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Chinese 6.0pre33
milesyao at netscape dot net
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Tuesday, July 22, 2003
A good Salon day - three quality articles!
- Homage to Blogalonia: a neat bridging of my lit and tech split personalities - Orwell as proto-blogger! But the article was flawed by the fact that the author apparently knows nothing about the "column culture" of Chinese (more specifically, Hongkongnese) newspapers, which interestingly got carried online pretty much intact by the supposedly ADD Gen Y.
Speaking of blogs vs. essays, I'd really like to introduce Halley to Me-Me one day - and see Michael Patrick King film the resulting sure-to-be-lethal koffeeklatch
Wait, does Carmen Maura blog?
- Anyone But Bush: Todd Gitlin is right - "But it's a huge failure of imagination if someone can't imagine why someone would support Bush. Since roughly half the population did." At the same time, an indirect rebuttal to the fed-up liberals moving to Canada in AP's well-circulated story (World Journal picked up the next day & editorialized on it!) - in the mold of the great Stay-or-Leave dilemma of Hong Kong 1997. After all someone has to do the dirty work of converting the heathens in Middle America.
- A Green Revolt Against Bush: the first unvarnished Good News on the political front in a long time - Good Guys Scoring Upset Victory. And this is so much bigger than Dems vs. Freepers biz-as-usual: whoever expects new hopes to the environmental doom-and-gloom to be so close at hand? I really hope these guys are right - the alternative is too awful to contemplate.
1:30 AM
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Two and half months after promise, I finally finished translating Doc Searl's World of Ends.
Will the Doc's blessing translate to riches & fame, or just (link-sluttery? /dotry?)
4:29 PM
Friday, July 04, 2003
Screwed up my courage & called in the WNYC Brian Lehrer Show for the first time - he has Isabel Allende on air for his excellent The New de Tocquevilles series, where he picks the brains of foreigners and immigrants for insights on America.
Well, I wanted to pick her brains about being an expatriate writer in America, and in general (a tightrope act as V.S. Naipaul showed). Was very nervous about letting my (insecure & untrustable) voice go live on air. As it turn out, it didn't matter anyway - she gave only the sort of general soundbite you can expect on such short notice.
After listening a bit more, I realized the truly original questoins I should have asked: Can Latin America or another non-Protestant foreign culture ever produce a great nation with all the virtues of the USA? Is capitalism (and modernity) genetically entwined with the Protestant Ethic?
(The Billion-Dollar What-If question planted in my head by, among others, Octavio Paz' tour-de-force essay The Labyrinth of Solitude that has hounded me since:)
"North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. They believe in hygience, health, work and contentment, but perhaps they have never experienced true joy, which is an intoxication, a whirlwind. In the hubbub of a fiesta night our voices explode into brilliant lights, and life and death mingle together, while their vitality becomes a fixed smile that denies old age and death but that changes life to motionless stone. ... It seems to me that North Americans consider the world to be something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed."
This was the same paragraph that leapt to my mind in my hour of anger with E. - for obvious reasons. The personal really is fucking political. :-) I'll need to come back to develop this - perhaps the rest of my life.
Meanwhile, a passionate discussion of the pachuco in East L.A. today.
3:10 PM
Correction: I forgot about Sex and the City. In fact, it was my emotional anchor in the last two weeks, as I sit there every night, in front of the TV in the empty house, chewing through the Third Season DVDs obsessively as the Final Season geared up over the cablesphere.
It was a good season - lots of drama, lots of character development, new territories. The breathtaking Carrie-Big plane-crash of an affair that would make Almodovar proud. I cried at the teary Carrie-Aidan breakup scene.
Only if there's someone to share it with ... (girls, you ain't alone.)
12:43 PM
Thursday, July 03, 2003
Just back from Marine Park - the Red Bank Fireworks this year is awesome! In terms of visual arrangement, choreography, innovation, or just sheer blinding wattage, tonight's display ranks favorably compared to any in my memory. Some of the two-stage rockets especially, the little bomblets going off in a different direction after the main explosion, in an orderly pattern or like crazed fireflies. And the one whose glowing red cloud fell back down to earth together as a group.
God, it's good to get out the house to mingle with the crowd. My life has been so lonely and dissipated in the last three weeks, ever since the roommates left and I gave up the job search. Only the PDMA project and the Kurniawan Java book kept me going.
(By the way - finally finished this damned book today. Not worth the time if you ask me. Will write an Amazon review.)
Will soon have to make the Big Decision ...
10:35 PM
Friday, June 13, 2003
Another rainy night. It's been monsoon season again since J. left three days ago. Perfect mood for Red.
Such soul food. Like the one red substance that never made an appearance in it, this film has such a rich texture that it compels me to return, to linger again and again. The poignant, unhurried twilight conversations of Valentine and the Judge was what I sought with E., but never got. The curmudgeon and the naif - they did not like, had no trust for each other. Yet there was no immediate write-off, like a modern American is wont to ("Get away from me YOU PERVERT!") Instead, they picked up in each other the scent of authentic being opposite to their own, and decided to stay and explore. Watching Valentine and the Judge slowly circling each other in the lovely golden twilight, I see in the charged air between them the tendresse and pudeur that Stuart Miller described so lovingly.
"Why was Valentine not repulsed by the Judge?" my ears perked up when Kieslowski scholar Annette Insdorf came on screen and threw up this rhetorical hammer, "That is perhaps answered by (Krzysztof) Piesiewicz's remark: 'Red is a film against indifference.' And ... that was Valentine's choice: 'I can only feel pity for you.' Pity - not revulsion, not indifference."
"And why is Red a film against indifference? Because it suggests that we all need to fight against the tendency to dismiss people who aren't as good as we might want them to be. And rather ... to allow them to tell us who they are, so we can help them to get to a better stage."
Exactement. Imagine E., or J., or any other American woman blurting out Valentine's line! But perhaps with good reason - empathy can be a dangerous thing in today's world. The same decision that in communal Old World leads to breakthrough and growth can, in the wilderness of America, lead you one day to wake up next to Travis Bickle.
Other throwaway revelations in the DVD: Irene Jacob relates how Kieslowski made the first draft of Valentine his fantasy Golden Girl. "Noooo No No." she said, "If she's interested in the Judge, it has to be from something unresolved in her own life, unreal relationships that drive her to resolve them with him."
So Kieslowski took her advice, and the re-written Valentine with her own quiet demons rose to be a worthy partner to Judge Kern's Prospero. And their relationship an allegory of the inner dialog between one's Youth and Age (or in Hillman's terms, puer and senex) - but as opposites troubled by each other, not simply antagonists. "He's provoking her. And through this provocation, the real contact can be established ... and that is her evolution, really."
Me? I'm about half way in between, still hopeful although disillusioned more and more by life. Awkward spot, isn't it? I guess that's why I fell so immediately for E. - that radiance of hers that is so easy and authentic, I rarely see in people her age (as Hillman put it above: "Fear is a huge thing for older people. The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding.") This woman has figured out life's secrets, and I wanted her wisdom bad.
I apparently misread her. So badly that even now I needed this long, rambling mess of self-justification in order to work through my shock and bewilderment.
11:59 PM
Monday, June 02, 2003
E. moved out today.
No drama. No goodbyes. She slipped out of the house without even seeing my face - and I wanted it that way. In fact, I woke up as she quietly moved out the last few loads from her room, bag by bag and trunk by trunk - and stayed equally quietly in my room for two hours, until she filled her car and drove away.
Nothing left to say. The night before, I had finally secured 20 minutes alone with her - by resorting to holding up her deposit. Unsportsmanlike, but the last trump card in my hand as it became increasing obvious that the last-minute confession I had hoped for was not forthcoming. And she stuck to her guns. I've been completely busy, she said, that's all there is. Her favors to J. is just plain kindness - Big Sister taking under her wings a new girl in town. And I have no business in their Girls' Club.
So, even less success than with J. I did not once crack her all-business facade, while my own eyes welled up with emotion as I tried again and again to re-connect with the woman that I once knew.
With the last thread of dignity that remained, I handed back her check, returned to my room and shut the door. I've had enough.
So today, before heading out myself for the usual Sunday Special, I placed the gift and card already prepared outside her room, knowing that she will return one last time. The card said, "To a friendship that could have been." - after the pre-printed message that Real Friends Always Have Time to Talk. I added that I will always remember that day early this year when she took me to tour my favorite Rumson manor where her sister turned out to be butler.
When I returned, there was a note on the table that, in the same business-friendly tone, thanked me for the gift and gave instructions for the last bits of house business.
And that was all.
12:04 AM
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