It's a Jumble

  "I don’t want to reject confessional writing outright, I wrote to you, but it’s a tricky mode for works received as black or feminist texts. . . I’m less interested in “what happened to you” than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, untethered emotion, that’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric discharge.”     --Sofia Samatar, from Opacities

 Yet we continue to live despite all our suffering --from As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, by the anonymous Heian-era woman known now as "Lady Sarashina," Penguin Classic Edition, translation by Ivan Morris

Have you been writing any poems recently? If you're not writing poetry, how are you getting through these dreary days? A person can only be happy when he finds something to put his heart into. Some people put their hearts into chess, some into beautiful women, some into a particular skill or craft, some into writing.     --Excerpt, translation by Stephen Owens in his book, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911

“Bao-yu had from early youth grown up among girls. . .As a result of this upbringing, he had come to the conclusion that the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings. To him, therefore, all members of his own sex without distinction were brutes who might just as well have not existed.”       --Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin (1710-1765), translation by David Hawkes (Volume 1 of the Penguin Classic Edition)  

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ―  George Orwell,  1984

Consider the gaps and cracks and hollows in things: it is in the empty chambers that light appears, and all auspicious things come to roost only where there is stillness. --from the classic Daoist text, the Zhuangzi , Chapter 4, translated by Brook Ziporyn 

"Today there's a swath of darkness over the sky. Above it, a layer of cold silver. As the child goes down the dormitory steps, a startled crow springs from a wire, rising with a snap of wings that makes the whole day vibrate like a bell." --Sofia Samatar, from her newest book, The White Mosque

  “Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the security of court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of tis ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.”         --Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) from his travelogue, T he Knapsack No...

“The October Country …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…” --Ray Bradbury, The October Country

  Fëanor was a master of words, and his tongue had great power over hearts when he would use it; and that night he made a speech before the Noldor which they ever remembered. Fierce and few were his words, and filled with anger and pride; and hearing them the Noldor were stirred to madness. --from The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

  "Lizard remained silent, her face still pressed against my chest. Through the quiet, I could hear her heart beating wildly and feel the tension in her body. I was reminded of her separateness, a being with different organs, bundled in a different sheath of skin, who has dreams at night that are nothing like my own." --Banana Yoshimoto, from her short story, "Lizard." Translated by Ann Sherif.

  "Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the reader, many a ghostly afternote of long duration."  --Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) on Japanese short poetry, from his eccentric collection of essays and stories, In Ghostly Japan

  I’ve finished reading Jung Chang’s  Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China , the classic memoir of one family’s experiences in China through Japanese occupation, the start of the Communist revolution, the utter madness of the Cultural Revolution, and beyond. Nearly every page provokes horror and outrage and incredulity, although there are also stories of stunning courage and human kindness. I started this book because I wanted to better understand how a nation gives into a charismatic dictator and slides into madness. I still don’t understand, no more than I understand certain events and movements of our present time.   There are so many passages that I underlined while reading this book. Passages relevant to our current time, passages depicting mass delusion and hysteria, a fevered cult of personality, zealotry, scapegoating, political cowardice, and the use of politics to grift and settle petty personal feuds.   Of the many passages I’ve underlined, I think o...

"The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack." --William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (quote seen in yesterday's tweet from the account @Wwm_Shakespeare)

I’ve heard this analogy many times: that books are both windows and mirrors. But I didn’t know the originator of this analogy until now.  “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.” --Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990. From Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Class room, 6(3), ix-xi.is.

"Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind." --Tara Westover, from her memoir, Educated . 

      "I'm not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together--it doesn't mean I know how to speak about the things that matter most to me."      "But you're doing it now--in a way."      "Yes, in a way--that's how I always say things: in a way."                 -- from Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman

Alexander Chee on writing: “All my life I’ve been told that this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think this is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it’s the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing." --Alexander Chee, from his essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one speaks of it, and that was the reason why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only ever going to scold them, make them feel diminutive, make them feel they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn’t be kind to them. She wasn’t going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could, and to her, that was a form of protection. That’s how we will be with our own children, my mother told my uncle, proud that she had realized this."               --Jenny Zhang, "Our Mothers Before Them," from her collection Sour Heart

This was my writing routine today: sit for a few minutes before the screen, pull books down from the shelves to re-read favorite passages; check Twitter, drink tea, pace around. Repeat. This was one of the books I pulled down from the shelf: The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman. The last in a trilogy of books that I love—a series that moved me deeply and changed how I write. I opened the book to a quote I’d underlined: “She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.” Yes. That’s what books have always been for me: a magic that takes me elsewhere and allows me to be, even if just for a few moments, somebody else.