A tale for the time being by Ruth Ozeki

So what happened was that I staggered my way through Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters (it got real….boring halfway through) and I brought the book to a bar where it got lost. So this book was next and I finished it last week. I liked it more than Beautiful Ruins, it reminded me of some nameless books I used to read in secondary school days? Mostly within the realm of coming-of-age narrative in first person peppered with surreal mini-adventures.

I probably liked the book less than I should, although it has elements that I missed/liked, including the topics of meditation, mental health, Schrodinger's cat, and reverse culture shock. And the way it is narrated too, which is mainly divided into the protagonist #1’s pov (in the form of diary) and protagonist #2’s pov (real-time, in third person). I realized that this division is at the core of the book hence is inseparable from it, but at the end I felt like it does it slightly more harm than good, the narratives turn choppy and there were parts my curiosity supposedly stimulated by the alternating povs was not substantial enough to carry on and switch to the other pov (really didn’t care about what happens to protagonist #2). Was it just due to the less-than-ideal pacing and momentums? Well for all I know this could be just my personal preference… Anyway the author Ruth Ozeki seems to be a cool lady, she’s a zen monk and all (always intrigued by monks who appear “normal” + live a city life) I was about to listen to her session with Brad Listi on Otherppl, maybe I should listen to that and give some update here after

Another interesting feature of this book is the footnote, I didn’t realize that the book was originally written in English until a few pages in, and I thought the footnote was written by a translator. When the footnote raised suspicions/questions whose answer can be found easily via modern means, it hit me that it was written by protagonist #2

I also liked the way the book starts off, seems very… self-aware in a way that moulds pretty well the thought process of a junior high school student’s. It does not omit the awkwardness (“Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being… Ugh. That was dumb. I’ll have to do better. I bet you’re wondering what kind of stupid girl would write words like that.”) and the lengthy explanation/justification for the existence of the record in the first place, the way you’ll probably feel when you post your thoughts publicly: You put a bit of yourself out there, and you have to, in a place where you’re not too sure whether there’s an audience in the first place (like here? should I feel awkward? lol nah). Nao’s confidence of the special audience’s existence however is uniquely strong in this case, which propels the book forward, giving her diary a conversational and eventually an “interactive” flavor as it goes

This book struck me as one that a Sophie’s World fan might enjoy? (A big ‘might’ bc I’ve never actually read the book lol). It leaves you a trail of philosophical nuggets and interesting riddles that are packaged in a lighthearted manner. Or ambiguous but plain-worded wisdom, which probably to a cynic’s eye won’t pass their bullshit litmus test, e.g.:

... there's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,

“Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne.”*

--------------------------

* Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne — "I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.”

The part where Nao starts to understand the essence of meditation intrigued me though, I liked how simple and explicit her conveyance is - in a few paragraphs she lays down the concrete steps and what might happen during the session - it was exactly the same as what I heard from headspace or Pema Chodron - and I started thinking how this now-familiar concept was pretty much unbeknownst to me when I was her age.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you’re probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in, and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg. Next you just relax and hold really still and concentrate on your breathing. You don’t have to make a big deal about it. It’s not like you’re thinking about breathing, but you’re not not thinking about it either. It’s kind of like when you’re sitting on the beach and watching the waves lapping up on the sand or some little kids you don’t know playing in the distance. You’re just noticing everything that’s going on, both inside you and outside you, including your breathing and the kids and the waves and the sand. And that’s basically it. It sounds pretty simple, but when I first tried to do it, I got totally distracted by all my crazy thoughts and obsessions, and then my body started to itch and it felt like there were millipedes crawling all over me. When I explained this to Jiko, she told me to count my breaths like this: Breathe in, breathe out . . . one. Breathe in, breathe out . . . two. She said I should count like that up to ten, and when I got to ten, I could start over again at one. I’m like, no problem, Jiko! And I’m counting away, when some crazy revenge fantasy against my classmates or a nostalgic memory of Sunnyvale pops into my mind and totally hijacks my attention. As you’ve probably figured out by now, on account of the ADD, my mind is always chattering away like a monkey, and sometimes I can’t even count to three. Can you believe it? No wonder I couldn’t get into a decent high school. But the good news is that it doesn’t matter if you screw up zazen. Jiko says don’t even think of it as screwing up. She says it’s totally natural for a person’s mind to think because that’s what minds are supposed to do, so when your mind wanders and gets tangled up in crazy thoughts, you don’t have to freak out. It’s no big deal. You just notice it’s happened and drop it, like whatever, and start again from the beginning. One, two, three, etc. That’s all you have to do. It doesn’t seem like such a great thing, but Jiko is sure that if you do it every day, your mind will wake up and you will develop your SUPAPAWA—! I’ve been pretty diligent so far, and once you get the hang of it, it’s not so hard. What I like is that when you sit on your zafu (or even if you don’t happen to have a zafu handy, for example, if you’re on the train, or on your knees in the middle of a circle of kids who are punching you or getting ready to tear off your clothes . . . in other words no matter where you are) and you return your mind to zazen, it feels like coming home. Maybe this isn’t a big deal for you, because you’ve always had a home, but for me, who never had a home except for Sunnyvale, which I lost, it’s a very big deal. Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose, and I keep doing it because I like that feeling, and I trust old Jiko, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to try to see the world a little more optimistically like she does.

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely. I really like that. Here’s what old Zen Master Dōgen has to say about it: Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen. I guess it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you just sit down and do it. I’m not saying you have to. I’m just telling you what I think.

How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind

I’d argue that it’s impossible to talk about this book without expanding it into a discussion on life...bordering personal, especially personal growth. When I stumbled upon self-help book reviews on goodreads it became apparent to me how my previously held view re self-improvement/self-help books - that it’s all rubbish, unnecessary, and cunning in a way that they capitalize on the very vulnerabilities that make us human, that we are above self-help shit, that we can strive to be better without the aid of such things (because if it indeed is self-help you don’t need external materials ie self-help books to help yourself) - is shared by many. In particular because I was exposed to how fundamentalists behave, and naturally drawn to cult stories (Scientology, Jim Jones…). At that time it only seemed natural to me that this sense of repulsion bled into the more neutral, or even mostly helpful sections of self-help bodies of thought.

I’d lived my previous 20+ years like that - rolling my eyes whenever someone told me that Paulo Coelho is their favorite author, or that some event has changed their life, and then they turned to religion/a more positive philosophy in life. I also had a friend whose positive philosophy seemed intensely forced, like there was no room for critical thinking there. It felt like a shortcut - and there’s always a price to pay for taking one. My friend told me that I’m a person who won’t believe in anything/shift my belief unless it has impacted me personally, or that I have seen/experienced it myself, I justified this by saying that I just favor hard evidence over empty fairy tale. If you can relate then you know that no amount of advice can really do you any good unless you have suffered from the consequences on your own and instill the change from the inside of you yourself.

But even then the idea of identity itself (eg “I’m a person who won’t believe in anything )...is very fragile now. One of the ideas presented over and over again by different Buddhist philosophies is that your identity is not fixed, neither is anyone’s. I probably thought of identities as fixed before - I know the kind of person I really am, or she’s not that kind of person, she won’t do that, etc. And I was kinda proud, I held it like a badge of honor: “I know I am a stubborn person, I am an all-or-nothing kind of person, I know what I want.” In this view identity is akin to a glass sculpture. And the more you spend time with other people, with yourself, you see that we constantly violate this fixed set of… “rules” you kinda set of your own accord, again and again. In effect not only is our idea of their identity shattered, so are we, sometimes. Like when I give in to grey areas, or find myself not knowing what I want, I punish myself hard unconsciously. It’s not even like punishing yourself for not doing enough/getting good grades, it’s like punishing yourself for not being...yourself - but really, just for not being what you think you are (which is why it still genuinely baffles me when someone says, “be yourself” - I think what it means is really to “be at ease with yourself”, to just to loosen up and do whatever you feel like doing without caring so much about what other people might be thinking, rather than literally to “be yourself” because if you are unable to loosen up etc… essentially that quality is still attributable to you: You are still being yourself, you are not being somebody else. This could be a linguistic slip rather than a difference in perspectives)

In her essay, my granddaughter came to the conclusion that her mother had a fixed idea of herself as being a certain way. And one of my granddaughter’s conclusions was that we’re changing all the time; everything about us is always changing. My granddaughter said, “When you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. You leave out the emotions you don’t want to feel. And then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. These unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that’s eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that. And my mother’s escape was alcohol.” In order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves—the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. Looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering. Meditation gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions naked and fresh, free from the labels of “right” and “wrong,” “should” and “shouldn’t.”

Digressing a tad further… this Aeon article is pretty excellent on elaborating the downside of absolutist thinking - which I suspect is highly linked with how fixed you view of identity is. I love it - as recently I find myself more and more leaning toward respecting nuances and complexities, instead of shunning them away, it once felt like a wake-up call. Also a tad alarming when a study demonstrates how absolutist thinking is positively correlated with one’s mental health, the newest predictor after the use of pronoun (ie the more you use ‘I’ instead of other pronouns, the more prone you are to mental illnesses - I found this pretty alarming too…my rate isn’t looking that good lol)

So I started meditating in a conscious effort to...better my mental health. In this book Pema did a stellar job at pinpointing exactly the challenges I’ve faced since I started meditation (eg thinking if you can never truly be zen/calm & collected then what’s the point of it all - isn’t it as good as not trying at all? You think that you have it all together and that you’re really chilled out, and then something really blows it for you), I think it’s due to the fact that she was after all a “normal”/average Western human being before - studied in Berkeley, had a husband. It’s amazing how easy it is to relate to her, but even more amazing I think how after all these years she hasn’t lost touch with how she was before - she has this level of understanding of the common modern struggle I feel a lot of other Buddhist monks will never be able to come close to (nothing wrong, just different and definitely understandable that’s all). She feels so human… I love one of the talks where she doesn’t hold back saying that a certain kind of “self-love” practice corny, without denying the effectiveness of it - that to me feels very genuine and lighthearted.

A lot of things in this book are nothing new - something that you’ve heard before and keep hearing over and over again, but in my opinion it is exactly what you need - you need a constant reminder, a repetition. Our mind is so good at forgetting, but most likely it is actually just wandering. Served from Pema’s perspective however the reminder feels fresh. It feels like something you can keep coming back to, which is one of my favorite “dharmas”/reminders. I remember when I was little, I was back home in Jakarta, I was in a car traveling to my old house. And then all of a sudden I was thinking, why is it so hard to stick to a thought? I was thinking about a pink elephant and challenged myself, how long can I think about this pink elephant? Nothing heavy, no details needed, I just need to have this pink elephant on my mind. And before I knew it… I realized that I’d forgotten about the pink elephant. But I remembered that I forgot - and this bit, this part when I remembered that I’d forgotten...back then I didn’t know, but I was essentially practicing what meditation is trying to teach: To keep coming back. And that exact split-second moment, according to Mingyur Rinpoche, Pema’s teacher, is the moment of pure meditation:

Mingyur Rinpoche points out that when you’re just with the mind and thoughts as an object, and then you go completely unconscious and get swept away by them, you often have this little “oops” moment when you call yourself back. He pointed out that this “oops” moment is actually a moment of pure meditation, a moment where you are totally centered in the present moment. At this place, the mind just naturally comes back. It’s unforced. You could meditate for years and years and you never make it happen. And yet it happens here in this fresh, unmeditated moment of catching yourself to come back. Thoughts will arise, and when they do, let those thoughts pass through. It’s a very radical notion that thoughts could be a friend or an ally rather than an obstacle or something you have to struggle with. When thoughts call our attention to the discursiveness of our minds and call us back to the present moment, I’d say they are worth the price of admission.

Because no doubt will the mind wander, and it’s fine, it’s even useful because without the wandering there will be no “oops” moment. The mind can, and will wander, it just needs to come back… to be here again. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times it has to keep coming back. There is no limit to your humility, you’ll always find an occasion to seize the moment with arrogance in one form or another, but then you have your “oops” moment and replace the arrogance with the confidence that you are able to come back to the ground safely. For me this is a strong driver of constant practice because I know for a fact I will never be too zen to discard the practice completely

I find this “teaching”...to keep coming back, is so useful and so instrumental not only in meditation but also, in fact especially, in life. If there’s one thing you need to do, you just need to be present. If you can’t it’s fine, you just need to come back. When you let go of your old absolutist thinking, it’s so easy to feel groundless. In fact I feel a bit of it now - I try to stop letting go of whatever beliefs I have, whatever things I believe should happen. And it feels light...but it feels like floating too. I feel like there’s nothing outside myself that I can hold on to, much less fight for...I feel like my willpower is being sucked out of me, and it feels helpless. But at least I have myself and the rest of my life to figure that out, I have myself to keep coming back to - this can feel daunting and comforting at different times.

All my life I’ve been holding on too hard - I thought that’s how you’re supposed to fight, you fight your best fight, you try your hardest. You struggle and you power through and you look back and you marvel at how beautiful the struggle is. My friend told me that I’m one of the most determined persons he knows. Sometimes I think that’s how I got here (not saying that “here” is the most amazing place, but it’s better than a lot of other alternatives I could imagine). Another favorite dharmas of mine is (I use the word dharma very loosely, idk how else I’m supposed to address this thing lol) the inherent neutrality of all things… I still hold a similar view like last time - that there will always be struggle, that the struggle is beautiful - but now I think that we shouldn’t look down upon the time when it’s easy too. When there’s nothing happening. All of it - the good and the bad, without devaluing the good and denying that the bad sucks - is inherently neutral:

The fifth and last quality regarding why we meditate is what I call “no big deal.” It’s what I am getting at when I say we become flexible to the present moment. Yes, with meditation you may experience profound insight, or the magnificent feeling of grace or blessing, or the feeling of transformation and newfound courage, but then: no big deal. You’re on your deathbed, and you have this nurse who’s driving you nuts, and it’s funny: no big deal. This was one of the biggest teachings from my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: no big deal. I remember one time going to him with what I thought was a very powerful experience from my practice. I was all excited, and as I was telling him about this experience, he had a look. It was a kind of indescribable look, a very open look. You couldn’t call it compassionate or judgmental or anything. And as I was telling him about this, he touched my hand and said, “No . . . big . . . deal.” He wasn’t saying “bad,” and he wasn’t saying “good.” He was saying that these things happen and they can transform your life, but at the same time don’t make too big a deal of them, because that leads to arrogance and pride, or a sense of specialness. On the other hand, making too big a deal about your difficulties takes you in the other direction; it takes you into poverty, self-denigration, and a low opinion of yourself. So meditation helps us cultivate this feeling of no big deal, not as a cynical statement, but as a statement of humor and flexibility. You’ve seen it all, and seeing it all allows you to love it all.

Now I have a post-it saying “No Big Deal” pasted on my wall.

Although I mentioned earlier that the goal of meditation is not to be the most zen person but I’d like to think that it’ll be good if you can get better at emotion regulation, or at least emotion awareness while at it. And I find that a simple “drop the story and find the feeling” strategy laid out in this book really practical, and so far it mostly has worked for me:

As I’ve mentioned, one of the things that makes us get so lost in our emotions is that we attach our stories to them. I discovered quite a while back (and this was very liberating for me) that the escalation of emotions—where you’re really in the river, swept away, losing all your perspective, totally carried away by loneliness and anger and despair—is fueled by the story line. Our emotions are like the stone thrown into the water, without the rings. An emotion, without the story, is immediate, sharp, and raw. The direct experience of the emotion creates no ripples. But with the storyline, the ripples get bigger and bigger and go out farther and farther, and actually turn into waves and hurricane-velocity winds. The story line really churns things up. You know how you might put on music in order to make yourself cry? You play a particular song and you just milk the sadness. Our story lines are like that, except we don’t need music. We have our mind and our thoughts, and they can rev up the emotions. But if we use our emotions as the object of meditation, as our friend and support, it’s like standing on the bank of the river and observing.

In practice this book’s technique of meditation is a tad different from the one I’ve been practicing -mine is probably closer to Lynch’s transcendent meditation technique. The biggest difference is in Pema’s technique you are encouraged to open your eyes throughout the whole session, the idea behind it is that you should keep meditating in spite of the sights in front of you - often a bigger distraction than the sounds, smells... it’s quite compelling but I haven’t tried it yet.

In defense or rather in resisting a meditation journey we often turn to other “logical explanations” to be our devil’s advocate, which I think is only natural. But I find that sometimes they go hand in hand instead of negating each other. I just revisited a DFW’s video, I have a lot of sympathy for him, he was one of my role models. His “this is water” speech, angled from a human effort to shift from self-centredness to empathy, feels like a different approach to the principle of unconditional friendliness held by Pema. And in another interview videos of his, although he without a doubt expresses his ideas rather eloquently, but he keeps...holding back, he keeps coloring his speeches duller than they could be, reflecting how painfully aware he is of how ridiculously wrong he could be, I feel like... he keeps hammering on how he can’t run away from that fact...there’s so much sadness even in his brightest, most confident statements. This reminds me of my fav Pickle Rick’s episode in which Rick encounters a therapist, who in my opinion, gives one of the best monologues in the history of TV shows:

Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it’s your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. You enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hands. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it’s not an adventure. There is no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people… well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.

Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman

Another author I discovered via Otherppl podcast….wow I really enjoyed the session with her actually. She had a super buttery voice I couldn’t get over… could listen to her and Brad Listi converse forever. A certain raspiness and roughness along the edges helped give it some character too -- I was hooked right away. Anyway it was another nice ‘a-ha found a hidden gem’ moment when I realized that I’d never heard of her but from the conversation felt like I could really get behind her projects (she called her books “projects”... I had no problem with that). Lots of her work come in the form of short stories - which I really leaned toward quite naturally & at speed too. A lot of my recent favorites are actually female short story writers: Lucia Berlin, Lorrie Moore, and of course, the one and only Lydia Davis. So the newest addition to the gang is Lynne Tillman

Next I had to pick a a first - and initially I wanted to check out her collection of essays (What would Lynne Tillman do?) but it wasn’t available in the library I went to. So this one had a funny title, I thought, and a rather on point one at that: Someday This Will Be Funny. Couldn’t be closer to the truth at that time, like when you’re going through a tough time… you need to keep reminding yourself that Someday This Will Be Funny…. just so that you can be a little lighter.

Overall, I really enjoyed Lynne Tillman’s style, she definitely got her personal style pinned down. Some people compare her with Lydia Davis…. I think they both are of different leagues of their own. Style-wise, it’s probably easy to liken Tillman’s unembellished signature - bare but not clinical, matter-of-fact but not ascetic with Davis’ style. I think… Tillman allows herself a little bit more of self-indulgence, a lot of the stories here don’t suggest the level of pain Davis’ work is capable of summoning.

The most outstanding piece for me is the first one though: That’s How Wrong My Love Is. It outlines the narrator’s relationship with the mourning doves hanging around her unit, especially her feeding them and not wanting to feed other birds. The narrator begins to engage in anthropomorphism (lol while I was writing down the subsequent paragraph, I was leafing through the page previous to the one I was about to write and the narrator explicitly calls her preceding thought as “another piece of anthropomorphism” - talk about a certain level of self-awareness...) , which I think, rather than a sign of human flaws, is a source of wonder. Like why would you think the bird is thinking that way, why do we even entertain that possibility at all? But the product of the thinking itself is fascinating, although it takes a little darker turn in this particular part:

This is what happened: I whistled again, the three gazed at me, now closer in proximity than they’d ever been, the baby half the size of its parents, so slim and sleek, and with their heads turned in my direction, there was a long moment during which we continued to look at each other. Then, suddenly, but in unison, they flew away. They’d waited for me to come to the window, they’d wanted me to know they were abandoning their nest. And me, perhaps. I realize this sounds corny, ridiculous, or just another piece of anthropomorphism, or vanity, if feeling appreciated or recognized by birds is vanity. Yet I believe it was their intention, though I have since learned that mourning doves luck cunning and are not bright. Not long ago, I saw a documentary about many varieties of migratory birds--Migration--who fly thousands of miles twice a year for food and a safe place to nest, raise their chicks, and return when the elements change; their lives are full of duress and hard work. They have little rest (...) I thought, their travails necessitated small, light flight and why would they go on living like that? If they could think, they might think, as many humans do, life is meaningless if all I do is fly back and forth.

I think voluntarily putting ourselves in the shoes of others is, sometimes a healthy mix of empathy and assumptions. I think assumptions make up a lot of empathy, more than we give them credits for: How are you sure that you really know exactly how they feel? You always get parts of it right… and the rest wrong. But here assumptions are fun! Maybe because it’s in good faith, and it’s with animals. I assume that my cat loves me, although there is probably no proof substantiating such claim. But it feels good and I hope (I really think) it’s doing no one any harm

Not much else is known about the narrator, but before the end she then expands the narrative - I was blown away by how articulate and rhythmic Lynne Tillman is here - a very plausible thought process, like a thought pops up and you become your own devil’s advocate by countering it and defending it and countering your counter argument again and again:

I love animals, I am an animal, I’m a mammal, a human being, I like most people, love many, despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone. I am also selfish and want what I want. My greatest and most enduring problems in life are ethical, but living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavor, the unconscious is not ethical, and questions and riddles about correct behavior are endless in variation, new issues coming along all the time--stalking on the Internet, for example. Not feeding the mourning doves regularly is wrong, but I generally give myself a pass. My not feeding pigeons because I find them big and ugly is unethical. A self-named animal lover should feed all creatures alike. Worse, I am not a vegetarian. I love animals but discriminate among them and eat some. I eat less meat than I once did. I like steak, but usually resist it--for my health more than for the cow’s; I rarely resist roast chicken. I don’t eat bacon, I eat fish, crustaceans, but I would never eat horse, cat, or dog. If I were starving, caught in a war, desperate to survive, like the Donner Party who ate their dead colleagues, like most people, ultimately I would succumb, with remorse and disgust.

I hope I do no harm, yet I cause harm, about which I may have no knowledge, which is a dilemma I don’t expect will change or that I can entirely overcome: the predicament between principle and desire. There are things I like to do, and I do them, and, as much as I can, I don’t do what I don’t want to do.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang 

once i moved back to the northwest i started subscribing to podcasts again -- the commute is long and sometimes i don’t feel like listening to music or reading a book. i think it was a particular episode of otherppl or some other lit review podcast that i stumbled upon, and jenny zhang was the guest for that episode. they started off with the excerpt of one of zhang’s stories in sour heart, and i didn’t really like it at first… my friends told me that often i like movies that i can relate with a lot, i guess often this fascination translates to my preferences for books. either something totally absurd or something totally relatable… not always the case but often is. 

so the excerpt started off with the character’s grandmother -- i was never close with any of my grandmothers, so already i felt distant with the narrative. seemed like a lot of the stories circle around the relationships with distant families, and i am never close with any of them. i thought i couldn’t be bothered but i came across this excerpt and i thought it was really beautiful, this was what made me give this book a go 6 days ago: 

Tomorrow is my grandfather’s one hundredth birthday and so I decide to grow what some people might think of as wings, but what I think of as a natural desire to collect my family, which I do, sweeping down into cities and towns and villages I’ve never been in before and pulling each person close to me for a brief moment before throwing them into a sack. Hello, I say to each member of my family as I pick them up from their homes or their place of work or the restaurants where they are having their lunches or the recreation centers where they are shooting the shit about old times, and I say: hello, hello! hello there, hello remember me, I’m your cousin, remember me, I’m your niece, do you know me, I’m your second cousin, remember me, I’m your twice-removed cousin, have you heard of me, I’m your littlest aunt and I held you when you were born, I’m your great-grandniece, I’m your granddaughter, it’s really me, your daughter, your sister. 

--

Of all the voices speaking to me, it is my grandfather’s voice that I hear the clearest. Where is my little world-traveling granddaughter coming from now? he asks. Weren’t you in St Petersburg last year? Or was it Berlin? Or Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Manila? Bangkok? Seoul? All of those places, Grandpa, I say, tightening the bag. Is there a home for us somewhere? I ask the bag of my family, and immediately I hear muffled votes for New York! Shanghai! Beijing! Shandong! Wenzhou! Los Angeles! London! Bushwick! Paris! Sichuan! Hunan! Hong Kong! Washington Heights! E Flat! 

I try to take in all their suggestions but there’s too many and still more coming in. Without knowing exactly where I am, I begin to descend. We will all live to see this moment, I say into the bag of my family. We will land wherever there is solid ground, I promise. Everyone cheers and tells me they will go wherever I take them. There are so many voices talking at once to each other and to me and over me and over each other that I am suddenly flooded with an old familiar anxiety from when I was younger and my life was filled with people who were my family for one minute and strangers the next, when we shared our homes with other families who were close enough to hear our secrets but not close enough to understand them, when I would get so overwhelmed by the people around me that I would wish everyone, even my parents, could disappear, and when they did, when they left me alone for a few hours at night, I’d blame myself for letting the thought of living without them cross my mind, certain that of all the things aI had ever wished for, this would be the one to come true and the more I thought about it the more I froze until I was gripped in a loneliness so stunning I could only stand still, surrendering myself to it and replaying every moment of the last few hours, reenacting all the conversations adults had around me, all the conversations I should have joined, all the phone calls back to Shanghai I should have participated in, only this time, I responded with the words that I thought were expected of me, and I said them, exactly as gracefully and graciously as they were meant to be said, sounding them out in my head and whispering just the beginnings of each response out loud: I am grateful for… I know you tried your best… May you have… I wish I could offer… I don’t need… when I grow up… I hope one day… I do miss… yeye nainai I… I’m sorry I didn’t… Well, y favourite… I’m very fond of… I remember… It was wonderful to.. Funny because… I plan on visiting… Ha ha ha… I don’t want to be so… You know what I miss… Studying has to be a priority… You’re right… I’d like to try… I shouldn’t have been so… I know what you… No one is more beautiful… If you don’t want me to I won’t… Yes, I will come and see you, and it went on like that until my parents came looking for me, and without me having to ask, they would lie down next to me, sensing exactly the kind of exhaustion I was trying to outlive, and pet me and ask me questions that required no answer. How did we end up with such a sour girl? How did we get so lucky? they’d say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn’t last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely. the book opened with a rather impressive story, it’s not exactly revolutionary to portray the struggle of first-generation immigrants but here it’s just really funny, a lot of the book are quite funny actually, sometimes sappy, sometimes i feel a bit overdone, not sure if realistic at all. speaking of which i’m gonna start with my “complaints” first just to get them out of the way… one is the “shock value” feel that i get from parts of the story like the part where the korean girl tortures the kid who looks at her “the wrong way”. the escalation part bothers me, when the narrator keeps challenging the reader’s imagination to bring the torture method to another level and when it gets absurd (barbed wire-wrapped? barbed wire-lashed? how does this not end up in newspaper?) it ceases being fun after a while. two is i’m tired of the constant reminder on the intersecting characters of the stories...feels very forced and obligatory. it goes on for lines sometimes and as if it was not enough, the connecting character’s name has to be spelled out in black and white. three a lot of the characters’ circumstances are rather similar, their voices, indistinct from one another, fuse into one. maybe if in one story the dad is an ass it’s the mom who’s an ass in the second story, if in the first story the girl is rather ungrateful in the second story the girl is quite pleasant and amicable. if all their predicaments were summed up in one person in different timelines and these composed a novel instead of a collection of short stories, i would not be taken aback… 

all that being said, most of the books are enjoyable, maybe there are like two or three stories i would rather skip, not very moved by them. toward the end i fold more and more pages which could only mean for me it gets much better toward the end. 

i can relate a lot especially when the characters desire freedom, and when it hits upon them the price tagged to their freedom, they who think of freedom as a right not a privilege, and who actually pays for it: 

But now i wanted to be free. I wanted to be free to be selfish and self-destructive and indulgent like the white girls at the high school my parents worked so hard to get me into, and once they did, once we moved into a neighborhood where no one hung out on the streets, where everyone was the same pasty shade of consumptive blotchy paleness, all it did was make me want to get away from my family. I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them. I wanted white parents who didn’t care where I went or what i did, parents who encouraged me to leave home instead of guilting me into staying their kid forever. and especially when the narrator is leaving for (summer school?) california 

...My mother’s tears triggered a crying jag from my brother as well, and my father had to hold him back from running after me. It was strange to walk past them and wait in the back of the line to board the plane, knowing they were watching me go. I resisted looking back until there was only one person ahead of me in line. When I turned my head I saw the three of them huddled together--only my father was waving at me as my brother and my brother clung to him. it was a family formation that finally did not include me. I’m freeeeeeeeeeee, I thought as the agent scanned my ticket and then immediately began to panic when I realized I had missed my opportunity to say goodbye. I heard my brother shout out, “When’re you coming back, Jenny?” and then the door closed behind me and I hardly thought about them again for the next three weeks. It was only later, much, much, much later, that I understood and accepted that my parents paid for me to be free. All of it, I realized, had to be paid for by someone. also something that i took for granted years ago was upward mobility, i thought of it last time as a given, it was the only thing that could make sense, who’s gonna let their children descend the ladder lower than where they started? but it is obviously not a given, it’s not even related to how much you work for it sometimes, the realization that you are lucky sometimes comes with a certain kind of sadness and guilt and the comforting feeling that you are actually so very lucky. 

and also the effort you have to exert to re-connect with where you’re coming from only to be disconnected a couple of weeks after, seems futile… i feel this a lot. like i would have very deep and meaningful conversations with my high school friends and it felt like they had known me forever, and indeed they knew what i was like back then and could pretty accurately vision what has now remained. but the subsequent times i come back it will be a hit-or-miss, it’s a gamble. sometimes i try to reestablish the closeness but it doesn’t take off, sometimes i don’t get to meet them at all. all these often tempt me to discard the effort altogether and maybe i should just never come back again, i’m tired of breadth, let’s save all the energy… sometimes there are less risky ones, where we’ll always hit it off despite our minimum effort at maintaining contact. anyway all these connections despite the transformations are precious to me and although it takes a lot to reestablish them and it’s not always easy to disassemble only having to rely on chances in order to successfully reassemble them, i’ll still take it:

The next time I went back to Shanghai with my parents and my baby sister, my cousin and I were strangers again--I felt as warm toward her as a fish toward a frozen pond, and I tried to remember how it all felt two summers ago when we rediscovered each other, and I tried to remember how she saved me from drowning and how that meant we would always be close, but it was futile. My cousin and I were beginning to understand why our grandmother cried so often, and how there were so few options for coping with the reappearances and disappearances that we would both continue to make in each other’s lives. pretty good book about what “family” means and understanding it from a chinese/abc pov, i find quite a bit of overlap, a lot of it is quite adorable too, cute uncles, cute grandmothers, the second last and the last stories made an impression on me. 

my fav excerpt: 

Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think

there are bouts in my life whereby I get really curious and slightly obsessed with something, eg a certain type of music, art direction, or specific topics like… schrodinger’s cat, new sincerity movement, altered states of consciousness, and then recently big data. Usually it’s the idea first that reels me in, once pulled I will try to find any material I can get my hands on and then I will reach this homeostasis whereby I know about it a little bit, and I will only mention it casually, in passing, and usually never initiate the discussion… because I don’t really have the depth. But I don’t know, I still find it exciting

what got me really interested at first was this article on Real Life magazine on the consequences of algorithm and how machine learning threatens the legacy of human agency. This book addresses that in the last section, and I like how rather optimistic the outlook on the future of data is here. I am personally a quite dire believer in net neutrality… although for a while I thought there is no way for this area of knowledge to go forward without having the possibility of catastrophe as a silent follower.

ok honestly im super lazy to write abt this book lol it’s finished long ago, realized that this has become a pattern in my behavior kinda defeats the purpose of keeping this space around. i also finished monkey mind and to kill a mockingbird, an old copy with yellowed pages and i felt ok, it felt like a piece i had to read for the sake of reading, that’s the thing about classics… like i can definitely appreciate it and saw how it was necessary but i can never really imagine having it as my preference. same with art and music i guess but sometimes i do have the mood for classical music once in a while. monkey mind, on the other hand, was a pretty enjoyable long flight read

David Lynch is no writer… but he sure has something to say. The book reads like a good preview of how he does his work. Meditation plays a huge part, it’s nice to know that it works for other people too. He is more committed than me, he has done more than 33 years of practice, and he does two sessions totalling to 40 minutes a day.

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers

Another overdue book…finished this around 3 weeks ago. I think Dave Eggers for me is something that is a sure-fun timekiller – I won’t look for his books on purpose but when everything else on the list is on loan… I would pick Dave Eggers, or maybe David Sedaris. To summarize: I think I wouldn’t miss anything if I didn’t read this book, but I didn’t feel like the book was a waste of time, I would read another book of his

  Anyway, the book is 100% dialogue-driven; I like that when a book does something not half-baked… and nails it well. Like the author is not merely using it as a tool, or a device, but weaving it into every inch of the book’s fabric. I think the main juice of this book is how grey a grey area can be, but not in a didactic way, the whole tone is very… exploratory, freeing, curious. And because there are no inside narratives, everything that is happening, that is going on, is implied, but you can imply a lot from the dialogues, they are not that subtle

  Some bits and bobs that made me stop and think for a while:

 The problem with all those things you mention, education and whatnot, is those are chronic problems, as opposed to acute problems. We fund the things that are urgent, that everyone can rally around and more or less agree upon. And everyone agrees on funding the troops that are stationed abroad. You fund some advisors, then you inch it toward full engagement, and pretty soon no one wants to be the one denying body armor to our young people in uniform. So we find the money. We sell bonds, we borrow money. But will we get that kind of momentum to borrow money from China to pay for some national education reform? No. That’s not an acute problem. If there were an alien invasion tomorrow, and the only way to win against the aliens would be to fully fund Head Start, then sure, we would find that money.

  And then on mercy and how context & circumstances are tied heavily to perceived degree of evilness….

  (too lazy to type, can’t find quote on google, but it was a pretty damn good quote… on how if there were only 10 people on earth, your worst sin probably won’t seem so extreme and you’re not that indispensable. The truth is most people are averagely good…decent people…so in this real life scenario your worst crime (which probably isn’t that bad) sticks out more/simply gains more visibility. that’s Eggers’ character’s argument)

  Also sometimes you can’t clearly make out whether something is supposed to be genius or ridiculous. We realize less often that these two in certain instances are almost interchangeable, and a lot of things we hold sacred in our lives, can seem clearly laughable, viewed from another lens…

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Confession time: I only picked up this book bc I was intrigued by some remarks mentioning the similarities between Pynchon’s writing and that of DFW… Boxes ticked off: Differently-abled persons, interstate conspiracy, some secret organization with a catchy acronym, psychology issue, Freudian undertone (the protagonist’s name is Oedipa ffs), troubled therapist. The only thing missing in Pynchon’s writing is a soul :-(

Ok, now that it’s off my chest… I think this will be my last Pynchon. Definitely more fun to read when drunk, I have my fair share of laugh. Like with DFW’s works sometimes i get exhausted and just want to get to the end of the point but when the reading gets rushed I tend to miss a lot of crucial things, not even the details, just the picture the author is trying to paint in general. So for the first few chapters it’s fun -- whenever I think I don’t have a good grasp of the situation illustrated in the text I will gladly run it over one or sometimes two more times. But it gets tiring… so I just power through the rest.

Ok I don’t even have much thought on this book… Like with DFW’s writing I often come across parts upon which I find myself questioning - Is this situation:

A) Normal?

B) Only normal in the book’s universe?

C) Not even normal in the book’s universe?

Like in the beginning when we get to witness Oedipa’s infidelity in detail, there’s no questioning from the third voice whether it’s the right thing to be involved in, not even slightly, as if the series of acts is not out of place. It’s a pretty good foreshadowing for what’s to come though

You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

On the book jacket’s sleeve, Kathleen Alcott (not sure who she is, presumably an impt/well-known figure in contemporary literature) praises this book: “A terrifying and elegant talent you will not soon forget.” In contrast, I do actually want to forget about this book…. and I did, until I remembered that I have not penned down my thoughts abt this book.

I thought the book was weird, maybe you can manage to imply good interpretations - maybe the issues she is trying to raise are impt - body image, the mechanism of a cult, noise caused by an endless tirade of commercials and advertisement, consciousness, a sense of self + belonging, etc… but all of these are drowned in a foggy sea of plain weirdness.

Tbh, I did really like some parts, I did go wow that’s rly well-written. It made me think of tao lin’s taipei, like small revelations of things, things that people dismiss - these things are not a ‘big deal’, nevertheless it makes you think that ok so it’s not just me. Maybe I do have a bit of social anxiety, that’s why I can find traces of me in A, but most of the time this seething, electric sense of connectedness is eclipsed by the extreme alienness of sensations the character is experiencing. I also like parts where the narrative keeps questioning A’s sense of self, sometimes it rubs off on me, especially after reading Sam Harris’ Waking Up

Ok I’m gonna paste its synopsis on goodreads here:

“A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials— particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.”

I was reading it on the sleeve of the book jacket and thought… ummm. Weird. And sometimes it happens when I read a synopsis, so I thought of it as nothing - the impression dissipates as soon as I savor the book and have a good taste of what the book is trying to portray/drive at - replaced by a relief, a sense of familiarity. I thought I would arrive there, so I waited and it never came, not even on the last page. Like… the weirdness did not feel bizarre in a way that makes you wonder (I’d like to think of myself as having a good tolerance for strange things), it felt forced and synthetic… again maybe this is due to the fact that I do not have extreme paranoid tendencies, I think it’ll be good to have real ppl who do experience paranoia to testify whether the scenarios laid out are plausible, if they do, then probably my unfavorable view of this book emerged not out of the book’s lack of merits, but my incapability to absorb something I can’t relate with well enough

I liked this part where A mentions to her boyfriend C about a weird sighting of her neighbors, which C dismisses almost instantly. C is often capable of convincing her effortlessly, perhaps even unintentionally, that everything is fine, normal. I felt that this is done semiconsciously by C out of convenience, he does not want to bother entertaining probable, but seemingly ludicrous possibilities (low-level paranoid thoughts) - and A likes that, because it makes her think less crazy thoughts, nevermind that it leads her into thinking that she is the crazy one, and without her realizing creates an imbalance in their relationship’s dynamic (ie A needs C more than the reverse):

“Okay,” C said thoughtfully, as though he had made a decision. He put his phone in his pocket and pulled himself up to a standing position. “You are a sensitive person, you saw something weird, you feel spooked. No pun intended. There are plenty of reasons why what you saw might have happened, and some of them are weird. But some of them are just boring. You know? That family could have been going to some kind of school pageant. Or a birthday party. So you can ask yourself: Do I live in a weird town, or a boring town?”

I blinked at him.

“I’d say boring,” he added, nodding and then raising both eyebrows expectantly.

I loved his face, his bland white good-looking face. I believed in him and therefore in the boringness of my town. C was good at handling me. He made things suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them. He was like a magnifying glass, I only had to look through him to see the world in crisp detail. And he had a really nice smile and good teeth.

This is one of those “not a big deal” moments, and how the narrator jumps from C’s ability to his physical appearance, like his positive quality has a halo effect on his physical appearance (or maybe it’s the other way round), this thought process seems very natural, how your mind jumps from one thing to another, following a pattern

I also think this is very well written, how A describes her gaze direction which relies on her boyfriend’s - a subtle hint at the commensalistic tendencies their relationship is developing:

I went over and got under the blanket with him. I tucked my feet in under his things and looked where he was looking.

Also this kind of self-inquiry, the idea that your sense of self is constantly evolving, it assumes and loses its shape constantly - reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, only here told directly and real-time instead of being inferred through a nostalgic rewind:

Think this through, I said to myself. Just because you weren’t the person he thought you were doesn’t mean that you won’t be that person at some other time, someday. It doesn’t mean you’re not you.

And this separation between inner and outer lives, which to some might seem like an act of hypocrisy:

What bothered him, what seemed filthy, was the emotional aspect, the way I had dictated the personal. “You need them not only to be doing something for you but also feeling some specific way about it,” C said. A begging quality had entered C’s voice. C said: “Why can’t you just let people have their own inner lives, as long as they’re doing pretty much what they’re supposed to do with their outer lives?”

Plus substituting your object of desire as a coping mechanism, citing classic sociology studies:

Baby monkeys taken from their mothers will form attachments to fake mothers made of cloth or electrified wire, ducklings with no parents will imprint on a cardboard box with an alarm clock ticking inside of it. Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

And lastly, what keeps you from going batshit crazy (like in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, it is a very thin thread we are holding on to with all our might):

“Are you one of those people who acts normal, but is secretly about to chuck their lives and disappear?” I asked. If that were the case, I wasn’t going to waste my time getting to know him. I knew that we’d be dating for a while, at least, when he laughed several times, loudly, and kissed me for what was then the third or fourth time ever.

“Yeah, right. No way. Neither are you,” he said. “I’ve seen that on TV, those dads, and it is nuts. No way. Everything’s worked out great for me since whenever, I don’t have any plans to make it complicated. Besides, I’m attached to my material goods.”

What material goods? I wondered. Then I followed the arc of his arm pointing to a location across the room. He had been referring to his collection of DVDs, heaps of horror and comedy and porn, stacked together in a pile the size of a small love seat.

But these parts are more or less detached from the main crux of the story, I found myself slowly growing a particular dislike toward Kandy Kat’s commercials, and the ridiculous (not absurd) appeal of the cult…. Idk, it felt like the narrative invents a problem then attempts to solve it, instead of borrowing one from real life and emphasizing it

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

This is one of my favorite books, not only in 2017 but of all time. I am often scared of declaring a book to be my favorite, careful to take recency effect into consideration… And I feel like… if one finishes a book, unlike a movie, s/he must have to like it at least in the slightest, because to plow through the remaining of the book one has to muster a certain amount of strength and time to invest. If the book is not compelling enough, there is an option to abandon it or rather one simply cannot go on anymore. But I can say with confidence that this is at least safe in my top 10.

At first the book to me resembles a circus, it’s written well enough for me to want to go on, but seems like just a string of events happening after one another, I could not care less. In Naples where they first mention violence, I was not thinking that it would be real, physical violence. So deprived was I of the experience, when I read about siblings beating each other (parents beating children I hear about frequently enough to not bat an eyelid upon reading it), or when a girl as young as 12 carries a sharp object around and knows how to properly use it, to wound people with intention, I was shook a little. It’s so normalized - violence, poverty, Elena does not speak of them with great emphasis or ever think that it is out of the norm everywhere else. The neighborhood for a while is all she knows. It also reminds me of Shteyngart’s memoir, about him growing up in a Russian family, where violence is often viewed as a form of love.

The first few pages also discouraged me a little: There is a list of families and names printed there… Saw the same thing on one of Dostoyevsky’s novels and didn’t even start on that other book because of this kind of list. So many characters, too much hassle, but I read this book nonetheless, it defies one of the writing rules of having just a few characters, I liked it at the end, felt like she’s just telling a life

The main topic of the book is friendship and I can’t help but think of a not-so-close personal parallel. It made me realize… I don’t really have a good friend to discuss literature with. The closest was someone whose blog I always read on the internet, have been reading it for years. We met once at Starbucks, and it was made clear that the silence that we shared - her doing her work, me reading - was not one of comfort. I feel like, after reading many of her works, I will always be trailing behind… If we were friends I think I would constantly need her validation: She would stir something beautiful in me, and when she inspired me and influenced my writing in a positive way I would be endlessly doubtful of my own ability. Is it really me or is it her. This tendency to obsess over what I really am capable of achieving on my own… It never ceases. I always say that I don’t care what people think, and to a certain extent it is very true: The things I do, for fun or for a living, I don’t think people who are very conscious of what other people think of them would even try to imagine doing what I am doing. But I start to wonder if, out of my spontaneity, out of my carelessness, out of my lack of concern for what others think of me… There comes creeping a sense of inadequacy: An ego monster wailing, feed me. And I feel saddened by it at times. When I show this person’s writing to my friend he said, “She has something that you don’t.” And honestly I didn’t grow up imagining that one of the few people who greatly shaped my teenage years is someone whose life barely brushed with mine, it’s always an almost when it comes to her, and I will never be like her, it’s almost painful to think that I have to come to terms with it. It’s just very sad, but in a beautiful way. That, I think, is like Elena’s friendship with Lila, except that they really are friends.

And when Elena continues with her education while one by one, everyone just stops going to school because they can’t afford to, their parents need them to work, school is difficult and pointless … It said in the book and for a while it rang true to me: What good is it to have read? For me especially since I have no literature friends anyway, the furthest I do is exchange recommendations with friends or talk about books here. Books have become my escape, my true solitary moment, at the same time I don’t know if it benefits me anyway? The only thing I can think about is writing about them helps me practice my writing, but other than that… What good is it to have read these people’s lives, to have absorbed information like a piece of sponge? Music has helped me find good times and bond with friends, travel has made it easier for me to relate with people from other countries, fashion makes me more presentable, or at times experimental. But books? Apart from “Wow, you read a lot” (I don’t) remarks or a vague sense of admiration it seems to inspire in certain people who want to read but feel like they don’t have the time, I often wonder if I get real benefit from it…The only time I have shared comfortably my time and silence reading together, for hours, it was with someone who no longer plays a part in my life. Aside from that, I don’t know if I’m fooling myself when I say that maybe because of reading I think better, or I empathize better, I constantly question things, maybe indirectly books have shaped my character. But true that sometimes I think I have a useless hobby

In my defense of books in comparison with other platforms for storytelling, books come in the truest form. Sometimes I feel like when it’s a film the process of storytelling turns into an orchestra. It's beautiful, look at the lighting, the color scheme, the atmosphere. It's a collaboration, a work of different people. The publishing of a book involves more than one person too, someone's gotta edit the writing away or translate it to another language. But a book is more pared down when it comes to the number of hands being involved, in essence it’s a work of one person, although not completely unadulterated. The author is the sole pilot, there is no photography director, no screenwriter, no music... The only film I know that has the same amount of unreserve is upstream color, the guy tries to do everything from acting to composing and directing, and I loved that film. You can feel that there is something different about the film… when it’s a work of one person - and it's not just in terms of coherence.

On occasions I don’t know why I keep assuming out loud that My Brilliant Friend is autobiographical, I say it to my friends without a shred of doubt… I thought I read somewhere that it is, but when I googled it there was no evidence of its autobiographical nature. Just the way it’s told, the major themes of the novel, the anonymous nature of the author, they compel people, not just me, to think that it is impossible to write like this unless it really is happening to you.

After reading Ferrante I feel like other books try to prove a point, or deliver a message; whereas this book is just trying to present what life has presented to the characters as it is. For once, I feel the power of life or "the natural" has over the "artificial" aka fiction. The missing sense of purpose or motive.. is what moves this book forward. It reminds me of Zadie Smith's or Jonathan Franzen's works, so convoluted and breaking and at times seem to have no point. In this book the characters are there not to serve a purpose, like let's say they serve the purpose of being the protagonist’s nemesis, etc... Here they are just being, colliding with one another, they quarrell, intensely, frequently, they make up, they are friends and then enemies, and then friends again.

I think Elena's strongest point is not like Lucia Berlin's (although I have not read Ferrante’s other works that I heard are rather different from the Neapolitan series), whose phrase jollily dance with life and color the pages with robust. Elena's comes from the ability of showing how life moves you.... the ugly, the envy, the violence, the normalcy of it all, and absolutely Elena's thought process. And always always at least from what I've gathered so far, the best autobiographies (or in this case, autobiography-like books) come in the form of a tragedy. Sometimes you get to make a comedy out of it, but doesn't make it less of a tragedy. So I can understand Elena's need to go anonymous... if really it’s non-fiction, it runs the risk of arousing unwanted responses like Winterson's Mom who was livid and had to order her daughter’s book under a false name

In My Brilliant Friend we bear witness to the transformation of these little kids in great detail, and often one's character/quality is told as if being absolute.. in a way that we as readers won't even think of arguing otherwise. But as time passes we see events or even maybe something in a person that have remolded her character, and then we realize we never know someone, not even ourselves, that well. There are periods in your life when you're taken aback by the courage you thought you never had, or persistence, or tact... whatever it is. Like you feel like you’re finally awake or something. But at times you see these qualities ebb away too, sometimes they come back and you wonder if you can ever "define yourself in three words or less". I read Elena’s interview* and it seems like it’s not just something that I imply:

“To be alive meant to collide continually with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured.

(...)

The long story of Elena Greco is marked everywhere by instability, maybe even more than the stories of Delia, Olga, or Leda, the protagonists of my earlier books. What Elena lays out on the page, at first with apparent assurance, becomes increasingly less controlled. In “My Brilliant Friend,” I wanted everything to take shape and then lose its shape. In her effort to tell the story of Lila, Elena is compelled to tell the story of all the others, including herself, encounters and clashes that leave very varied impressions. The others, in the broad meaning of the term, as I said, continually collide with us and we collide with them. Our singularity, our uniqueness, our identity are continually dying. When at the end of a long day we feel shattered, “in pieces,” there’s nothing more literally true.”

I thought this would stop after I reach my early twenties, but no, and I'm unsure what to feel about it. I don't think I'll ever stop questioning myself 100%... I'm too self-aware for that. See, I’m starting a futile attempt to define myself again: as being self-aware, while I know that I'm often oblivious to my own shortcomings too. When I'm doing nothing I like to argue with myself. Would I ever know myself enough to be unwavering in things that are important in life? Or is it impossible to even come close to knowing what I truly am, for my behavior and thoughts are always influenced by other factors - either, in Ferrante’s words, due to collisions with other people or external circumstances? Should I just take this form of uncertainty as a learning or growing process, an unending one, while we’re at that? I like to surprise myself anyway.

At times this book shuffles back and forth, not in excess, between past events that seem like nothing at first and the present ones - reinforcing the powerful effect of retrospect. When it is known that Lila will stop going to school despite her apparent intelligence, and Elena will continue, Elena goes to meet her teacher Maestra Oliviero. What Maestra Oliviero tells Elena about Lila not going to middle school, it stuck with me, and it comes back full circle a few years later:

“Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?”

“Yes, the people, the tribunes of the plebs are the Gracchi.”

“The plebs are quite a nasty thing.”

“Yes.”

“And if one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself.”

Then a few years later:

“Do you know what the plebs are?” “Yes, Maestra.” At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

Very excellent read, despite me being deterred a few times (the cover, the list of families, the slow pace at first) I am really pleased with this book, stayed awake till 5am this morning to finish it

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

It was a balmy weekday night and the two of us were sitting by the rooftop pool. We talked about death, about Singapore, where to go next in life. He said that he does not believe in anything but would like to believe that his grandmother is at some safe place beyond this planet. “It makes it easier,” he stared into the abyss. I do not deny that. Religions, make-beliefs: They make life easier. How could they not? Everything else is fleeting in life. But I still call majority of them a delusion… Something comforting that you cannot prove or disprove. Do I call these beliefs false? No, but it does not make them any truer. I’m simply not ruling out any possibilities. I’m just saying I don’t know. My reasoning is simple: To blindly believe despite the absence of evidence (except some inconsistent afterlife stories told by near-death survivors and holy books whose truth value is deemed to be inherent, ie it declares itself to be true that’s why it must be true) seems to me like an insult to human mental faculties. Why don’t I simply reject all religions or Gods proposed by them? Because absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. Maybe I’ll drive myself at a different conclusion as I dig deeper. But now I’m saying that I don’t know. Despite this explanation, I’m aware that this confession that simply acknowledges my not knowing would offend some even in this era.

If you can’t move past any discomfort possibly caused by that first paragraph, you can give this book a skip. If you find yourself at the other side of the spectrum, there lies another challenge. A big chunk of the first part of the book is spent on emphasizing the key difference between bogus spirituality and legit aka scientifically-backed spirituality. I think it is a tad overdone but I can understand the necessity. In the world where spirituality gains a difficult reputation in the science and/or atheist communities, there is a need to go an extra mile in order to gain credibility before presenting your arguments and their supporting evidence. And yet despite his effort, many still dismiss Harris’ attempt to illustrate the benefits of keeping in touch with your spirituality.

Not all religions are made equal: this statement makes its echoes at the beginning of the book. It’s not a secret that Sam Harris loathes Abrahamic religions almost equally, but mostly he criticizes the doctrines promoted by them. Many would consider his criticism offensive and loaded with prejudice, but I personally think his assessments are fair practice at gaining a deeper understanding on major religions. Putting all religions under the safe blanket of “all religions necessarily teach the same good things” or making a sweeping generalization like “the religions are peaceful, it’s the people that cause trouble” - I think, is an oversimplification. It seems harmless to make this assumption, but in reality the resulting damage can be significant.

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality - and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them.

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

The common ground between religions, according to him, is that they are “addressing the same reality”. They provide views of “consciousness and the cosmos that is available to the human mind.” But when we look deeper, their paths start to diverge. The main difference is religions’ views on self transcendence: Abrahamic religions are dualistic whereas Eastern ones are not. When you “become one” with God, depending on which school of faith you adhere to, you are either enlightened or bound to be exiled. The idea of self-transcendence is one of the major focuses of the latter part of this book.

This difference has also allowed the author to cherry-pick “useful” elements of Buddhism practices, and honestly I could say that his approach to spirituality is the closest to mine at the moment. I believe that a clarity of mind will have a profound impact on quality of life, and that you can separate spirituality and religion. The former has been repeatedly proven empirically over the years, the latter is more of a personal attempt at having a better shot at well-being in life without the forced “truths” some religions require their true followers to wholly believe in.

He starts out by pointing out that the majority of sources for happiness are impermanent. Either they are impermanent in their existence - relationships fail, money comes and goes, recreational substances wear off - or in the duration of happiness derived from attaining them. People often cite possessions and material beings as major sources of happiness, and yet we know that we all have this human tendency to get bored at the speed of lightning. This is a widely known truth, and it’s discomforting. Spirituality, according to Sam Harris, provides an excellent alternative to attaining a healthier state of mind in the way that: 1) It does not depend on external factors, and hence 2) It is more stable and less fleeting. A comparison with stoicism crossed my mind upon reading this part.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

Being a neuroscientist, his approach is refreshing in a sense that he seems pretty committed to his venture into the glimpse of self-transcendence - which is often neglected even by those who believe in this experience, including me. He often travels halfway through the world to spend time with the gurus, which has helped his self-transcendence-related practices.

His occupational background means the gurus and their practices (even, as we read further into the book, his fellow scientist) are not exempt from close scrutiny. Being aware that the spirituality world is prone to abuse (the scheme of enlightenment programs that begs you for more and more money as you become closer to reach the final stage of enlightenment is not an alien concept, at least in this part of world that I’m living), Harris does not hesitate to reveal the dark side of enlightenment. He is also constantly critical of the various methods, pointing out the shortfalls and recognizing the fact that there are no perfect gurus or methods, only better ones (spoiler: Dzongchen is one of his favorites). Fortunately, according to him, the impossibility of attaining perfect enlightenment does not translate to futility - we can reap the benefits even just by trying.

Lastly, Harris talks about substance use. He mentions that the use of certain substances, in particular psychedelics, is ethically neutral - I am of the same opinion. He believes that it can show (not tell) you things you otherwise are unable to see/feel/experience, but it can also send you to a bottomless pit of despair. Unprecedented magic vs a full-blown, terror-filled psychosis. Their huge benefits do not mean that everybody should try them:

I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation. Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or heroin, I might never sleep again. But if they don’t try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.

I highly recommend the book, I think the topic of spirituality is never an easy one and often emotionally loaded. To glimpse it through the eyes of a rather wise neuroscientist helps make it a detailed and precise introduction to spirituality, detached but not cold. It is not a sin to want to believe in something more than the physical world - but it is better to do it in a way that is further from a comforting illusion. It is true that some negative emotions are often our brain’s way to tell us to solve problems or deal with certain situations, but we can try proceed to go for the solution without being accompanied by the unpleasant reminder. My friend might have to come to terms with his grandmother’s death, but he does not have to trick himself into believing that she is in a safer place now. Sam Harris might say that she simply ceases to be. Call me lazy or cowardly or skeptical or trying to play it safe, but for me it remains unchanged that I simply do not know.

A Manual For Cleaning Woman by Lucia Berlin

Whenever I feel the need to say something through my writing, I feel naked. Exposed… vulnerable. Not the nicest state to be in. So this is what I, or some of us do: We manipulate, as much as possible. Names altered, punchlines added. We pretend things that we hold dear don’t matter to us. Sometimes, we distance and remove ourselves - so much so that the body of knowledge is no longer recognizable; let alone resemblant of our own story.

(Welcome home, it’s safer now.)

But that’s not the case with Lucia Berlin. No one is saying that her works are 100% autobiographical… the umbrella of fiction her book falls under has allowed her to add a touch of, well, transformation of the truth (she refused to call it an “alteration of the truth”). Nevertheless, Berlin never plays it safe. She is never guarded in her stories. Upon reading her I get the feeling that although there are parts she might have preferred for the world to not know, she is not hiding them. Awkward details are dwelled upon sufficiently, discomfort never being glossed over. Pain - whether inflicted by or upon her, so much of it. Unafraid to bare it all, Berlin in her selected stories is doing what the opposite of most of us are doing. Being naked. Vulnerable. Human.

The thing about a collection of short stories is there must be a common thread connecting all of them - recurring themes, style of writing, a common voice - and yet they need to differ or be disjointed enough so that there is some space to breathe, a room for variation. This is why collections of short stories are not for everyone. You take a break and you start again. Just when you start investing in the storyline or the characters, the stories are brought to an end. It is emotionally and mentally taxing. Not the case with Lucia Berlin.

At first, perhaps, the book seems like a series of well-written stories: Neat, vivid, electric, expressive, introspective yet absorptive, calm yet unrestrained. A few stories down the road, patterns emerge: Alcoholic mother, dying sister, passionate affairs, troubled families, food stamps, school bullies, abusive men. All told in a very savory manner. Berlin relishes each and every detail, milking the most out of life. And then you realize all along it’s her life we’ve been reading.

Maybe I am biased… Mexico city is one of my favorite places to visit and I love the folks in Berkeley. Although either way I cannot imagine people getting bored from being told about these places. I mean, how could they? These places are bursting with life. Joie de vivre!

She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a ti. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.

But there is a price for that liveliness. Reading Berlin was a hard slap across my face. Things that I thought were cool back in Berkeley and Mexico City, have real consequences on people’s lives. I remember when I thought a text exchange with a stranger that I met on the street was funny:

“Hey man amanda here! Met you a while back near shattuck market. Got some of the stuff you told me last time?”

“Sorry this his aunt he got in santa rita.”

"Oh alright when is he coming back? He didn’t bring his phone?”

“Don’t no yet.”

How naive of me. At first I thought Santa Rita was a place like Santa Monica, until I googled… and giggled. I told my friends about it. The aunt’s broken English, the coincidence. “So funny right?” It makes me sick now… There is nothing funny about someone giving up a share of his life, most probably due to social injustice and a crooked federal prison system. This is how I feel about a lot of people who think black culture is cool with almost no context... We can think so because we are watching from a comfortable seat. To us they are a spectacle, a sight to behold. A band of tough fellas under the flag of counterculture. We glorify them, the “street” culture, unaware of or heavily underestimate the day-to-day suffering. In Indonesia we would say, “Ngomong doang sih enak (more or less translates to “Talk is cheap”).” In Good or Bad, this sentiment is illustrated clearly:

“See, they like you,” Miss Dawson said. “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

I knew that they liked my shoes and stockings, my red Chanel jacket.

Miss Dawson and her friends were exhilarated as we drove away, chatting happily. I was sickened and depressed.

“What good does it do to feed them once a week? It doesn’t make a dent in their lives. They need more than biscuits once a week, for Lord’s sake.”

Right. But until the revolution came and everything was shared you had to do whatever helped at all.

“They need to know somebody realizes they live out here. We tell them that soon things will change. Hope. It’s about hope,” Miss Dawson said.

I’m a bit of both of these characters, currently. Scared of not doing enough, sometimes I end up doing nothing at all.

Lucia Berlin is the only white person I’ve read so far who has successfully managed to talk in depth about it in an immersive and non-condescending manner, probably simply because she has lived through it. There are no “white people suffer too” or “it’s all in your head” sentiments. She knows, and she’s telling us these. Reading her has made it more difficult for me to react to these issues, because I get a good glimpse of their world and there is probably nothing I can do about it. My defensiveness for the minorities is not out of the need to become politically correct.

Addiction plays a central role to Berlin’s stories, summarized by one of the strongest lines in this book: Of course by this time I had realized all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic. There is probably not much known about alcoholism, people thinking that it’s less harmful than illegal drug addiction, or that if you drink a lot it means you are an alcoholic. I think the main thing that separates an alcoholic from someone who loves to drink is in fact, unrelated to alcohol. It’s what they do with the rest of their time. The Rat Park experiment came to mind: If you are “caged”, the likelihood of you consuming and eventually becoming physically dependant on your substance of choice increases dramatically. Not when you have the option of spending your time in a “Rat Park,” full of toys, friends, and other pleasantries. Lucia Berlin’s characters do not have the luxury of a “Rat Park.”

In this book most of the gems are placed beyond halfway through the book. Just when I get blown by one of the stories, it is outdone in the next story. My favorites: Friends, Melina, Grief, Fool to Cry, Good and Bad, So Long, Let Me See You Smile, Mama, Silence, Mijito, Here It Is Saturday.

Berlin is a master of phrases, they dance. My favorites:

The absence of noise was what so evocative of her childhood, of another era. No sirens, no traffic, no radios. A horsefly buzzed against the window, snip of scissors, the rhythm of the two men’s voices, an electric fan with dirty ribbons flying rustled old magazines. The barber ignored her, not out of rudeness but from courtesy.

and

“I pity you. All your life you are going to be paralyzed by What Is Done, by what people tell you you should think or do. I do not dress to please others. It is a very hot day, and I feel comfortable in this dress.”

“Well… it makes me not comfortable. People will say rude things to us. It is different here, from the United States…”

“The best thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once in a while.”

and

Jesse made everybody feel important. He wasn’t kind. Kind is a word like charity; it implies an effort. Like that bumper sticker about random acts of kindness. It should mean how someone always is, not an act he chooses to do. Jesse had a compassionate curiosity about everyone. All my life I have felt that I didn’t really exist at all. He saw me. He saw who I was. In spite of all the dangerous things we did, being with him was the only time I was ever safe.

and

These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.