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meikureetitle = bad Mandarin pun, a play on 'fool's spring' and 愚蠢 (yu2 chun3, 'foolish/stupid') + 春 (chun1, 'spring'). see the actual seasons of Britain:
1. Andrea Long Chu reviews Ocean Vuong's 'The Emperor of Gladness': I'm a non-innocent reader here; my petty disdain for self-orientalising impulses in popular Asian(-American) diaspora stories is well documented by now. but I have to say this is a fairly evenhanded if unflinching review, and helps me think more sympathetically about Ocean Vuong's work and his newer directions. some excerpts:
see - it's possible to make valid points about the uh, the privileged position that some kinds of knowledge hold in the western tradition like the written word and the dismissal of the epistemological value of traditions in racially othered regions that don't fit that mould. I've been willing to pause my haterism in the past and give Vuong some benefit of the doubt that people might be distorting what he means. but that would ideally be accompanied by something other than broad-brush characterisations of rich literary histories within the ~motherland~ et al.
I'm also willing to join the choir of people who think it's in fact valid if authors want to jettison the tethers of character and plot, fuck coherence and sensibility. (I'm not being ironic.) I love nonsensical experimental pieces of fiction even if they have a notoriety for coming across, Ottessa Moshfegh-style, like My Year of Wasting The Reader's Time (cr. transversely for this phrase). I love them especially so if they have no pretensions about how subversive they think they're being versus their fiction's actual content. (I'm tired of experimental fiction that ends up simply being Young Man with Existential Ennui Fucks Women.) but the political and material context of such pieces would also make or break them for me. and importantly: it's better if people aren't jettisoning those things to shield a lack of confidence.
2. and a related article - Gay Sincerity Is Scary: When it comes to popular gay fiction, on earth we're briefly cringe. I actually don't vibe much with this or agree with lots of it, especially the short-sighted decision to think that the problems with Vuong's oeuvre stem simply from being too cringe or tenderqueer.
3. The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art. another article I think misses the mark and appears to hit on a timely contemporary concern but misinterprets the causes of it... but it does have the opening line, "My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery." it's however a thing of caricature how the author takes shots at identity politics in art, and then ends this reminiscing about his lost days in Christian boys' schools, as if being a white Christian man is not an identity in itself. do you want to tell us something, Kissick? what's this really about?
- the other night I dreamed I was writing fic and titling it 'all things revolting', with 'revolt' having the double meaning of both disgusting + rebelling. I have to hand it to my subconscious, this sounds exactly like the pretentious psychobabble I'd fall prey to in fic attempts IRL.
- I have of course had other unfortunately memorable dreams about fic writing, like this The Old Guard Andy/Quynh one: 'there were even Google Docs outlines/notes I’d jotted down about the story. I remember one of them: “the timeworn surreality of Andy and quynh’s first encounter in the desert — dust choking them, the arid gales of simoom wind whipping around them — with a fairytale quality to it, almost; the timelessness of it being precisely what makes this mean nothing and everything at the same time, what makes the difference for them (because they are immortals, and timelessness is their trap, the structuring condition of their pain).” what was I on???'
1. Andrea Long Chu reviews Ocean Vuong's 'The Emperor of Gladness': I'm a non-innocent reader here; my petty disdain for self-orientalising impulses in popular Asian(-American) diaspora stories is well documented by now. but I have to say this is a fairly evenhanded if unflinching review, and helps me think more sympathetically about Ocean Vuong's work and his newer directions. some excerpts:
Vuong has rightly objected to the expectation that all immigrant writers will “perform ethnography” for the reader. Yet he remains a caricature of the diasporic poet: painfully earnest, self-consciously sage, constantly complaining about “authenticity” as a way of asserting it. The critic Som-Mai Nguyen has accused Vuong of “blunt-force ethnic credibility,” citing the poet’s tendency to pontificate about the motherland. Vuong has said, for instance, that he struggled to write standard prose because “in Vietnam, the oral tradition is elusive” — as if the Vietnamese have no novels.
see - it's possible to make valid points about the uh, the privileged position that some kinds of knowledge hold in the western tradition like the written word and the dismissal of the epistemological value of traditions in racially othered regions that don't fit that mould. I've been willing to pause my haterism in the past and give Vuong some benefit of the doubt that people might be distorting what he means. but that would ideally be accompanied by something other than broad-brush characterisations of rich literary histories within the ~motherland~ et al.
What a pleasure to be given characters and a plot! Emperor feels at every turn like the book On Earth should have been, if only Vuong had seen prose as an opportunity instead of an obstacle to be sandblasted away by pure force of lyricism.
And even second-grade Vietnamese can be abused. “In the Vietnamese context — and it might be similar to Chinese — words are like spells,” Vuong told the writer Hua Hsu in 2022, claiming English speakers have a basically primitive relationship to language compared with the peoples of the Far East. This is deeply insulting to Vuong’s much-invoked illiterate ancestors, who were apparently so in touch with the primordial metaphors that they never managed to convey basic information to one another. Of course, what can make the mother tongue seem like magic is the simple fact that one does not speak it very well. Like many children of diaspora — I include myself here — Vuong mistakes his own naïveté for insight. [...]
The reader, again presumptively white, is clearly meant to suppose that Vietnamese culture understands love and weakness as two sides of the same poignant coin. But in reality, yêu and yếu are just two words that sound meaningfully different and mean different things; they are no more esoterically linked than live, laugh, and love. The pathos here thus depends largely on the reader’s total ignorance of Vietnamese. To explain the basic facts of tonal languages would break the spell.
I'm also willing to join the choir of people who think it's in fact valid if authors want to jettison the tethers of character and plot, fuck coherence and sensibility. (I'm not being ironic.) I love nonsensical experimental pieces of fiction even if they have a notoriety for coming across, Ottessa Moshfegh-style, like My Year of Wasting The Reader's Time (cr. transversely for this phrase). I love them especially so if they have no pretensions about how subversive they think they're being versus their fiction's actual content. (I'm tired of experimental fiction that ends up simply being Young Man with Existential Ennui Fucks Women.) but the political and material context of such pieces would also make or break them for me. and importantly: it's better if people aren't jettisoning those things to shield a lack of confidence.
2. and a related article - Gay Sincerity Is Scary: When it comes to popular gay fiction, on earth we're briefly cringe. I actually don't vibe much with this or agree with lots of it, especially the short-sighted decision to think that the problems with Vuong's oeuvre stem simply from being too cringe or tenderqueer.
3. The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art. another article I think misses the mark and appears to hit on a timely contemporary concern but misinterprets the causes of it... but it does have the opening line, "My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery." it's however a thing of caricature how the author takes shots at identity politics in art, and then ends this reminiscing about his lost days in Christian boys' schools, as if being a white Christian man is not an identity in itself. do you want to tell us something, Kissick? what's this really about?
