Category: Books
Li Ang’s The Lost Garden (Book acquired, 11.20.2015)
Li Ang’s novel The Lost Garden is new in English translation by Sylvia Li-chun Lin with Howard Goldblatt. Publisher Columbia University Press’s blurb:
In this eloquent and atmospheric novel, Li Ang further cements her reputation as one of our most sophisticated contemporary Chinese-language writers. The Lost Garden moves along two parallel lines. In one, we relive the family saga of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was a gentry intellectual imprisoned for dissent in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. After his release, Zhu Zuyan literally walled himself in his Lotus Garden, which he rebuilt according to his own desires.
Forever under suspicion, Zhu Zuyan indulged as much as he could in circumscribed pleasures, though they drained the family fortune. Eventually everything belonging to the household had to be sold, including the Lotus Garden. The second storyline picks up in modern-day Taipei as Zhu Yinghong meets Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy. Their cat-and-mouse courtship builds against the extravagant banquets and decadent entertainments of Taipei’s wealthy businessmen. Though the two ultimately marry, their high-styled romance dulls over time, forcing them on a quest to rediscover enchantment in the Lotus Garden. An expansive narrative rich with intimate detail, The Lost Garden is a moving portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions.
The Refugees — Tamara de Lempicka
A planet spoiled by the human species (Ursula K. Le Guin)
My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. . . . We survive there as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity of the Hainish. They came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the sick one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish; older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don’t even understand, despite all our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past, their endless past. Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us . . . a little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it. . . . We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not very much.
From Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed.
A depiction of one of Frederik Ruysch’s displays
Even pain counts (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
From Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed.
Three Books
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien.Sixty-second printing of a mass market paperback Ballantine Books edition (1977). No designer is credited, but the cover painting, titled, The Hills: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, is by Tolkien. All three books were a gift from my aunt.
The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.Sixtieth printing of a mass market paperback Ballantine Books edition (1978). No designer is credited; cover painting by Tolkien.
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. Fifty-sixth printing of a mass market paperback Ballantine Books edition (1977). No designer is credited; cover painting by Tolkien.
Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Seated, Holding Her Right Leg — Egon Schiele
Reading Girl with Cat — Leonor Fini
“In Between” — Gertrude Stein
John Frum Cargo Cult Songs
Eddie Campbell’s 1001 Nights of Bacchus (Book acquired, 11.19.2015)
I took my kids to the bookstore yesterday because they wanted to get some more Choose Your Own Adventure books. We got a bunch of those—and maybe I’ll do a post on those, although I’ve never wanted this blog to be a nostalgia-soaked blog, although maybe that will be a nostalgia-soaked post. My son wanted to check out the comics section; he’s five, and short, and his height matched the “G” section, where he kept grabbing up Green Lantern comics (to which I: put those back). Incorrectly shelved there among the Corps though was Eddie Campbell’s 1001 Nights of Bacchus (to which I: give that here).
The first time I saw Campbell’s art I was shocked. I was 12 or 13—it was in a back issue of Cerebus which I had bought in the comic shop next to the music store where I took trombone lessons (don’t ask)—so, being 12 or 13, I was still capable of shock. Dave Sim had printed (or reprinted?) the prologue, or part of the prologue, from From Hell, Campbell’s book with Alan Moore on the White Chapel/Jack the Ripper murders. What a book. I had never seen anything like that. Campbell’s inky lines seemed savage, severe, violent and sketchy, especially juxtaposed against the work of Sim and Gerhard in that particular issue of Cerebus. (The issue was part of Jaka’s Story). Continue reading “Eddie Campbell’s 1001 Nights of Bacchus (Book acquired, 11.19.2015)”
There is nothing in the world worth worship (William H. Gass)
Truthful people are a big pain. That is their aim in life: to be a big pain. Because we naturally love lies. Lies are more fun, far pleasanter to hear, for the most part, and certainly more effective. In fact, they are called for. Parents pretend they want to know whether Gertie is screwing in the parlor and whether Peter is smoking pot in the barn. And if the kids tell the truth, as they are beseeched to do, they will be ragged and snagged and grounded unmercifully. So the kids learn. Lying promotes freedom. Lying guards privacy. Lying saves lives and wins elections. It describes things as they ought to be. Of course, we need to be truthful, but only on occasion.Lying is a vice that succeeds, as so many other vices do, only in an environment of truthfulness. Remember the paradox: Cretans are liars, the Cretan swore. And retell to yourself the fable about the boy who cried, “Wolf … wolf …” one too many times. Vices need virtues and vice versa. I am speaking, of course, about the little lies of daily life, not the big lies of priests and politicians, those who want to fix things and those who want things fixed.
People who publically complain of sin so often privately enjoy it. Lutherans, for instance, don’t like lust. Catholics and Calvinists are both against it. Mormons allow us several wives but it’s not on account of lust. Baptists are not on lust’s side. If you measure a man by the quality of his enemies, Casanova figures well.
The trouble with temperate people is that they are rarely temperate. All the temperance societies I know promote abstinence. “Nothing too much yet everything a little bit” is not their motto. No. Nothing is the operative word. “Masturbation in moderation” is not their motto. A truly temperate person doesn’t play golf every day. A truly temperate person doesn’t run more than a block a week. A temperate reader won’t read all of Austen or a lot of Balzac. Temperate persons eat sensibly, which means they never diet. But those whose profession is temperance only rail against sex and alcohol, drugs and atheism. Professionally temperate people are cranks. Atheism they ought to like. Atheists admire the word nothing. But they probably don’t admire lust much. Not a single favorable vote from the Methodists. Pietists—nix.
Piety is a nasty little virtue. Reverence for Pa the father, Ra the god, and hurrah the flag. Piety is respect for power and privilege, ancestors and the dead-and-gone deities. There is nothing in the world worth worship.
From William H. Gass’s essay “Lust.” Collected in Life Sentences.
Assassin Pursued by The Furies — Arnold Böcklin
Voight-Kampff machine sketches by Syd Mead
All Oscar Wilde
All art is immoral.
All art is quite useless.
All thought is immoral.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
All beautiful things belong to the same age.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.
All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode.
All women become like their mothers: that is their tragedy. No man does: that is his.
All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals.
All men are monsters. The only thing to do is to feed the wretches well. A good cook does wonders.
All men are married women’s property. That is the only true definition of what married women’s property really is.
Various aphorisms of Oscar Wilde.
A Hand Puppet — Katsushika Hokusai
Biblioklept