Here we go again. My on again, off again relationship with blogging continues. Posts under the category "Artificial Reasons" were grabbed from a defunct blog of mine. My email is: crazyfingerorg at gmail.com. All emails to me are considered confidential and I expect you will treat my emails the same way.
Books centered on experiences of children in troubled times should never be analyzed and bandied about too much, because there's too much of "me me me...look how much I can see..."-ness in any analysis and criticism. Anyway this to-be-released book, Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan looks like an achievement already.
More by Uwem Akpan in the The New Yorker magazine:
These stories are a significant achievement because, among other things, the craft of writing the author got it right. Because if you don't, then you are conveying inaccurate experiences, inaccurate re-collections. That inaccuracy would be a world away from the truth, however dangerously all-encompassing that term "truth" is.
At lunch we were discussing how ass-backwards the sales approach has been this quarter. I said, with my usual animation, "When you are falling from a 100-story building, until 50th floor it feels like flying."
Over and again, I am amazed at how this business remains unchanged. Yes we are a high-technology business, but in a lot of ways we are a jelly-beans business. People don't like to hear that.
Walking back, I self-consciously nudged Y. away from the curbside (yes, yes dear KT, I still remember the lesson...! But I think she knew what I was doing by the way she smiled). Convinced of what lay ahead for us, I said aloud, "We are in a flying phase. And you know what, I am not exactly sure what kind...! Scary."
Before we reached office, two images came to my mind. One a scene from the book I am reading now. And the second from "The Wire," (which in my book is likely to remain for a long time the best TV drama ever made).
Bao-yu and Aroma in Cao Xuequin's The Story of Stone, Vol 2: "`Now my idea of a glorious death would be to die now, while you are all around me; then your tears could combine to make a great river that my corpse could float away on, far, far away to some remote place that no bird has ever flown to, and gently decompose there until the wind had picked my bones clean, and after that never, never to be reborn again as a human being - that would be a really good death.' `I'm sleepy," said Aroma, unwilling to reply, for she had observed that his mad fit was on him again. And Bao-yu at once closed his eyes and fell fast asleep."
And here is that scene, the last moments of Bodie.
I am not a big fan of reading blogs via feed readers. This may be why the number of blogs I read have come down steadily. Sandbox is one of the very few feeds I have in my Netvibes reader, and I love reading every post.
By far the best part of my day-job is the opportunity to immerse myself into most things Chinese. My pinyin is nowhere close to where it should be by this time - given it's been a few months I am hacking away at it - but my Beijing trips increase my cravings for China with every visit. Hmm...did I say the best food I ever had was Chinese food in China? I now think - though only half-way into the 4-volume set - that The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone) is probably the best literary work that emerged from 1760s east or west or whatever.
I am now reading Yu Xuanji's poems. She died around 871, when she was only 28. About her:
"Outside her remarkable poems, we know very little about Yu Xuanji. Her
surname, Yu, which means "fish," is unusual. Her given name, Xuanji (Hsuan-chi
in Wade-Giles romanization), means something like "dark secret" or "mysterious
luck." She was born around 844 and died around 871, at the age of twenty-eight."
"Western
role names like "nun" and "concubine" (lesser wife) and courtesan" (since
a number of the poems suggest that she led this life as well) are clumsy
ways at best of denoting social roles and relationships that were very
different from the ones we know. They fail to characterize a life that
we are more likely to glimpse, if we manage it at all, by turning to the
remarkable poems she left, forty-nine in number. These poems reflect her
relations with men--relations that are certainly more complex and interesting
than any reduction of them to sex and commercial transaction would suggest--and
they also show her exploring the Daoist ideals of meditation, solitude,
and contemplation of nature. Behind them stands a person who escapes stereotypes,
a gifted writer who explores the limited options available to her, material
and spiritual, with vigor and imagination. "
Strangest thing. No matter how much I resist the urge to express, get angry at myself for breaking the silence, this stickiness remains. Driving back to airport at 5am in the morning in Washington DC, it occurred to me that pointless-ness as a state of being is perhaps the last frontier. After all, when one understands so much, is at peace with so much that was once the source of restless-ness, what was once love turns into a tendency to leave things alone. Leave people alone. Leave oneself alone. To make way for something else. Funny how often in moods like these, the song and the soldier creeps back into my mood. I think I will now remember this song as the one to go to, whenever I need to recover from the pointless-ness.
