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| On originality |
| 01.25.05 (7:06 am) [edit] |
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Originality (as thought by most as a kind of deliberate difference) represents a departure from engagement with reality. In order to engage with reality, one must deny the impulse to be original: after all, being original means being different from everyone else as a prejudice: by not engaging with everyone else, one relies upon preconceived notions of what constitutes everyone else in order to shore up one's own sense of exceptionality. This doesn't mean that originality is entirely evacuated; rather, originality is part of the process by which one realizes the complexities of one's own engagement with the world (the engagements of another are necessarily both different and interconnected to one's own); originality therefore arises from a complex engagement with the world rather than from self-isolation and deliberate difference. Originality is more creative (in the sense of productive) a notion when we think of it as a matter of accidental difference.
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| On dance |
| 01.24.05 (6:06 am) [edit] |
Think of your basic unit of time (basically the unit of time that is most repeated in your schedule; this unit develops habit based on routine). My primary unit is currently the week, which is the basis of the school scheduling; a secondary unit is the fortnight, which is the basis for many group and advisor meetings.
Once you have determined your basic unit of time, work towards embodying this unit as a series of instinctual, intuitive actions. The gradual development of temporal embodiment means that successive actions make sense. Proximity is important to making sense: actions that occur in nearby places enable not only time to be embodied, but space as well. Since I forget things easily, I depend upon embodiment and intuition: if I want to drink water more regularly, I cannot legislate a glass of water with my coffee; having a water cooler next to the cream and sugar, however, reminds me that a glass of water makes sense with my coffee.
Gradually guiding your embodying of times and spaces allows you to consciously shape the way you are shaped.
Choreography is a good way of talking about movement through space and time as being embodied, shaped and shapable. Dance is intimately related to habit: when you learn dance (or when you think you simply dance), you preform and adapt choreographies you've developed over time (and that have developed your movements); dance and habit are linked in choreography, the way we script our movements and the way our movements are scripted.
When dancing, the repetition of beats is a way that the body can become inured to the rhythm of the environment. But when there are beatless, gaping holes in the music, as is the case with certain compositions, then you need to retune your body: you are caught in the act of being habitual, of dancing simply without the music. Reattuning your body to your ear, becoming aware of the way in which your body fits the environment and responds to it as an active ear, is the way in which habit is not discarded, but learnt from and adapted.
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| Xmas is too close to Exams |
| 12.18.04 (10:26 am) [edit] |
Last night I submitted my Ph.D. exam questions and will now have to buckle down and prepare hard for the exam January 5. Once that's done, there's only the dissertation left, which means a) I'll be relatively portable, and b) I've got a new way of life to get used to. I'm considering applying to be the writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library which, if they're nutty enough to have me, will let me live in a library and devote myself to doing academic and creative time.
Come to think of it, as much as I've been itching to travel (Jessica, my belle for the last few months, has travelled quite a bit and it's part of her fabric, in multiple senses of the word), having a university library carrel and the local underground coffee shop nearby has amounted to as close to paradise as I've been able to figure at this stage of my life. Being a writer in residence in a library. What kind of world produces this sort of utopian conditions, really now.
It's somewhat odd to realize that you've reached the requirements for these kinds of careers, to look down the list of criteria (Canadian citizen? Sure. At least one well-regarded publication? Check.) and to discover that you're at least minimally qualified for the position. All minor variables like similarly qualified candidates for the position aside, yes, they're talking to you. Which is probably why the marketing manager for your publisher sent you the posting in the first place.
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| Michel Foucault on dandyism |
| 11.28.04 (8:06 pm) [edit] |
The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on “vulgar, earthy, vile nature”; on man’s indispensable revolt against himself; on the “doctrine of elegance” which imposes “upon its ambitious and humble disciples” a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art.
- from his essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1978)
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| Obliquity |
| 11.12.04 (6:11 am) [edit] |
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I've been very interested in the idea of the "oracular" lately. I'll pick up some books on the Delphic oracle, maybe dig up any primary sources I can find to see what the Greeks themselves said. You could say that a prophecy is a statement that people relate to their own lives and experiences. Under pressure of desire, cause and effect relationships become much muddier. Some anthropologists might say that the definition of magic is the confluence of cause and effect relationships under the influence of desire (i.e. you stubbed your toe on the chair-leg and attribute cause and effect relationships because of certain desires that you have). If literary criticism is the practice of interpreting, then oracles are supposed to have access to something beyond the ordinary, whether chewing on bay leaves or having a direct line to God. We'll read all sorts of things into the gaps in our information on a writer's access (and life), which is why it's better not to lay out things explicitly. Speaking of explicitness, at least three people have described my writing as "oblique." It's always difficult to characterize one's own writing because how it's different from what you don't write, and by definition you can't see past the limits of what you know. So when the word "oblique" pops up a few times, it's a gift from those who can see me more clearly than I can. So can I use the word "oblique" to understand not only my writing, but myself as a person? Am I an "oblique" person? What does it mean to be oblique? What does it mean to be oblique? What does it mean to embody "obliqueness"? In this way, if several people give us a word to understand ourselves, then it's a gift from those who may see us in ways we can't see about ourselves. This adjective tells us how our writing relates to our lives: an adjective about our art tells us how we work in non-art domains. This adjective shows how our aesthetics are already part of our lives.
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| You are my prosthetic limb |
| 11.07.04 (1:30 pm) [edit] |
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I've been increasingly systematizing my writing process. We might call it the "technologies of writing," 'technology' in the Greek sense of techne, the means by which something is done and, in this case, the ways in which I shape and condition the way I write. The way that third parties participate in my writing is crucial: I depend upon people, whether other writers in workshop or artists like my best friend. The networks that I create between myself and others are, therefore, part of these enabling technologies. They are like prosthetic limbs, extending the reach of what I can do as an artist. These limbs are entire systems of writers, critics, libraries, publishers, etc.
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| In Search of Organized Time |
| 11.01.04 (4:46 am) [edit] |
I brought my most recent poem to the Avol's Bookstore morning workshop, which is based on the form of a heart, atria, ventricles and all. Doctors Jessie and Jeannie were on hand for the operation. I bought a copy of Gray's Anatomy to commemorate the occasion.
I'm rather in flux with whom I'm spending the majority of my time. It's great to make work part of the social scene; my friends use work as a chance to be in the same spaces. It's like watching TV with friends: you spend time with them without having to foreground talking. The Six Feet Under club (or SFU for us secret handshakers) has been slow of late, what with school obligations. But we managed to squeeze in an episode a few days ago.
Speaking of time organization, I was just talking to a colleague yesterday about it. As a result of studying for both my Ph.D. qualifying exams and being in an extremely structured creative writing class, I tried to structuring my poetry production in a very systematic way, with specific days for writing, revision, revision, and final revision. A poem these days is alive for the span of a week and no longer. Inspiration, as a result, is extremely bounded and systematized. It's turned out to be a very successful system for me (it's helped me avoid the post-book slump that seems to be almost a cliché among writers), and I'm now trying to import it back to my school habits and it seems to be working well with my academic writing. Since I picked organization-schemes as my monomaniacal hobby last year, I've had a lot of fun talking to people about their systems.
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| Online reviewing |
| 10.09.04 (2:44 pm) [edit] |
My friend Sara sent me a link to a journal and suggested that I get my book reviewed there.
This got me thinking. What kind of role does reviews play in the reception of a book? Since curious readers increasingly google authors in order to learn about them, read their work, etc., establishing an online presence becomes likewise increasingly important.
Online reviews promise a potentially wide readership. The UW-Madison FELIX poetry series, which has focused on bringing print and online journal editors from the Midwest and New York, recently had a meeting at which a print editor and an online editor compared readership statistics, and the differences were more than notable: while the online journal received could expect ten thousand hits per issue, the print journal's sales totalled just over a thousand and, in fact, many of the journals never left the office.
More than a few times you hear at readings the host admits to googling the author in order to come up with her or his introductory blurb. In other words, the construction of the author's identity is largely if not entirely done through online means these days.
Come to think of it, since FELIX brings in editors from throughout the US with an attention to online journals, I think I'll approach these editors with review copies of the book. I hate the impersonal process of submitting cold to journals. Hopefully the personal introduction will be enough to provoke some reviews.
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| Postor |
| 09.25.04 (3:50 pm) [edit] |
I'm excited. Nes is working on the poster for the book. Speed Racer meets Mod Squad on some Mission Impossible with James Bond listening to Superdrag. While playing Grand Theft Auto.
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| Wisconsin Book Festival Reading |
| 09.15.04 (11:32 am) [edit] |
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Wisconsin Book Festival Reading, with Wisconsin Poet Laureate:
Sunday Oct 10, 1-2: College Library Open Book Café
Avol's Bookstore Reading:
Thursday Oct 14, 7
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| Good Morning |
| 08.29.04 (7:14 am) [edit] |
Woke up around 5 thinking.
Wrote up proposal outline for Canadian doctoral grant. Helped organize overall ideas about PhD project.
Received manuscript for friend's new chapbook. Wants me to blurb.
Wrote up notes for blurb. Enjoyed manuscript.
Ate bread and cheese. Picked up morning groceries.
Sitting at café. Writing up blurb properly.
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| Don't go, Shane! |
| 08.14.04 (6:50 pm) [edit] |
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Bonnie and I watched Shane.
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| T.S. Eliot on thievery |
| 08.13.04 (10:06 am) [edit] |
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
- from his essay on "Philip Massinger" (1920)
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| Sunny side up |
| 08.07.04 (1:53 pm) [edit] |
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In Tucson, Arizona, you can get your hair cut at a place called The Coyote Wore Sideburns.
In Tucson, Arizona, you can give up on wearing shorts because wearing them doesn't help with the heat.
In Tucson, Arizona, you can get your wits barked out of you when you walk around Bonnie's neighbourhood at night.
In Tucson, Arizona, you can empty your wallet getting the most daring western shirt you're going to wear in this lifetime.
In Tucson, Arizona, you still get your toaster ovens at Target.
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| Word around town |
| 07.22.04 (8:24 am) [edit] |
Worked on the book with Carleton today. October is shaping up to be nuts: Avol's, a cool little bookstore in new digs, will be launching the book on the 14th, the Wisconsin Book Fest will be having me read early in the month, and I'll also be heading back to Toronto for the Nightwood launch in late October.
C'est What, a Toronto institution, is closing next month. If you had a basement and you had a lot of wood to furnish it, it'd look a lot like C'est What. Saw Lenni Jabour and Justin Rutledge at their last gig there. Whereas Lenni breaks hearts with old piano tunes and French, Justin does it with barely a voice and a ratty photo taped to his guitar.
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| Dodgeball & Pointy Shoes |
| 07.05.04 (7:06 am) [edit] |
Besides yard sales and ice cream, Brantford has a mall movie theater where you can watch Dodgeball.
White Goodman (Ben Stiller as hilarious villain) vs. Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughan as hero)
The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that onscreen villains are much more interesting than heroes:
Agent Smith vs. Neo
Jafar vs. Aladdin
Leo DiCaprio's character vs. Daniel Day-Lewis's in Gangs of New York
My guess is that insofar as the Hero is supposed to be an Everyman character, the Hero must be as bland as possible in order to represent as many men as possible. As in so many stories, the conflict is masculine-centered. The Hero is alienated from society in a way that prevents him from fulfilling his potential and being recognized as a Hero. The Villain, on the other hand, is firmly perched at the top of the food chain. The course of the story depicts the rise of the Hero and the fall of the Villain.
All of this probably comes as no surprise. But what I find interesting is that insofar as the Hero is supposed to represent the largest number of men in the real world, who does the Villain represent?
If we take Daniel Day-Lewis's character in Gangs of New York as an example, we note his height, his top hat, his handlebar moustache, and his interesting fashion sense. In contrast to the bland cap and clothes of Leo's character, we are meant to notice Day-Lewis's character, and his visibility is related to his villainy.
In other words, the Villain sticks out as exceptional. He's the embodiment of Exception. Which would make him the opposite of the Everyman: rather than representing the largest number of men possible, the Villain represents the smallest number of men possible.
Port Dover also has a pier, the kind that has a tower with a green light for boats, the kind on which you while away the evening by talking to your friends. It's also the kind that young white men with baggy pants visit with their boom boxes.
One of them asks your friends, "Do you have any weed? (No.) Coke? (No.) What kind of music do you listen to? (No real answer.) Oh yeah? We're from London."
The one with the beer funnel turns to you. "Where are you from?"
"Canada."
"You know what I mean. What's your background?"
"Canadian."
"What languages do you speak?"
"French."
The one with the backwards baseball cap comes over to you. "Are you fucking with me? Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
At this point, your friend is smart enough to say, "Let's go," and you leave.
The first thing that strikes you is that you have been marked by being exceptional. Let's say it's your pointy shoes. Or let's say it's your skin color. Either way, you're visible. If you were an Everyman, you'd be invisible because you wouldn't have any features that stick out.
Under these rules, you can't be an Everyman. Everymen have the power to stay invisible and wear baggy khakis. Eventually you realize that you can't change your skin color, but you can wear pointy boots because staying invisible (bland) is a crucial part of Everyman's game.
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| The New Pornographers & Wittgenstein |
| 06.26.04 (12:44 pm) [edit] |
Others have already pointed out that a line from The New Pornographers's "Chump Change" ("... the world is that which is the case") is drawn from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
But it's also a handy way to think about anthropology, which has been on my mind because of the book (since it's called Anthropy and has to do with the study of human life) and because I've been putting together my Ph.D. exam section on ethnography.
You know when you're breaking up with someone and the music playing in the background seems to unnervingly relate? That's like The New Pornographers and library research.
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| A Week in Revue |
| 06.26.04 (9:46 am) [edit] |
Art kids party.
They eat food
and watch music.
Music kids
blow lids
off all that lit shizz.
Lectures
at punk venues
mean art kids
rock out
now. I eat food
and watch music.
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| Table talk |
| 06.17.04 (4:30 pm) [edit] |
The last post generated a bit of discussion, so I thought it might be worth trying a new way to discuss a topic. I'll ask a question for which I'd like to hear your answers. If you answer them, you can pose another question for everyone.
Q: When someone is joking around with you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, would it be better to say something serious or something funny? Why?
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| The Cool and the Lame |
| 06.14.04 (7:15 am) [edit] |
Since I never got to try on my new suit for the Griffin Literary Awards (I missed Adam at Union Station and saw The Saddest Music In the World with Lisa and Sou instead), I was itching to try it for a wedding that Lisa invited me to. (Here is a http://www.livejournal.com/us... to her account of the festivities.)
Which also meant that I had never worn my tie clip. Bonnie and I found it in a vintage shop. Ever the romantic, she wanted to engrave it with a tiny R where it crosses over the middle of the tie. The first five engravers she contacted wouldn't do it in the amount of time I had before I had to catch my bus (two hours). If the sixth wouldn't do it, as she put it, it wasn't meant to be.
Like all good details, the R is too tiny to see except from up close. It reminds me of how opera singers have elaborate costumes that most audience people won't see, but the details are what make their characters believable, especially to the singers themselves.
The wedding was in a modern-looking church in Newmarket. The ceremony was led by an Asian priest with a pronounced accent. When he read scripture, he sometimes corrected himself, which produced snickers in the audience. "Jackie Chan." During the first few audible comments, I looked back and realized that the congregation was white. The priest continued to read scripture and, as the rules go, the congregation would respond appropriately with the words they knew. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the words were a kind of power the congregation bonded over, words that they thought the priest aped as a parody of an English-speaking person. I didn't sing with them--I didn't know the words--and when we sat down, someone said "She Bangs," and people for rows around couldn't keep themselves from laughing.
"Why weren't you laughing?" I was asked afterwards by a man who looked like a football player despite his burgundy shirt and tie. "We find all of these things funny--funerals, weddings, whatever. We like to have a good time."
I didn't have an easy answer for him. Guys (a constant conversation topic between Bonnie and I) have a tactic we call, "Cool Chick / Lame Chick." This is how it works: a guy (who often have a few buds in tow) makes a joke. This joke usually has to do with women. The woman in the group is then faced with a decision that may or may not be posed explicitly: is she going to be a Cool Chick (i.e. laugh along, whether she thinks it's funny or not) or a Lame Chick (i.e. not laugh along, explain why she doesn't consider it funny, squirm, or leave). If there is more than one woman in the group, then the decision becomes exponentially more difficult because each woman's decision acts as precedent for the rest of the women. In any case, the It's Just a Joke is the weapon of choice for the Laid-Back Guy.
Jim, let it be known, was not the only Laid-Back Guy at the wedding, but as a man with a neck as wide as a pigskin and a penchant for classic rock, he had adapted "Cool Chick / Lame Chick" nicely for Asians like me.
So when they requested "She Bangs" during the reception dancing, I sat it out. Don't get me wrong; I put everything into my dancing and people appreciate it. As the dancefloor filled, a number of the dancers our age would refuse to let me sit down. A blonde bridesmaid in red kept leading me by the hand to dance as I'd try to leave. A guy with spiky strawberry blond hair would give me the guy-bonding "props" gesture. Later, in his amazement, he said to Lisa, "I don't know how he does it. Maybe it's his clever Chinese feet."
The details are everything: you stay quiet because you're Chinese; you dance hard because you're Chinese. You're publishing your first book because you're Chinese; you're doing your Ph.D. in English literature because you're Chinese; every word you speak seems in contradiction to what others see in your skin: these are the details that others can't seem to see except from up close.
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| Montréal, where plates are stacked with smoked meat |
| 06.06.04 (9:23 pm) [edit] |
This weekend, the League of Canadian Poets met for its annual general meeting in Montréal. I went with my friend Adam, whose book won the League's award for best first book.
My publisher suggested that I bring my manuscript to Anne Carson, who gave the guest lecture this year. Consistent with my work habits, I interspersed working on the manuscript with yabbering with Adam on the train, eating carnivorously, and buying bagels at the finest bagélériés the city has to offér.
The Cast:
matt (he publishes his name in small caps because he's such a humble guy) is the president of the league. he is a tall, guy-next-door kind of fellow, has blond spiky hair and wears a jacket that makes him look like a security guard.
Triny, like Chris and Adam and I, published her book this year with Nightwood Editions. She and Adam tell jokes like siblings who are just about to hit each other.
Chris, who was shortlisted for the award that Adam won, is a tall lanky guy with glasses and hands for storytelling. If he's quiet and something really strange happens (like poets dancing to oldies during the gala dinner, let's say), he becomes very quiet and says, "Wow," very emphatically, every now and then.
The Gala:
I recorded Adam's Lampert reading and acceptance to mp3 using my fancy little mp3 player. I burned him a copy on CD. You can hear him threaten to read one of Chris Banks's juvenalia poems and, if you listen carefully, you can hear Chris freak out in the background.
Unlike Adam, who accepted his award with aplomb, I shat myself approaching Anne Carson for a blurb. I had written out my introduction several times on hotel stationery. I think I remember saying something stupid about Virginia Woolf, which, in retrospect, was probably lethal. In the moment, however, Anne just looked at me blankly and said, "I don't do blurbs." I hadn't figured out what to say next so I just went back to my table with my manuscript. I only worked up the courage to give her the manuscript once I reasoned with myself that, if she turned down even taking it, then at least she wouldn't see how much my style rips hers off. But, well, gee, I printed out the copy for you and don't feel obligated to read it if you're too busy, but she took it and said, "Thanks," with the same blank look.
Now I'm scared she'll read it. It's meeting your childhood superhero and trying to flex.
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| Our Worst-Case Scenario |
| 05.23.04 (4:58 pm) [edit] |
The tornado warning that came over the P.A. system said that we had to go into the basement of the library and stay away from windows. Instead, everyone sat at their computers and looked at each other.
As I looked out the window, I saw a guy in a heathered T-shirt, white shorts and sandals carrying a a bag of McCombo in one hand and medium-sized fountain drink in the other. The trees waved frantically.
I figure that natural disasters are like the movies: we look out the window and we see special effects. Say, did that guy just get hit by a lamp-post? Or maybe it's the opposite--we look out the window and we see reality TV, which, come to think of it, amounts to the same thing.
Either way, everyone turned back to their email.
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| Fiddy cent |
| 05.18.04 (7:25 pm) [edit] |
I'm listening to Patsy Cline and reading a story in which a museum security guard wakes up one morning and decides to stage a heist at work.
I'm a sucker for duffel bags full of money and guitars that sound like they're from California. And boots. Real. Pointy. Boots.
That's the thing about movies with protagonists. Imagine you had your very own story, one in which some omniscient narrator keeps having to describe how bad ass you are every time you cross the street.
You probably don't play in a band, but boy do you like to hold meetings in really loud places. Somewhere there's a cop who looks who's going to have to come out of retirement just for you. And he kinda looks like Bruce Willis.
In the meantime, I think the chicken stew burning to the pot.
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| For the record |
| 05.11.04 (6:23 am) [edit] |
It's taken me two years, but two nights ago I finally interviewed my dad about his life and recorded it to mp3 and even burned it to CD. I've been writing about his life since the interview.
Here's an excerpt. He's describing what it's like living under Apartheid in South Africa:
My parents lived in the big city: Johannesburg. My father was working for the Chinese Councillor as the newspaper division with the government Gazette, earning very little money because it was not profit-making. It was subsidized by the Taiwanese government. Your grandma was the only dressmaker able to make Chinese dresses. She got lot of business. She was quite well known in the small community in Johannesburg. Because of the racial policies and immigration there was less than seven thousand Chinese in Johannesburg.
My family wasnt allowed to buy a house in South Africa. The Chinese government provided a house for the employees of the newspaper. Their house was shared by three families. Each had one room, sharing a shower and kitchen. Imagine three of us living in one room, four of them living in another room.
I was working for thirty rands a month. Rands were equivalent to two U.S. dollars. I was working for thirty rands a month so I was earning sixty dollars a month working for somebody. Compared with whites it wasnt much money but compared to blacks it was a lot of money. You can rent a house for thirty rands. No one would rent a big house for himself.
I worked long days and saved as much as possible. I sent it home so my brother and sister could afford to go to private school. They went to a Catholic-run private school where they studied with whites. Chinese could go as long as they could pay the fees. Blacks couldnt enter the school even if they had money to pay. I couldnt get a good education because I couldnt go to white schools unless I paid large sums of money which my parents couldnt afford to, and I couldnt go to black schools because Im a Chinese.
Because my father was earning very little money and couldnt afford send me to private school. So I had to start working at the age fourteen for somebody outside in Eatondale, about forty-five minutes drive from Johannesburg. I ran a corner convenience store. I worked with no salary because I couldnt speak English. But theres only one condition they offered me is a tutor to learn English paid by the employer. But other than that I might have a few dollars pocket money to buy clothes and so on.
After that I start learning English and learning Afrikaans which is official language and some of the native language. Mostly the customers are the Bantus. Im able to speak Zulu, Sesotho, three or four types of languages. After a year or so when I know how to speak, how to serve the customers, they started paying me a little money but not too much still.
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