Dad

But the war cast its shadow nonetheless, to the point that some of us grew obsessed by it. For we too faced an imaginary test.

—Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt

New Years in Rochester

Empire Service north passes through tunnels before bursting into scenic view along the Hudson River

Memorial Art Gallery

Susan B Anthony’s attic

We threw pots on the second day

Retro outside, delicious fish fry inside

"Real Jobs"

Washing dishes is a real job.

Émile Zola was a Hachette publicist. Booker Prize winner James Kelman drives buses. Patty Park was a Columbia University Press publicist, drop-in grocer. Hanya Yanigihara also worked as a publicist before moving to magazines. Countless New York City poets work programs and communications for cultural institutions, large and small. Laid off artists walk dogs, house sit, nanny kids. Salman Rushdie is a former Ogilvy and Mather ad man. His most famous taglines? For Aero Chocolate: ‘Adorabubble’ and ‘Incredibubble.’ John Ashbery dreaded having to “write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal,” so he wrote that poem. Becca Schuh is a bad waitress and good writer. John Keats, William Carlos Williams, and Anton Chekhov worked in medicine. Tolstoy had serfs. Nabokov had wife-editor Véra; Eliot Valerie; Kang Frances; Wendell Berry has Tanya.

Real Job, Serious Writer

Let us now praise famous men. My point is that art isn’t made in a vacuum sans money or commerce or domestic help. Why are writers so weird about this? This relationship btw money and art is crucial and mostly ignored. It’d be more helpful for the next writer-artist coming up to know this stuff. It took serfs, a wife, or a crap job for that ‘Genius’ to sit and have time to write without being swept into household worries, financial worry. 여유. Imagine if culture scenes were more honest about who can afford to make art and how they afford it…

Hello again

  • Was not a hard break from 2022 because the big break was my move from the U.S. to Taiwan in September 2022. So I measure the real year as September to September. I had a huge host of new experiences - from the subtropical climate to new places to different calendar to fruit. It’s hard to even sum-up

  • The red stampy thing with my Chinese characters for my Korean name. The NTU campus and biking on Sundays to the experimental farm fields. Mandarin classes and classmates at MTC. Taiwan’s incredible fruits and knowing I’d completed a year with the return of pomelos to the grocery - measuring the passage of time by seasonal fruit. The view from my 8th floor apartment onto the southern mountains of Taipei. Discovering what proper mangoes, tofu, rice, and sweet potatoes taste like in Taiwan. Japanese stationary shops and Stationary Paradise. My sister’s visit to Seoul last November and drinking with GW. The beauty and poetry of Chinese characters. Dora’s haircuts. Qidong house for L’s writer’s residency. The pet stores of Taichung. Dadaocheng. Alexander Wang. Eastman house in Rochester. My hard-hitting investigative report on neighborhood alley shop Corgi Ice Lolly (unconfirmed money laundering front?). Ipoh’s Perak academy. Costco!! The K-Drama J recommended. Komeda coffee. Visiting uncle in Geochang with Mom and Grace for Chuseok. J’s parents visit and the National Palace Museum in Chiayi. I made seriously delicious kkaenip kimchi for the first time. Stupid Malayan night herons. Photography and Korea. IWAT.

I haven’t updated this blog in years (a little over a year, really), deactivated it for some forgotten reason, and had turned my attention to newsletters instead (like the rest of NYC media). I still have two newsletters that I update when I feel like it, and you’re very welcome to read them:

TABLE (Buttondown) Asia and culture focused - Note: The Buttondown platform has a major syncing problem, so I am likely to switch from this back to Substack.

PORT (Substack) An old one I started in New York for my walks

There are pluses to that email newsletter form for sure (updating people on the latest), but I still like this old form, its capaciousness, its rawness (debatable it’s Squarespace), its space for rumination and error. I am a Xanga blogbaby after all. I reread some of my entries and nearly edited out some of my snarkier thoughts, but then I thought better of it. Whatever. Let it lie. I felt suffocated by Twitter and the industry then. That was the truth. And I like using this space as a mood board and quote basket!

I’m in a reflective mood at the end of the year, so I’ll try to take stock.

;)

 

Reading

My all-time writing hero Ann Wroe, the Economist’s obituarist, wrote an obit for paper tickets and paper invitations in the latest World Ahead 2024. Paywalled.

Luke Winkie (Gawker) wrote a really wonderful essay “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a blogger” about that 2010s era of the internet.

Kitchen Translation

A recipe is a translation of a dish into language. A recipe is always waiting to be translated back, though it can never go back there, exactly.

The source text of a recipe never survives: where are those plums?

Rebecca May Johnson

 

Kitchen Table Translation seeks to make space for the fact that translation can be an intimate act, and many of us use our translation skills in non-professional as well as professional capacities. Some of us, when we translate, call on our family (rather than colleagues) to help us with challenging passages or words. Some second generation, diasporic and indigenous writers who speak (or partly speak) an ancestral language at home might find the discourse of mastery fraught, especially when access to a language has been lost through historical violence and dislocation. And some of us experience translation all the time in our bodies, names, homes, movements and daily lives even if we are not translating from one text to another.

Madhu Kaza

 

A few years ago, when I likewise had to leave the country, I asked myself: “What is a country?” My answer was that the country is a table and the abstract space which surrounds that table. The country is a moment. It is the moment when you make a spontaneous joke and your friends at the table laugh without need of further explanation, without needing the references explained. When someone says they miss their country, they mean they miss that moment at the table, rather than the vast space that surrounds it or the eternity surrounding the moment itself.

Ece Temelkuran

Sometimes what’s lost in the conversations about ownership or appropriation are these questions of really concrete, tangible forms of power, because culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead of asking who owns something, can we shift the question to “Who has the opportunity to benefit from it?” So in an immediate sense, the question is: “Who is profiting from the sale of hummus or falafel, and what are the conditions that allow them to set up restaurants or food companies that let them profit?”

Anny Gaul

Can't Sleep

Can’t sleep. Freezing rain taps the roof and windows. Normal to be unable to fall asleep the nights after war is declared. Another war, another war. When will this ever end? Woke to a text message that morning, “Ugh Putin is so evil.” Out of context Em. Then, blearily barely awake, I take the phone from G bc mom on Kakao, “Russia declared war on Ukraine.” The sinking stomach. […] Will President Winnie the Pooh be emboldened…? Can’t sleep. I went to the basement and unpacked boxes of books from my past lives — graduate student, assistant publicist — and dusted off the First World War books. I feel a sense of déjà vu. The Great War. The scholars describe the failure of our languages and texts to speak of and account for the violence… “War is a terrible thing,” said the 거제도 taxi driver after he picked us up from the POW camp that’s now, bizarrely, an amusement park with a zipline over a fake felled aircraft. (The boy soldier who cried for water in 불신시대. 그 소년병은 가로수 밑에 쓰러져 있었는데 폭풍으로 터져나온 내장에 피비린내를 맡은 파리떼들이 아귀처럼 덤벼들고 있더라는 것이다. 소년병은 물 한 모금만 달라고 애걸을 하면서도 꿈결처럼 어머니를 부르더라는 것이다.) When will it end? Max Plowman looks at a street lamp at night and its curves, writes, “Art lives by all that war destroys.” As if this planet isn’t already wracked with crisis - as if the nearly 6 million dead from COVID-19 wasn’t enough - more radiation, oil, gas, blood? Putin’s hands. Donate to the Kyiv Independent, and watch news all day. But keep these old books near. These paperbacks that now sit by my bed as dumb talismans — Literature & The Great War (signed by Randall 11/6/13), For Two Thousand Years, The Book of Common Prayer (a Cajun doc muttering to himself in the snow-covered trenches the prayer of St Francis ) — reminds:

“Hope? The only hope is us. While we are here there is still hope." Read here.

NB 3.10.2022: There is a way to talk about the gravity of this European war without resorting to the age-old ‘We care because they’re civilized’ (Aryan) tropes. Europe’s wars — on that teeny landmass where sneeze and you’re in a neighboring country — tend to be protracted affairs that suck the rest of the world into the hurricane of their violence. With global energy & trade deals / still colonialism in place, the continental border is a false frame. The First World War saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as well as the Qing dynasty; the British conscripted Indian and Chinese laborers, the French the Algerians, the Germans the Tanzanians; Imperial Japan captured Korea and attempted China; resources for the motherland One body! led to famine, inflation, riots and unrest in the colonies. So yes, fear because war on the continent has potential to become a world war. The major difference between then and now is ofc the idiots in power have nuclear weapons. I never thought that I’d be spending my early 30s Googling ‘nearest nuclear shelters’. None of the American ‘90s romcoms taught me to expect this.

In reality

A lot gets lost and created in translation. More languages means more puns.

Greeting Mom at the entrance, E: Focaccia 만들었어, 엄마. Try some!
In the kitchen ten mins later, M: Where’s the tea?
E: Tea??
M: Tea 만들었다메
E: ???? I made 빵. Focaccia
M: 응, 카차, 카차!!! 차 아니야?

Contingent Labor

From Chad Wellmon’s essay ‘Degrees of Anxiety’ on higher education, but this applies elsewhere too

“Unless these feelings of [anxiety, alienation and anger] are recognized as part of a bigger social whole, the insistence to resist and organize on behalf of an imperiled institution can be all too parochial. Instead of fighting for the utopian promise of higher learning for everyone, we end up defending a relatively recent and particular form of professionalism.”
— The Point
“... My bigger, utopian hope is that we fight not simply on behalf of a profession and in defense of monopolies of status, but rather alongside everyone who aspires to know and understand our dappled world.”
— The Point

From the ‘What is College For?’ Summer 2021 issue of The Point magazine.

Update 2/19/2022:

Literacy matters more than literary.