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very 'overdue' reading round-up of interesting articles/books/marginalia I've come across. in the spirit of "good is better than perfect":
literature:
said Japanese gardener is taciturn and indifferent to the concept of apologising for Imperial Japan's war crimes at every turn, despite the fact that Yun Ling herself survived as a POW in a camp during the war and bears visible wounds from that experience, both literal and metaphorical. what's the logical recourse for the plot to take, then? they start having an affair! eye-goddamn-roll.
it's not instantly objectionable depending on execution, and one could do something interesting with that, but I didn't find it to be the most graceful of metaphors.
Yun Ling herself had potential to be interesting at the start: very uncompromising, studied Law at Cambridge after the war ("[...] and I never took on an English name just to make anyone's life easier there."), became a judge then started losing her memory, makes many ethical and moral compromises throughout the book, but as another review puts it she ended up not quite fleshed out.
she also had blindspots, especially to do with racist prejudice towards side characters from minority backgrounds in Malaysia, which I suspected were intentional on the author's part so that she was not uncomplicatedly likeable. these however did not go challenged in the text... and ended up creating the feeling that her perspective was impregnable and natural and reasonable. again, I am sure any discerning reader will know to think otherwise, but I'm fairly alert to the depiction of unspoken racial hierarchies within Maritime Southeast Asia/Nusantara and this made me raise my eyebrows.
I expected it as well given that the book deals with WWII but there are semi-graphic descriptions of wartime sexual violence. I have reservations about how those were handled too. it's not the 'what' so much as the 'how'. everyone knows by now the usual narrative grooves about comfort women and so on; one doesn't break any new ground just by mentioning them for gritty realism points. a more thoughtful or reparative, I suppose, way of going about it would be to turn usual motherhood statements in those narratives about passivity and violence and taintedness upside down and restoring a sense of agency to those women. we've all heard stories about the post-war ostracisation of women who underwent sexual violence; but what about, say, women coming together and sheltering each other instead of relying on a society that would've failed them, afterwards? continued injustice isn't the only show in town.
to the author's credit, there is a little of that: a character who seeks refuge and becomes a nun after the war.
if you're conversant with discussions around reproductive futurism from queer theory, you might quibble a little with how Western teenagers are developmentally characterised here. after all queerness is often married in popular discourse to notions around gender failure, and the failure to achieve the goalposts of (narrowly defined) adulthood and social reproduction specifically -- that delayed or stunted development towards adulthood is a key feature of how queerness is perceived on a societal scale. on the other hand you have people who think of children as blank slates for reproductive futures, as people free of sexuality, such that any awareness of queerness among them is an aberration.
but I find this point resonant anyway, for how queerness is... processed, for lack of a better word, within East Asia, in patterns that are interconnected with those in North America or Europe but nevertheless remain unique. I was reminded, reading this review, of a conversation I had once with a researcher from Hong Kong looking at lesbian subcultures in China and HK, and how the practicalities of dealing with life as a queer person in those communities just amounted to maintaining a pact of silence and "don't ask, don't tell" policy with family members, while maintaining the outward semblance of adults achieving 'normal' milestones so you can be left alone within your internal life to live your truth and so on in seclusion. put that way you can see why the metaphor of skin-wearing crocodiles for queer people feels apt.
total tangent, but I was also reminded of Tariq Jazeel’s commentary on how Euro-Western queer theory has tended to leave him feeling 'bereft', a sentiment I sometimes share:
fandom:
geraineon shared some thoughts and thought-provoking essays on diaspora fiction here. I think the comments are an interesting read too, although full disclosure, I participated in them. I have thoughts, inevitably and predictably, having grown up in a country not dominated by a white majority and then moved to a country that is (tldr: I would still consider self-indulgent spiels about my experiences with racism, done for no purpose other than to bootstrap myself into a noble 'victim' and comfort myself, to be gauche), but I'll throw rocks at the glass house another time.
tobermoriansass on Tumblr on conversations on fandom racism and imperialist attitudes, breaking past the impasse of an over-tired focus on shipping and whatnot, and how to move the needle forward more constructively.
in general I have a low tolerance for fandom conversations that start circling around themselves to the same few uncritical repetitive points, so this was refreshing. I have similar feelings around discussions on the f/f gap, and the ever-present cudgels of Women Are Never Well-Written and Women Are Not Allowed to be Depraved in Fandom, That's Why We Don't Write About Them! hello, me: happily writing lesbian incest noncon in my corner. I think it's just a skill issue, you guys. no, my dirtybadwrong f/f is not pathbreaking feminist fiction, lol, but I'm also not writing it in spite of the fact that the f/f scene is imaginatively parched, or whatever. sometimes these conversations generalise so much and betray such a failure of imagination/curiosity beyond their participants' immediate fannish circles that they beg for the most facetious responses.
infimace-blog on rap as an artform.
articles, essays, misc:
Radical epistemology: reading Amia Srinivasan’s ‘Radical Externalism’: I don't agree with everything or even much of what Srinivasan argues in her wider work (I think it's... tepid, not radical enough, even), but this is a piece on rethinking the justification of truth claims based on internalism/externalism, with implications for social injustice. I'm not well-versed in the field of philosophy, but I read this and wondered about the effects of this at 'higher' scales: international relations, countries with incommensurate interpretations of historical conflict, ""just war"" theory, etc.
Me versus myself: Why do I let myself sabotage my own best-laid plans?
How the ‘unforced error’ of austerity wrecked Britain (from The Guardian): I'm not politically astute and so have been gulping down analyses of the political situation in Britain.
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?: an essay arguing that stories about queer joy necessitate a change in the very medium and format of how those stories are told, going from individuated existential malaise to wide-angle collective perspectives.
The Gray Area: An Open Letter to Marjorie Perloff: I read this because I'm not too conversant with literary theory and this was like a mise en scène introduction to the Conceptualist debate in literature, and more widely the debate about what counts as a poem.
literature:
- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng: 3/5
CN: war crimes and sexual violence
the plot in one sentence: Yun Ling undertakes an apprenticeship under an exiled Japanese gardener who served the Japanese Emperor so she can construct a garden in her sister's memory. see, that's interesting, no?said Japanese gardener is taciturn and indifferent to the concept of apologising for Imperial Japan's war crimes at every turn, despite the fact that Yun Ling herself survived as a POW in a camp during the war and bears visible wounds from that experience, both literal and metaphorical. what's the logical recourse for the plot to take, then? they start having an affair! eye-goddamn-roll.
it's not instantly objectionable depending on execution, and one could do something interesting with that, but I didn't find it to be the most graceful of metaphors.
Yun Ling herself had potential to be interesting at the start: very uncompromising, studied Law at Cambridge after the war ("[...] and I never took on an English name just to make anyone's life easier there."), became a judge then started losing her memory, makes many ethical and moral compromises throughout the book, but as another review puts it she ended up not quite fleshed out.
she also had blindspots, especially to do with racist prejudice towards side characters from minority backgrounds in Malaysia, which I suspected were intentional on the author's part so that she was not uncomplicatedly likeable. these however did not go challenged in the text... and ended up creating the feeling that her perspective was impregnable and natural and reasonable. again, I am sure any discerning reader will know to think otherwise, but I'm fairly alert to the depiction of unspoken racial hierarchies within Maritime Southeast Asia/Nusantara and this made me raise my eyebrows.
I expected it as well given that the book deals with WWII but there are semi-graphic descriptions of wartime sexual violence. I have reservations about how those were handled too. it's not the 'what' so much as the 'how'. everyone knows by now the usual narrative grooves about comfort women and so on; one doesn't break any new ground just by mentioning them for gritty realism points. a more thoughtful or reparative, I suppose, way of going about it would be to turn usual motherhood statements in those narratives about passivity and violence and taintedness upside down and restoring a sense of agency to those women. we've all heard stories about the post-war ostracisation of women who underwent sexual violence; but what about, say, women coming together and sheltering each other instead of relying on a society that would've failed them, afterwards? continued injustice isn't the only show in town.
to the author's credit, there is a little of that: a character who seeks refuge and becomes a nun after the war.
- Notes of a Crocodile (鳄鱼手记) by Qiu Miaojin
Lazi and her friends spend their lives in the time honoured fashion of students everywhere: falling in and out of love, reading, attending classes, doing assignments, bickering, sleeping and earning pocket money, and analyzing every nuance of their relationships in midnight conversations. [...] College in Taiwan represents the first time Taiwanese youngsters can take a breather from the utterly relentless round of examinations and cramming that has marked their childhood and early adolescence, and deal with the pleasures and the pains, the stresses and strains of growing up. This is not so much to say that Taiwanese are late developers in that sense, but more to note how the search for identity and a role in life preoccupies Western teens at a much earlier age when perhaps their ability to articulate their feelings has not caught up. Happening later, in their college years, Taiwanese are more able to articulate their dilemmas, to themselves and to their friends, and their diaries.
Reconciling the desire for self-determination and the need to meet parental and social expectations is a highly stressful and difficult balancing act that many highly educated young Taiwanese experience as an existentialist dilemma, as do the characters in the novel. One of Lazi’s friends articulates this as coming up against the wall of absurdity, a description that references both Sartre and Camus, and Dostoevsky.
if you're conversant with discussions around reproductive futurism from queer theory, you might quibble a little with how Western teenagers are developmentally characterised here. after all queerness is often married in popular discourse to notions around gender failure, and the failure to achieve the goalposts of (narrowly defined) adulthood and social reproduction specifically -- that delayed or stunted development towards adulthood is a key feature of how queerness is perceived on a societal scale. on the other hand you have people who think of children as blank slates for reproductive futures, as people free of sexuality, such that any awareness of queerness among them is an aberration.
but I find this point resonant anyway, for how queerness is... processed, for lack of a better word, within East Asia, in patterns that are interconnected with those in North America or Europe but nevertheless remain unique. I was reminded, reading this review, of a conversation I had once with a researcher from Hong Kong looking at lesbian subcultures in China and HK, and how the practicalities of dealing with life as a queer person in those communities just amounted to maintaining a pact of silence and "don't ask, don't tell" policy with family members, while maintaining the outward semblance of adults achieving 'normal' milestones so you can be left alone within your internal life to live your truth and so on in seclusion. put that way you can see why the metaphor of skin-wearing crocodiles for queer people feels apt.
total tangent, but I was also reminded of Tariq Jazeel’s commentary on how Euro-Western queer theory has tended to leave him feeling 'bereft', a sentiment I sometimes share:
Reading Lee Edelman, reading José Esteban Muñoz, reading Michael Warner, I have been left feeling at equal turns inspired by the radical imperative to intervene in the fabric of the (hetero)normal, yet also a little bereft by the Euro-American preoccupations of Queer Theory as it comes out of metropolitan, predominantly North American, locations. Queer Theory’s critiques and refusals of heteronormalizing institutions like marriage are written from places – locations – where gay people have the option of being normal precisely because of their legal right to marry. The gay community does not have that right in Singapore, nor in Sri Lanka. This simple fact has, for me, always necessitated a kind of geographical contextualization of radical queer critique. That is to say, the uneven geography of gay rights necessitates an important question about what exactly it is that queer interventions aim to make strange?
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: 3/5
fandom:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tobermoriansass on Tumblr on conversations on fandom racism and imperialist attitudes, breaking past the impasse of an over-tired focus on shipping and whatnot, and how to move the needle forward more constructively.
in general I have a low tolerance for fandom conversations that start circling around themselves to the same few uncritical repetitive points, so this was refreshing. I have similar feelings around discussions on the f/f gap, and the ever-present cudgels of Women Are Never Well-Written and Women Are Not Allowed to be Depraved in Fandom, That's Why We Don't Write About Them! hello, me: happily writing lesbian incest noncon in my corner. I think it's just a skill issue, you guys. no, my dirtybadwrong f/f is not pathbreaking feminist fiction, lol, but I'm also not writing it in spite of the fact that the f/f scene is imaginatively parched, or whatever. sometimes these conversations generalise so much and betray such a failure of imagination/curiosity beyond their participants' immediate fannish circles that they beg for the most facetious responses.
infimace-blog on rap as an artform.
articles, essays, misc:
Radical epistemology: reading Amia Srinivasan’s ‘Radical Externalism’: I don't agree with everything or even much of what Srinivasan argues in her wider work (I think it's... tepid, not radical enough, even), but this is a piece on rethinking the justification of truth claims based on internalism/externalism, with implications for social injustice. I'm not well-versed in the field of philosophy, but I read this and wondered about the effects of this at 'higher' scales: international relations, countries with incommensurate interpretations of historical conflict, ""just war"" theory, etc.
Me versus myself: Why do I let myself sabotage my own best-laid plans?
How the ‘unforced error’ of austerity wrecked Britain (from The Guardian): I'm not politically astute and so have been gulping down analyses of the political situation in Britain.
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?: an essay arguing that stories about queer joy necessitate a change in the very medium and format of how those stories are told, going from individuated existential malaise to wide-angle collective perspectives.
The Gray Area: An Open Letter to Marjorie Perloff: I read this because I'm not too conversant with literary theory and this was like a mise en scène introduction to the Conceptualist debate in literature, and more widely the debate about what counts as a poem.
Perhaps what we learn from the combination-punch of Reznikoff and Place is that this question — is it poetry? — can no longer pertain to form, nor to content. We can't require of a poem that it have a "poetic" content, nor even that it have line breaks or rhyme or other traditional markers of "literariness," so Conceptualism must therefore attack other, extra-textual notions of what makes poetry: for one, the fact that it is "made" by the author; for another that it must be made at all. When Conceptualism takes the form of Conceptual poetry, it attacks the dominant paradigm that all poetry is lyric poetry; it suggests that poetry need not be lyrical, and that it need not issue from a single, intentional speaker (or, once upon a time, a singer).
Conceptualism, in its purest, most radical form, challenges any value based on poetic craft or know-how — that is its power. With its democratizing potential, a kind of Kaprow-esque "anyone can be an (uncreative) artist" attitude that recalls Fluxus as much as Cage, it would seem to provide a powerful critique of all the hierarchies American poetry has comfortably set up for itself. That is why it's a little ironic to see that Conceptualism's staunchest supporters are most likely to be found in the academy and the art institution, and even — I should say, of course — in those very MFAs that you single out as strongholds of Conservatism.
This is one irony of the recent rise of Conceptual writing. Another is that a movement which is so committed to eliminating lyrical charisma has invested so heavily in the charisma of the poet as performer. Performance has become an exceedingly important aspect of Conceptual writing, as it was for Conceptual art, where the ephemerality of performance worked to perpetuate the dematerialization of the commodity-object of art. After all, theater (as you have written before, in The Futurist Moment, for example) is what the avant-garde strove for: the theatricalization of art brings the work out of the rarefied "art world" and into everyday life, in such a way that it has to be approached within a political context rather than as an aesthetic object to be contemplated, bought, and sold.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 09:46 am (UTC)put that way you can see why the metaphor of skin-wearing crocodiles for queer people feels apt.
Total tangent rather than "actual well-thought-out-point", but I recently read the 1993 experimental novel The Lizard Club by Steve Abbott, a gay author in the milieu of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, etc. He died of AIDS prior to the work's publication. The characters in the book are more or less all versions of real people Steve Abbott knows, including the protagonist Steve Abbott, except most of them are man-eating lizards in human form. To what degree the novel has a plot, it revolves around the allure and challenges of the lizard lifestyle and the difficulty of trying to either commit to it wholeheartedly or "go straight", as it were. Just kind of an interesting random conceptual overlap... Particularly as the main thing I disliked about it were several moments of what I can only describe as "gleeful bursts of pomo hipster racism" from an author firmly situated as a white gay male countercultural artist (but one who died of AIDS prematurely, thus defying the "good martyred queer vs. problematic assimilationist gay" dichotomy people sometimes use.)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 11:52 am (UTC)I see this SO MUCH and it annoys me more every single time. And is also frankly bizarre to me when I'm sitting here reading historical cyberpunk baihe that has been precision-engineered to create affordances for SO MANY of fandom's most beloved relationship tropes.
There's also a weird strain of puriteenism I sometimes see online that goes 'YES UNHINGED LESBIANS! BUT I DRAW THE LINE AT INCEST! AND NONCON! INCEST NONCON IS BAD!' I was once yelled at by one of these people for merely bringing up the fact that incest noncon baihe exists.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 06:21 pm (UTC)lmao, commiserations, I want to tell those people to free their minds. kind of ironic too, considering how popular 骨科 is in CN fandom spaces. if only they knew!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 06:09 pm (UTC)are there any books or writings by her (in JP or CN) that you particularly love?
no subject
Date: 2024-07-21 01:48 pm (UTC)The fact is that a lot of her novels are on the dark side for me, so I haven't actually read that many! But 星月夜 is a short one that I read in Japanese and really liked, a love affair between a Taiwanese woman teaching Japanese-as-a-foreign-language in Japan and one of her students, an Uyghur girl from Xinjiang. There is obviously a lot going on there, but among other things the way she shows the process of Japanese language learning (by a Chinese speaker) absolutely fascinates me, can you read the furigana in this photo?
The other one I really like is a book of essays in Japanese which is somewhere in my want-to-translate pile, 透明な膜を隔てながら.
let me know if you pick anything up by her at some point...
no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 12:22 am (UTC)oh wow, that excerpt is fascinating and hilarious with the 頭がすぎすぎ痛くなってきた bit after trying to decipher the text and reason for kanji vs non-kanji use, hahahaha. is this from the Uyghur girl's pov? this definitely feels true to the average CN -> JP learner's thought process. I too have the bad habit/crutch of reading kanji in Chinese instead of Japanese when I'm in a rush or too lazy to look up the furigana.
a language tidbit in return from me, part of my Japanese classes involved the sensei telling us NOT to write certain kanji the way we would in Chinese and to distinguish between 笔顺/書き順. I was once marked incorrect for not writing two tiny strokes in 意 correctly. a summary of the saga and why I was wrong:
no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 11:33 am (UTC)is this from the Uyghur girl's pov? this definitely feels true to the average CN -> JP learner's thought process. I too have the bad habit/crutch of reading kanji in Chinese instead of Japanese when I'm in a rush or too lazy to look up the furigana.
Yup. It just struck me as such a vivid rendition of that intermediate stage of learning, when you know a lot but there are still gaping holes... . and yeah, I do the opposite thing of reading hanzi in Japanese when I'm too lazy to look up the pinyin! (And sometimes get completely confused. (The absolute worst one is 感慨, gǎnkǎi vs kangai.)
and wow, I wouldn't have lasted a day with your Japanese teacher, that's quite something. (I would've 恼羞成怒, a useful chengyu I just learned!)
Let me know if you get hold of the novel and what you think! <3