UFO in Kushiro (Slogtastically Late)

When trying to address the question of why we tell and read stories in which bad things happen, particularly in the lens of the Murakami story, I keep thinking back to the line in the middle when Shimao says to Komura: "No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself."  The fears and terrors which we simulate through literature are in fact idealizations of the self, fears and terrors actualized by the text through the self.  It is as though to garner the experience (and complexities, and thrills) that come from the bad things that happen, yet to avoid the risks, we crave stories in which the reader-self (which we cannot escape) reconstructs even the harshest realities.

We read stories in which bad things happen in part, generally, so the self learns.  The self cannot escape its own self-contained optimism, its sense that things will get better, in which case, it would be useful to learn from bad experience.  I think this is a long term goal for the self, though, and that the reader-self does not always see it this way so directly at first.  At first, we may read literature in which bad things happen, not necessarily out of schadenfreude or ill humor, but because there is a capacity to wonder at the vastness of ill fate that is possible for us.  There is a capacity to wonder at the vastness of the pain and suffering we find the capacity to nearly inflict on ourselves, through the act of reading alone.

This past fall, Professor Landy co-taught a course called Literature and the Brain, in which he introduced a variety of questions, one among them, which we read books that "do not make us happy." Aside from the "I must make my way through this text because ultimately, somehow, it will make me a better person" attitude, which he claimed to be the attitude for reading in general, Landy claimed that we read about bad things also because the act of imagining things that (hopefully) don't usually cross our thoughts activates parts of the brain that often lie in disuse, and the neurotransmitters that travel abundantly after this unexpected activation causes a kind of pleasant sensation, even a slight activation of dopamine receptors.  This is a product of vivid fantasy-making anyway.  "We need illusions to make us happy," Landy said, according to my notes from the class.  Indeed, such happiness breathes only within the stretches, from outskirt to outskirt, of the self.

Poetry Slam 2nd Literary Event

I arrived home for summer with one last assignment to complete. With perfect timing, A friend of mine invited me to a poetry slam at one of the clubs in downtown Minneapolis. I realized I could kill two birds with one stone. Complete my literary assignment, and have a good time with my friends as well; I’ve been to one other poetry slam in my life, and I loved it. The energy the performers bring to the stage leaves an electrifying tingle lingering in the air. I went with the intent to have a blast.

The club was dimly lit, and cool colors shone off the walls. My friends and I melded with the drunk mass, as we tunneled our way through to nab a good spot. The lights pointed towards the stage come on as the first performer comes out. A short girl with a short haircut, glasses, and a bow tie steps up to the mic.  She performed an original poem that detailed her struggles coming out as a lesbian. Her performance was astounding. She really drew the crowd in and had an amazing stage presence. To paraphrase her poem,  She first talked about her realization when she was a young girl. She realized she was a bit different than the other girls, because she never liked the same things as them. All of her friends wanted to play with dolls, but she was never into those kinds of things. She told us that growing up was sort of a struggle for her, as her mother was deeply religious. She details a few discussions she has with her mother, that were very intense.

The next guy that came on the stage was tall and broad shouldered with a jet black pony tail and olive toned skin. He had a button up shirt with the top button left open and a silver feather necklace gleaming from his neck. He performed a poem about his Native-American heritage. This guy had an awesome use of imagery in his poem, I could vividly picture a lot of what he described. He detailed the loss of his culture and language over time and how it affected his family. He also talked about the general poverty of his community, and gave us a description of living life in a Native-American project. It was extremely deep and emotional. I was starting to love this poetry slam.

The rest of the night consisted of a couple people continuing the trend of original poetry pieces, and then a couple bands played a song each. Finally, the event ended with someone reciting Shakespeare’s My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun. This piece I found particularly beautiful. The poem was extremely fluid and pleasant to the ears. It has made me want to read a collection of Shakespeare sonnets this summer. Maybe memorize one or two. I hope there are more poetry slams I can attend this summer. I left that performance with even more appreciation for poetry slams than when I walked in.

Literary Event: Undergraduate Awards

My second reading of the quarter was also a reading from my fellow students. The Undergraduate Awards were packed with  Something I found not incredibly surprising but seemed to really stand out to me was just how different undergraduate readings are from many professional readings. I forget that for many of my classmates, although they are incredibly talented writers, reading their own pieces, and becoming comfortable to do so in their own intended voices, is not something they have much experience doing. If not for the experience of the reading alone, I thought that it was really great to see other students showcase their work. I am still most interested in prose but this was the first time I felt that I truly appreciated the poems- something I had not done much of before actually studying poetry this quarter. While I thought all of the pieces were very unique and deserving of their prizes, two of them espcecially stuck out to me.

One individual whose piece I enjoyed was George Malkin- although he is in no way new to these undergraduate awards. He did bring a bit of performance into the story, speaking in different voices for his various characters, but that is not why I enjoyed it considering I did not think the best aspect of his writing was his dialogue. Instead, I really enjoyed the narrative of his story and it was something that I felt was very flavorful and unexpected from a student. There were many images throughout his reading that really stuck with me and I liked how visual his writing was.

Katie Wu, another writer who has won her fair share of literary recognition while at Stanford, had a simple yet powerful piece, entitled “The Haircut,” which was probably my favorite of the night. There is something in the way of Katie’s writing that can really address deeper emotional and psychological issues without being too heavy-handed. This piece was non-fiction and told an anecdote about the only time Katie remembers her father laughing, while he was alive. The emotional connection Katie had with the story caused it to be properly charged both on paper and in her actual reading and even though there were very humorous instances in the piece, when Katie talks about her mother’s response after seeing that her daughter had chopped off all her hair, there is a gravity to the piece that is always there but does not detract from the lighter moments. I felt that she striked this balance beautifully and when thinking about all the things we wrote on the board at the beginning of this class about what we expect or want in a good narrative, I do not think this piece was wanting in much.

Literary Event: Poetry Out Loud

Because I have a personal preference for prose, I have a tendency to go to readings of those who write prose, specific fiction. In fact, something I realized when I was at this event is that “Poetry Out Loud” was the first poetry reading I have attended during my time at Stanford even though I have been to more readings than I can count. It was a bit different than I expected but proved to be very dynamic nonetheless.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this competition was how diverse all the different readings were. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” for example was read very playfully, as expected, but the student brought into the piece a different, humorous voice for each one of the characters in the poem. It was impressive to hear all of these distinct parts be imagined, breathing new life into this poem which is already pretty humorous and entertaining in itself. I felt as though children could have sat there and listened and, although they may have not understood each word, they would have enjoyed the story immensely.

There was one spoken-word piece of the night titled 'Beethoven.' I realized, upon completion of the competition but, before the announcement of the winners, that I am clearly biased toward the genre. Although the actual piece was not as strong because it is not a poetry classic, wholeheartedly enjoyed how dynamic the reader’s performance of the piece was. However, speaking with others about the aims of the competition made it clear how out-of-place this piece sort of stood when compared to the others. I thought that it was this reader’s vibrant reading that made me really feel and see this piece. However, when I saw it online that night and watched the same poem performed with much less theatrics, I realized it was more the nature of the way spoken word pieces run and flow that allow them to induce emotional responses from their audience.

Along the same vain, one thing that really surprised me was the third place prize. "The Idea of Key Order" by Alicia Triana was read confidently and steadily, but that was about all I thought of it throughout the night. When commending Alicia for her reading, the judges mentioned that she did not seem to try to impose any meaning or emphasis on the piece but instead just read it as is. In my opinion, the lack of theatrics made this piece fall a bit flat and I was not sure I understood why this would be the ideal for a poem like this. I also wondered if any performance would have been favored because if it lacked some of the theatrics it had or if Alicia’s piece was favored for this reason because of the kind of poem it was. In my opinion, it may have just been inappropriate to add much emotion to the kind of poem she had. But I did not agree that a piece like “The Walrus and the Carpenter” was taken away from, only supplemented, by the reader’s bringing in a more creative performance.

Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' was the very last poem read and was incredibly strong, eventually winning first place. I am very familiar with this piece and while it is already a pretty loaded poem, I felt amazed that the reader’s performance still made me see Plath’s words again for the first time. Something that was very masterful about this reader was how evident it was that each choice she made was purposeful and full of meaning. Her dealing of line breaks and punctuation was great and even though I did not have the physical poem ahead of me, I could almost hear the places in which Plath meant for the piece to sit and linger over the reader. This reading was violent but also matter-of-fact, displaying the intensity of the poem but not relying solely on it, but instead very professionally and carefully dealing with each detail.

Literary Event: 2013 International Virginia Woolf Conference

I’ve never cracked the spine of a Virginia Woolf book, but last week I was a featured speaker at the 2013 International Annual Virginia Woolf Conference in Vancouver. Using computationally driven macroanalytic techniques, I didn’t have to.

For a class on digital methods for critical analysis (a truly Stanford version of a humanities class), my best friend and I developed a classifier in the R programming language to sort out stylistic similarities between Woolf’s diary entries and her characters’ streams of consciousnesses in her novels, none of which we had read.

The fruits of our labor included such startling revelations as, “In general, the characters of the Waves (with the exception being Rhoda) very

strongly exhibited a classified with the year 1928, with Bernard, Jinny, and Neville classifying

into ’28 with 92%, 94%, and 86% confidence respectively.”

If the magnitude of this discovery is lost on you, I will admit that it’s lost on me as well. In presenting our findings to Stanford’s foremost Virginia Woolf scholar at the end of our digital methods my class, my friend and I had no idea the significance of any of our results. Consequently, I had a fantastic opportunity to improv a presentation, the topic of which I was stunningly ignorant on. Essentially, I had to iteratively proffer statistical information and various interpretations, gauge which reactions seemed most right, and continue from there.

In what was sort of the ultimate version of getting an 'A' on that book report on that summer reading book you never read but actually spark noted, Stanford gave my friend and me both grants to fly to Vancouver and present at the international Virginia Woolf Conference last week in Vancouver. Kidding aside, our research was actually interesting and opens new doors into humanities studies, even if I'm neither a particularly adept programmer, statistician, or Virginia Woolf scholar; rather, I just happened to be at the right school at the right time with the appropriate.

As for the Woolf conference, itself, it was a truly strange experience entering briefly into such a small world with such a shared, fervent interest that I knew and know nothing about. Weirder than that was being caught in the middle of it—having an old, hunched-back Woolf scholar with a strong dutch accent, for instance, come up to myself and my buddy telling her about how important our research approach could be for her study of the use of color words in Virginia Woolf's corpus. Certainly, however, it made for a funny little story. 

Literary Event: Anne Carson

It's difficult for me to begin this post, talking about Carson, in no small part because of what she means to me.  She means a great deal.  A friend gave me her slim first volume, Short Talks, as a gift in my junior year of high school.  One might say "I read it like the bible," but I don't read the bible.  I'll say instead I read it like my email, refreshing it frequently -- or rather, finding what was fresh in it over continuous reading.  I have read several of her books, most recently "Red Doc>."  Her work confuses me and rewards me when I don't expect it.  Different lines mean differently, or are of varying importance, at different times in my life.  A lot of her work I won't understand sheerly based on where I am in my life right now.  What I can understand, and for which I must reestablish my understanding, produces what Nabokov called "the indescribable tingle of the spine."  His phrase requires, I think, no explanation.

At her reading, Carson read from Short Talks.  She read the one on Gertrude Stein and also one of my favorites, on driving across the Rockies with her family while reading Madam Bovary, looking up at the pine trees.  The 'punchline' of that story is that now any time she sees hair on the arms of a woman, she thinks "deciduous."  This concept Carson alludes to, of the mind jumping great distances to form associations between one thing to the next, to form coherency -- the mind's instinctive allegiance to narrative and narrative construction -- is what most distinctly defines Carson's work for me, and what attracts me to it.  It is this notion that (with plainspeech) the beauty of writing is not so much what the writer has put down on the page, but rather, the work the reader performs in filling in the gaps from what the writer left out.  The story is co-constructed by the writer and the reader who narrativizes with whatever material's been given.  The story might not even exist in fact, by definition, if there weren't an audience.  We own what we read with more authority than we often afford ourselves.

Perhaps why I love Carson most is the way she compels me to do work, to fill in the gaps given the knowledge she provides.  These gaps are filled with inference and with observations from my own life.  This not only makes the poetry more personable, something of my own chalice, but also ensures that the meaning will change as my life changes.  I can never fill the gaps with exactly the same cement twice.  

My favorite short talk, one of my shifting chalices, is from the end of the collection.  She did not read it.  However, it most strongly colors my reading of Carson and my impressions of her from her visit here, so I will share it below.  It is called "On Hedonism":

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care
why anymore I just want to get away. 
When I look at the city of Paris I long
to wrap my legs around it. When I
watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead calm
sea. Desires as round as peaches
bloom in me all night, I no longer
gather what falls.


I feel like I have filled my life around the blank spaces in the poem, in the line breaks, between the punctuation.  Something blooms in me when I read Carson, but I do not collect it, it is dark, I can't tell what it is.  

Literary Event: TC Boyle

I went into TC Boyle's reading without any knowledge of his work.  Before I walked over to Cemex, I Google Image searched him to get an idea of what he looked like, because a) clearly that way I'd learn more about him than by actually reading one of his stories, and b) it wasn't like I'd be seeing him anyway in twenty minutes or something like that.  I thought he looked like some famous actor, but couldn't put my finger on who.  My roommate agreed, yes he certainly does look like someone from a blockbuster, but she couldn't offer any name either.   He looked vaguely piratey I thought, but it could have just been the earring.

Boyle's appearance presaged his performance a little in the way one hears the entirety of a familiar melody release in the mind, briefly and prophetically, when the first chord strikes.  He wore a yellow suit jacket.  He looked like a banana.  But his voice -- metrically crisp, sonically clear, resonant, commanding -- contrasted the comedy but did not belie it; rather, introduced the confluence of two understandings, the light and the meaningful, the diverting and the enduring, which remained fixtures through the story he read.  The Lie, a short story which took Boyle thirty minutes to read aloud -- including pauses containing both dramatic effect and moments of release for audience laughter -- actually, and with no exaggeration, kept me leaning forward in my seat the entire time.

The Lie is not a unique story, but it was told individually and distinctively well.  More than anything else, it particularized the kinds of feelings and experiences we experience generally, experience in part, or experience with an intent to forget.  The story focalized around a man who doesn't want to go to work, calls sick, goes to the movies, and repeats.  The catch is that he must offer taller and taller lies to his boss and coworkers in order to keep up his absences, ultimately lying over the "death" of his infant daughter.  Perhaps the most stomach-twisting part of the narrative is when his coworkers force him to accept a grocery bag full of cash as an offer of condolences.  What does he do with it?  He shoves it under the kitchen sink -- and when his wife gets a sympathy call and finds the cash, it's game over.

While Boyle's story certainly made me think of the lies we tell in our lives -- their potential for enormity, the anxiety -- it also made me think of the place of lies in fiction.  Fiction as an act and study appeals to me, in part, because of the way it makes useful three of my least useful abilities: lying, exaggeration, and daydreaming.  Boyle's story compels us to consider not only the lies we find in stories, but the stories we find in lies, and the narrative propulsion that's found in our swift ability to distort reality.  If you tell a lie often enough, you begin to believe it, and fiction serves the purpose of reifying a fib's proposed reality.

This discussion reminds me of an earlier discussion we had in the course, when we were studying trauma narrative -- what is the nature and place of "truth" in narrative?  What are its limits, and when does the "unreal" represent the truth more accurately than reality?  I am asking this question with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried particularly in mind; O'Brien often tells "untrue" stories because they hit at "the truth of the matter," the lasting impressions, more effectively than "what really happened."  Boyle's story The Lie exemplified, in a way, not only the gripping potential of a lie, but the gripping potential of storytelling, which does not easily discriminate what is a lie from what is not (or even if it is important.)

Gary Snyder Reading

I had the strange experience of sitting next to someone who drew portraits of Snyder throughout his reading.  This friend of mine had to for an art class; apparently the instructor thought Gary Snyder to be a particularly interesting subject to sketch.  He was correct.  The lines in his face just fell so beautifully.  His hooded eyes would open at these wonderful little moments in the reading.  They had these big bags under them, twice the size of the eyes themselves. 

Because of this, I remember nothing of what he read, aside from him speaking somewhat about his experiences with Zen Buddhism.  I likely only recall this because I was in Ken Field’s Beat Lit class last quarter and we read No Nature and Zen Mind, Beginners Mind.  Fields kept saying that this was probably the last time he would do a reading at Stanford, he’s getting old and he lives in the backcountry somewhere, so it’s an effort to come out and do readings for chirping students and graduate contenders.  And all I remember is the way he looked.

I was so struck by how small he was, because his words always seemed so big to me.  His head was enormous compared to the rest of his body, I loved that.  His shoulders seemed so narrow.  I remember him wearing a flannel shirt but I must have made that I up.  Throughout the reading I imagined him as a wood logger, just like Paul Newman or Henry Fonda in Sometimes a Great Notion.  His beard was also quite wonderful.  He would take off his glasses and put them back on, this did not depend on whether or not he was reading.  I thought this was odd but I loved when he would just hold the frames in his hand as he was making a point.

I also remember being very annoyed by the crowd because it seemed so much like what I had expected.  The sort of kids my age I figured would be into him, the hippies from town.  I think I was really just upset because I thought this reading was my secret and I wouldn’t see so many people there.  Really it was lovely to have so many people there, laughing and listening to his words.

Anne Carson Readings

I first encountered Anne Carson’s work in Eavan Boland’s Women Poets class last year.  We read “The Glass Essay,” the heftiest work we read all quarter.  I remember avoiding it any way I could, but recommendations from others in class got the better of me.  I was absolutely enthralled by it in my first reading.  I loved Emily Bronte the “wacher”, I was disturbed and excited by Glass’s appropriation of Bronte’s life and its stagnancy.  She told us that Anne Carson would hopefully be visiting the following year, and I’ve been waiting eagerly since.

She was incredibly lovely in her reading at Cemex, and I was near tears throughout, sometimes because of her tremendous wit and sometimes because of her crushing insight on matters of grief and suffering.  Her voice was incredible.  I’m almost invariably struck by readings from poets.  The text always bends under their inflections.  Her deadpan style could become so disarming under the weight of her words.  She described a woman asking the person at her bedside to help her pluck the hairs that had started to form under her chin.  I did not weep but I wanted to.  I regret it now.  I can’t return to that place when I simply read that work.

There’s something also to be said for her appearance.  I hadn’t ever thought about how she might look.  It seems ridiculous to note, but she was beautiful I just wanted her to keep reading, to keep talking. 

Boland’s Poetry and Poetics class met for her Colloquium as well, over in Bechtel.  This put a damper on my experience with Carson.  The additional reading included a pseudo performance piece from her husband, who moved disjointedly around the room with a piece of string, the other end of which was attached somewhere almost of reach beside a window.  I was annoyed and frustrated, and remember none of her words.  The class she taught also participated in a piece, and another involved multiple voices layered in a chorus of mostly repeated phrases.  It seemed somehow pitiful, and I remember being angry that she had wasted her talent.  It was only thirty minutes of time with a free lunch after, I don’t really know what I was on about that day.

Wolf Shmid on "Eventfulness"

     It has come to my attention that the scholar Wolf Shmid is one of the world's leading voices in the field of Narratology. This was totally unbeknown to me on April 24, the day he was to give his talk. Strangely enough, however, I was also invited to have lunch with him earlier on the same day. 

     Lunch rolled along awkwardly. A taciturn man, in my opinion, should not expose himself to these type of contrived situations. Ten of us sat around him expectantly, unsure of what to do, as Wolf looked down and calculatedly considered the spoon's trajectory from the plate to his mouth, plate to his mouth. 

     The day was sultry, and thin wisps of steam rose from the soup. Dark rings appeared under Wolf's armpits. Nervous twitches sporadically shook the table. I felt the food fall all the way down to my stomach, and could hear distinct crunching and slurping sounds around me. Good God, I thought to myself, am I the one destined to save us from this awful muck? I looked around, and confirmed it. Just as I cleared my throat, the man beside me spoke out.

     -"Hi there, Mr. Shmid, I was wondering if you had any advice for neophyte graduate students?" 

     It was too late to save now. The worst question that could have possibly been asked had been put forth as an ice-breaker. The frozen faces turning toward Wolf knew it was up to him now. 

    Wolf looked up from his soup at the man with a quizzical expression, and with a slight smirk, said "No." Honest and taciturn are a bad combination. 

    In any case, the lunch proved entertaining in the end, seeing all those students try to squirm their way out of the mire with meaningless questions. Wolf glided through it impervious to any nonsense, quietly self-assured throughout. I took a liking to him. 

    Hours later, Wolf sat at a long, wooden desk, before a group of 20 people, consisting of the ten students at the lunch, and ten members of the Slavic Department, all crammed in a tiny room.  

    The talk was about "Eventfulness," a category that was first introduced into the narratological discussion by the Russian theorist Jurij Lotman. Essentially, Wolf defined it as an important narrative phenomenon and a major narratological tool applicable to all media representing changes of state. Eventfulness gained the upper hand only with the prose of sentimentalism and romanticism around 1800. The event was increasingly modelled as a change in the internal, mental state of a character. 

    This development culminated in the novels by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in which, of course, a varied abundance of event concepts are deployed. While the novels of the two realists show people who have the capacity to undergo fundamental transformations and transcend the boundaries of morality and the logic of personality, Wolf compared these to Chekhov’s post-realist narratives, which place a major question mark over the eventfulness of the world and the ability of people to change. 

    Chekhov’s narration is centered on interrogating the idea of a mental event, an existential or social insight, an emotional switch, or an ethical/practical reorientation. If an event does not occur, the tellability of the stories lies in how they represent its prevention, in how they illustrate the reasons that lead to the intention of change and prevent it from being realized.

     It was a dense lecture and a complex array of ideas to digest. It was excessively dogmatic, and one of my conclusions toward the end was how much more productive the approach we took in class was. It seems practical to be aware and informed about these theoretical concepts, but the art of storytelling and narrative can never be fully boiled down to a set of rules. I left with a question: Doesn't the exercise of narrative disembowelment go against the creative, delightfully immediate impulse of literature?  

Lyric Novel to Lyric Stage - An Amusing Circumstance

I happened to get a last minute ticket to this presentation during the English Department Senior Farewell gathering. I sat next to department chair Gavin Jones and we chatted about the department and general life subjects. Neither of us had any expectations for this (play? reading? presentation? something?) and I was very excited to see what was going to happen.

The play/reading started out with a small video introduction from the novel's author. He gave the premise of the show, which was to highlight the challenges and outcome of turning a lyrical novel into a musical play. Then the director of the play and four readers took the stage. The director gave humorous presentations about what was difficult during the translation, which parts he thought were particularly important to translate correctly, and parts where he took creative license to do what he wanted to achieve the proper affect. The readers would take turns reading sections that the director spoke about. They read well and had good voices. After the readings they would show parts of the play on screen. That was probably the best part, seeing the professional actors act out the novel.

The process that the director talked about was very interesting and all the problems he stated made sense. When do you add more or less emphasis and/or emotion to a scene? What about times when the novel is less explicit? What do you do then? The novel ends with a letter, but the play ends a scene after which the director included and wrote himself. I liked how he was able to take creative license and end the novel in a completely different way and the experience as a whole shed light on taking a novel and giving it more visual effects.

Levinthal Reading

The Levinthal Reading was my first experience reading a piece of my own fictional work in front of an audience. Its one thing to make a speech about something towards your classmates, its a completely different thing to go out to the podium and read something of you've made up. Needless to say, I practiced the entire day when I had free time so that I wouldn't mess up during my reading. I was supposed to go eighth, but my friends had to leave early so I bumped myself up to third. I was nervous. I sat next to my friend who was also reading her work, and we did our best to relax our nerves even though it seemed pointless. The wait was the first part. I hardly remember the people who went before me; I do remember being very impressed by their work. I whispered to my friend "man, what kind of shit are we writing." We laughed some tension off. Then my name was called.

I'm told I read quite well. That I didn't look nervous at all. Contrary to belief, I was extremely nervous (I believe my hands were shaking slightly and I felt very cold) and, according to my writing, I read poorly (and I'm pretty sure I forgot to mention the title of my piece). But something I learned is that it was all about my presentation of the writing, not necessarily the writing itself. I messed up a couple of times, but no one knew it. I improvised and it went well. Once I was finished I relaxed and it felt really good to have read my piece in front of people. While it is not something I will revisit any time soon, it is something I am capable of doing. And it was fun reading my piece aloud.

Carson Reading in Cemex

I loved this reading. Carson walked on stage and everyone was clapping. The clapping stopped before she got to the podium and she turned and told use to keep clapping, it was very funny. Carson started by reading some poetry by an ancient greek poet, Sappho I think, that she had translated. Some of it was very funny, some of it was very dark. Carson was very deadpan. Then she read an essay she wrote about Proust, which was essentially a collection of fifty nine thoughts she had about his work. The essay was at once insightful and hilarious. Again, Carson was entirely deadpan. It was a very cool approach to literary criticism and made me want to read Proust, despite the fact that it took Carson years and years to get through his novel. Carson immediately struck me as a very emotionally mature and intelligent person. She was well dressed and seemed to be very in control of herself. I had read 'The Glass Essay' before, I was surprised by her in person, I didn't expect her to have such a wonderful sense of humor. I expected her to be like Sylvia Plath or something. 

Carson then read some of her own work. She read a poem about a daughter and a dying mother that almost made me cry. Then she said, 'that was sad,' and had everyone in the audience participate in the last two poems she read by shouting the last words. This was probably one of the best readings I've been too. Carson seemed like the coolest lady ever. I felt myself wanting to be able to do her some kind of enormous favor, wishing I could run into her at the grocery store with way too many bags and help her with them or something, I don't know. For about an hour or however long the reading was, she owned the entire audience. Everyone was clapping at the end, she shyly sat down on the stage and started talking to Eavan Boland. We were all still clapping, she looked up and said 'you can go now.' Again, very funny. This reading just made me wish I had had enough free units to take a class with her this year. This talk definitely made me a big Carson fan, she was great.

Gary Snyder Reading

I was in Ken Field's class last quarter and we read Gary Snyder's 'No Nature.' Ken, of course, urged us to see Snyder when he came to campus this quarter. This reading was pretty much what I expected. Snyder read some of poetry, sang a little, and rambled a lot. He talked about eastern philosophy, haiku, and the environment. He told us about his place in Nevada and all the different generators he has out there. He has three, at one point they all broke. He also has a cherry tree that he uses to tell seasonal time. There was some kind of larger, climatic phenomena he had learned about from the tree and he explained it to us, but it went over my head a little because I was paying more attention to Snyder himself than what he was actually saying. I got the impression that Synder was a very smart, funny guy, but that he mostly lived with his own ideas and was pretty isolated. Some of what he said made a lot of sense, some of it I felt was a little looney.

Snyder read a lot of translated work, some of it I think was by Basho. I could definitely see what an influence Japan had had on Snyder's work. He talked about how some of the best poets never became famous until they were dead. There were a lot of funny moments durring this talk, Snyder is a pretty personable guy. I was impressed by how calm he was, even as he was being a bit of a goof. He seemed like a very patient, observant, and nice guy. I was also struck by how old and little he was, he had this great big voice coming out of him, out of his little wrinkled face and scraggly beard. The audience was also cool, there were lots of older ex-hippies in the audience, sometimes watching them was just as fun as watching Snyder.

Literary Event #2: Words on Water, Urban Narratives

On June 1^st, I attended Words on Water, a literary panel event that aimed to engage “India and America in conversation.” It opened with a Talk on Visual Arts by Dr. Dan Herwitz, who spoke on his parents’ expansive, avant-garde collection of modern Indian art: it’d grown to over six thousand pieces by the end of their lives. The works included paintings inspired by Picasso, and I especially liked the work of Bikash Bhattacharya.

The talk then transitioned into Urban Narratives, a literary panel featuring three Indian-American authors, Vikram Chandra, Sonia Faleiro, and Saikat Majumdar (one of my current professors), moderated by filmmaker Laleh Khadivi. Chandra’s and Majumdar’s fiction novels, Sacred Heart and Silverfish, as well as Faleiro’s nonfiction book Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, all take place in Bombay, and required the writers to travel back to their home country as part of the writing process.

The discussion began with Khadivi asking why the writers chose to use Bombay for their book’s setting. Chandra, who wrote a crime novel, said that Bombay was “fit” for large-scale crimes and corruption. Majumdar had depressing memories of 80s Calcutta—a city he deemed similar to Bombay—and wanted to write about “what happens when a city is left behind, when nothing happens to it.” Faleiro was intrigued by Bombay residents’ ideas of success: what is considered “success” and growth under extreme pressure and poverty? Is it pushing off your daughter’s marriage until her teenage years, as opposed to toddler years? After all, first-world countries would still consider that unwise and inappropriate.

The panel’s second half made me think about the research stage of the writing process, particularly for the story’s setting: how much time do you need to spend in a city to portray it as accurately as possible? How do you “get into your city,” but keep a balanced perspective? Faleiro admitted that she tried to live the same life as her subjects to fulfill her “obsession with the most correct representation,” but would always remain an outsider. After five years of immersive research, however, she realized that Bombay life was becoming, quite dangerously, “everyday life” to her. Eventual distance, all three writers stressed, is what actually sharpens one’s focus on a specific setting. You need purposeful alienation from your city, or things that would stand out to the stranger’s eye might become invisible to yours. I thought that the idea of “purposeful alienation” was very helpful advice for my own writing—not only does it apply to settings, but to characters and events as well. 

Novel of my life (Very late)

                The novel of my life. If anyone were to write it, it would definitely be me. I think I could do a good job with it. I think it would be interesting. I have a lot to gain from writing about myself, and I think a lot of it would have important universal echoes. My youth was often very dramatic. My parents divorced, beginning when I was nine, and their battle tainted all of our lives (I have a brother who is 2 years younger than me) for the next five years. It continued to haunt us through my high school years. My parents had been together since they were fifteen . Their divorce shattered a part of my mother, and it brought forth in her a wound that had been concealed by my father’s love and commitment to her. This wound had been a part of her since she was an infant. Her biological father left her and her mother when she was just one year old. He was a drunk. This was not the wound; she wouldn’t remember him leaving. What happened was that my grandmother arranged meetings between my mother and her father, his name is Jesse, and Jesse almost invariably blew off these meetings, crushing my mother. My grandma has told me that my mother, at three and four years old, would wear her nicest dress, have her do up her hair, and wait with a big smile for her father to come see her. And then he wouldn’t come. And now I sit here writing this just imagining the moment, maybe thirty minutes past time, when my grandmother would have to tell my precious little mother that her father wasn’t coming, that she could take off the dress. One particular account of this pattern my own father told me about fairly recently, during one of our many conversations silently intended to help us better understand the divorce and its aftermath: what happened, why things happened, and what we do now. He told me that one time after my grandmother had realized Jesse wasn’t coming, she took my mother to a convenience store to buy a treat, a candy bar or an ice cream or something. While they were in the store, Jesse tromped through the door with a couple friends, all of them drunk. I can’t imagine without cringing the disgust that must have pulsed through my grandmother at that moment, and the base psychological trauma inflicted upon my young, tender mother. I almost think emotional trauma is worth than physical trauma, but I only am familiar with the former, thankfully. Anyway, why I bring this up, why this anecdote figures into my own life, is that I am intensely interested in how large packets of energy are submerged and then how and why they are released way later in one’s life.  Further, I am also interested in how these energies perhaps never die, or are completely expelled from people, I have a theory that these energies are only transferred, undergoing some kind of transformation, from one person to another. I believe that my mother’s frustration,her  hate for her father found a vessel for expression, now that she was more articulate and intelligent than her toddler self, in my father’s leaving her. And I witnessed much of this drama, and it, in turn, formed me, especially as I became older, began to question my mother, and began to have my own drama with her, and now I feel that in some way, somehow, I carry the same hate that caused Jesse, my blood grandfather, to treat his daughter so terribly. I strongly believe that these ideas are worth my extensive exploration.

2 Posts 2 Late

[Okay, not really too late, but I couldn't resist the title. They're only 'late' because the readings were so long ago. Also, I should mention that this is two posts in one physical post for your reading convenience.]

Anne Carson Reading (in Cemex)

I always find myself unexpectedly confused and amused after reading Anne Carson, so it was no surprise that her reading left me with the same ambivalence.

The confusion arises, as I’m sure it does for most, from the – for lack of a better word – weirdness of most of her work. While normally I would be limited to slandering her artistic wit as ‘weird,’ at this reading I realized that a large part of my confusion is not so much an inability on my part to latch onto some sort of meaning in her work – though there is plenty of that – as much as it is a vicarious assumption of what someone else might think of her work, this hypothetical person being someone who’s not an English major, or someone who studies Classics, etc. In other words, I found myself irked by the esoteric nature of her work. (I also shudder at having to use the word ‘esoteric’ to describe something esoteric, but that’s an issue for another blog post.)

When I say “the esoteric nature of her work,” what I’m really thinking of is the Proust piece. To be perfectly honest, as I’m writing this (far too long after the reading than I should be), all I remember is lot of referencing (maybe even quoting?) Proust, and drawing parallels between her life, or some speaker’s/narrator’s life. Now, as someone who considers himself not necessarily well read, but at least on the way to well read, I feel the need to say that I have not read Proust. I know him only because he is so often referenced by academics and academic-type writers, so perhaps my perspective is too skewed and limited to form a valid judgment. Still, I feel like I won’t end up reading Proust in my lifetime – I’ll read 50 YA novels (and write 100 of them) before I take on such a monumental task. I feel the need to bring this up because it serves as backup for my main critique of writings like this that reference intellectuals like Proust, and that is that to me they feel alienating. I understand that for those who have read and love Proust, including references to his work can do the opposite; they can feel inclusive, an invitation into a special club of those who understand.

I suppose this simply goes against my main tenets as a writer. I write because I want to speak to people. I know there is some much-loved saying that asserts that if what someone does can resonate with/change the life of one person, it’s worth it. While I sympathize with this sentiment, I don’t share it completely; for me, a work of writing would feel like a great accomplishment if I could speak to the greatest number of people. Writing has such infinite power – why not aim to unleash it to its fullest extent?

In Anne Carson’s favor, however, and in the favor of those who write works similar to her Proust piece, I do completely understand the desire to use writing as a way of experiencing life. By reconstructing Proust’s narrative in a new way, and perhaps a way that is relevant to her own life, I can see how Anne Carson would find joy or satisfaction in viewing life through this limited, fictional lens. 

Also, to end on a positive note, I should address the amusement I said I feel when I see Anne Carson, and that comes largely from her as a human. It’s her quirks and her eccentricity that make me smile sideways and chuckle. No writer who walks up to the podium and pumps her arms for more applause with a sly grin – nor one who includes an audience call-and-response bit – should be taken too seriously. 

Thank you, Anne Carson, for your silliness.

Anne Carson Colloquium

I’ve attached both of these blog posts as one entry not just for convenience’s sake, but also because they’re quite related, both in the nature of the readings and my feelings towards them.

Without too much introduction, I’ll paste here (unedited, in full) my notes from the reading. Basically, I tried stream-of-consciousness narrate from the perspective of the person I mentioned in the blog post above – the person who is not used to literary or cultural events, who doesn’t know how and doesn’t really care to find hidden meaning in wacky poetry/performance type pieces. Spoiler alert: this person is at least partly me, and sometimes I feel like this person is the audience Anne Carson most enjoys befuddling.

A man is tangling people in string...this is...avant garde? I think I know what that means. I can’t look down for a second without him doing something new with the string. Why is the string that color? It’s so unusual. Are these two people on the sides really just there to hold down the string? I haven’t absorbed a word of the poem except “igneous,” which I think was the first word that Charlotte said. (Oh, I know Charlotte, the tall girl, the one who read with Anne Carson, so it was easy to follow her.) Well now he’s tying string around Anne Carson – he’s allowed to do that? “A library of melted books” – that’s kind of nice, maybe, but also terrible. The string is now going over the audience. This is interesting, bordering on uncomfortable. How rehearsed/choreographed is this? Okay now there are students all around the room standing up and talking at the same time. This is a bit much. Glad I sat in the middle, maybe? Or not? This next piece apparently requires a one minute introduction...enough said. This guy is murmuring “bracket” the way a frog ribbits; it makes me uncomfortable. Just noticed brackets being animated and projected on the wall beside me. Really? Okay now they’re all silent for a while. How would I live tweet this? One guy is in a t-shirt and jeans (the string guy), while the others had the decency to dress for the occasion (or is this even a dress-for-the-occasion type of occasion? I’m wearing shorts!) Did they really bring the string for just that one poem thing? This girl’s hair in front of me is interesting. It’s tied up in a little design, like a flat flower, and the color is rich, layered. She’s wearing the right color of green for her hair. Okay now they just got to “Fragment 87c” – I just don’t even know what this is anymore. Apparently that was supposed to be a dance. Lunch now? Well. Okay.

MFA Thesis Exhibition

The two events I'd originally wanted to attend for my final blog post became infeasible: Akutagawa Prize winner Wataya Risa's visit was cancelled, and I had to go pick up a visa in SF instead of attending the Nemerov lecture at the Cantor Arts Center. So I decided to take a look instead at the MFA Thesis exhibition, whose poster I kept seeing right outside lecture the past couple weeks. I also went because I heard that there would be a speech delivered by a fake Condoleezza Rice. I thought it would be cool to see what graduate students, whom I never really see or hear about, are producing on this campus.

There are five artists being exhibited in the gallery, the entire graduating class of MFA students at Stanford: Ben Bigelow, Chris Duncan, Dawn Weleski, Terry Powers, and Greg Stimac. Combined, the artists use a wide range of media that communicate their messages across many senses: video, cast material, perfomance, sound. In the vestibule, there are Chris Duncan’s hanging castings of cymbals and the tools required to cast, along with mirrored images of the sun and pairings of real objects and their castings. In the main space, a video installation plays in a temporary room with a blue grid image screened onto the walls, Powers’ paintings and Stimac’s photos hang on the wall, and Weleski’s videos and podium are located in the back of the room. The works are engaging and modern without being pretentious.

I noticed a thread of deception, an overall feeling of being intentionally misled, in the artists’ works. Duncan’s pieces made objects that copied other objects in form but not essence: the castings were of the negative space left behind by cymbals, leaving us with shapes whose purpose was intricately tied to music but themselves were incapable of producing sound. The sculpture in the corner of the room was also a casting, appearing to be shoes but was something else entirely. Welenski’s works, with their fake Condi, hit most upon the theme and tied in notions of political deception not elsewhere present in the exhibit.

I should describe the Condi pieces in a bit more detail, as they were the highlight of the showing for me. After being denied in her request to audit Condoleezza Rice’s class at Stanford, Welenski hired an actor to impersonate Condi and filmed the impersonator pretending to be her as she walked around campus speaking to individuals and taught a class to local eighth graders. On top of one of the screens, however, was this message: 

Unfortunately and obviously, the mock speech was cancelled. The script is on display, containing lines like “I am one hell of a motherfucker” and “I apologize for causing identity confusion in the hearts and minds of Muslim-American youth, and for making them feel apologetic for the blood on my hands.” That would have been fun to watch.

All in all, I would recommend taking a peek: the gallery is quite small and you can see everything in less than 15-20 minutes or spend up to an hour if you finish The Grid, a 35-minute video installation by Ben Bigelow. I think the exhibit’s open until the 16^th of June, so stop by if you feel so inclined.

Literary Event #1: From Lyric Novel to Lyric Stage: The Golden Gate

For my first* literary event, I attended “From Lyric Novel to Lyric Stage: The Golden Gate: A Multimedia Presentation,” which was held in Bing Concert Hall Studio on May 30^th. The presentation interwove Stegner Fellows’ readings of passages from the original novel-in-verse, The Golden Gate, corresponding scenes from the new opera adaptation, and live commentary from the composer, Conrad Cummings, on the adaptation process. Though I hadn’t heard of Stanford alum Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse before the event, my cello professor had mentioned that he and Conrad Cummings were neighbors as children, and that he was an excellent composer.

The event opened with a video welcome by Vikram Seth, who had been pursuing a master’s degree in economics at Stanford in the early 80s when he came across his first novel-in-verse, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, at the Stanford bookstore. The novel not only inspired him to begin writing his own novel-in-verse, The Golden Gate, but also led to his taking a break from pursuing economics and becoming a Stegner Fellow instead. The Golden Gate was published in 1986, and describes the lives of both impassioned and emotionally detached 20-something San Franciscans in verse that is funny yet painful. There are break-ups, first dates, first-time homosexual encounters. (Spoiler alert summary: when Janet, the protagonist John’s former and current girlfriend, dies unexpectedly, the successful, stoic engineer finally realizes the importance of genuine friendship and human connection.)

I truly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s writing, and found Cummings’s composer commentary quite interesting (when John and Liz have their first kiss, for example, the music deliberately changes from 5 beats to 6 beats per measure), but what disappointed me was that the opera scenes weren’t live. We watched clips from a workshop (which meant minimal props and scenery) on a screen instead. I should have known from the subtitle “A Multimedia Presentation,” and the singing and acting were nonetheless impressive (plus it was my first time watching an opera in English), but it would have been more engrossing to see the opera singers right next to the readers on stage. (They also mentioned that the event was being filmed, which meant they were filming a filming…)

Still, The Golden Gate was an enlightening performance, and I particularly enjoyed Cummings’s explanations of his alterations when it came to adapting “lyric novel” for the “lyric stage.” Comes summer, I plan to read The Golden Gate.

*Technically, this was my second event, but I had to leave in the middle of the Creative Writing Undergraduate Awards reading (I did like the excerpt on twelve-year-old Holly and her crown molding-shopping, though).