree with this implied distinction between form and content. I think the banality of story in these ten books figures a deeper banality of message, which is something like, “We humans can learn to live with each other eventually, but it’s going to be painful.” Gee, thanks. Next!

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Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” -- Nietzsche

Since I had just heard about Barbara Ehrenreich’s new work against the rhetoric of “positive thinking,” I was more skeptical than ever about a self-help book as I boarded my plane to England in late June 2010. But A. had passed me the book, and I figured if it made it past his excruciatingly sensitive bullshit-meter, it must have some kind of substance. Indeed it does: it locates meaning in suffering.

Suffering isn’t the only way to find meaning in one’s life; one can do something, like write a book, or have other kinds of experiences, like falling in love. But Frankl’s opening autobiographical essay about his experiences in the holocaust elegantly illustrate that if a person can come up with ways to deal with suffering, they perhaps have a bedrock of meaning that can help them through any other aspect of life. (Full disclosure: I am biased in favor of this perspective on life because I remember well that it is exactly what my grandparents taught me.)

I’d like to mention just a few of Frankl’s experiences of suffering, and the means with which he responded to what life asked of him.

As he was led to the concentration camp at Dachau, Frankl couldn’t help but be consumed by curiosity. He wonders about the stories behind all the people, Nazis and prisoners. He notices detachedly that when malnutrition becomes a fact of life, movement of the body degrades, but ultimately the human body finds a way around it. Curiosity about one’s circumstances allows for the detachment from the distressed affective response, and gives a measure of control over, not the situation, but the response to it. Also the sheer force of life is inspiring, and can be found anywhere if one takes the time to observe it. It brings tears of pain and joy to my eyes to remember how my Grandma suffered through cancer three times, and yet even as she watched her own body consumed, was always able to observe her own self-consuming flesh with great detachment. We would even laugh over it!

Second, one must make the most of one’s attachments. Frankl does not use this word or even dwell on this at length as part of his logotherapy practice, but he clearly illustrates that his fellow prisoners form a close-knit community that enables a few of them to survive -- Frankl’s own life was saved many times because of attachments that he formed. Love, the strongest possible attachments between humans, makes only a single appearance in Frankl’s text, as he contemplates his wife from his camp, and overcomes the perplexing thought that she was quite likely already dead with the thought on this attachment, love. He quotes from the Song of Solomon: “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Finally, genuine religious devotion, which I would now define simply as the attachment to God, is apparent all around the camp, and is an answer to the question of what one makes of one’s sufferings. Again, Frankl does not describe this in detail, but rather gives only anecdotes of how some of the men in the camp would gather in prayer, the most pious and genuine prayer that Frankl had ever witnessed. To bring up my Grandma again, it was she who taught me to pray, and looking back it is clear that prayer aided greatly in her conceptualization of the mind as an entity distinct from the body, and further with a central purpose: to return to God. God may or may not be real, but my Grandma’s attachment to Him certainly was. I lament (lament, the word is etymologically correct) that this, I could not inherit from Grandma. My interrogative mind has struck down the certitude of God’s existence, and I think I can never gain it back again.

Those are just some of the great lessons to be learned from suffering specifically; we might also mention that it is of great use to contemplate suffering even when we are not suffering. On my flight to England, I was served a meal that was quite terrible -- one of those lasagnas that comes in a tin, with noodles that taste roughly like tin, along with some leathery green beans and a hard roll of bleached flour. But my mind flew to my reading, in which Frankl gives a thorough contemplation of concentration camp soup: the thin, watery soup, which was the mainstay of camp prisoners (52), the cook who dealt the soup evenly, scooping to the bottom for peas (58), the value of cigarettes as currency for soup (81), soup for good cheer in a rare camp theatrical revue, soup as payment for medical services. “Soup” occurs eleven times in Frankl’s short essay, which shows how the stuff symbolized the life of the camp, life not to the fullest, but not death either. I thought of these things, and as I returned to my lasagna, I found that I ate it with gusto, scraping up the last dregs of cold tomato with my crust of bread. How grand life is!

These comments all refer to the first of two parts in this book. The second part is an expository introduction to Frankl’s medical philosophy, which he calls logotherapy. It turns out that Frankl was a certifiable prodigy of psychology -- certifiable since he opened correspondence with Freud at age 16, and was soon formulating his own model of neurosis in distinction to Freud’s. Freud thought that at base, most neuroses were ailments of the psyche traceable to childhood family relations and sexual experience. Frankl early on felt what drives humans was not sex, but the search for meaning, of which even sex was only a part. Many neurotic responses are “noögenic,” or born from the mind, the mind which drives itself towards meaning but cannot locate it. Frankl’s basic treatment is to teach the subject “self transcendence,” or as my mother taught it, “get over yourself.”

Among the many topics Frankl touches on in a very small space, paradoxical intention particularly rings true to me. I think of how I’ve always had trouble using urinals, and paradoxical intention immediately suggests a solution: when I approach the urinal and find myself unable to pee, I’m frequently concerned that it may take a long time to get started, and this makes me unable to start. So I may think to myself, “Aha, I can take the longest of all to pee. Watch, as I stand here for minutes, nay, over an hour!” Immediately I see there is no need for this, and I am able. Amazingly, clinical studies show that this short-term fix works over the long term as well. Patients with much worse disorders than I have testify to its enduring power.

Getting over yourself, self transcendence, means seeing yourself in the world, and locating the ways you can gain a sense of self-determination. We must actively wonder what possibilities there are. Frankl likes to say that it is not about asking what the meaning of life is, but rather thinking of the possibly the world is asking something of us. By speaking of it this way, Frankl emphasizes the need for all of us to be responsible for our own response to the world. Being a responsible person, and feeling responsible, are thus key features of any meaningful life as much as the need for self-determination.

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Reading: New Formations

"Britain's most significant interdisciplinary journal of culture, politics and theory."

I read Roger Lockhurst's contribution to the special issue of new formations devoted to "life writing." I was hoping for some close reading's of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, but instead I got a brief meditation on the significance of trauma memoir. I was interested, and found Lockhurst really hits the right note on this touchy genre: it's kind of bad to read about people getting hurt and dying, to witness the grief and pain of the author in the writing. But it's good in a way, because it prepares us for necessity of "magical thinking" in our own lives. And at its best, it can remind us of the need for "magical thinking" in life more generally -- Lockhurst does a great job implying a lot here, without going into excruciating detail.

There was one significant reading, however, on the subject of Didion's application of "repetitive syntactical structures," when she describes her experiences after her husband's. This repetitions (wish I could quote some to you but Lockhurst doesn't give an example) convey "both a sense of magical incantation to keep him alive, but also a kind of post-traumatic automatism - and these repetitions are accumulated throughout
the book to brilliant effect. These tropes are at the foundation of literature’s
elegiac function, at least according to William Watkin, who suggests that in
elegy ‘language’s assumed magical powers of naming, and thus of giving or extending life, is called upon in the service of intense grief.’" That last part certainly sounds nice, but I'm not sure I've digested it yet.
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Farewell to Sloth, Pt. XXXVII

Johnson's reading tables, 1729.

No writing on Thursday or Friday due to meetings with students, lecture, meeting with others, social gatherings, and frequent attacks of Sloth.

This morning I read about an online exhibit of Samuel Johnson memorabilia, including the earliest known letter he wrote, at age 16, looking to his cousin for a teaching job, and the "libellus" (little book) that he started in 1729, aged 19-20, to fight Sloth with a suggestion of the possibilities of reading.

In the table above, we can see him imagining how much he could accomplish over the course of weeks, months and years if only he read 10, 20, 30, etc. lines of Latin per day. I am inspired, and happy to find that in my current state I am thinking much along Johnson's lines when he was a 20-year old. Of course I'm 30, and so a bit slower than Johnson, but then again that's no surprise.
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Note on a Book Series

Looks like a nice cover, right? You'd think the publisher would give us a larger version of the central graphic...

I've always wanted to read books in the series that the publisher comes up with. A newish example of this is the "Critical Interventions" series edited by Sheldon Lu. Don't you love the long, intimidating titles? I do want to get to such books, but I also don't feel bad when I don't have time to read them.

This latest series from University of Hawai‘i Press aims at building a list of innovative, cutting-edge works with a focus on Asia or the presence of Asia in other continents and regions. Manuscripts and proposals exploring a wide range of issues and topics in the modern and contemporary periods are welcome—especially those dealing with literature, cinema, art, theater, media, cultural theory, and intellectual history, as well as subjects that cross disciplinary boundaries. The scholarship should combine solid research with an imaginative approach, theoretical sophistication, and stylistic lucidity.

Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema, by Xiaoping Lin (January 2010)

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, by Yingjin Zhang (October 2009)

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Note on Downloading Books

The Young Guo Moruo. Isn't just 太 Romantic?

I was surprised to discover that a website at the University of Oklahoma allows the general public to download entire books. For example, here's the first book by Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers.

Thanks, OKU. But I wonder if Prof. Lee is aware of this...
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