Writing Target Completed

This is NOT Qian Zhongshu, dummy

As I re-read the essay "Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged," I'm struck how Yang Jiang's voice is directed very specifically at a popular readership that stubbornly seeks biographical details from novels. So what she does in this essay is actually give her audience lots of biographical details, just as they wished, but showing at the same time how much of the story is purely a creation. Characters and plot are based on reality, but not limited by reality. It's a very simple point, but remarkably, it needs to be said over and over again, and I know for a fact that it needs to be said in both Chinese and English reading cultures.

Tomorrow: start putting together my notes on this with the essays on Yang Jiang's childhood. What's the connection I'm looking for?
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Return to my Dissertation

Yang Jiang's family, 1927. This is the setting of the first part of my dissertation.

It's always so difficult for me to work on what I'm supposed to work on! But I'm back at last, to tackle my dissertation. This first section is intended for publication with Biography, though it has grown a bit too long, and it seems difficult to predict if it will get in or not. I definitely want someone to read it over for me before I submit.

Notes, bibliography and all, this article adds up to about 7,000 words. My goal is to flesh out the two remaining sections to the chapter in the next two weeks, 15,000 words a week, totally up 30,000 words, which I'll then edit down to a draft that ideally will be 10-15,000 words in length, for a total length to this chapter of some 20,000 words.
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The Case of the Cranky Critics: Wang Hui

Wang Hui's big contribution to English, so far

I made some comments earlier this year on my efforts to read the essays in The End of the Revolution by Wang Hui. I found him a bold and original thinker with a typically challenging intellectual writing style. I just want to note here that I have discovered from the China Beat, a (usually quite boring) China studies blog, that Wang Hui is now the subject of a high-profile plagiarism case. Historian Peter Zarrow defends Professor Wang, albeit in the usual ambivalent way that serves first and foremost to defend his American institutions, as if China's first priority should be to move towards our version of the professionalization of the field. I felt a strong repugnance for this reasoning, because American graduate and professional study of history seems to me to be facing far too many internal crises to recommend itself to any nation-state. If there is any substance to Zarrow's defense, it is in a vague feeling about the communicative effects of Wang Hui's accusation:

...judging from my browsing of the internet, I do not want to see web lynching or a media circus. There is something truly weird about many of the attacks.

Is Zarrow seeing "web lynching" on the internet? What does that look like? Or is he afraid that he will see it soon, judging from his browsing? What does he mean by "weird"? (In my experience, Chinese prose on the internet is almost always "weird," and if not, that's also "weird.")

As a member of a China-studies email list I am on said in the opening reply to Zarrow, it might have been better for Zarrow not to participate at all in this affair, or else if he had wanted to be useful he could have signed onto an open letter to CASS requesting "an open, transparent and impartial investigation" into the affair. I note this because it's a nice example of the kind of intercultural pitfall one faces as an American scholar who wishes to hold a conversation between two extremely complex institutions and traditions. It's no wonder that so often our replies to problems are -- silence. I don't want to encourage silence, but rather sticking to a harsh, cold realism. Just the facts ma'am. Zarrow did make a mistake by acting in a case when he didn't have all the facts, only a sense that something in it was "weird."

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IABA 2010 Conference Report

IABA 2010, final keynote. L-R: Jay Prosser, Lauren Berlant and Margaretta Jolly

I really had a great time at the International Auto/Biography Association biennual conference in England, and I was honored to be asked for a conference report. I confess I spent an inordinate amount of time on it, so I hope it's good...

IABA 2010 Conference Report

Many thanks to Margaretta Jolly and Sam Carroll for extending all of us a warm welcome to IABA 2010 at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. For this dissertation-writing graduate student, IABA 2010 offered an inspiring -- if at times jarring -- impact on work in progress. The sheer size and scope of the conference defies any effort at a complete or even representative report, and so I will restrict myself to remarks on keynote speeches and panel talks that I actually saw and heard. Further, I will focus my comments on the most contentious conversations that I heard, conversations which reveal continuing uncertainties lurking beneath the floorboards of our field, as well as in our own careers as critics, writers, feminists, and citizens of the world.

Nancy K. Miller set the tone for all of us who write memoir criticism in her opening keynote address, “My Body, My Biography: Against Recovery.” Miller avows that the recovery narrative, which has penetrated the book market and is now taken up in advertising campaigns is far too obligatory a form, too focused on the potential for self-transformation. The narrative arc has become a social crutch because it implicitly takes the recovery story to be equivalent to recovery itself. Leigh Gilmore very much concurs in her own talk. Like Miller, Gilmore takes pains to profile storytellers like the clown David Shiner who fail at obligatory form, but who discover as Quentin Crisp did, that “failure may be your style.” Indeed, says Gilmore, the failure to live up to one or the two available gender formations dominant in world culture has lately inspired some of the best “fail” narratives.

The panel “Intimate Lives in Public Places” pushes this challenge to narrative arcs to its logical end: can a self speak and yet fail to tell a story at all? Louise Yelin examines the autobiographical video clips of Amikam Toren’s Carrots to find a model of overcoming alienation and locating new possibilities for empathy in memories of brief, chance encounters between the artist and strangers in the public sphere. Bella Brodzki examines the extreme graphic subjectivity offered up by Art Spiegelman in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! Spiegelman’s identity merges with the motif of drawing, making formal and psychic disintegrations happen in parallel. Julia Watson also examines how an artist grapples with the fused impulses to draw and to represent the self in the work of Bobby Baker, who has documented her experience of a course of treatment for psychosis in drawings that have subsequently been modified and exhibited in museums. Watson’s presentation on Baker’s art drew much discussion, particularly regarding just how we are to interpret Baker’s multiple mediations of her course of treatment, and her ultimate renewal of psyche with the revelation that she had cancer. Baker gives it that her “cure” was in fact cancer. Nancy K. Miller offered, “Cancer: it’s good for depression.”

The above critics show the ethical, health-oriented moment we are in as scholars engaged with the ongoing expansion of the roles of life stories outside of the purely literary. At the risk of seeming retrograde, Professor Meg Jensen engages instead with writers of novel and memoir; still, Jensen proves that there is much more to learn from these forms. Jensen’s enthralling discussion of J. G. Ballard’s expository work on his own Empire of the Sun hints at the way a storyteller may find the “essential truths” of his or her memories in fiction rather than in memoir pe se. Following, Jensen’s discussion with Blake Morrison and Rachel Cusk focused on what a writer might consider the biggest difference between fiction and memoir. Unsurprisingly, for these talented and experienced storytellers, the forms have many similarities – Morrison’s reading from a poem, a novel, and a memoir of his, for example, all showed uncannily similar crafting of the very same motif, that of competition between one man and another. For both Morrison and Cusk, the memoir distinguishes itself as a kind work that can “go bad.” It can become painful for them to revisit in a way that their fiction or poetry never seems to do. Throughout these discussions, the tension between truth-telling and story-telling is palpable, and apparently irresolvable. Perhaps the greatest lesson the writer teaches is to plunge forward to complete what it is that asserts itself as a vision in the mind, and damn the consequences, be they alienation from old friends or even settlement on charges of libel.

Morrison and Cusk remind us that the writer quite often puts social and ethical concerns quite to the side of the needs of art. Feminism and other critical practices that take social consciousness-raising as their end cannot take the same stance. Much discussion throughout the conference on feminist thought and practice showed that an international feminist approach to life writing is still a work in progress, littered with unexpected ethical pitfalls. Professor Kay Schaffer, who works collaboratively with Professor Song Xianlin to study contemporary women’s writing from China, was candid about the inability of Western feminism to predict or describe the success of works like Chen Danyan’s three biographies of bourgeois Shanghai ladies, with their celebration of pre-Communist Chinese gender frameworks. In a later panel, Katja Kurz described with approval how Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower was able to gain American condemnation for the practice of female genital mutilation, but Prof. Schaffer objected that Desert Flower had a demonstrably deleterious effect on local African efforts to gradually reform the institutions that practice female genital “modification” (the moniker “mutilation” exposing for Schaffer the demonization taking place here).

This last point raises one of the most difficult problems within feminism (and indeed, in all other practices of advocacy as well): how do we balance our interest in global consciousness-raising with the need to attend to the circumstances of the local? Professor Nadje Al-Ali’s keynote “Writing Iraqi Women’s Lives: Trauma, Memory and Identity” speaks to the fierce urgency of this issue. Prof. Al-Ali’s presentation reveals the effects on amnesia on the female subjectivity and ethnic identity. When she shows us photos of parading bands of extremist Shi’ite women, dressed in dark, foreboding robes, for example, Al-Ali explains that such a phenomenon was previously unknown in Baghdad, and that its occurrence is strictly post-2004. She described briefly how Iraq’s history reveals many different female subjectivities which may be able to offer something to a population still traumatized by violence every day. Al-Ali’s presentation reveals the perplexity of a witness who serves as both scholar and advocate. Al-Ali was openly negative about the prospects of using the concept of “intimate publics” to describe a situation of near-total breakdown of the public sphere. Her impression of American theory is clearly colored by the fact of the invasion itself, as well as the efforts of international human rights organizations to build new subjects in Iraq and other catastrophically traumatized places. In all cases, Al-Ali feels, not enough attention is paid to the facts on the ground.

Balance between global and local is also required in environmental advocacy. The panel “Ecocritical life writings across cultures” opens up the exciting possibility that our field of life writing may be a crucial component of successful ecocritical strategies. In the field of ecocriticism, Rachel Carson stands out as the foundational success story with her 1962 work Silent Spring. Zhong Yan’s paper on Rachel Carson’s letters helps us understand how environmental consciousness and personal attachments amplified each other. In fact, Silent Spring is a delicately crafted combination of scientific prose, personal writing, and political rhetoric in a profoundly American idiom. If this fact had emerged a little more in Zhong Yan’s panel, the tremendous resonance between Carson and the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, the focus of work by Professor Adetayo Alabi, might have emerged more clearly. (Is Wangari Maathai the Rachel Carson of Kenya?) Further, given that towering figures of Chinese literature like Ji Xianlin (1911-2009, subject of a paper by Wu Shuang) and Shen Congwen (1902-1988, discussed by Professor Zhao Baisheng) express a range of environmental consciousness based on place, clan and the diverging branches of the Chinese tradition, what are the prospects for harnessing the ethical and political rhetoric native to this tradition for environmental writings of the contemporary moment? Zhong Yan noted in the question and answer period that the poet Xu Gang (b. 1945) has had a substantive effect on the national discussion on the environment, but just how the life course and personal consciousness factor in this writing remains to be seen.

It is extremely fitting at this moment that there be more profiles of the intersection between life writing and global concerns such as feminism, human rights, politics, and the environment, for it is from these that a portrait of human beings as contemporary global citizens emerges. The talks of my own panel, concerned as they were with the agency negotiated in contemporary Chinese life writing by emerging subjects who speak for disability (Sarah Dauncey), by elder writers remembering colonial subjectivity during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (Marjorie Dryburgh), and by an elder writer dreaming of a bourgeois, progressive Confucian family life lost in the second world war (Jesse Field) are surely evidence of this direction of work. One can only hope that these discussions will continue and expand.

Lauren Berlant’s final keynote in the form of a conversation with Jay Prosser presented many challenges from the larger world of knowledge production outside of auto/biographical studies: to what extent have we grasped “exemplification” as a problem? How long can we go along taking the individual life as a main object of study? Berlant also calls to us for a closer consideration of institutionality. She meant particularly that we look more closely at the ways the law shapes lives and therefore life narratives, but I believe she also wanted us to consider for a moment the why behind auto/biographical studies. That this is an understudied question was evident enough in a previous day’s roundtable of editors and representatives from our major journals, where despite Rebecca Hogan’s call to discuss the why of editors and journals, audience and speakers alike preferred to dwell on the how and the what. One fears that our institution now lives on, unexamined.

Berlant’s theory of intimacy, her project for some years now, offers a preliminary answer, or perhaps we should a path towards examining again. The objects of study in our field are a major subset of what Berlant would call “the world of affect,” the main purpose of which is to describe the multiplicity of modes of attachment: hate, ambivalence and skepticism, for example, can all be modes of attachment made public in life (and other) writing. To give historical dimension to the current moment, Berlant describes our time in terms of the withdrawing state in the 1970s, which for the intellectual left constitutes an ending to a former “fantasy.” There is no more expanding sense of citizenship. There is, though a need for a new concept of the good life. This, then is both a fertile and a mournful moment. The necessity is to track “people’s attachments to the world.” We must expand the field of “what it means to have a life.” Whether or not these terms and propositions are translatable to a truly global readership (and many audience members thought not), they are concerns worth addressing in detail.

No field is without aporias. Every field faces the death of its own critical practice exactly in as much as it moves inward from the margins of institutions. But the strength of a field as it institutionalizes must lie in scholars’ capacity to see and respond to the needs of other scholars, students, writers and readers. There is much evidence that IABA is such a dynamic, responsive field, and for that reason alone, I look forward to 2012 when we shall meet again in Canberra, Australia.

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Dance: A Recent Translation

"The performers are like the live plastic material in motion, with their physical movements directly translating the concepts of nuclear physics..."

I recently had a chance to translate some Taiwanese arts criticism. After doing so much history, it was refreshing to be asking all these big questions, and to have such stylish, colorful language in play

The Terrible Message of Environmental Consciousness of Nuclear Energy:
“1/2 Life” by the BodyCartography Project. (.Artco, April 2010. )

Text and Photos by Li Chia-ling

Combining video, installation, sculpture, theater, dance, music and scientific research, the BodyCartography Project can be traced back to the first work presented by video artist Olive Bieringa in San Francisco, in 1997. Two years later, dancer Otto Ramstad joined to become co-director. Now 13 years old, the BodyCartography Project is not so much an artistic group as it is a series of creative designs. In the past 8 years, many different new works have launched under the umbrella of the BodyCartography Project, each a collaboration with a different artist. Presently the group is on an all-American tour presenting its new work for 2010, 1/2 Life, which seeks to display the body’s existence among scientific research, data, and a controlled world. Half Life begins on the fringes of the Pacific Ocean, and along a path directed through the nuclear superpower of America, Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, and the nuclear-free zone of New Zealand to bring forward humanity’s use of nuclear energy as an environmental topic.

Of History Of Nuclear Energy: Environmental Consciousness
The specialized term “half life” from radioactive physics originally refers to the course of nuclear reactions within the atom. The artists of the BodyCartography Project have appropriated it as the title of their new work. Half Life creates the artistic relationship between nuclear physics and the physical movement of the body, thus advancing the persistent inquiry into nuclear themes. This environmental concern is the pride of Bieringa’s mother culture – New Zealand is a nuclear-free zone. The 1/2 Life of 2002 was still a concept only just thought up from out of the spirit of some earlier scenes from dance/video works by the BodyCartography Project. Until, that is, a 2007 trip to Japan’s Kyoto Arts Center to do a three-month residency, in collaboration with dancers on the ground in Japan. Then they lanched 1/2 Life in its concrete form. The show conveys the tight connection between the invention of nuclear energy and the world of humankind in a stage of early modern history. Besides this research, the work is also a collaboration with physicist Bryce Beverlin II to get through to the scientific content of nuclear physics. Bieringa and Ramstad take this real-world data and materials and evolve it into movements for the body of the performer. Whether ensemble or solo performances, all scenes of 1/2 Life feature a shadow of the body, twisted by slowness or intensity. With three full years of research and planning to it, slow or intense and twisted certainly was a slow process of creation. This also reflects the view of American artist Hal Foster that “artists are like ethnographers.” Artists since the 1980s have used the language of art to deal with topics in society, culture, politics, education, and economics. This is very different from the belief of modern artists that “art is for art’s sake.” This direction of artistic creation makes the things that art deals with not limited by issues of formal materials; the content and trends within topics of investigative and observational research also become important processes for molding artistic expression.

Of Bodily Movement: The Direct Translation of Science

The experimental theater PerformanceSpace 122 was the location for the premiere of the BodyCartography Project’s new work 1/2 Life. The theater’s dark hall is made to bear an important, contemporary experiment in the “totality of art” conveyed in the sixty minutes of 1/2 Life. This includes sculpture and installation by visual artist Emmett Ramstad, body-movement performances by dancers Olive Bieringa, Otto Ramstad and Kitamura Takemi, as well as musical accompaniment by composer and harpist Zeena Perkins. Out of a visual display of molded plastic materials emerges a contemporary artistic ceremony that symbolizes the links between nuclear energy and ecological systems in contemporary art. Artist Emmett Ramstad’s use of so much plastic material applies a random, organic construction to put a ceiling over the experimental drama. Bieringa calls this a sea of plastic, meant to convey the nature of lines of invisible radiation and the irresolvable reality of plastic. The performers slowly come onstage, faces expressionless, bodies costumed in plastic. By turns they slow and then intense, moving their bodies in dance they enter the dark, box-like space of the theater. The performing ensemble usually hides their bodies behind thin wooden panels, as if using them as protective quarters. They move them constantly, but then in an instant the curved wooden panels become still and motionless, forming a scene of abstract “live sculpture.” At times the assisting performers holding the thin wooden panels sway them to create a live, natural sound. These “shadow movers” resemble the assistants to Japanese “kuroko” performers, who stand behind them, dressed in black. But they also symbolize the “critical mass” for chain reactions in nuclear physics, as well as the “group mind.” The performers are like the live plastic material in motion, with their physical movements directly translating the concepts of nuclear physics, including matter, energy, radiation, and resonance effects; their bodies here symbolize matter. In the last scene of the performance, a space constructed of wood and canvas slowly slides onto the stage. It looks like living quarters meant to hold shadows. The essence of the architectural elements is derived from Japanese metropolitan temporary canvas housing erected by vagrants. The performers, in this four-sided room, moving back and forth among the pleasing natural shadows cast on them, finally strip off all their clothes to present the movements of washing their bodies clean, concluding the performance of 1/2 Life.
The term “cross-disciplinary” which has spurred a flood of discussion for some time would seem appropriate to talk about the work 1/2 Life, which combines such multiple layers and forms of art as theater installation, body movements by the performers, and natural sound accompaniment. But to the BodyCartography Project, using the term “cross-disciplinary” to describe the work is not as good as speaking of their efforts to engage in “transdisciplinary” concepts. This is because “cross-disciplinary” refers to a dialogue between disciplines, while the Latin root “trans” in “transdisciplinary” has the meaning of “penetrating into,” “through,” which reflects the BodyCartography Project’s effort to completely unify different fields in one work. Many contemporary artists are using a “multiplicity” of art forms. These at once answer and also reflect the circumstances of the age we are facing. American art historian Meyer Schapiro has said, “Every change in ideology brings in a new style or a new art — every change in the content of art is produced by a specific social change, which is material in origin.” Perhaps Schapiro’s comment explains 1/2 Life with the concept of “transdisciplinary:” a various and multiple contemporary artistic vocabulary.

Interview with Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad. Interview edits and photography by Li Chia-ling.

Q: Is "Body Cartography Project" the name of a group? Or a common collaborative artistic project?

Bieringa: "Body Cartography Project" began in 1997 and 1998. About eleven years ago, it really began to be a collective project, a collective process. Beginning from 2001 and 2002, Ramstad and I collaborated on this project, and we worked within the project model. We collaborated with different kinds of artists, but we rarely presented collective work. In that area, we adopted what was perhaps a more traditional model in which two artists collaborate. But sometimes we'd also see some projects move forward with the support of different artists.

Q: I certainly don't think this is a traditional model. Presently when artists form themselves into artistic groups, most of the time they work together with similar artists. What's of interest here is that you and Ramstad were always project guides collaborating with different artists. Which is to say, each work project presents different forms of art.

Bieringa: Yes, the possibility for different media; it depends on the needs of each project.

Ramstad: In selecting diferent people to work with us, we change the model of "observation."

Bieringa: The "1/2 Life" project, for example. We worked together with scientists, visual artists, composers, other performers, and lighting designers.

Q: Speaking of collaboration with scientists, for several years now there has been discussion of the relationship between art and science, but mostly coming at it from the angle of engineering and technology. Speak just a bit on your experience collaborating with scientists to put on "1/2 Life."

Bieringa: Collaborating with scientists on this project was particularly productive; you could say that it made this project clearer and more specific in certain dimensions. The material here, with its violent history, is both dark and heavy, touching intermittently on death, disease, and pain. Thus, if you don't wish to manifest certain points of this violent history, it's because you don't wish to feel uncomfortable, or you think it is too gloomy. We most certainly do not wish to create works that are pleasant to see and think about. Rather, the feeling of discomfort in the work can really be useful for some people. Therefore we take one step back from real historical fact and approach it with a method of work located in science.

Q: A neutral position.

Bieringa: Speaking from a certain angle, the stimulating and abstract nature of real physics – this poetic language – supplies us with a space in which to create something, to maximize our benefit. The physicist that we collaborated with brought us to a university laboratory to show us the materials. Following, he came back with us to the workshop to present a lecture.

Ramstad: For example, he answered our practical questions about physics. Afterwards, we were able to do an extemporaneous performance based on nuclear physics. We were trying to penetrate and bring together two forms of engagement -- understanding and movement -- to deal with this information. We made many works to translate nuclear physics.

Bieringa: or to shadow it.

Q: Since this work sees bodily movement as an important part, for you two with your background in dance, what concept do you have of the body as an artistic material? What revelations can we find from "1/2 Life?"
Ramstad: Many works of dance are meant to supply us with representations of the body. We use our bodies to perform, and the audience in turn uses their bodies to observe. In between the two emerges a certain sympathetic response -- this is the relationship between us and the audience. To deal with this terrifying knowledge and to find a way to describe and represent it is extremely challenging and extremely arduous. This is also to place into the dance what we've just discussed, the collaboration with scientists, and in some sense to take the body as the movement of atoms and particles. I believe the work is an echo to the knowledge, one that comes back with more poetry. Also it offers people a specific explanation that they can clearly understand. You could say, we use the body as a vessel for transmitting knowledge. We create and perform the results of research. We connect this knowledge with people in a rapid and concrete fashion.

Q: "1/2 Life" combines the languages of many forms of art. What are your views on crossing disciplines?

Ramstad: All along we have been thinking of "transdisciplinary," which is not to place one thing onto another, but rather to think if as happening and evolving between each of the sciences. This is also to consider an interesting method of creation: you use the media you need, and then put it into its relation in the sequence of ideas. Moreover you find reciprocal and adaptive forms -- we try to create a complete experience.

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My Teaching Philosophy, Second Draft

In Ancient Greece, aspiring teachers had to do these elaborate courtship dances, just as we do today in America (I'm kidding. Sort of.)

Teaching Philosophy: Language and Literature

In everything I do, I believe in asking questions, I believe in pursuing what is right and true, and I believe that life is best seen as a never-ending process of making new connections. I am completely committed to passing these beliefs down to future generations, and the way I do this is by teaching language and literature. Language is the basic tool of communication without which there can be no commerce and no progress. Literature is language as art, and belongs in conversation with the other arts such as dance, theater, visual arts, and music. As a language and literature teacher, I work together with the other teachers of the arts and humanities to expand the imaginative power of people, but my special ability is helping students gain the power to listen and speak for themselves.

Giving Students the Power to Speak I: Language. The whole world over, the traditional first step to connect students to other times and other places is to teach them a foreign language. I love teaching Chinese, and first-year Chinese in particular, because when students grapple with the four tones of Mandarin, or take up the brush to draw Chinese characters, they face a big gap between what they have known before and what is to come. I get to see them crossing that gap multiple times every day. I also love to teach English, my native language and the language of all the people, places and things that are most familiar to me. Teaching English offers up the story and the spirit of the English-speaking people, and I am proud to be a part of that story and that spirit. In both cases, students and teachers work together in a progressive, graduated course of improvement that leaves everyone with a more sophisticated and more adaptive vision of what language and culture and society really are. Once students have this vision, they take it with them in whatever they do next, because they have begun to understand the value of making connections.

Giving Students the Power to Speak II: Literature. Literature is the art of listening and telling. Literature in the classroom involves two reciprocal activities: reading and writing. When I teach literature, I make my students listen, and I make my students read. Then I make them tell, and I make them write. And then we start again. My literature classroom is an interactive workshop experience that aims to give students the power to speak for themselves. On the one hand, we ask questions about what we read and hear, we analyze the parts of what we read, and we learn the history of what we read. At the same time that we do this, we produce papers with beginnings, middles and ends. We write in complete sentences. And we learn to write with style.

The Great Multiplicity of World Cultures. Whether I’m teaching courses in Chinese literature and Asian studies or in Freshman composition and basic research techniques, I teach that literature’s great power is to tell the story of how we live and how we die, what we value and what we ignore, what we love and what we fear. As an American scholar of Chinese literature and culture, I make sure that the underlying lesson in all my courses is that there is great value in crossing borders, listening to others, and making connections. My greatest hope is that my students leave my classroom with a sensitivity to the delicate balance of human life, the perils we face in the world today, and the need to call on all our talents and traditions to form and preserve healthy, sustainable communities all over the earth.

Truth and Beauty. I do not value all literature equally. I discriminate towards the stories that have the power to move the reader, the depth to challenge the listener, and the tension, conflict and crisis that call out to us always to examine, understand, and question our values. My students meet an opinionated person of taste with an eye for quality and craftsmanship in his art, and I have found that they love to share in the great conversation on what is good, what is not, and where to find more good stuff. I teach great books from the Chinese and Western traditions, but I also teach film and television shows, letters, diaries and blogs, graphic novels -- powerful stories in any form, and especially stories of great beauty that resonate with the students and inspire them to seek truth in their own, unique ways.

Investment in the Institution. I want an active, transparent position in whatever institution I serve, so that I can make sure that I am fully engaged in my institution’s strategic plan for growth and development. I need leadership that understands the role of the humanities and the value of asking big questions about life, communities, and what we owe to each other as human beings. And as a teacher, I pledge to invest in my institution on a holistic level with a view to helping student learning – this may mean taking extra time to teach basic skills, or developing curriculum in collaboration with other faculty members, or adjusting my teaching to better fit within the larger university community. Good teachers need good schools.

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The Lesser Wall of China

La'er Mountain, still a site for non-Han communities. From a tourism website

The Lesser Wall of China (an unpublished paper I’m not supposed to cite -- I’ll update with citation info if the author publishes or gives me permission)

A new paper from an upcoming conference on “borderlands” at my university presents a fascinating new view of the Ming state conducting what amounts to diplomatic and missionary relations with the non-Han peoples within the Ming borders.

The author’s main example concerns the so-called “Miao 苗” people , who are actually multiple interrelated cultures scattered throughout China's south and southwestern border regions. Ming officials actively cultivated a "mission" to "civilize" the "Miao" and other non-Han people. The groups of people who held lots of commerce with the Chinese and began paying taxes and making other investments into Chinese culture were labeled "cooked" 熟, while the many communities who fiercely opposed becoming Chinese were labeled the "raw" 生. Since the "raw" Miao lived outside the cultural values that really defined "China" to the Ming political apparatus, then there we have the curious situation that certain locations in China were not Chinese. Examples included La'er Mountain in Hunan province, with its "raw" non-Han villages.

There were two very interesting examples in this paper that I wish to note, even though I'm actually violating the author's request not to cite the work. If he sees this and protests against my action, then I will of course remove this whole post.

First, the Ming official Tian Rucheng 田汝成 (1500-1563) described the great multiplicity of "Miao" peoples in his memoir "Yanjiao jiwen." Tian describes how filthy and unmannered they were. Men and women were promiscuous; funerals consisted of laughing parties; they held deep grudges and had no compunction against murder for revenge.

Second, the author makes use of a fascinating true crime story that simply cries out to be told using English true crime conventions. The Grand Secretary Gao Gong (1512-1578) reports that when a "pacification commissioner," presumably a "cooked" Miao, killed the son of a tribal leader, the victim's brother sued for justice in the Ming court. The court sent a military expedition to put down this "pacification commissioner," despite the Grand Secretary's vigorous protest that these murders among barbarians should be left to them to sort out. Apparently, the troops were unsuccessful in putting down the commissioner, or else the Grand Secretary's view prevailed. The commissioner was pardoned on the condition that he make reparations to the government, the brother of the man he killed, and the mother of the man he killed.

A generation later, this story repeated itself, with the commissioner's son, now commissioner, committing a similar murder. But this time the Ming allowed the commissioner's son to go free from the very beginning, with the understanding that he would murder more "raw" Miao. The government realized clearly that divided, the Miao fall faster, much to the benefit of the Ming.

Our author hammers home the point that all this demonstrates that the Ming was far from the monolithic empire it is often conceived as, in contrast to the more diverse Qing dynasty. The point is fair enough, but I note the descriptions and stories here for their own sake. I'd love to tell the tale of two generations of murder, rebellion, and court intrigues against the "barbarians" in some historical fiction of my own some day.

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Reapproaching Positive Thinking 1

Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist that academics love to hate. Well, that's one point in her favor...

At the IABA 2010 conference, Nancy K. Miller mentioned Maureen Dowd’s June 1, 2010 column “A Storyteller Loses the Story Line” as evidence of the popular equivalence between the story of recovery and recovery itself. Miller seemed to me clearly following Barbara Ehrenreich, and when I brought this up with her she just nodded -- “I’m just nodding here, you’re so right,” she said. In any case, when I heard that Dowd had taken an interest in storytelling, however utilitarian, my interest was piqued, and so I read some Dowd. The climax of Dowd’s June 1 column is as follows:

In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

This president has made it clear that he’s not comfortable outside whatever domain he’s defined. But unless he wants his story to be marred by a pattern of passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise, he’d better seize control of the story line of his White House years. Woe-is-me is not an attractive narrative.

We can see here something of what Miller means when she speaks of an equivalence between the story’s positive and the real positive that is so desired. Dowd took the qualities Obama assigns himself in his life story for qualities he would take into his presidency. Obama doesn’t display those qualities in the story as Dowd sees it today, hence Dowd’s lack of satisfaction. Miller deduces a much stronger, and more stupid, reading here: Dowd wants Obama to come up with a story that seems more positive, and thus more attractive. Damn the facts. But a more sympathetic reading of Dowd is available to us. She wants Obama to display the qualities that he displayed before. She may even believe, as I do, that he really is an empathic and well-meaning man, but simply unable to project in this moment of multiple, interrelated crises. So her meaning may be for him to project what she still believes from his earlier story to actually, really be there. Miller makes this sound very bad indeed: a confusion of story and reality. But what needles me in both Miller and Ehrenreich is that in their current “realist” moment they deny any application to positive-seeking vision. I’ll be working to respond to this -- in part with the very careers of these thinkers.

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Con Air (1997)

Inciting Incident on Youtube: I wouldn't be surprised if this goes offline

I watched this film on my last night in London, absolutely wretched that I could not pay attention to anything else in the hostel common area. Terrible as it is, it brings a joy to the simple manipulation of convention. It reminds us that hack story telling is often great story telling. The values that underlie this film at first seem offensive, but in the end it maybe has nothing at all to do with law or society or gender, and only to do with the love of action filmmaking, period. Mysterious!
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Song at Midnight

Embedded from Archive.org

Finally, months after I advised one of my students on a project to write about the 1937 film Song at Midnight 半夜之歌, I watch it myself. The sensitivity of the writer for the film s/he is writing about is best made evident to the reader if the reader has also seen that film. That doesn’t mean I didn’t do a good job grading my student’s paper without seeing the film; it does mean that if I had watched the film I could do better. I realized my student was a sensitive reader early on in the project and recognized this in the final paper; now after watching the film I realize more deeply how and why the student reacted to scenes in the film. It’s better if you watch the film. So to help me remember that in the future, and to pay homage to my student DZ, I offer the following as a response to both the film and DZ’s work.

Song at Midnight is a fantastic dream of a modern Chinese tragic hero. As a youth he learns the great art of speech, figured here as song. He also learns to be moved, the value affect, emotion, connection: love. But love and song and his very being are attacked! Who, what, why? Recovery seems an option, but then...oh horror! Oh desolation! How could it be? My face, my face in the mirror is not human any more. Like Sima Qian, who faced the (possibly worse) abjection of castration, the hero here is willing to find his humanity again after a terrible trauma: 我愿意学那 “刑余的史臣” I am willing to study that "History minister who was the remains of his punishment."

How to do this? First, tell your story. The phantom must find a supporting character to offer an autobiography. Life, song, love, tragedy: aren’t you moved? Can’t you join with me? But the attachment is not strong. The phantom thus finds the strength to stand again on his own. He meets his enemy, and destroys him. But the society that nurtured his enemy now turns against him, and he is destroyed by the crowd. As with Iranian film, this film features scary, violent crowds of people in scene after scene: humanity as swarm, flock, feeding frenzy.

So Song at Midnight, like Phantom of the Opera, gives us a misunderstood martyr, a tragic hero whose ending shows up the cruelty inherent in us as a society that cannot welcome difference. It is a sad meditation on the difficulty of revolution, change, difference.

But it is also a beautiful picture of failure. Stylishly ugly, the phantom is the original emo, as A. says. I shall wear all black. Nobody likes me, so I will stay over here in the dark. I will sing my song, alone or to one person who just might understand. Oh, my woe! My tragic woes!

A. had another insight worth noting, as well: since this version of the phantom story pushes the female lead from second to third place, and introduces a second male character who forms a strong homosocial bond with the protagonist phantom, then the whole story becomes excessively involved with what DZ properly calls “the male gaze.” Much better to have filmed the entire film from the point of view of the unwitting female character, with whom we would have no trouble identifying as she faces first the horror of hearing of her lover’s death, then the strange songs, meeting his doppelganger, and final revelation of his tragic injury. That would make for a very different movie experience, but one that also emphasized the perplexing feeling that modern life so often leads us into, especially in such historical turning points as Shanghai in 1937.

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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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Skrik!

Me today

Today I studiously avoided distractions, but as usual it feels like too little too late. I used the morning to scan half of the French dissertation on Yang Jiang's work, which doesn't look particularly useful but which I should have read through by now. I wrote a fair-ish paragraph introducing my subject and practicing for the AAS panel description I need to write, but I've lost the meaning of the thing. Once again I don't feel confident in the texts I want to study or with what I want to say about them. I'm at sea with my presentation for next Thursday. Sigh.

I did get through "Remembering My Third Aunt"again, and wrote a little bit about it, though the writing lacked soul for the most part. My chapter draft is a huge mess. Tomorrow I'll finish scanning the French dissertation and begin in earnest on the clean-up operation with this bit of writing. Oh, I wish I had given the writing to my teachers before I left for England!
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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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Public Sphere

Habermas, the philosopher of the moment

Writing today. Excruciating as it gets this close to presentation time.

Reading a bit too. Finally with the Habermas:

They already sprang from the needs of a bourgeois reading public that later on would find genuine satisfaction in the literary forms of the domestic drama and the psychological novel. For the experiences about which a public passionately concerned with itself sought agreement and enlightenment through the rational-critical public debate of private persons with one another flowed from the wellspring of a specific subjectivity.

Tomorrow: revise, supplement. Begin reading essay on Yang Jiang's aunt.
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Progressive Bourgeois

Seems Like Old Times

I only watched the first few minutes of this film before it became apparent that neither Goldie Hawn nor Charles Grodin, and least of all Chevy Chase, do anything that is remotely funny to me. Still, I might have continued to watch because this is the story of a progressive bourgeois family that serves to re-inscribe the rules for behaving in the public sphere by focusing closely on what we owe to each other in our home life.

Formulated this way, the film does much the same work that Yang Jiang's essays about her childhood in a progressive Confucian home where her father was a lawyer, her mother a housewife with a social conscience, and their home a kind of salon and half-way house where free expression and help for the disadvantaged were the main motives driving daily life.

But it was after all a bad film, which is why A. wouldn't consent to watch it through. Homework viewing, perhaps?
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Writing on my Own

Portrait of Modernity as an Old Man (Thanks, Tianya)

Productive day of writing on my own. I'll share a snippet of a portrait of Yang Jiang's Gatekeeper:

"I am the gatekeeper of the Yang household of Temple Lane. My name is Zhao Peirong. That's ‘Zhao’ 趙; ‘Zhao’ spelled with with a ‘xiao’ 肖 and a ‘zou’ 走.”
To this day his voice is still in my ears...He was in his fifties, thin, and of medium build. His back was slightly hunched, and his face was long and narrow. Hanging off the sides of his mouth was one of those mustaches in the shape of a ba 八, the strokes of the ba trailing off in a downward hang. He walked with the slow steps of an old person, or a scholar. When he spoke, his mouth always carried a certain smile, the lips pursed as if he were about to make an apology. And then he would always begin by saying "Zhege, zhege..." (this, this...), which with his Antown accent came out as "Guoge, shige..."

Tomorrow: finish "Remembering My Father," talk with SC, revising the Yang Bi essay.

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