Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs in the Bay Area

Dear all,

I did not know what to expect when I picked up this book to read; I did not know, I suppose, that I would fall in love—the way the mysterious narrator says in the opening paragraph, “The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.” Falling in love with a single person—final, swift, fateful—yes, but the truth is, I did not fall in love with Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs with swiftness. I wandered in, mildly curious and confused, lulled by the quaint New England rituals and solitudes, until the stories and the daytrips and the dooryard visits began to revolve within me and stir deep pangs of longing.

Part of this, I believe, must have something to do with the narrator herself—a writer of some sort on her summer retreat at Dunnet Landing, well-traveled but having chosen to seclude herself in this tiny fishing village on the coast of Maine, who finds herself tempted so much by the gossip and chatter and characters at her lodgings with Mrs. Todd’s that she rents an abandoned schoolroom on a hill to work during the daytime. These are, of course, details gleaned over the course of reading the novella—of herself, her history and particulars, the narrator is inconspicuously silent as we join her in marveling at these beautiful, enduring people of Dunnet Landing. It isn’t until the third page into the novella that we’re graced with the first “I”—until then, a third-person omniscient voice seems ready to carry the entire narrative.

This strangely distant, yet acknowledged and appealed to narrator of Pointed Firs brings together both remoteness and warmth; Mrs. Blackett smiles at her and squeezes her hand, Elijah Tilley invites her to his house for dinner, countless people turn to her as the medium of their lives—yet we know nothing about her own loves and dreams, except that she writes and fishes, and would sooner surrender herself to self-forgetfulness than to solitary work: “…as we turned away, I saw a flutter of white go past the window as I left the schoolhouse and my morning’s work to their neglected fate.” How much I, too, am easily lured away from my writing!

Besides the narration, something else held me back sometimes, and that is its quaintness—so quaint and picturesque and off-key. The picture book view of the folk of Dunnet Landing reminded me very much of Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which is filled quaint, little cottages and tombstones, and is narrated by a similarly romantic writer. In Pointed Firs, however, there is something pitifully pathetic in the stories recounted, like shriveled blackberries on the stem that had too little sun and too many harsh sea gusts to let them ripen. There is something ludicrous in the Queen’s Twin who is convinced that she and the Queen of England lead parallel lives, who cuts out magazine photographs of the royal family and makes gauzy, fanciful frames for each relative; something petty in the way Mrs. Todd, as generous and spritely as she is, dismisses others for being dull or stingy. Yet we are asked to love these earnest and simple people because, as Mrs. Todd says, “Don’t it show that for folks that have any fancy in ‘em, such beautiful dreams is the real part o’ life? But to most folks the common things that happens outside ‘em is all in all.”

I am aware that my own idealism, which makes me cling to these quaint little stories, is quite laughable, that my naïveté might be discounted as the strange fruit of ivory towers and pastoral commons. Yesterday, sitting outside “Brainwash café” in its own bubble in SOMA, I was told just as much by someone who is far more realistic, and being a lawyer, far more concerned about clauses and provisions for off-chances and eventualities, far more shrewd about diction and loopholes for profits and tax breaks. Yet even he cannot live without his dreams, for what is an iPhone and a MacBook but sleek modern versions of magazine cutouts? What is this mania for information at your fingertips but another kind of distraction? Mrs. Todd says discerningly of the Queen’s Twin, “I expect all this business about the Queen has buoyed her over many a shoal place in her life. Yes, you might say that Abby’d been a slave, but there ain’t any slave but has some freedom.” I have always thought that self-proclaimed idealists are the true pessimists because we believe so resolutely in misery that we’ll see every silver lining in the gloom and doom while the realists simply read the day’s weather report and plan accordingly.

I refuse to plan accordingly, I’d rather be accused of the albeit artificial and self-imposed ignorance and vanity that allows a sense of surprise in a world where there is nothing new under the sun. Surprise. This is my mantra against knowledge and complacency, prejudice and practicalities. Though we may all of us be prisoners or slaves of this hard, unsympathetic world we live in, I think our mantras and manias save us and give us sustenance and society in our loneliest hour. At the very least we recognize another’s loneliness by the forlorn or listless look that mirrors our own, and there is some fellowship of solitary dreamers that leads us to leave small offerings of kinship, sympathy, or tribute to each other. Each letter I write is in some way an offering of that sort.

Here is the line in Pointed Firs that captured for me that cold, austere New England air “of some ethereal northern sort, with a cool freshness as if it came over new-fallen snow”: “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellow of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

Here in the Bay Area, we haven’t the hundreds of secluded islands that splinter off the coast of Maine. We have, instead, blustery winds that sweep through the marsh grasses and carry in a sea layer of fog that hugs our coastlines and overshadows our peninsulas; dry yellow hills that roll gently into the marshes or into our suburbs and into the bay; grey mudflats and grey industrial walls and debris. We have a loneliness of length that stretches in one long unbroken path upon a levy from inland canyon into the flat sheen of the salt ponds; a loneliness of sprawl that builds tract houses from hillside to the last stretch of infill; and a loneliness of highways that cuts through our cities and replaces distance with endless longing or euphoric independence. People come to the very edges of the golden state to reach the ends of this long loneliness, and there, I trust, they often find that they can go no farther and make their home upon its shores.

I, for one, am still longing for more and have sent out this length of words into the winds. (Play here Mary Poppins' "Let's go fly a kite!") :-)

Much love,
Jules

Animal Incompletion

So this theme has come up over and over again - I don't know exactly
how to work it into my own work - and it seems definitely to hinge on
a different kind of reflection, one that bears on a more properly
'anthropological' problem, in the sense of it being a philosophical
reflection on the 'human' as such. The question is what defines the
specificity of 'human,' on what grounds can the human be legislated as
an entity different from animals, most obviously, but also from
machines, from gods. This again is part of a longer series - I've
reflected on this in some of my papers, but it also seems like this is
the question that motivates a long of early anthropology - that is, in
defining an object for the discipline, there emerges a kind of
reflection of what is proper to the human as a way of thinking what is
proper to the discipline. In this sense, Agamben writes of the
anthropological machine, that which serves the sole purpose of
producing the human.

Of course this is a really complex topic, so I think I wouldn't do it
all at once here. But I will at least want to pass through a couple
of key points that are anchoring this reflection. So Marx, Derrida
(Lacan), Arendt, but also Boas, Herder, Levi-Strauss. The point of
this wouldn't to be to work toward but to work through a critical
animality studies, to think what animality will ultimately offer us,
which, I think/hope will be a way of thinking of an anthropology that
will really problematize this question of the human again. So in
broad strokes, the way I imagine this working is something like this:

a) there is a sense in which human difference from other living beings
hinges on a couple of possibilities:
1: something that serves as a supplement, something additional to the
mere physicality of the animal body
1a: this is either a species-level biological trait or something that
must be developed either by the self or in the society of others.
That is, we either have a vision of the human species at the level of
the individual body, or the human as a social animal, whereby the
human body is already propped through multiple connections with
others. The problem here is that we have conflicting ideas of where
the human begins - is it individual or is it social, and what will be
the status of something extra/over the animal that needs to be
developed amongst others - and so, human difference must be cultivated
in a relationship with the other (human). This is Aristotle on the
polis, which I may come back to through Arendt.

But the problem anyway is that you'd need to be able to determine what
the basic unit of the human is, and if we mean to say that the human
is in fact a social animal, what the condition of his being-human is,
if there is in fact a condition of its activation (being amongst
people), how is the human not in fact given as a condition of the
human body. The other possibility is that the human difference lays
in a potentiality, the potential of becoming-human, where the
ontological status of the human is a potential to become human?

2: a prior condition of lack, where the human exists in fulfilling a
need that other animals can do 'naturally.' Most often, this is
framed in terms of a lack of instinct, where the human is that animal
that is woefully ill-equipped to survive, where there is a gap between
nature and human requirements. I think we see this in Nietzsche, in
Marx, in Derrida, in Herder (especially on language)

But here, culture is that which develops to fill the gap. Perhaps
culture is 'instinctual' in the sense that people must have culture
(and this is where Levi-Strauss, in his search for
funadmental/elemntary forms becomes really interesting). So here's an
interesting point, that Derrida gets into a lot, which is that Lacan
is very interested in what he takes as a human capacity to respond
rather than just react - I would want to argue that response is based
on its fallibility, or rather, the possibility of its not happening or
happening in a different way. This way, response is about a capacity
for difference, which is more interesting to consider then in these
terms: human is that which has the possibility of different
possibilities.

Anyway, I always start writing and then can't keep my attention, and I
let my thoughts pool up and never say what I need to say.

So here:

What is the human? That which makes, which is made, insofar as it is
an incomplete animal (or animals are incomplete humans?).
This makes anthropogenesis as a figure of what people make very interesting.

Alternatively, anthropogenesis might be analyzed as a kind of slogan,
a semiotic process by which 'the human' becomes the privileged
perspective through which everything will be understood. I am
thinking of how the colonial project is similar, in that it seeks to
have everything pass through it, where the empire becomes the conduit
through which all knowledge must pass. Like an electromagnet, it
orients all toward itself.

What am I working through? I don't want to reproduce the kind of
analysis that says that human is that which destroys, but I also don't
want to think about human as that which creates, either. I would want
to think of the human as part of a process without a necessary
subject, or that can't be apprehended as a process at all, insofar as
'process' assumes a kind of normative structure in time already..

Who knows?

Re: [reading in] Reading Huckleberry Finn and Vanguardistas in Berkeley

Just a reflection. From behind the firewall. Today, I was pleasantly
surprised by my improvement in Chinese in the last month, I had this
moment of pure amazement at my own ability - these moments are few and
far between, amazed by my capacity to circumlocute, to sound like I'm
still learning the language and yet, not also sound like an idiot. I
could reflect on this point all day, but I won't.

But I did enjoy reading Juliana's post, I had this monstrous feeling
of simultaneity in space, what's the word? Of being in many places at
the same time, or having the feeling that one's position is expansive,
that spaces are connected in ways that rely on and transcend their own
physicality. Or maybe this is only to say that spatiality is mediated
by imagination and experience, filtered through the spatial
epistemologies we exercise as cognitive maps. I'm remember this
moment in that interview, Latour and Serres, that we read earlier -
where he talks about time and topology, that science of expanding
plastic sheets, where bunching up and impossible expansion produce an
experience of temporality as overlapping. We live in the overlap of
time on itself, and perhaps to that we may add the overlap of spaces.

How, in the extended cough that is Beijing air, how do I miss sunny
Berkeley where one never thinks about humidity? What this group needs
is a way of talking about weather, then, in this moment of global
atmospheric systems, which is basically the climatological incarnation
of a set of problems that as an anthropologist I suppose we think
about a lot - how do you talk about connection without subsuming
infinite interconnection to a kind of globalizing sameness. How do we
experience the alterity of spaces themselves while also recognizing
their interconnection? (Or am I just a climate ideologist, woefully
committed to my Spaceship Earth?).

But the question that Jules raised is a haunting question. I'm
suddenly reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston, but only because of the
phrase 'a childhood among ghosts' or something to that effect, and
through that, to the figure of the specter. I haven't read Huckleberry
Finn in ages, but my imagined Huck Finn is vivid, if possibly
inaccurate. The specter of slavery is already a glaring presence,
the horror of slavery is the condition of his narrative, and it
undergirds his corn-pone days lazing on the river. The horror of
slavery is physically manifest in the brute physicality of Jim's
blackness, in the course of his interactions with people and things on
the course of the river. The raft is a kind of liminal space where it
seems that Huck himself, passing through, is as haunting as the
spectacle of slavery, that in its very omnipresence is also ominously
absent in the book. Who is whose specter, here? Can we imagine
liminality with the caveat that liminality will always be an
in-between, where the precondition of the liminal is this structural
in-between-ness that presupposes and depends upon those stages that it
marks? Or here, will the raft be an inside outside, a space marked
not by its exteriority but by its being inside of the world from which
it seeks an escape.

Here, the terms of 'escape' are already overdetermined by a kind of
socius that works by orienting everything toward itself, by forcing
everything to pass through itself - literally, in that the raft flows
down the river thoroughfare that is also the main artery of a regional
plantation economy (and in this way, the river is both the way out
while paradoxically the precondition of the slave-driven economy
itself) - and then, figuratively, in that slavery will present itself
irresistably as a kind of epistemological conduit (that mirrors the
river itself), in that it forces all discourse to pass through itself,
even that which tries to escape it. After all, disavowal depends on
the originary presence of the disavowed, the escape reifies what is
being escaped. I guess I see a parallel here in the colonial project,
that 'gift of a world,' in which the colony orients all knowledge
toward itself, like one of those magnets that makes the iron in your
sand form neat lines which turn toward a center, or in more
charismatic forms of discourse that have the principle effect and
condition of asserting their very necessity in their capacity to
redirect knowledge toward themselves.

Sorry, this is incomprehensible. I'm thinking through something else,
and it seems that this trope repeats itself all over the place.

<3 <3 <3

Reading Huckleberry Finn and Vanguardistas in Berkeley

Dears,

This is a much elaborated letter that I originally wrote in shorter form to another friend in France: The last few days have been spectacularly hot (by northern CA standards) and the carpet of my apartment is cut up by bright, sun-filled patches of heat. I don't know what is wrong with me, maybe it's the leftover pizza I've had for breakfast (and cheese not agreeing with my lactose-intolerant stomach), but these same days have left me closemouthed and shellshocked in Spanish class. My teacher pokes me ever so gently every hour or so, Juliana, ¿quieres decir algo, o Juliana, ¿tienes una pregunta? but I'm underwater somewhere, or under shimmering heat waves.

For homework, we had to write a poem in response to the poetry of visiting poet Arturo Dávila (the polyptotonic redundancy of poe-poe-poe-, I hope, you'll take as a sign of my groan of frustration when we were given this assignment; there is so much bad poetry, I think, because we are told to write poetry in this way—as homework, as an outlet, as leftovers and throwaways).

I'm not a poet, and I don't write poetry except maybe once every five years, but as you mentioned the things left out, the missed encounters and misunderstandings, and the detritus in your last email, I thought I'd share the piece I finally wrote—not as sobras y restos, but as something extra, superfluous, and spontaneous. I realize that many of these words are all near synonyms, but there’s a difference among the bits and pieces that slip out of our hands—some are simply throwaways, some continue to haunt us (like the Steve McQueen film you described), some we keep chasing. Too much of my writing, and the writing that I read, is a mere listing of things. The “list” is a great temptation—it gives the appearance of, if not encompassing everything, then the massive quantity of what more there is to list, if only the list could go on.

But the “list” is a lie; it captures all the wrong bits and pieces so that its abundance is the mire of trash. I want to be saved by something beyond this great listing of things—maybe by rhythm, by the drawing out of things, which is the slipperiness of figuration, by hunger for something not there rather than satisfaction of what is there (“donde hubo manzana/ solo queda un hambre;//donde hubo palabras/ (potros o toros/ sujetos) queda la severa/ forma del vacío” – João Cabral de Melo Neto):

“Tomo esta evanescencia y lubricidad de todos los objetos, que les deja deslizarsenos de las manos cuando los agrarramos más, a ser la parte más innoble de nuestra condición.” –Emerson

Respuesta a Naufragio

El sueño es una migaja triste
Que el pájaro pequeño comió
Y después se acostó en tierra
Con las garras arriba al cielo

La mañana no trae su canción
Y las alas no vuelan de nuevo
Pero nadie nota la omisión
Donde anidan los pensamientos

(The first line is taken from Dávila’s poem “Naufragio.”)

I finished reading yesterday Huckleberry Finn—someone (Jenn Liu) told me over the weekend that the huckleberry plant is renowned for being undomesticatable; it won't bear fruit if you try to cultivate it in the garden (and just now, a quick online search tells me that it has to do with elevation. Huckleberries grow wild at high elevation where deep snows insulate buds and shoots; but tend to freeze in the open coldness at lower elevations.) My first point of reference was Thoreau's huckleberries and their elusive and essential ambrosia, but of course! Huck Finn is the embodiment of undomesticatability.

I fell in love with Huck Finn as he went along his way down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (so much so that I hated the part where Tom Sawyer came in, or where anyone else took too much of a share in the dialogue). I loved his voice, his easy acceptance of everything, mum on all things disagreeable, and going at turning and thinking, turning and thinking. There are a few people whose voices I have fallen in love with—and they are people not quite from the South, but with a lump of the South in their throat so that they catch you unawares with slight drawls and infinitesimal caesuras. I am thinking of two people in particular—his has a velvety smoothness, hers a grainier catch. Huck’s voice goes in hops and skips, yet in the main, straightforwardly on, and it carries you forward so gently that you forget its relentless power to wash over and blandish things.

But mostly I felt for Huck’s lonesomeness—which is different from when he is lazying about with Jim, a "solid lonesomeness" "listening to the stillness" in the company of someone familiar. There is another lonesomeness deep in the droning insects, the rustling leaves, and the hum of a spinning wheel, when the buoyancy of Huck’s voice seems to falter and the suspense of the moment is something out of his hands. These are the times when we suddenly hear the frailty of our own voices, the slightness of its timbers and cords, and every knot and tie that holds it together is poised to unravel. It is when we have only our own voices to trust that we are most alone in the world.

At some point, I tired of the circles of discussion, platicando platicando, and I remembered suddenly that these words which I puzzled over and rearranged and loved were just words, that there was some gap between the words and the feeling. Maybe it has to do with the Girondo and his “Apuntes callejeros,” vanguardista to the hilt. Somewhere along the lines of experimental poetry, the words detached themselves from all reference and became literal puzzle pieces and ingots of steel. I said that the apuntes were observations scribbled en tranvía and trailed off in the form of ellipses, each estrofa un apunte that gets shorter and shorter until cut off. It was only later that I felt abandoned or my brain lulled while my stomach dealt with lactose, and I wondered what hole I'd dug myself into with all these words. (Only now do I understand why Girondo’s sombra throws itself into the spinning wheels; or as Huck says, “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.”)

Yesterday I took a nap during the hot afternoon slump and hoped that things would take a turn for the better. Phoebe and I bicycled down California, stopping at a farmer’s market down by Milvia where I picked up some peaches, to Monterey Market on Gilman where I picked up some nectarines and pluots. I bought some black mustard seeds from Lhasa Karnak because I’ve been dreaming about that upma and those green beans that I had at my sister’s in-law’s place. Today Lisa is visiting so we’ll pick up some cheese as a side and I’ll fry up the turbot sole, and the upma and green beans will have to wait until next week.

p.s. A response to Jerry: Strangely enough, I met Amitav Ghosh back in my college days when I took a class he taught on “archives” and read a mishmash of books that all touched upon archival materials but remained (in my poor bewildered undergraduate brain) intransigently disconnected from each other. But to return to what it is to “write history in the form of a novel”—I thought about this in Huckleberry Finn, which can be read as a nostalgic representation of life in the Mississippi Valley “forty to fifty years ago”—a history of the South, of slavery, and growing up.

It was difficult for me to reconcile that lulling effect of Huck’s narrative style with the cruelties and injustices that he encounters, and I think this is part of the conundrum that Twain’s notice at the beginning of the novel states: “Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.”

How can we be nostalgic about a South that was horrific, abusive, and yet honey-loving, and corn pone-filled? What sort of political commentary is Twain making about the violence (and artifice) that knits together the South with its feuds and brawls, loafing and humbugging? To say that this is no commentary and no moral lesson, and damned if I am nostalgic, is maybe one way to deal with the messiness and relentlessness of life—but only in retrospect.

It is at heart a deeply pragmatic way to shuffle through the debris of the past and into the care of providence, but it eschews a regular plan of action and offers no impetus for change in the present. To me, that is part of the stalemate in Burma—what oversight allows its people to be simply lulled over again and again and what foresight (or lonesomeness) will provide the moment of stillness to make the decision to “go to hell,” to risk all morals and principles, and all interest and welfare, for someone else’s freedom (as Huck does for Jim)?

p.p.s. Speaking of shipwrecks and freedom and being passed over, a story someone retold to me over the weekend about Vietnamese refugees: https://www.dw.kqed.org/tv/programs/archive/index.jsp?pgmid=17330&date=20090501

Reading Portrait of a Lady in Berkeley

Oh dear, I completely forgot to check the blog! Here is one I wrote a month ago exactly!

June 14, 2009

Dear Irene,

Your little letter was a splash of sunshine here in cloudy Berkeley. We seem to need quite a bit of coaxing before the heat manages to dissolve the grey and let the afternoon sun shine through. I like to imagine you speaking French in your light, lissome voice, in an open roof car (what are those called?), full of people gesticulating loudly, the stereo blasting some high-stepping accordion music, the conversation rollicking through English and French and Korean and Italian. How was the lunch party in the burbs?

Despite the quaint m’lonesome’s and m’love’s in your letter, I highly doubt that you play the old maid very well. You are too sweet; I think everyone will fall in love with you, I think everyone has fallen in love with you already. I feel a bit like Henrietta in The Portrait of a Lady, which I just read, who is fortitudinously vigilant over Isabel Archer’s propensity to go off in zigzags. I don’t mean that you suffer the “sin of self-esteem” and regard for one’s own opinions that Isabel does, only that I wouldn’t be surprised if you received a proposal here and there that forces you into “a thousand ridiculous zigzags." I am thinking of when we shared our mutually embarrassing stories of obliviously going on dates. Don’t forget to come back to the Bay Area—it will truly be gloomy if you don’t!

Have you done much reading and writing and espresso-ing at the picturesque little cafes of rue des Tessiers? I thought it funny (and notable) that Isabel can never keep her attention on a novel when we as readers do keep our attention on her, or rather, it seems to recall us from our wandering attention (as The Portrait is so long and plodding at times, my attention did wander). Yet other times, and this is so at the end of the novel, our attention is so fixed upon Isabel, so stridently hoping for her happiness that when she departs to her despair, we’re left clutching at her shadow in the most unhandsome way (Emerson wrote, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” in “Experience”).

More often, we find Isabel “motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn," a novel forgotten on her lap or neglected on a desk. If it is true, as James writes, that a “well-chosen volume” can help “to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason”; then it is also true that the moulds of reason have their limitations. James’ novels are not philosophical treatises, and so the practice of reading a novel is not quite inhabiting this “organ.” But it is inhabiting another point-of-view, even if only parenthetically, as in the remarkable feat of readerly perception Ralph performs: “He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogenous organism…." And so this is the kind of inhabiting that we do as we traipse and trespass through the consciousnesses of James’ characters. But like Ralph, we find that our view is not, after all, from within Isabel’s shelter of mind, but locked out from it and peering as through a microscope or listening with a stethoscope into it. And I find this limit (and modesty for his characters’ privacy—who would have thought that eavesdropping is more courteous?) most striking in the curious turns of phrases from the narrator: “We know how much she like Lord Warburton…” or “I have already had reason to say that Isabel knew her husband to be displeased…," and most pointedly, “The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it…." These foreground the deductive logic of the narrator’s position; it reminds us that we are always ever on the outside of someone else’s house.

In The Portrait, I do not think it is just Ralph and Osmond who think of “life as a matter of connoissership." All the characters desperately collect and clutch at things and peoples. What is most frightening, and perhaps even more relevant to us in our so-called digital age, is that they collect not just objects, and everything that can be turned into an object, but also minds. We like to think of the mind as infinite, volatile, and uncontainable; freedom of speech is only as good as freedom of the mind. Yet description fails even to capture what the mind is. We liken it to the soul, the heart, the brain, an aura, a fragrance—“a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas."

I thought that since you thought about “things” in Jane Eyre, you might find this thing-like quality of the mind as perfume and gardens interesting, too. And even this mind may be annexed the way Osmond wishes to appropriate Isabel’s, “attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park." That is the sadness of The Portrait; the overwhelming sense that Isabel’s mind must retreat further and further into the shade; that her mind may be caught in the vise of another’s will. But is it ever? When we step away from the doorsteps of Isabel’s house, can we believe, as she says, that “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us…."

Have I bored you yet in this rather long-winded and impersonal treatise? If I have, then I have succeeded in convincing you that my mind is, quite unfortunately and unexceptionally, my own and no one else’s. If I haven’t, then we’ve temporarily achieved a laudable cohabitation. I watched, yesterday, the new Pixar/Disney movie Up, which takes this theme of house to a most delightful and poignant (at least as poignant as cartoon animation can get) incarnation. I found none of the characters wholly loveable, and I think that is their charm. If you go to see it, tell me what you think.

These Pixar movies represent to me the revival of a classic art form—if we can call statues classic, then we can call cartoons classic. In Rome, Isabel sits for long meditations in the company of Greek sculptures, “under the charm of their motionless grace, wondering to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound." Cartoons display this same alien subjectivity, and this is most apparent in the episodes that go entirely without human dialogue. The by-now famous amuse-bouche of Pixar movies are the animated film shorts, which have been (at least all the ones I’ve seen) inventive pure storytelling in the form of nonhuman shape and sound without dialogue except in caws, grumbles, and chirps. Hemming and hawing at its best.

I hate to end on a sad note especially when I have no reason to do so, except that the old man in Up also reminds me of this sadness, but I love this passage so much I want to share it with you here. And as we are among Greek statues, why not continue with Roman ruins? “She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sad in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness."

Like Isabel, I take great comfort in my own smallness, but I think it is too easy to bewilder ourselves with our surroundings and convince ourselves of our insignificance. It is more difficult to believe in our significance, at least it is for me. I spend most of my day reading and writing; I go outside to play tennis with Shu Ping at Willard Park, to bike to the AMC in Emeryville, to go grocery shopping at the new Berkeley Bowl down by my dance class on Heinz. The busy little circles I’ve made for myself are not unnatural and I have little real desire to widen the circles except in restless imagination. Yet I am aware that to believe in the significance of that smallness as some mode of welfare is also paradoxically immodest and egotistic and too apparently impotent. I don’t know if this letter suffices as an answer to Isabel who “often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself—a thought which for the moment made her fine, full consciousness appear a kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for oneself?"

Much love,
Jules

Ruins

春望
国破山河在
城春草木深
感时花溅泪
恨别鸟惊心
烽火连三月
家书抵万金
白头搔更短
浑欲不胜簪.

Du Fu
Spring Prospect

Reading Brideshead Revisited in MP

Dears,

I apologize for the delay in posting. Every few days here in MP I catch a new ticket stub or flower or city map in the nostalgic sieve that is my now-bulging notebook; I feel like my thoughts and readings in response to your lovely letters/posts have been similarly accumulating in a unattractive jumble. For one, true to your prophecy, Jules, via A Portrait of a Lady's Isabel Archer, I had indeed been struggling to read anything since my first quiet days in Montpellier--though various books have made some delightfully picturesque props for a many afternoons passed at local sidewalk cafes and parks! As beautiful and mind-soaking as Proust was in Paris, by week two in Montpellier, I found myself caught up instead in various currents: one pulling me away from Swann's Way-- and along the way, regular internet access-- another floating me an inscribed copy of Brideshead Revisited (1945) from a close (and perhaps now former) friend-- followed swiftly by a volume of selected poems by Auden courtesy of a cool Swedish girl in my French class.

Because I find the sentimental impulses borne of a pressing sense of both personal history and borrowed time (Auden goes back to Gothenburg not long after I leave the South of France) are quite sympathetic to one another, if not really the same at heart, I've been toggling back and forth between the two: savoring Waugh in long stretches on the train, at the beach, in patchy shade the local botanical garden, peppered judiciously by a poem or two of Auden's while waiting for friends to arrive or classes to begin. I finished Brideshead Revisited two nights ago; I wanted to weep and didn't.

From the first pages of Waugh's 1959 preface, one can't help but encounter the questions that Jerry and Jules both raised (albeit differently) about the relation between history and fiction, the things that happen and the stylized work of the telling, the big, bad passing world and its tiny players. In the fifteen years that followed the writing of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh sees the end of the war, the pristine preservation of British aristocracy-- or at least its relics, and duly repositions the novel as "a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals" (x). A wounded soldier's 1944 drive to "pile it on, rather, with passionate sincerity," amounts then to the wry novelist's 1959 "panegyric preached over an empty coffin." And to this reader in 2009, both accounts seem to vibrate steadily and powerfully throughout: the sincere, swelling notes of outcry against the changes wrought by time, by retreating youth, by circumstances seemingly beyond any one control balanced by the constant and weary rhythms of resignation to things being the way that things are, were, and might very well turn out to be...

So I'm getting slap-happy with the metaphors here. Besides just liking metaphors (and this glass of wine that's accompanying them), I think I have a hard time describing otherwise this weirdly old and raw sentiment of mourning and accepting loss and life. But I think maybe Waugh might do it better. Charles Ryder watches his best friend, the enchanting, odd, child-like Sebastian Flyte (who endears himself to Charles and the reader alike for the entire first half of the book) confirm his adult life of misery and alcoholism: the Flytes enjoy a last moment of (false) peace, a brief section break, and the words, "a blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne-- that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night..." (156). Extreme sensation bounded by the trained expectation of routine, an inflection of doubt regarding future sustainability hemmed in by the bleak assurance of the retrospective voice. Repeated in reckoning with his second love, Julia. Bleak, bleak... an over-tender heart feels battered like that first bruise, too weary to even muster what are usually easy tears. Thus ends the ostensible novel. But actually no. Thank God for epilogues?

Instead, Charles interrupts his own dour train of thought: "Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame-- a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones..." (326). Distant, absent, revisited, absent, revisited, distant, revisited... Overlaying the two prominent lines of passionate resistance and resignation in Charles' history, a third-- some kind of slippage, unseen, unexpected, yet as enduring as the continuation and tragedy of human history: faith, or something like it.

I've been thinking-- or at least feeling-- a lot about the concurrence of these three tensions these days. Not the least of which as I join a number of wedding parties, turn another year older, make plans for the coming fall, say goodbye to a dear relationship, remember the uncanny number of recently lost loved ones, and do this all while vaguely or painfully grappling to get a handle myself on my sense of that third line-- past, present, or future.

Oh yeah. I was originally planning on writing about how fantastically brilliant some of these dialogues in this novel are-- I mean really. The novel largely comprises dialogue, and Waugh (or perhaps Waugh through the admittedly self-editing Charles) is quite (often hilariously) good at filling out characters and their relationships with the flick of a wrist and a few lines sparse exchange. Especially as I devote most of my energy this summer to speaking my idiotic French with new friends and acquaintances, questions of what one might perceive in another through conversational exchange have definitely been on my mind... But anyway, I have to go back to struggling through French in the morning, so I think it might be best to stop here for now.

I hope you all are living and reading well!

Much love,
Irene

Fwd: artillery

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jerry Zee <jerryczee@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:05 PM
Subject: artillery
To: jerryczee.readingin@blogspot.com


Aiming past this Great Firewall
Maybe there are Mongols on the Other side
Heard you can see them from space
Rabbit, melancholy, grinds medicine

--
Jerry Zee
University of California - Berkeley
Department of Anthropology
+86 1352 240 4670
(626) 297-9959

Ah, here it is! It's a truffula seed. It's the last one of all. Catch it, don't muff!

Reflections on The Glass Palace

Wandering Paris, it seems like everywhere you go, there are the lingering ghosts of past American presidents, congealed into monuments and street names, or in our case, waving from a tower of the Notre Dame, as we walked toward a stop of le Metropolitain, already late for an appointment. The French love Obama – who doesn’t, really? – and we were vaguely aware of his presence in the barricades that materialized outside Shakespeare & Co., announced in a redundant performative by our (British)(-accented) clerk. Irene and I, we bought more books, despite that we each had more than a full bag solely devoted to them (I put my camera and passport in mine, too), and I have a bad habit of either reading books right away or leaving them for ‘some summer’ down the line. I write, in each book, when I start reading them and where. In the corners of the front pages of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, written in pen over their pencil-written prices (in Euro! Imagine!), then: Jerry Zee/2009/Paris, France.

500+ pages later, I finished The Glass Palace sitting in the window of our Beijing apartment building, and I’ll offer some preliminary reflections on the book now. I know Irene has this book, somewhere, so maybe this will be the beginning of a discussion.

First a note on Ghosh and a note on reading Ghosh as an anthropologist. I had the good fortune of having a long coffee with him with two boys in my program in the fall – he was a thoroughly kind, interested, and earnest person, and it was strange reading while also imagining the process of his writing – we talked, of course, about writing. Ghosh was trained as an anthropologist and became a novelist, and his books, I think, are inflected by a particular ethnographic imaginary that is rooted in a long of concerns that seem to leak through like inside jokes in my reading. There are elements of a postcolonial critique, and then, elements of a critique of the postcolonial critique; there is an extreme attention to detail and to the everyday; there is a deep and interesting relationship between the presentation of historical reality and its rendering as fiction. And in this book, there is something almost autobiographical – the book reads in one way as the working-through of a number of family ghosts, a set of questions of different kinds of heritage and inheritance (what if we were to read this with Specters of Marx?) – so already, for me, there is a fascinating question about historical and diasporic memory and the scale-making processes across time by which histories are seized as our own, by which the minutiae of everyday life and the world-historical events of war, revolution, and empire are articulated together, are made in the same process and yet, never fully articulate. But here, then, I’d be interested in wondering what people think about what it is to write history in the form of a novel, and specifically the politics of an authorship that wishes to claim nostalgia without at first making the simple but impossibly difficult move of equating nostalgia with a kind of false recognition or ideological veiling?

The book, then. The book is a history of families, it works the histories of kinship in with the trajectories of empire-making and –breaking, the flow of commodities within and beyond the empire, the complex movement of people and ideas in spaces that are experienced to be ever growing. The empire is a black hole, in that in the making of an imperial space it draws everything into itself. A powerful electromagnetic that has the special capacity to re-orient (the orient?). We start in Burma on the eve of its incorporation as part of British India, head east to Malaya and west to British India, characters travel through Europe and the US, live and die as refugees, escape the Japanese to Calcutta and Singapore. The novel is punctuated by the ordinary tragedies of death and rebirth, which themselves are traced through the dramas of incipient nationalisms, a subtle discussion of perspectives on the empire at the edge of its dissolution, and ultimately becomes a reflection on nation-as-kinship and kinship-as-history.

The relationship between the book and One Hundred Years of Solitude struck me, even as the book’s jacket compares it to Doctor Zhivago (A Doctor Zhivago for the Far East!). Rajkumar Raha and a handmaiden to the exiled Burmese royal family meet, briefly as children, and when Rajkumar makes a fortune by speculating teak and then rubber, he heads to India to search for her. The book traces descent and friendship across the British empire in Asia, starting after the collapse of Burmese sovereignty and ending after WWII, in the meantime, introducing a large cast of surprisingly well-developed characters, Burmese, Chinese, Indian, British, and American, and goes from state to army to plantation to the racialized antagonisms of imperial administration, transposed into the racialist nationalism of independence. The book ends on a strongly moral note – we stand, in the mid 1990s, outside the compound of the house-arrest of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, a 4 page chapter that I find worthy of exploring more – this is where I think a lot of things coalesce, including, I think, a self-consciousness of the book’s inevitable framing as “postcolonial literature,” and thus, a reflection on the temporalities of power and the discursive framings in which times are made and made to overlap.

Aung Sang Suu Kyi appears – “She was almost beautiful beyond belief” (541). When she speaks, “the delivery was completely unlike anything [Jaya] had ever heard. She laughed constantly and there was an electric brightness to her manner./The laughter is her charisma, Jaya thought” (542). Here is where it is – the aged Uncle Dinu, introverted and thoughtful, whose criticism of Indian nationalism is at odds with others in the book (and yet, who is vindicated, ironically, when nationalism turns into fascism and not the expected freedom) notes that she is the only politician he has ever trusted:

“Because she’s the only one who seems to understand what the place of politics is…what it ought to be…that while misrule and tyranny must be resisted, so too must politics itself…that it cannot be allowed to cannibalize all of life, all of existence. To me this is the most terrible indignity of our condition – not just in Burma, but in many other places too…that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing…religion, art, family…it has taken over everything…there is not escape from it…and yet, what could be more trivial, in the end? She understands this…only she…and this is what makes her much greater than a politician” (542).

Two pages from the end of the book! There is much to be commented upon here, especially the imagery of cannibalism, in all of its evolutionary pre-modernity, in its savagery and ruthlessness – but especially in cannibalism as a horrifying vision of a much more pervasive misrecognition of the value of human life. There is, to me, in this statement, a pervasive and glowing humanism and also its antithesis. It is first of all framed in the utopian imaginary of a world beyond the political, a world where everywhere the state, as a merely-human (and therefore in principle unnecessary) superstructure has imposed itself, drawn the multitude of human experiences into its irresistible embrace. There is here a strong parallel between ‘politics’ as an empty signifier and the symbolic-material violence of the Empire itself – that which pervades, that which orients all gazes to itself, which arrogates itself as the node through which all else must pass through to exist.

There is a utopian imagination of the state of nature here – I don’t think Ghosh would necessarily argue that because it seems like what he’s trying to do is rather yearn for a world where there are extra-political time-spaces. And yet – how can we sustain this vision without falling back on some notion of a patchwork of domains, touching without overlapping? Politics, art, religion, related but autonomous? I am conflicted with this – not because I disagree, but because it seems important to be able to argue for separation as a kind of metaphysical-empirical condition, and yet – and yet – what is the force of the political-as-separation in a book that ostensibly has been about the inflection of political, in one way or another, in all facets of life (and of their inflection in this abstract space of the political?). So, it seems like what Ghosh is advocating through Dinu’s reflection on Burmese democracy is a vision of government and self-negation – the state as that which will disappear. Note the deep resonance with some visions of Marxist history, where at the end of history, the state will be grasped only in its obsolescence – state-as-disappearance.

On what can this disappearance be legislated as an ethical/philosophical stance besides the artifice of the political itself? And so, there is a humanist stance here that sees in the dying of politics the liberation of a deeper human essence: to this, I want to say, “Resist!” in that we forget that the human itself is formed in relationship to the political (even if we concede that it is not formed in the political exclusively or worse, that it is formed by the political). And yet, there seems to be another kind of humanism at play which would see the artifice of politics itself as precisely that through which ‘human’ will be expressed, if we are falling back on a deeper vision of the human as a biological under-determination that is endowed with the capacity to create, where creativity and making will be that which limns to gap between human original incapacity and the demand to live.

I’ll stop. After suggesting some more interesting ways of thinking.

The Postcoloniality of the enterprise presents itself as a problem in the text – how do we think Postcoloniality in the mix of perspective that Ghosh offers, none of which necessarily becomes overtly hegemonic in the text?

What is the space- and epoch-making project of the text, and how might we think across and space and time, as Ghosh does, in considering new avenues for critique, but also new possibilities for creation? The latent notion of a radically different cartographic imaginary is at stake in this text, as it is in other texts of his.

Can we think of the relationship between intimacy, love, and duty in the text, as it relates to conflicting registers of filiation and affiliation? The family, the village, the nation, the state, the empire? The self?

Kinship, of course, remains a central engine of the text, but this is a kinship that is filtered through both descent and election, recognition and something that is not quite denial but closer to what Anne-Lise speaks of as the Open Secret.

And lastly, as a consistent concern of mine, I want to ask about mobility in this text, and the space of potential movement defined by the geographic pretensions of Empire, but also the technological innovations of rail and flight, wartime plays of strategic advantage, and the geographies defined by links of blood and friendship.

Sorry!

Reading Proust in Paris

Dears,

After a three or four hour ride on the TGV, I arrived in Montpellier from Paris this afternoon. I was originally hoping to take in all sorts of romantic scenery as it flew past along the way, but I pretty much passed out as soon as the train started moving. On arrival, the walk through what I think must be a very old and beautiful city center similarly passed by in the bewildering blur of two very cute and very energetic five year olds running ecstatic circles in and out of traffic and around me. And so here I am: in the South of France, in my room, writing with all of you, though many, many miles away.

I think the sleepy disorientation of the day has been the only constant of my past eight here in France-- in kind of a wondrous way, really. I read some of the Anne Fadiman essays you loaned me, Lili, my first morning on the Metropolitain. I began with that essay "You Are There" in which-- quite germane to the premise of this blog-- she describes the delicious phenomenon of reading books in the place they describe. It was a delightful eight-page prelude to tackling Proust's gargantuan In Search of Lost Time while I aimlessly wandered from one arrondissement to the next.

So I walked the Boulevard Haussmann and wondered with Marcel's great-aunt what it would be like for Swann to have had his mansion there instead of the Quai d'Orléans on the Île St-Louis. On Wednesday, I hunted down Proust's reassembled bedroom in the Carnavalet where most of the work was composed-- and where (it seems so far at least) the narration, the acts of recollection that form the seven-volume novel itself likewise occur. I took in the thin, fringed blue covelet draped over his bed, the cane perched on the small writing desk lacquered in black and gold, and I thought about how the "gusts of memory" that came to him in the one took on such an elegantly concrete form at the other.

But as nerdycool and exciting as it was to track these locations and material memorabilia, the project of "You-Are-There Reading" Proust resonated more as a place of mind and body than that of any map. The pseudo-delirium that fueled my first post here never quite faded; day by day, I set off to explore Paris almost entirely by foot after a spotty night of hostel sleep. No watch to tell time, no words to tell anyone else: I hardly spoke, I filled journal pages, I occasionally forgot to eat or drink anything but baguette bits and espresso until a clarifying dusk crept in around 10 or maybe 11. Wandering back to the hostel afterwards, I'd be exhausted but absolutely refused to let sleep in for another four or five hours because I craved the continuation of living alone outside of habit. Waking up each morning in an unfamiliar hostel bed, surrounded by unfamiliar people and sounds, the momentary dislocations of memory and time and even our very bodies that Proust describes so stunningly in the first few pages of Swann's Way registered immediately in a way that my own location couldn't. In my continued remove from any of a typical day's ordering principles like time or even other people, I felt a nearness to my thoughts and old memories and the new sights and sounds around me-- they drew together in moments like Proust's famous bite of madeleine or flooded my field of vision as I wandered Parisian cemeteries or sat dazed at some sidewalk cafe...

If any of you have read or plan to read Proust this summer too, I'd love to hear what you experience of reading it's like. A friend of a friend (who I hope I can now call my friend!) saw me lugging Swann's Way around the Jardin du Luxembourg, and he remarked that every bit of Proust bears re-reading two or three times and some dedicated pause for thought-- making the reading of the world's longest novel none the snappier. And it's true: I'm constantly amazed by how fantastically beautiful and complete (or perhaps contained?) each thought is on the level of the sentence. It's difficult for me at times to sustain my reading, as fascinating as I find it, precisely because of how it inspires my mind to wander. Sure, I could just have a short attention span as a result of a week's sleep deprivation, but I think there's also something to the way in which the novel seems to promote the slowness and expansiveness of thought and experience in the very experience of reading it.

But then again, I'm only 76 pages in.

From Montpellier with love,
Irene

PS Also, yay for *hearting* V. Woolf. I'll try to find a copy of The Waves at the English-language bookstore here. If I can find the English-language bookstore...

the waves on the BART (go round and round...)

Post-graduation, post-dissertation summer life has slipped into a cascading series of various projects....cascading from increasing to decreasing "importance", that is. So right after I filed the dissertation, I thought, I'm going to turn a chapter or two of this baby into an article or two. But then I began thinking, I should make the final revisions on the whimsical young adult's novel I've been working on since the summer of 2005, or I never will. And then I thought, Gee, I sure like 30 Rock. I should watch all the back episodes since I can watch them instantly on netflix! And yesterday, I finally thought, I should, like, totally read The Waves since it's been on my reading list for, like, forever.

Uh...not that Woolf's Waves are less "important" than 30 Rock. It's just differently important. Like...Lucky Charms and African Springhares.

But I digress. The Waves!

I cracked it open at the El Cerrito Plaza BART station on Saturday afternoon, at the start of what was to be a 1 hour and 5 minute long journey to visit my best friend in South Bay for a family BBQ. And it reminded me why I *hearted* Virginia Woolf, and indeed, all those krazy modernists in the first place--the oddly comforting experience of opening a book and reading lines and having no idea what's going on, but being okay with it and knowing that, somehow, by osmosis, meaning and context will diffuse from the paper pages into your consciousness. You don't know anything...but somehow, you will. Don't worry. Be happy.

It's nice to let go for a little bit...and as the train hurtles all of us passengers towards Fremont, to immerse myself in the concentrated kernals of pure perception contained in the pages I hold before me.

An excerpt: "That is my face," said Rhoda, "in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder--that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world.

(Proust to come, time to go...!)

So I definitely had a post on Proust planned for my evening's activity, but it appears that the internet in my hostel is down and I only have about 4 minutes left on my card at this now very crowded hole-in-the wall internet cafe where I can't locate punctuation for the life of me. (I think most of my time has gone to locating the apostrophe...) Suffice it to say for the mo that Proust and Paris are both mindblowing, but it will take more than my now two remaining minutes to explain why...

Love and eager anticipation to hear how your (reading) lives have been this summer--

Yours,
Irene

Packing

Hello, hello -

Some interdisciplinary flavor, here, but I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't be better off in an English department. If this is a blog about reading, I hope you'll forgive me for lacking the critical vocabulary to talk about reading-in-itself, but maybe I'll be able to talk about readings. I'm not sure what everyone is reading this summer, or if there will be a lot of overlap - my experience in the last year is that the overlaps are surprising and generative; I hope when it happens that it will be both...and if not, I'll either write notes on this blog to nobody, or write in my own blog..to nobody.

Left Berkeley two weeks ago, been at home in LA, reading less than I thought I would, and finally shipping out tomorrow night to New York, then to meet Irene in Paris, and then the rest of the summer in Beijing, with a stint in Shanghai at the end of it all. I'm in the ridiculous situation, proper to the graduate student, of packing and having more books than clothes by weight, and trying to make decisions about what to carry with me. There are three stacks of books on my nightstand at home, hastily thrown together from the books on my shelf at school.

My bedtime reading has been Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss - just started it, but now kicking myself for buying the large, pretty version rather than the compact travel version. I wonder if it'll make its way into my bag.

But if anyone is down, in the last few weeks, I've been not-finishing a lot of books, jumping back and forth, reading a chapter here and there. Some ethnography, some theory, all the good stuff...

Off the top of my head:
Cori Hayden's When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico - this one is marked for the Literature and Environment group that Juliana et. al are putting together for 09-10.

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique - a reading-together of Marx and Kant. More into the Marx than the Kant

Confucius's Analects - I've been skimming it this time, trying to read it with and against Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, but I'm not sure if it's working. This is part of a broader effort to try to mount a better orientalist critique of Foucault, in general...

Foucault's Security, Territory, Population.

Liberation Ecologies, which is this edited volume that's supposed to be the Bible of political ecology...which is apparently what I work on?

Derrida's Spectres of Marx and The Animal that Therefore I am. Etc.

And I picked up the Paul Virilio reader - he writes about architecture, speed, time-space, etc. Pretty fun to read.


ANYWAY, maybe some of this strikes a cord with someone. I'm scared now that I don't have enough to read for the summer...there are more books here I'm re-reading or haven't started yet...will keep them updated. But let's read together...


is this how this is to work?

jerry

Reading 101 in the car

Dears,

It's been a hectic week since I left Berkeley. Seven hours on the road, twelve hours in flight, and more than seven thousand miles later, I'm desperately sleepless but writing from a lovely, little flower box of a hotel room in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. But you and this blog, unformed as it yet is, have been in my mind since the day I left Berkeley-- really.

I guess I'll kick off these readings in (of, through, [insert applicable preposition of choice here?]) various locations with a semi-delirious small confession: every word I've read in the last seven days has been on either a road sign, street map, or guide book page. And menus. So many menus. Yum... Anyway, in embarking on a summer of travel reading with you all, I didn't think I'd take to the task quite so literally. But as I sat bleary-eyed and alone in my car Sunday morning, watching vast swaths of looming greens shrink to bristling yellows (and grow back again), yellows rolling out into dimpled blues (and back again), until the blues get shut out by walls of shopping development stucco-peach, I found myself obsessively taking in any bit of text along the way. After a while, the green mile markers and exit names, yellow driving instructions, blue call box postings didn't simply mar or echo the surrounding landscape in its various forms-- they named, characterized, and bound it. They began to narrate the 101.

A boring stretch of drought-stricken grass was thrown into relief by an even uglier call box, a handmade billboard for fresh raspberries at the next exit, and a 297-mile count from San Luis Obispo. Without getting out of my car or even getting off the highway, I glimpsed the red paint-stained hands of the earnest fruit seller, the obsessive grandeur of Hearst Castle, the cookies and clogs of Solvang, the death of a memorialized officer on that stretch of road-- all through mundane words on mundane signs that don't usually even form mundane sentences.

And somehow, for the first time, I found it all incredibly reassuring and exciting. Besides my state of exhausted loneliness-- why? The signs made my transit feel knowable while actually only ever offering partial information. And then traveling down the road from sign to sign, driving provided my own narrative links...

Heading down the California coast perhaps isn't novel to most of us anymore, but a day into wandering the streets of Paris with my Lonely Planet in hand, it's become all that much clearer to me how reading on the road-- or failing to-- how the simplest sign posts-- can change an experience of a place entirely. But now to read things longer than a guidebook paragraph this summer...

From Paris with sleepy love,
Irene