with what eyes?

thinking about the part in karen tei yamashita's Letters to Memory, a book which is like 12x weirder, funnier, and more idiosyncratic than its subject matter might lead you to believe it is, where she writes about how ruth benedict (author of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword) never went to japan but did have a kibei research assistant who had been interned in the U.S. before meeting benedict, so, follow me here, who's to say The Chrysanthemum and the Sword isn't actually about... us? and then she runs this theory by her nisei mom and her mom is like, "what are you talking about? The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is about them."

this 🤝 Michel Nieva's essay from Technology and Barbarism about all the Argentinian authors who wrote about the pampas plain without ever having actually seen it, but instead drew from descriptions by earlier authors the most famous of whom was in fact drawing from descriptions by European authors who had only briefly passed through the region. Nieva calls these authors "travelers at rest" who "mobilize pure motionlessness"; a literature sprouted from "an imaginary expedition." Or like Karen Tei Yamashita says, "There is something endearing--although likely only for the novelist--about occupying a people with their own fiction."

guy who does buddhism slightly wrong and ends up in nevada after he dies

that's just reguar old Saṃsāra