within a forest dark.

September 6, 2017

heim — home. yes, the place one has always been, however hidden from one’s awareness, could only be called that, couldn’t it? and yet, in another way, doesn’t home only become home if one goes away from it, since it’s only with distance, only in the return, that we are able to recognize it as the place that shelters our true self? (71)

forest dark (harpers, forthcoming 2017) feels like a departure from nicole krauss’ previous work, but, then, when i think about her previous work, i think each of her novels also feels like a departure from the one that came before it. like, great house (norton, 2010) follows four narrators — and there’s a fifth character in the mix, a desk that’s made its rounds from person to person, life to life. the history of love (norton, 2005) is this beautiful, heartrending story that bounces primarily between two characters — alma and bruno, one a child, the other a writer and wwii survivor — and that was a departure from man walks into a room (doubleday, 2002), still my favorite of krauss’ books, a straightforward novel about a man who wakes up in the desert one day, his memory wiped by a tumor in his brain.

i don’t know that i loved forest dark in the ways i loved man walks into a room or was entranced by the history of love. (great house, for me, was unfortunately largely forgettable.) i read forest dark in an afternoon and an evening, though, barreling my way through in on a hot, steaming labor day, not stopping until i’d completed it, and i read most of it on the floor, draped over a folded futon and hiding under a fan with the windows open as wide as they’d go and the blinds pulled up to let in as much of a breeze as possible.

the carpet (i hate carpet, but my parents’ house has carpet in the bedrooms) felt sticky and damp from the humidity, and i paused once to take a nap because heat saps me of energy and i’d spent the early afternoon writing, a second time to take a break and read more orange is the new black recaps (i’m still debating whether or not to continue with the show or call it quits), a third time to eat a slice of cold pizza and a banana and a peanut butter jelly sandwich and a glass of milk.

i finished it at night, sweating in bed at eleven p.m, the pillows and blanket shoved away from me, and, when i was done, i dropped the book back onto the floor, onto the scarf i’d laid on the carpet earlier to protect my elbows from the roughness, and tried to go to sleep.

i hate/despise/loathe summer, always have, likely always will.

in forest dark, krauss alternates chapters between two characters, two perspectives — the third-person of jules epstein, a sixty-something retired lawyer who’s spent the last few years giving all his stuff away, and the first-person of nicole, an author from brooklyn in a failing marriage — and they both travel to israel, epstein to donate $2 million in memory of his deceased parents, nicole to work on her new novel, which is supposed to be about the tel aviv hilton.

there’s a lot of philosophizing in forest dark, a lot of talking about writing and religion and things that lie more in the realm of the conceptual, and you couldn’t say that much really happens action-wise in the novel. both epstein and nicole are going through changes in their lives. both of them go to israel, stay at the tel aviv hilton. both have encounters with eccentric men, epstein with a rabbi who seeks epstein out, claiming that epstein is a descendant of david, nicole with a man who claims to have worked for mossad, who is a retired professor at tel aviv university who shares nicole’s love for and fascination with kafka.

(kafka, i suppose, is the third character in forest dark. the novel explores an alternate theory that kafka faked his death and lived on a kibbutz as a gardener until his peaceful, actual death.)

i admit that i was pretty whatever to the epstein chapters — they were good, well-written, but neither were they all that interesting to me — but i loved the chapters we spent with nicole. it’s public knowledge that krauss herself divorced her husband (the novelist jonathan safran foer) a few years ago, that they have two sons together, and she doesn’t try to create clear differences between herself and the nicole in the novel. in the novel, nicole is an author; she’s written several novels about jewishness; she has readers who approach her to tell her how boring her most recent novel was (great house) or how they loved one of her novels so much, they named their infant after a character (“alma” in the history of love). krauss herself spent a lot of time at the tel aviv hilton throughout her life. there’s a lot that is blurred in that boundary between the personal and the written, much of which, i dare say, has been blurred intentionally.

that’s not why i loved the nicole chapters, though; i’m not that interested in the personal or in trying to parse what is “autobiographical” and what is not — nicole spends a fair amount of time thinking about writing, about narratives, and there was a lot i loved about that because, sometimes, i spend a fair amount of time thinking about writing and about narratives.

there were some things i identified with, too, like this bit on dance versus writing:

more and more it seems to me that dancing is where my true happiness lies, and that when i write, what i am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, i am never satisfied with writing. to write is, in a sense, to seek to understand, and so it is always something that happens after the fact, is always a process of sifting through the past, and the results of this, if one is lucky, are permanent marks on a page. but to dance is to make oneself available (for pleasure, for one explosion, for stillness); it only ever takes place in the present — the moment after it happens, dance has already vanished. dance constantly disappears, ohad often says. the abstract connections is provokes in its audience, of emotion with form, and the excitement from one’s world of feelings and imagination — of this derives from its vanishing. […] but writing, whose goal it is to achieve a timeless meaning, has to tell itself a lie about time; in essence, it has to believe in some form of immutability, which is why we judge the greatest works of literature to be those that have withstood the test of hundreds, even thousands, of years. and this lie that we tell ourselves when we write makes me more and more uneasy. (136-7)

for me, it isn’t dance but music, and i think maybe that’s why i’m obsessed with the rhythm of language. it’s what i love so much about ian mcewan and what i loved so much about the history of love, the lyricality and beauty of mcewan and krauss’ prose because music is the thing that’s been with me my whole life, the thing i once wanted to pursue, the thing that has kept me here. it’s been my lifeline in so many ways, standing in for something much bigger than itself, filling the spaces left vacant by dead hope and empty futures.

music is that ephemeral thing somehow holds the center of my life.

and i loved, too, the idea of the lie we tell ourselves about writing as standing up against time, and it reminded me of what jonathan franzen said when someone asked at a reading if he thought about how his writing would exist fifty years down the road. he replied that he doesn’t think about that; he writes in the present, for the present; and i thought, hey, what awesome freedom is that, not to fuss about legacy or futures you might not be around for, but to exist in the here and now, to try to serve and respond to the here and now.

as someone who has spent the greater majority of her life waiting for that one day — one day, i’ll be skinny, and, one day, my life will begin — i understand the futility of thinking about, planning for, writing toward that one day. in the end, it doesn’t matter whether work is rendered a “classic” because it’s still around hundreds, thousands of years down the road; it’s about whether or not work resonates with people today, as they exist today, whether or not work meets people’s needs as they are today.

then again, maybe that’s a perspective that’s easier for me to take because i’m generally not concerned with forever. i don’t worry about what will happen after i’m gone. i don’t want to live forever, and i don’t care about being remembered forever. i don’t give two shits about immortality because, to me, it’s already incredible and incredulous enough that i’m even here today — and, besides, what does a hypothetical future matter if our present is falling apart?

i ask myself frequently these days who i write for. it’s not that i worry about or concern myself with any notion of an audience; i don’t sit and think about who’s reading me and why; and, over the years, i’ve learned not to fret over personal reactions to my writing. much like i have writers whom i love and to whom i respond positively and viscerally, and much like i have writers whose work i don’t enjoy, whose writing style i don’t prefer, i know i am not the writer for everyone. i know that there will be people out there who intensely dislike and disagree with the things i write, and i’ve learned not to worry about how people feel about me, simply to make sure not to give them the power to control or affect how i feel about myself and my work.

(you can’t control how people feel about you. you can control how they let you feel about yourself. don’t just hand over that power.)

however, i do ask myself who i’m trying to address with my writing, not with any kind of specificity but in broad strokes. who is my ideal “audience”? who are the people i’m trying to speak to, to reach? who is the reader i have in mind?

because, as someone who does want to write professionally, i don’t consider my writing to be a solely (or even primarily) personal endeavor. i write things to be read, and i write them hoping that they will be read by a wide group of people, not just people i know, to whom i hand-deliver my work.

and, so, in that sense, i do think about who i’m writing for, and i’ve been thinking about it a lot in regards to this series of daily posts i have planned for national suicide prevention week. i’ve been thinking about it a lot in regards to my book, and i’ve mentioned it before here, how my thinking has changed, how i’ve moved from wanting to help the non-suicidal and non-depressed understand the suicidal person, to learn to see the suicidal person as human, into wanting to speak to those who are suicidal and depressed, who often feel so alone and isolated because ours is still a stigma-ridden, shame-based, guilt-producing culture.

and i think that that’s the perspective i’m taking with this upcoming series of posts, the first of which will be published on september 10, tentatively at 3 pm EST. (the time may be later; it may be earlier; that remains to be seen.) it’s not to say that it isn’t important, valuable work, trying to reach those who are fortunately unfamiliar with these darknesses and this kind of pain, but it’s not the work for me, at least not now. the more i’ve been talking about my own depression, my own anxiety disorder, my own history with suicidal thinking, the more i find that it’s increasingly frustrating trying to talk to people who don’t understand — it’s so isolating, so reinforcing of that sense of us vs. them, no matter how deeply i do appreciate people’s effort at least to try to understand, to be kind, to be supportive.

because, in many ways, ultimately, i write for comfort. i write to scratch the itches in my brain. i write the stories i want to read, the stories i wish were out there for someone like me, and i think that that’s what it means when people say to write for yourself first. because one of the things i’ve learned over the last year or so is that i am not that unique a person. my lonelinesses, my wants, my fears, my insecurities, my sadnesses — these are not things that are unique to me. the things i want are fundamentally simple and basic; i want someone to love who loves me back, who wants me back; and i want to be able to do work i don’t hate that means something, contributes something in some way or to some degree. i want to be able to be independent. i want to know that i’m okay.

and, so, when i write for myself, i’m not writing for some special individual who’s too precious for the world. i’m writing for the lonely child in me who’s bursting with want, who’s looking to connect with others like her because she knows that they exist. i’m writing for the lonely children out there who are looking for these same connections, these same assurances that they aren’t alone, their lives mean something — and none of this was meant to read like a mission statement, but, sometimes, i think it needs to be said.

and i’ll never be the type of person who writes a straight-up book review, but this is what i look for in books — a mirror, not the kind that shows you who you are on the surface but forces you to look, to look deep, and to look in the places of yourself you don’t want to see. and the thing is that these kinds of mirrors can be found anywhere; it’s not about non-fiction or memoirs or stories inspired by true events or fiction that’s intentionally telling stories about the world. there is no “right” or “wrong” book, only openness and self-reflection and the willingness to look yourself in the eye and not look away.

and this is what i loved so much about forest dark, that krauss gives us a story that is very personal, that blurs the lines between public and private, that asks questions of the stories we tell, whether to ourselves or to the world — and, in turn, she’s written a book that asks you to engage, to think, instead of reading blindly, and to ask what it is we tell ourselves so we don’t have to be cognizant of what we’re losing.

the naked bulb sputtered on and off behind his inflamed lids when he tried to sleep. he couldn’t sleep. had he accidentally given sleep away, along with everything else? (14)

i frankly hate descartes, and have never understood why his axiom should be trusted as an unshakable foundation for anything. the more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest, where once we lived in wonder, and understood it to be a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of being and the world. now we have little choice but to live in the arid fields of reason, and as for the unknown, which once lay glittering at the farthest edge of our gaze, channeling our fear but also our hope and longing, we can only regard it with aversion. (47)

“we like to think of ourselves as the inventors of monotheism, which spread like wildfire and influenced thousands of years of history. but we didn’t invent the idea of a single god; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to him and in doing so we invented ourselves. we gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.” (friedman, 81)

“this is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.” (klausner, 107)

narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance, given that it is processed by the mind whose function it is to produce coherence at any cost. to produce, in other words, a credible story. (122)

“you think your writing belongs to you?” he asked softly. (125)

narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance — is that what i wrote? what i should have written is “human life.” because nature creates form but it also destroys it, and it’s the balance between the two that suffuses nature with such peace. but if the strength of the human mind is its ability to create form out of the formless, and map meaning onto the world through the structures of language, its weakness lies in its reluctance or refusal to demolish it. we are attached to form and fear the formless: are taught to fear it from our earliest beginning. (138)

writing about other lives can, for a while, obscure the fact that the plans one has made for one’s own have insulated one from the unknown rather than drawn one closer to it. (168)

and yet, purely on the level of strategy, he continued, there’s genius in it; as much genius as in the story of refusing a dying kafka’s last will to take everything he’d left behind and burn it all unread. when the world slowly woke to brod’s kafka, he proved irresistible. and though the legend may have been brod’s own handiwork, in the decades that followed, it was expanded and embroidered upon by the border of kafkologists who took up where brod left off, gleefully churning out more kafka mythology without ever once questioning its source. (192)

earthquake weather.

September 4, 2017

it's been hot as balls this last week or two, and it's no secret that i hate heat of any kind. i don't care if it's dry heat or humid heat; once the temperature starts inching past 78 degrees, i start raging because i sweat non-stop, feel bloated, and struggle with lethargy. i mean, my insomnia is bad enough in whatever weather, and the heat has only made my insomnia worse.

it feels like a piddling thing to rant about, especially given the hundreds of thousands displaced in houston, in south asia, in LA county, and it feels like poor form, maybe because it is. let’s move on.

on wednesday, i finished kamila shamsie's home fire (riverhead, 2017), and i loved it except for the last paragraph, which left me confused and kind of muddled because i had to read it multiple times to try to understand what she was getting at. (i'm still not sure i "got it.") it's a paragraph that reads beautifully, written in lovely prose, but the ambiguity was too ambiguous for me, too prosey-for-prose's-sake, and it inserted a slight bitter note to a book that should have left me feeling unequivocally wowed at what shamsie has accomplished in these pages.

because home fire is a stunning book, one that achieves its ambitions. it's a punch in the gut, one that makes you look hard at yourself, at your internalized prejudices, and it makes you ask yourself what you think about muslims and islam and why you do and what those prejudices say about you and how they shape the world and affect real people with real lives and real families and real hopes and dreams and fears and loves.

home fire is not a book that lets you read it comfortably.

i finally started watching orange is the new black the other week, and i don't know that i'll keep watching all the seasons, but i'll keep going until i lose interest, which might be sooner than later. i’m currently halfway through season 3 because i skipped half of season 2 because i was bummed about the lack of alex and annoyed with the drama between red and vee — i couldn’t stand how power-hungry and emotionally manipulative vee was, especially over suzanne, or how she tried to drive a wedge between poussey and taystee. (i love poussey, poussey and her broken hearts.)

there are many things i love about orange is the new black, but, mostly, i love that it's a show about women, women who don't all look the same, think the same, want the same. i love the ways it shows how insidious racism and classism and misogyny are, how they don't always exhibit in obvious, gross acts or words but are often masked in more genteel, nice ways, like in a CO (healy) who appears to be a thoughtful, old white man who's looking out for his inmates. in particular, he wants to protect piper (the main character who's an educated blonde white woman with a male fiancé, for the unfamiliar) and make sure she serves her time without getting into trouble — except, no, his nice intentions are actually entirely rooted in racist, homophobic, chauvinistic crap.

and i think this is the scarier, more dangerous manifestation of any -ism, this kind of -ism that thinks that it's all right, it's not "like that," it's an exception to discrimination, hate, and bigotry. i'd almost rather have the assholes who march around in their polos and khakis, carrying tiki torches in public spaces (then crying about how their faces are being plastered all over the media), than have the assholes who think they're better than that — they're not racist; they're not sexist; no, they would never take to the streets with tiki torches or treat a black person as lesser or rape a woman. they would never.

except prejudice isn't always about brutality and overt violence. prejudice isn't always about assault. prejudice isn't always obvious.

prejudice is in the way you look down your nose at people and don’t want to grant them legal protection or equal rights or second chances because they're trans, they're addicts, they're sex workers, they're homeless, they're simply different from you. prejudice is in the way you think it's your right or calling to protect a woman because she's a woman and she's weaker, more emotional, in need of guarding because she's a woman. prejudice is in the way you think you're better than others like you because you're so nice to people of color, you tip service people well, you would never use the n word or call an asian person oriental or whatever — you’re PC; you know all the terminology; you ask people what pronouns they prefer.

prejudice is in the way you think you couldn't be racist or sexist or homophobic because you're a person of color or a woman or queer.

prejudice is in the small ways your world order betrays itself in your self-elevation, and the world is a more dangerous place for it.

i think a lot about media and art and content created by women and how they’re held to impossible standards. it makes me think about the 2016 ghostbusters with its kickass female cast, how it’s so much easier to criticize films by women, about women, [arguably] for women because we want them to be representative of so much more than they should be — a film like ghostbusters should be fun, easy entertainment, and, for all its weaknesses, i’d say it delivered on that front, and yet, it’s not good enough — it must be deeper, must contain no flaws, or it’s failed in its implied purpose, and, thus, work by women is not good enough and not worth investing in, and that’s all the fault of this one piece of work.

and i think a lot about art created by people of color, how there’s sometimes (often?) a sense that POC art should contain a deeper message, some kind of morality or stronger awareness of being in the world, like it should be educational somehow, exposing of the deeper humanity of POC that is apparently so difficult for non-POC to conceptualize on their own.

for our inaugural read, my online book club read bandi’s the accusation (grove, 2017), the first collection of stories by a north korean writer still living in north korea, and we talked about how we might read these kinds of “important” books differently from other books. do we give a writer like bandi more room to allow for narrative or style weaknesses because his work itself is important, giving us these glimpses into north korea, humanizing north koreans who are so easily demonized and pilloried by those outside?

similarly, am i relieved that books like moshin hamid’s exit west (riverhead, 2017) and shamsie’s home fire are beautifully written, so i can recommend them to people without having to add qualifiers of the writing isn’t as good, but it’s such an important book, you should read it?

am i glad that writers like jenny zhang and esmé weijun wang and celeste ng and rachel khong patty yumi cottrell are incredible, strong, unique writers because they’re asian-american and i want more of us asian-american writers out there?

if i’m subconsciously putting these burdens on my fellow women, my fellow POC, where does that leave me?

am i complicit in the system i criticize?

this weekend, i plan to read nicole krauss' forthcoming fourth novel, forest dark (harpers, forthcoming 2017), which harpers very kindly sent me — or, at least, i was planning to read it, but i got distracted by orange is the new black and the heat and planning content for national suicidal prevention week.

i’m so excited for forest dark; krauss is one of my favorite living writers; and her debut, man walks into a room (doubleday, 2002) is one of my top ten favorite novels, one i turn to when i'm feeling uninspired and discouraged because krauss' prose is exquisite and haunting. i love the way she writes about memory, about history, about the things that follow us, and hers is writing i aspire to, which isn't something i say about other people's writing in general. (i'm not interested in being another writer; i want to be my own; but, when i read krauss, i think, god, i hope i can capture this kind of ghostly beauty and thoughtfulness in my own way.)

i get a little anxious when it comes to new books by writers i love. will i be disappointed? are my standards too high? will this author be like ian mcewan, whom i loved once, until he started turning out book after book of beautifully written ennui?

and that’s heightened when the author has been away for so long — or, sometimes, when the author hasn’t been away for as long as usual (aka franzen’s purity [FSG, 2015], which was published only five years after freedom [FSG, 2010]) — and, yeah, this is all kind of dumb, but i want the people i love to do well, to thrive, and, so, there it is, this branch of my anxiety, like i don’t have enough to be anxious about in my own life.

maybe it’s a way of getting out of my own problems, though. who knows?

i’m also reading chiara barzini’s things that happened before the earthquake (doubleday, 2017), and i’m reading it as my commute read, something light and easy for those in-between hours when i’m zombie-ing it between home and work. i can’t say i’m loving it; barzini’s prose style is one i decidedly don’t enjoy, all clipped sentences and abrupt phrasing; and it’s something i don’t linger on, simply pass over as quickly as i can speed read.

in another instance, i might just stop reading things that happened, but the thing is, barzini’s novel hits familiar spots for me because it’s set in the san fernando valley in the 90s, and i grew up in the san fernando valley in the 90s. the streets she describes, the people, the attitude, the heat, the general feel, from the social post-LA riots tension lingering in the city to the narrator’s unhappiness being here — it’s all familiar, and i’m finding that, sometimes, that sense of familiar is nice.

as someone who grew up in the los angeles area, though, LA is not somewhere i write about because it’s not a place or a personal history i want to explore. it’s a place in time i’ve wanted so long to fold over and forget, to move on from and recreate myself, and, when i read about it, it’s very much like seeing a place in a dream, somewhere familiar but not, knowable but not.

it’s a familiarity that i enjoy exploring through the ways other people write about and capture LA.

it’s oddly a way for me to remember this place i came from, while also maintaining much-needed mental and emotional distance.

going back to orange is the new black, i can’t stand piper, and i don’t seem to be alone in this. i spend a fair amount of time thinking, oh, you white woman, and her naïveté and privilege are one thing, maybe, to some extent, something she can’t help, but it’s her sanctimonious but i’m a nice person! crap i can’t stand.

(alex deserves better.)

at the same time, though, sometimes, the reason people or situations or things make us uncomfortable is that there’s familiarity there, a realization of, shit, i’m kind of like that. i don’t like that about myself, too. i think like that. it’s not pleasant to come face-to-face with that ugliness, with the ways we try to guard ourselves from learning that, no, we’re not actually very nice, we’re all kinds of messed up and manipulative and self-protecting. we’re all kinds of selfish.

and piper is kind of the character who’s meant to play that part, just like she’s meant to play the part of the naive, ignorant, sheltered girl who’s suddenly thrust amongst people she likely never interacted with in the “real” world, who’s forced to reckon with her actions in the past and their effect on the present.

and yet … i’m so annoyed with piper that i’m close to dropping the show. or maybe it’s more accurate to say that i’m bored with the lack of alex, and i’m tired of piper being her deluded, sanctimonious self, and i’m tired of her running to alex when she needs her and leaving alex when she no longer does.

i just really like alex.

because, hey, i’m the kind of TV-watcher who shamelessly and unapologetically watches something for one person/character. what can i say? i have a weird loyal streak, and season 3 of orange is the new black is boring me because alex is just there to be piper’s girlfriend, and i want more of alex as her own human with her own interesting, complicated history and self and not as a cipher for a boring, annoying white girl who doesn’t seem to grow. end rant. and end post. i feel i’ve gone on for long enough.

september is national suicide prevention awareness month, and national suicide prevention week is september 10-16. are you ready? let’s talk.

here's to lazy sundays.

August 27, 2017

i have to say my last post was kind of a mess; i shouldn’t really try to write things when my writing brain is still recuperating; but i had photos i wanted to share, though i suppose i could have just shared the photos, forget about attaching so many words … but, anyway, on to the next thing.

sometimes, i like to spend chill, uneventful weekends at home, doing little else but running the most basic errands (usually just to the grocery store) and reading and doing little else. sometimes, i’ll meet friends for dinner; sometimes, i’ll clear my schedule so i can rest for the upcoming week; and i don’t know, i suppose the funny thing is that my idea of resting is to clean, cook, and clean some more.

you can’t cook without cleaning. it just doesn’t work that way.

anyway, so maybe i should stop saying “anyway” so often, but, anyway, i read multiple books at one time, hopping from title to title until something captivates my full attention and demands that i commit. now that i’m done with my book (for now), that means i have the time and energy to read again, and it’s been such a pleasure, diving back into the world of words i didn’t write, stories that aren’t mine to tell, to be reminded again of the vitality of stories and voices and narratives, especially given the state of our world today.

right now, my three main books are kamila shamsie’s home fire (riverhead, 2017), which was recently long-listed for the man booker, paul graham’s in memory of bread (clarkson potter, 2017), and eun heekyung’s beauty looks down on me (dalkey archive press, 2017). i’m about halfway through the shamsie and the graham and just barely started the eun. none of this stops me from having an opinion about everything.

i suppose, first things first — this is not my house. i’m temporarily staying at my parents’, and this is their house, the house i grew up in. it gets great light and is spacious, and it’s got counter space galore, which is great for making pasta, working with dough, cooking in general, hanging out, eating while doing some writing, reading, creating. when i think of home spaces, when i think of whatever future home i will make, i think of kitchens because, to me, the kitchen is the heart of the home, the center that holds it together.

(when i think of home, i think of you. i think of the meals we’ll make together, the messes we’ll create and clean, the life we’ll build from this core.)

i keep hearing that home fire is a retelling of antigone, and here is where i confess that, yes, i did read antigone — over ten years ago — and i’ve a bare bones remembrance of that story. here is also where i confess that i didn’t bother to google antigone; i don’t really care for retellings or “inspired by”s or “loosely based on”s or whatever; and maybe that’s a weakness in myself as a critical reader — shouldn’t i be interested in the source of things, the inspirations, the places things come from?

i don’t particularly care for greek tragedy, though, and never have, and i like walking into a book without external influence. it’s why i very rarely read reviews before reading the book (and, also, very rarely read reviews after reading the book), and it’s why i stay away from books that are newly published to absurd levels of hype. it’s also why i tend to stay away from the books that circulate heavily through instagram and media at-large.

going back to home fire, though — i’m about halfway through now and have hit the third part, the third character. the book is divided into five parts, each focused on a different character, and the novel, overall, tells the story of a family, of three orphaned siblings really, the children of a jihadi. the eldest is studying in northampton; the younger daughter is in london studying law; and the son has run off to join isis. it’s a book that has a lot to say about who we are, and it’s a book that might have fallen into the trappings of pedantic moralizing in another writer’s hands. (i feel the same about moshin hamid’s exit west, also riverhead, also long-listed for the man booker.)

rather than dive into content, though, i’m going to end this with a note on form: i’m always wary of walking into a book that focuses on multiple characters because, oftentimes, the book falls prey to ambition, the voices all sounding the same. shamsie, however, avoids this trap by staying in the third-person, simply honing in very tightly on each character. i’m tempted to say that i love this kind of narrow perspective, but i’m tempted to say that about any narrative form that’s done well. it’s the execution that matters after all.

but this is connected to what i mean when i say that it’s a book that could have been something else in another writer’s hands. instead, shamsie has thus far delivered a very human book, one that is unflinching in examining and presenting its characters as who they are, that is uninterested in casting one-dimensional judgments about one kind of person being morally better or superior to another. at the same time, home fire is also not interested in making excuses for people’s heinous actions or questionable behavior and thinking; shamsie doesn’t shy away from being critical, from drawing lines where they ought to exist, while still asking us, the reader, to be self-critical of our own assumptions and the narratives we force and enforce on people who might, on the surface, be Other from us.

in the mornings, i keep my skincare simple, though some may argue that applying five products to my face isn’t simple at all. i don’t wash my face in the morning, not with cleanser, because i don’t want to over-cleanse my face, so i just rinse with water in the shower and have that be that because, yes, i shower every morning, and, yes, i wash my hair everyday — if i don’t, my hair becomes a greaseball, and i have neither the patience nor the desire to “train” my hair to require a wash only every 2-3 days.

also, hi, i love eggs.

i picked up graham’s in memory of bread at elliott bay book company in seattle, and i picked it up because i loved that cover. (isn’t it beautiful and clever?!) i wasn’t planning on buying a book at all, but that sounds like a stupid statement to make because why would i walk into a bookstore in the first place if not to browse, hopefully find something that catches my interest and calls out to me, read me, read me, read me, i KNOW YOU WANT TO.

and, why, yes, i did want to read in memory of bread. i felt like i’d relate quite a bit, though it isn’t celiac that i have.

in his late-thirties, graham is diagnosed with celiac disease, and, after becoming deathly ill and being misdiagnosed several times, he has to make drastic changes to his life. to put it simply, he can no longer eat gluten, and it sounds like a deceptively simple thing — just don’t eat gluten, and you’ll be fine — much like living with diabetes sounds deceptively simple — just don’t eat sugar, and you’ll be fine.

the problem (also condensed down) is that gluten is in everything, much like sugar is often in everything, and, beyond that, graham has an emotional connection to food. to him, bread is not just bread; it’s ritual, familiarity, history; and a meal — the prospect of meals — is more than simply physical sustenance.

it’s all that emotional complexity to which i relate so heavily, and i’m marking up passages in this memoir while nodding along vigorously because, god, it’s nice just to know that someone gets it. food is not just food; it’s how we make connections with other people, other cultures; it’s one very visceral, very intimate way we learn about the world — and, for someone like me, someone like graham, that initial sense of loss is a terrible, terrifying thing.

part of me thinks this is a dangerous thing, writing about books before completing them. i mean, i might end up not finishing them at all; i might read further on and realize that this book is starting to fall apart, it isn’t worth my time; or i might finish them and think that i actually disliked them intensely.

and yet i don’t think that would invalidate the thoughts i’ve recorded here, how i’ve felt about them thus far.

i mean, if it hasn’t become clear yet, i’m interested in the process of things, whatever they are, even if it’s reading a book, not simply the end result or thought.

i never used to be the type of person who did much work or reading or anything other than sleep in bed. this has changed in recent months, usually as my day job wipes me out so i like to catch up on stuff in bed before i turn in for the night. i still need a desk, though, and i do most of my work at my desk, currently this blue one from ikea i’ve had since college. it’s my favorite still, and i love it, and i hope one day to take it to brooklyn with me, whenever i make my way back home.

now that the book is done (for now), there’s an essay i’m trying to finish, an essay i started writing late last year, one that’s gone through several iterations before settling into the shape and form it’s in now. it’s an essay that was born out of a desire to write about depression and longing, about love and desire, about the lingering, hateful will to survive, and, as always, i’m surprised by the ways any writing project grows, how it begins as a seed and goes through life cycles, how it attempts to flower, fails, lies fallow.

maybe that’s the fun of it, the malleability of projects, and i love this about creating content in general, whether it’s an instagram post, a blog post here, a long-term writing project i’ll spend hundreds, thousands, of hours on and try to publish. i don’t think one is lesser or greater than the other; it’s all work; it’s all something to create and to create well because work is work is work and i have to believe that all of this means something.

the great accomplishment of this weekend is that i managed to take down my cookbook tower (which was balanced precariously on a barstool for months) and arrange my collection on a shelf. i’m (obviously) being glib about that being my great accomplishment; i’m impressed my collection only toppled off my stool twice and didn’t damage anything; and this shift in space was a long time coming.

(speaking of, that massive cookbook post is still coming.) (also, that post-it on my macbook? it’s from seattle last month, and it has a list of restaurants on it. it’s still hanging on pretty impressively; i mean, i take my macbook to work everyday.)

if you hadn’t noticed, i like parentheses a lot — and, honestly, i don’t know what the point of this section was, maybe just to show: if you live with a reader or with a writer, you should be used to books everywhere.

(sometimes, i think about you, and i think about one day having to bring our books together. i imagine we’d read pretty different things, maybe with some overlap in food. i wonder if we’d end up with any duplicate copies. i wonder what we’d do with those. i wonder if i’ll ever write this goddamn story i started writing about you.)

brine, sear, bake — my holy trinity when it comes to chicken breasts and pork chops. brine your meat in a salt-sugar-water solution (i added some smashed garlic this time) (there’s something so therapeutic about smashing garlic); let it sit in the refrigerator for 30-45 minutes; while it does that, heat your oven and your cast iron skillet to 400 degrees; take your pork chop and rinse, pat dry, salt and pepper it; transfer the hot cast iron to the stove on high heat; toss on a chunk of butter (and some apples here); sear your meat on one side (for this pork chop, i seared the first side for 4-5 minutes); flip it; bake in oven (chicken takes about 20 minutes, pork chops from 6-10, depending on thickness) (chicken is done when the juices run clear; pork is done when you press a finger to the surface and it feels firm but still springs back).

you’d think i could have written that out in a list instead of a giant paragraph.

*insert shrug emoji here.

i first came across the library of korean literature, published by dalkey archive press with the literature translation institute of korea, at mcnally jackson, the bookstore i still consider my home bookstore, as funny as an idea of that sounds. (it’s true, though; my other home bookstore is greenlight.) (when i think of home, the one and only question that always starts ringing through my head is, will i ever get back home again?)

over the last two or so years, i’ve been growing my collection of books from this series, and i absolutely love that this exists. i love the range of authors, though it remains pretty contemporary in time, which i actually don’t mind, and i’ve even come to be fond of the covers, which are, at least, consistent and stand out, despite the plainness and, idk, un-aesthetically-pleasing-ness. every time i went to mcnally jackson, i’d check their shelves to see if they had any new titles (new meaning anything i didn’t already have), and, if i wanted a specific title, i’d always order through them. (if i wanted to preorder anything in general, i’d always order through them.)

truth be told, i haven’t really kept an eye out for new titles recently, not since coming back out to los angeles, but, on friday, i went to the last bookstore because i’d had dinner at grand central market and was debating whether or not to read home fire. i found this eun heekyung in the same display as the shamsie and had to pick it up. it’s new to the series, published this year, and i’m interested in any writing out of korea that has to do with bodies and food and people who don’t belong, marked as they are by their physical appearance. korea is largely a conformist society, and it expects sameness — it expects you to wear the same makeup, be the same size, want the same things — and, as someone whose body was always too big, too tan, too un-made-up, i’ve always existed outside that, spending much of my life looking in, wanting to be a part of that world, to be accepted and considered beautiful and desirable within those standards.

it’s a terrible way to live your life.

one of my favorite korean novels-in-translation is park min-gyu’s pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014), and it, too, is a novel that explores people who exist outside contemporary mainstream society, whether for socioeconomic or physical reasons. in pavane, the main female character is ugly and has been shunned her entire life for it, relegated to a life that would never attain much, would never be able to aim for anything outside her station, and maybe that sounds overly dramatic, but i dare say there are many women who might relate.

anyway, so, i started reading beauty looks down on me in the bookstore, was interested in the way eun writes about food, how often the mentions of food seemed to appear as i flipped through the pages, and i can’t wait to read this. i’m waiting to finish the shamsie first though, maybe wrap up the last one or two stories i have left of jenny zhang’s sour heart (random house, 2017) — i’ve been lingering over that collection because i don’t want it to end; i want more from jenny; i always want more from her because i always want more from the writers i love.

and the other thing maybe is that going back to korean literature-in-translation is also a way of going back home again. there’s a strangeness to it, yes, because korean culture is a place both familiar and intensely foreign to me, but there’s a comfort in all of it, in that base recognition of names and cultural cues and patriarchal bullshit. it’s a thing both attractive and repulsive to me, and that’s my way of negotiating my relationship with my ethnic identity, this simultaneous intense love and reproach that hold me close while often making me wish i could pull away, all the while knowing i never will.

this was supposed to be a simple, short post.

[san francisco] go west.

August 25, 2017

it has been a week of recuperating, of kind of shutting down and just going to work and doing little else in the spaces in-between. last saturday, i finished my book — or, maybe more accurately, i finished this current iteration of my book — and i sent it off to an agent for consideration.

it's been a week (minus twenty-four hours), and i'm still kind of stunned that this happened, that there is a complete manuscript in my hands, that it was the culmination of 2-3 weeks of frenetic work, edits and rewrites and rereads done in the spaces between work and sleep, work and sleep, work and sleep. a year ago, i didn't think i'd be here — hell, a month ago, i didn't think i'd be here. i didn't think i'd ever be able to sit down and tackle all the issues in my book, take it apart, and put it back together again.

if there's a lesson to be learned there, maybe it's that things get done a little bit at a time. things get done by doing the work. things get done by taking care of yourself, listening to your body and your brain, learning to work and live and create within your limitations.

it's not that there wasn't a cost, though.

my insomnia is at an all-time worst, and my inability to sleep and to sleep well is taking its toll. when i say "insomnia," i don't mean that i have difficulties falling asleep — i have difficulties staying asleep, achieving deep sleep, waking up rested. my psychiatrist has tried a slew of medications from lorazepam to trazodone to gabapentin, none of which is prescribed primarily for insomnia but is used off-script to treat it, and, unsurprisingly, none of them has worked. lorazepam does help lessen my anxiety. sometimes. trazodone did nothing. gabapentin worked the first time then proceeded to give me the worst nightmares, nightmares of violence and terror and brutality, my subconscious taking the medication and wreaking havoc.

before we proceeded further, my psych referred me to a sleep clinic, told me to test for apnea just in case, though i didn't think apnea was my problem. the test came back as very, very mild, that, if a normal human has 5 apneas per hour of sleep, i have 6.5, and the sleep clinic nurse told me i could fix that likely by learning to sleep more on my side. (i spent 80% of the night on my back.)

the thing, maybe, though, is that my psych and i both know that my insomnia is directly related to my anxiety, that i wake up having panic attacks and can't sleep because my brain is racing, churning over all the various crap that i chew over, fret over, obsess over. it's not that i do any of this intentionally; i don't spend much of my waking hours very cognizant of these things that apparently haunt me; but i wonder if maybe that statement, too, isn't contradicted by the fact that i pick incessantly at my nails, at my cuticles, at the skin around my nails, picking and picking and picking to the point that i've drawn blood and the ends of my fingers are tingling from pain.

my mother asks why i can't just stop, that it looks so disturbing, but, as with other things in my life, i don't know how to tell her i can't.

it's impossible, in many ways, to convey the impossible.

last weekend, i went to san francisco, and here are a few images from the weekend. my best friend moved to san francisco when i came back to LA, so i've been going up often to visit her, to see my brother and now sister-in-law, to meet new friends — and my weekends in SF tend to be gloriously chill weekends in which we do nothing but eat, hang out, and, apparently, walk up and down the same few streets in the mission over and over again.

i love these weekends. i love the ease and comfort of them.

anyway, so, it's been a week of recuperating because i'd no idea how much i'd driven myself past the point of exhaustion to finish this manuscript. it means it's been hard to find words for much of anything, to put my thoughts down cohesively, to mull over things. in san francisco, i went to see ingrid goes west, which i liked, and it made me think about social media and instagram and what is real and what is authentic and what is a personal brand and at what point does the brand subsume authenticity and turn it into a gimmick? it made me think about celebrity and how much i hate celebrity and how much i dislike it when someone's persona, her personal brand, takes the spotlight over her work and her work becomes secondary. it made me think about how much i dislike it when a woman will skill and infinite potential chooses that for herself, and it made me think about that part of myself that reacts so instinctively negatively to that because maybe there’s something odd about that, about how, for someone who writes so much about her own self, the self as brand makes me so uncomfortable.

i’m aware of all the contradictions in my sentiments.

like i said, though, i’m still recuperating, still letting my brain take things easy this week, so we’ll have to revisit all of that later. have a good weekend, all! there’s a massive cookbook post coming soon!

the brave in the mundane.

August 15, 2017

sometimes, LA looks like soho, just sans the throngs of people, and it makes me homesick. in 32 days, i’ll be back home in brooklyn, and it’ll only be for a weekend, but i am so, so excited, especially because i'll be there for the brooklyn book festival, and i am very much looking forward to that. i've gone every year since i moved back to NYC in 2012, and i was worried i'd miss it this year, but i shan't!

but, ugh, where to begin — what a horrific weekend we’ve seen, what gross displays of despicable human behavior, from the privileged who lit up tiki torches and waved confederate flags and proudly toted the swastika to the ones at home who raise, love, and support the people on the streets and the institutions that enforce that privilege to the cheeto in the white house who’s been faster to call out women by name but wouldn’t condemn white supremacists.

ugh.

anyway, hi, i’m having a hard time coming up with words, so here are some words i put up on instagram on sunday, words i've expanded on here.

the 2016 election has exposed and fortified a lot of the ugliness many of us knew still existed in this country, in this world, and the horrible reality is that that this ugliness is going to continue exhibiting itself in the near future. we're going to see a lot more fragile white [male] egoes exploding in irrational, hate-fueled rage, and we're going to see a lot more white privilege protecting itself in the delusion of "but i'm not like that," never mind that that statement itself betrays complicity.

we're going to get more statements from politicians but no action that supports said statements or moves toward change, and we're going to get more half-hearted, easily-appeased pseudo-disapproval from GOP congressmen over the mess that currently occupies our seat of government. we're going to get more senseless racist, bigoted, sexist tweets from the cheeto, emboldening the racism, bigotry, and misogyny that will further endanger the lives and livelihoods of POC, queer and straight, whatever our gender and/or our beliefs.

we're going to have days when it's easier to rally en masse and put up a fight. we're going to have days when it's easier to be diligent about keeping up with the shit our governments, whether federal, state, or local, are trying to pull to take away our rights. we're going to have days when it's easier to know what we're fighting for, to believe that change is possible, that the better future of equality we're hoping for can and will be the reality in which our children and their children grow up.

the other side is that we're going to have days when everything is simply harder. we're going to have days when it all feels futile, when change seems impossible, when the world appears to have progressed one step only to be regressing ten. we're going to have days when we feel small and insignificant, when we feel like we're just one human, one insignificant, scared, tiny human, and what can we accomplish when we're nobody and the whole of society seems to be against us, determined to see us as subhuman, to take away our rights but claim ownership of our bodies, our labor, our cultures?

but here is this: bravery isn't about super-strength or super-smarts or super-whatever. it's not about being an extraordinary human being. bravery is simply getting up in the morning and going about your day as best you can, refusing to fold over in the face of hatred.

bravery is being you, whoever you are, and existing because, sometimes, simply being here, being present, being alive in a hostile world is the most powerful form of rebellion there is because it's staking claim to your right to exist, to be seen and treated fairly, to be respected and known. it seems like nothing, going to work, taking your kids to school, paying your taxes, worshipping at your chosen place of worship, shopping for groceries and household supplies and clothes, but it's not nothing — with every act, you say, i have every right to be here, and the truth is that it's no small thing to be a POC, a queer person, a woman out and about in the world. that alone requires so much bravery, more bravery than we might even imagine we contain, although we do.

so i'm going to say this again: stay.

even in the face of all the hatred and violence and truly disgusting displays of human behavior we're seeing these days, stay. don't hide. don't run. don't take your own life.

stay. stay and fight, and, together, we'll make this world a better place. stay.

here are a few articles, some good reading amidst all the crap, because i spend a lot of time at work reading articles, and these are a few that have stuck with me.

01. missbish, “bringing heat in and out of the kitchen”
might as well start with something nice about someone who makes me smile, and i’m sure my crush on kristen kish has been well documented by now, so here, start with some kristen.

02. missbish, “the youtube who feels like a best friend”
i. love. claire. i secretly think about running into her in DTLA (or just, LA) and being her friend because the article title is right — claire marshall really does feel like a best friend, and her vlogs are my favorite. sometimes, i don’t know why they’re so fun to watch; they’re literally of her running errands and talking into the camera and doing boring day-to-day things; but i love them. i find them so soothing.

03. electric literature, "jenny zhang doesn't care if you feel comfortable"
jenny's been doing some spectacular interviews during her press tour for sour heart (random house, 2017) (just do yourself a favor and read this fabulous collection already), but this one miiiiight be my favorite so far. if i had to pick a favorite.

(this one with i-D is also fabulous. and this one with lithub.)

04. the white review, "interview with han kang"
han's human acts (portobello, 2016) is one of my favorite books about one of the most horrific acts in contemporary korean history, and the way han writes trauma is so visceral and intense and thoughtful.

05. the white review, "interview with jorge semprun"
also this from the white review: i first read this interview while doing research for a comp lit course in 2011, and i still think about it now, six years later. i love what he has to say about memory.

06. the new yorker, jia tolentino
tolentino has been killing it for the new yorker recently. i was going to try to pick a favorite, but i decided i didn't want to, so here's her archive instead. have at it; she's great.

07. salon, "kate mckinnon and hollywood's big gay test"
i love kate (who doesn't?), and her career is one worth watching, not only as that of a great comedic actress but also as that of an openly gay woman in a still-long-ways-to-go-as-far-as-any-kind-of-diversity-goes industry. i hope she continues on the rise; she's just too good.