The following is a work in progress and a work of fiction. You're hereby warned that the language is rough and laced and peppered with obscenity. I am sharing it in this forum, and not elsewhere due to the "rules of engagement and use" involved.
Wissai
I Was Tested and I Failed. Miserably. Dismally. Abysmally.
Let me tell you this up front. I thought I was a nice guy, deep down, a kind possessing a real soul and rare sensitivity to boot, despite my rough, repulsive exterior of having a pock-marked face, balding hair, yellow teeth, sallow complexion, and packing 285 lbs on a frame of 5'8".
I thought when the chips were down, I would rise to the occasion and show the world what a nice, decent human being I really was. But yesterday I was tested and I failed. What you see from the outside is what is inside me.
I arrived at my office late. The traffic was a bear. Not one, but two accidents on the same damn freeway I-45. So by the time I closed the door of my office, and settled down to do some work, I was already in a foul mood. That changed instantly with a phone call.
-Roberto, this is your buddy Silvio.
-What's the fuck you want? Listen, I was late for work this morning and I've got tons of things to do.
-Fuck the work. I've got something you wouldn't believe what I'm gonna tell you.
-Spit the fuck out. I don't have all day.
-Okay, pal. The Asshole was dead.
-What? You're not shitting me, right? But how the fuck you know this. Who told you?
-Nobody. I was there. I couldn't believe it. Just like watching a movie.
-What do you mean you were there?
-I was there when the bastard got shot and died.
-Now, back up and tell me everything. If this is one of your stupid jokes, I will cut your dick off and slice and dice it into hundreds of pieces and feed to the dogs.
-No, this is no joke. Can't you tell how excited and out of breath I am? I am still at the scene. It just happened a few minutes ago. Cops still have not arrived. Here was what took place. I was standing in line for my coffee at Starbucks when all a sudden there was a commotion at the door. I turned around and saw the Asshole got into a loud argument with a young black Yuppie who apparently bumped into the Asshole as he got into the door and spilled the coffee onto the clothes of the Asshole. There was some name calling and I heard the word "Nigger" used a couple of times. And then two loud bangs and the next thing I knew was that the Asshole was on the floor and the black man was quickly out of the door. I briskly walked over and there was already a crowd gathering. Somebody was yelling for an ambulance. I edged closer and saw the Asshole was lying face up. It was quite obvious he was dead. His face was very pale, ashen, eyes open though and obviously in shock. He looked stupid as he often did when he was alive. Blood pooled around him. There were two bullet holes on his chest. Have you seen anybody got shot and killed before? I have. Back in 1968, two days after the Tet Offensive in Saigon, I ventured out to the streets on a bicycle. There was nothing going on the Nguyen Huynh Duc Street where I lived, but as I got to the bigger artery street Vo Di Nguy, I saw Anerican soldiers in Jeeps and trucks convoy passing by. Their faces looked grim and anxious, and their guns trained at the roofs of the buildings, looking for the VC snipers. That was when I felt fearful and was tempted to head back home. But curiosity got the better of me. I continued pedaling on Vo Di Nguy Street, past the Chi Lang Street. Mind you, the streets were quite deserted. There was not much vehicular traffic. Nor were there many pedestrians around. In looking back, I was wise in taking my bicycle out instead of my Honda motorbike. I was nineteen at that time and dressed like a poor, ignorant young man, venturing out on the street on some kind of an emergency, instead of a foolish, stupid, irrepressible college student morbidly attracted to the carnage of war. Before long, I came to the body of an American dead on the side of the road. Amazingly, his motorbike was not far his body. Nobody stole his bike yet even though he had been dead for quite some time. I stopped pedaling my bicycle. I stopped and looked at the body. I still remember vividly to this day that dead Anerican. He was lying in a prone position. His face was on the ground and lying sideways. He was in his middle 30's. His shirt was white and swollen due to accumulated gas. Flies were buzzing around. Ants were over his body. I didn't detect any stench nor did I see much blood. I did remember he was very pale and drained of color. I stayed at the scene no longer than a minute and then I headed back home. About ten years later, I was living in Chicago. One day, I drove past a Secen-Eleven Store and saw a crowd gathering in front of the store. Once again, curiosity forced me to turn around and drove to the parking lot of the store in order to find out what was going on. A young white man lay face down right in front of the store, just a few inches from the door. Once again, his face was very pale, ashen-gray, drained of blood. One bullet hole was on the back. A young white woman, apparently his girl-friend, was crying hysterically. I got back to my car and the scene of the white American man lying on the side of Vo Di Nguy Street came back to my mind, and I then made a mental note to myself that I should and would not die like that, a bullet hole in my body, and dying like a dog in the street. Well, today, the Asshole died like a dog, not in the street, but close enough, in a store, near the door. I know you hate his guts. I thought you wanted to know he had just met his demise. What do you think and how do you feel?
-The bastard should have died sooner. That is all I want to say right now. Thanks for calling. I must get back to work.
But I lied to Silvio. I didn't get back to work. I just sat there at my desk and looked out of the window. The sky was blue. The air was awash with sunshine. For many years, I had fantasized that I would take out the Asshole myself. I was just waiting for a right moment. Now some black dude did that for me. I felt vaguely unsatisfied and unfulfilled. I wanted the Asshole to die at my own hands. I wanted to see him suffer. That didn't mean I was not glad he was gone. To me, he was not even human. He was a bug, a piece of shit, a fly that ate shit and bothered people. Now he was dead, I must reorient my life. I just read last night that a real man must live like an invincible warrior and an untrackable, untraceable, undefeated assassin. He must work on his body and mind at all times. He must be unsentimental and highly adaptable. Watch out world, here comes the crazy assassin who happens to read philosophy.
(cont.)
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, để lại cho ai
gia tài của mẹ, là nước Việt này?
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, một đàn tham - ô
gia tài của mẹ, một cái nhà mồ
Dạy cho dân tiếng nói lọc lừa
dạy cho dân chόng quên màu da
dân chόng quên màu da, nước Việt xưa
cộng trung hoa đưa rước vào nhà
cộng mong dân lũ dân nghèo ngu
ôi lũ dân nghèo ngu, quên giặc thù
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, ruộng thành sân gôn
gia tài của mẹ, làng xόm bùi ngùi
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, một bọn buôn dân
gia tài của mẹ, một lũ "+" hèn.
Hát ngọng zọng "nà-hội"
na ná na na ná na na na ná na nà nà........"Fầu -Tù"
http://baomai.blogspot.com/
BaoMai
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now we are being lorded over by the Viet Commies.
What is our legacy?
What do the Viet people get from the Commie Idiocy?
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now we get Commie boundless corruption
And our land is peppered with cemeteries.
The Viet Commies have taught us to live in infamy,
To forget our roots,
And of our Viet nation's glorious history
While inviting the Chinks back to our land.
The Viet Commies think we are a people stricken by both poverty and stupidity
Who would easily forget that the Chinks are our ancient enemy.
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now the Viet Commies have converted our ancestral farmlands to golf courses,
And reduced our towns and villages to mere corpses.
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now the Viet Commies are ruling us without mercy.
They're selling our land and our women to our enemy
While converting us into a people of pusillanimity.
Translated by Wissai
April 30, 2011
36 years since South Vietnam fell to the Viet Commies with strong support of the Chinks from the North.
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, để lại cho ai
gia tài của mẹ, là nước Việt này?
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, một đàn tham - ô
gia tài của mẹ, một cái nhà mồ
Dạy cho dân tiếng nói lọc lừa
dạy cho dân chόng quên màu da
dân chόng quên màu da, nước Việt xưa
cộng trung hoa đưa rước vào nhà
cộng mong dân lũ dân nghèo ngu
ôi lũ dân nghèo ngu, quên giặc thù
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, ruộng thành sân gôn
gia tài của mẹ, làng xόm bùi ngùi
Một ngàn năm nô lệ giặc tầu
một trăm năm đô hộ giặc tây
bao nhiêu năm cộng sản đoạ đầy
gia tài của mẹ, một bọn buôn dân
gia tài của mẹ, một lũ "+" hèn.
Hát ngọng zọng "nà-hội"
na ná na na ná na na na ná na nà nà........"Fầu -Tù"
http://baomai.blogspot.com/
BaoMai
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now we are being lorded over by the Viet Commies.
What is our legacy?
What do the Viet people get from the Commie Idiocy?
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now we get Commie boundless corruption
And our land is peppered with cemeteries.
The Viet Commies have taught us to live in infamy,
To forget our roots,
And of our Viet nation's glorious history
While inviting the Chinks back to our land.
The Viet Commies think we are a people stricken by both poverty and stupidity
Who would easily forget that the Chinks are our ancient enemy.
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now the Viet Commies have converted our ancestral farmlands to golf courses,
And reduced our towns and villages to mere corpses.
Once we were ruled for a thousand years by the Chinks
And a hundred years by the Froggies.
Now the Viet Commies are ruling us without mercy.
They're selling our land and our women to our enemy
While converting us into a people of pusillanimity.
Translated by Wissai
April 30, 2011
36 years since South Vietnam fell to the Viet Commies with strong support of the Chinks from the North.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Pain
Pain is caused mostly by ignorance, greed, and ego. Take the recent cases of a douche bag and a scumbag. The douche bag is a hypocrite. He self-righteously admonished others for using obscene language in a forum. And then lo and behold, he posted a filthy sex joke comparing a porthole of a cruise ship cabin to a human female sex orifice. When you confronted him about that, he turned out not only a hypocrite but also a coward because he didn't take ownership of the joke. Instead, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to discuss about his hypocrisy. You are sure he is still in pain for losing face. His pain was self-induced for being self-righteous and power-hungry. Needless to say, you are now looking at him as being no more than a piece of shit for he had no sense of honor.
The other case involving a scumbag was quite hilarious. He used somebody else's words in attacking you. You countered that by avoiding frontal assault of dismantling your views by using his own counterarguments, but by using the words of others instead of coming up with his own words, he was not honorable if not downright cowardly. You later expressed your contempt and repugnance for his renunciation of his ethnic background by getting rid of the names given to him by his parents at his birth and completely taking some stupid names that have no relationship to his ethnic background. Names are important for self-identity. By hiding behind some made-up names which have nothing to do with his ancestry, the scumbag proved he was hopelessly alienated and uncomfortable of being who he was. Of course, you always have contempt for creatures like him, those who have no pride of who they are and where they come from.
Douche bags and scumbags out there should have realized that there was a psychic pain in attacking you because you would counter-attack fiercely. You don't go around and attack others without provocations. You could have taken a high road and ignored the douche bags and scumbags and assholes in this world because they are so numerous. They breed like rats and pigs. But your silence would be misconstrued by them that they were right and righteous in inflicting you pain. You simply wanted them to taste and experience the very pain they inflicted on others. Very often, a simple admission of mistake and an apology would have made all your pains disappear as you knew we all made mistakes. It was the holier-than-thee attitude and smug embrace of power that enraged and infuriated you.
The other case involving a scumbag was quite hilarious. He used somebody else's words in attacking you. You countered that by avoiding frontal assault of dismantling your views by using his own counterarguments, but by using the words of others instead of coming up with his own words, he was not honorable if not downright cowardly. You later expressed your contempt and repugnance for his renunciation of his ethnic background by getting rid of the names given to him by his parents at his birth and completely taking some stupid names that have no relationship to his ethnic background. Names are important for self-identity. By hiding behind some made-up names which have nothing to do with his ancestry, the scumbag proved he was hopelessly alienated and uncomfortable of being who he was. Of course, you always have contempt for creatures like him, those who have no pride of who they are and where they come from.
Douche bags and scumbags out there should have realized that there was a psychic pain in attacking you because you would counter-attack fiercely. You don't go around and attack others without provocations. You could have taken a high road and ignored the douche bags and scumbags and assholes in this world because they are so numerous. They breed like rats and pigs. But your silence would be misconstrued by them that they were right and righteous in inflicting you pain. You simply wanted them to taste and experience the very pain they inflicted on others. Very often, a simple admission of mistake and an apology would have made all your pains disappear as you knew we all made mistakes. It was the holier-than-thee attitude and smug embrace of power that enraged and infuriated you.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Personal heaven and hell
You received the following words on a Sunday Easter:
"I am sitting here on the beautiful, spring, Easter morning missing my family and grieving for an absent connection between us. We have often shared thoughts about the questions of the heart. Feelings such as I am having now, confirm your occupation of a space in my heart. Love is many things but it is above all a unity, a feeling of completeness-wholeness. This wholeness is the creative force found in the Universe. It is the energy that created this universe-The big bang.
Birth and the love symbolize this creativity, this mystery. That is why you grieve for a baby boy that you never held or saw. There is forever a breach in your personal heaven – a gap -- a hell.
We all have our personal heavens and hells. Heavens and hells are part of our story. Stories are the explanations of the cosmos or space around us. That is why cultures and peoples have similar traditions. The world is what it is. This energy or force has been felt and is observed since the beginning. This force or energy is the beginning. New beginnings, new birth, new creation is the renewal of this cycle-- spring, summer, fall, and winter, continue.
Easter’s stories and symbols are stories that are glimpses of the Universe – Many condemn the spring or Easter symbols believing that their story is the true story. Have they bothered to contemplate or to learn the stories that came before the ones that they are sharing, telling and teaching? It is the same story just different words with assorted connotations and associations.
Spring is part of the cycle of life-of creation.
As human beings find the baskets, filled with eggs and candy, left by the Easter Bunny and/or gaze up at a cross do they realize these events are symbols or characters of the same story- a story that is acted out in front of their eyes and hearts for them to observe and listen to? We are all a part of this chronicle and a part of one another."
You wrote back:
"Funny you wrote about love and life and stories of creation and rebirth. I have chased after love all my life. Now I am in the twilight of my life, I must confess that I don't know what love is or means anymore. When I was much younger, I fancied that I knew what love was. Talking about heaven and hell, that reminded a story by JD Salinger entitled "For Esmee--With Love and Squalor". Like all
Salinger's stories, it was beautifully crafted and written. In the story, there was a definition of hell, which I think attributed to Dostoyevsky, : hell is the inability to love. If that is true, I've been in hell for a long time. I've seen people talking a good game of love, but on closer examination, it just turned out they were talking the love they have for themselves: self-love and selfishness. That didn't negate what you have been laboring on the issue of copyright. There must be some kind of live there.
Also, talking about stories of birth and creation and renewal, all my words are a reflection of my attempts of creation and of seeking validation and affirmation of my worth and values. The more I know about humans, the more I realize I don't know the depths of their depravity. Granted, there are a few humans who have inspired me for their nobility and courage. These people are very rare. It seems to me most humans I've run into are cowards, douche bags, and anal orifices, also known as assholes."
"I am sitting here on the beautiful, spring, Easter morning missing my family and grieving for an absent connection between us. We have often shared thoughts about the questions of the heart. Feelings such as I am having now, confirm your occupation of a space in my heart. Love is many things but it is above all a unity, a feeling of completeness-wholeness. This wholeness is the creative force found in the Universe. It is the energy that created this universe-The big bang.
Birth and the love symbolize this creativity, this mystery. That is why you grieve for a baby boy that you never held or saw. There is forever a breach in your personal heaven – a gap -- a hell.
We all have our personal heavens and hells. Heavens and hells are part of our story. Stories are the explanations of the cosmos or space around us. That is why cultures and peoples have similar traditions. The world is what it is. This energy or force has been felt and is observed since the beginning. This force or energy is the beginning. New beginnings, new birth, new creation is the renewal of this cycle-- spring, summer, fall, and winter, continue.
Easter’s stories and symbols are stories that are glimpses of the Universe – Many condemn the spring or Easter symbols believing that their story is the true story. Have they bothered to contemplate or to learn the stories that came before the ones that they are sharing, telling and teaching? It is the same story just different words with assorted connotations and associations.
Spring is part of the cycle of life-of creation.
As human beings find the baskets, filled with eggs and candy, left by the Easter Bunny and/or gaze up at a cross do they realize these events are symbols or characters of the same story- a story that is acted out in front of their eyes and hearts for them to observe and listen to? We are all a part of this chronicle and a part of one another."
You wrote back:
"Funny you wrote about love and life and stories of creation and rebirth. I have chased after love all my life. Now I am in the twilight of my life, I must confess that I don't know what love is or means anymore. When I was much younger, I fancied that I knew what love was. Talking about heaven and hell, that reminded a story by JD Salinger entitled "For Esmee--With Love and Squalor". Like all
Salinger's stories, it was beautifully crafted and written. In the story, there was a definition of hell, which I think attributed to Dostoyevsky, : hell is the inability to love. If that is true, I've been in hell for a long time. I've seen people talking a good game of love, but on closer examination, it just turned out they were talking the love they have for themselves: self-love and selfishness. That didn't negate what you have been laboring on the issue of copyright. There must be some kind of live there.
Also, talking about stories of birth and creation and renewal, all my words are a reflection of my attempts of creation and of seeking validation and affirmation of my worth and values. The more I know about humans, the more I realize I don't know the depths of their depravity. Granted, there are a few humans who have inspired me for their nobility and courage. These people are very rare. It seems to me most humans I've run into are cowards, douche bags, and anal orifices, also known as assholes."
Friday, April 22, 2011
Why do you keep a blog?
An asshole sent you an email asking how many readers that you have. You fired back an answer to the effect as far as you knew there are more than one and fewer than three. You then advised him the number of people that follow your blog was none of his goddamn business and he should go fuck himself in the stinking bush behind his pigsty euphemetiscally called "residence". This asshole is the same douche bag who had the temerity to call you a blowhard in a snide, sneak attack. Now that you know him for what he fucking is, his name is engraved on your black list waiting for the right opportune moment for you to send him to a journey of unbearable excitement.
Humans are so fucking stupid, it is not even funny. In fact, it's downright sad and ridiculous. Why didn't the asshole keep his mouth shut? What's the fuck he would gain for the snide remark and stupid inquiry?
Back to the the title of this blog. You keep the blog because you want to stay sane. As simple as that.
Humans are so fucking stupid, it is not even funny. In fact, it's downright sad and ridiculous. Why didn't the asshole keep his mouth shut? What's the fuck he would gain for the snide remark and stupid inquiry?
Back to the the title of this blog. You keep the blog because you want to stay sane. As simple as that.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
A Hundred Names for Love
The following is taken from a book review in the NYT.
How Language Heals
By ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Published: April 15, 2011
Diane Ackerman and Paul West have combined brilliant literary careers with the most enviable of marriages, a “decades-long duet.” Speculating on their longevity as a couple in “One Hundred Names for Love,” Ackerman writes: “We stayed together for the children — each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. . . . All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”
ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE
A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
By Diane Ackerman
322 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
Excerpt: ‘One Hundred Names for Love’ (Google Books)
Lives: The Husband’s Speech (Februa
As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle — he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he “had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons,” Acker man writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she’d “find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades.”
Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. “He had chosen to live the proverbial ‘life of the mind’ to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-passionate wife,” Ackerman writes. “Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna.” His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: “MEM, MEM, MEM. . . .”
Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband’s side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: “In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share.”
West’s every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write — though “aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases,” Acker man explains — he is able to describe his own efforts. “On rare occasions,” he tells his wife, “the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm — or thal — unable to complete itself because of my aphasic ineptitude.”
A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says “cherubim,” which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Ackerman corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises “tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending.” She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation — a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own.
Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? “Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think,” Ackerman recalls. “Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts.” Or as she quotes West explaining it: “The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life.”
As in her previous work — “A Natural History of Love” and “A Natural History of the Senses” being my favorites — here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: “Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut.”
The book’s title stems from the fact that “once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo.” The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife’s name. When a friend asks him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?” his face falls “as if touched by a Taser,” Ackerman writes. “ ‘Used to have . . . hundreds,’ he said with infinite sadness. ‘Now I can’t think of one.’ ”
Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, “swan, pilot-poet,” and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly “names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as ‘Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.’ ” An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes “continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish — all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly.”
I will confess I was deeply affected by “One Hundred Names for Love.” Ackerman and West’s is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.
How Language Heals
By ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Published: April 15, 2011
Diane Ackerman and Paul West have combined brilliant literary careers with the most enviable of marriages, a “decades-long duet.” Speculating on their longevity as a couple in “One Hundred Names for Love,” Ackerman writes: “We stayed together for the children — each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. . . . All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”
ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE
A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
By Diane Ackerman
322 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
Excerpt: ‘One Hundred Names for Love’ (Google Books)
Lives: The Husband’s Speech (Februa
As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle — he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he “had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons,” Acker man writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she’d “find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades.”
Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. “He had chosen to live the proverbial ‘life of the mind’ to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-passionate wife,” Ackerman writes. “Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna.” His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: “MEM, MEM, MEM. . . .”
Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband’s side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: “In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share.”
West’s every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write — though “aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases,” Acker man explains — he is able to describe his own efforts. “On rare occasions,” he tells his wife, “the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm — or thal — unable to complete itself because of my aphasic ineptitude.”
A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says “cherubim,” which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Ackerman corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises “tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending.” She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation — a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own.
Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? “Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think,” Ackerman recalls. “Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts.” Or as she quotes West explaining it: “The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life.”
As in her previous work — “A Natural History of Love” and “A Natural History of the Senses” being my favorites — here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: “Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut.”
The book’s title stems from the fact that “once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo.” The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife’s name. When a friend asks him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?” his face falls “as if touched by a Taser,” Ackerman writes. “ ‘Used to have . . . hundreds,’ he said with infinite sadness. ‘Now I can’t think of one.’ ”
Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, “swan, pilot-poet,” and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly “names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as ‘Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.’ ” An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes “continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish — all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly.”
I will confess I was deeply affected by “One Hundred Names for Love.” Ackerman and West’s is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.
The White Butterfly, A translation.
I translated this gentle, but coolly romantic poem per the request of a friend whose daughter's friend recently had a family tragedy. Soon after the tragedy, the bereaved young mother dreamed of a white butterfly. According to my friend, the translation (the suffering woman can't read Vietnamese) brought some solace to the grieving young woman. I am glad the poem was of some use.
On a related note, once an asshole challenged me to translate Viet poetry into English. I didn't want to take up his challenge as I knew it would be very difficult. I have seen some, including the asshole, trying their hands at it, and I was not impressed. And I was afraid my efforts would have the same result.
All literary endeavors, even translations, should be the labor of love. We must first possess the feelings. Over time the feelings will find their way into words.
I can write a book about feelings and words. In some ways, my feelings and the mysterious and exciting ways my feelings have journeyed really captivate me. Many women like my feelings. And what's not to like? I am disarming, vulnerable, respectful, and uncommonly romantic, and I have a way to convey my feelings with words.
Nhà nàng ở cạnh nhà tôi,
Cách nhau cái dậu mùng tơi xanh rờn.
Hai người sống giữa cô đơn,
Nàng như cũng có nỗi buồn giống tôi.
Giá đừng có dậu mùng tơi,
Thế nào tôi cũng sang chơi thăm nàng.
Tôi chiêm bao rất nhẹ nhàng...
Có con bướm trắng thường sang bên này.
Bướm ơi! Bướm hãy vào đây!
Cho tôi hỏi nhỏ câu này chút thôi...
Chả bao giờ thấy nàng cười,
Nàng hong tơ ướt ra ngoài mái hiên.
Mắt nàng đăm đắm trông lên...
Con bươm bướm trắng về bên ấy rồi!
Bỗng dưng tôi thấy bồi hồi,
Tôi buồn tự hỏi: "Hay tôi yêu nàng?"
-- Không, từ ân ái lỡ làng,
Tình tôi than lạnh gio tàn làm sao?
Tơ hong nàng chả cất vào,
Con bươm bướm trắng hôm nào cũng sang.
Mấy hôm nay chẳng thấy nàng,
Giá tôi cũng có tơ vàng mà hong.
Cái gì như thể nhớ mong?
Nhớ nàng? Không! Quyết là không nhớ nàng!
Vâng, từ ân ái nhỡ nhàng,
Lòng tôi riêng nhớ bạn vàng ngày xưa.
Tầm tầm giời cứ đổ mưa,
Hết hôm nay nữa là vừa bốn hôm.
Cô đơn buồn lại thêm buồn,
Tạnh mưa bươm bướm biết còn sang chơi?
Hôm nay mưa đã tạnh rồi!
Tơ không hong nữa, bướm lười không sang.
Bên hiên vẫn vắng bóng nàng,
Rưng rưng... tôi gục xuống bàn rưng rưng...
Nhớ con bướm trắng lạ lùng!
Nhớ tơ vàng nữa, nhưng không nhớ nàng.
Hỡi ơi! Bướm trắng tơ vàng!
Mau về mà chịu tang nàng đi thôi!
Đêm qua nàng đã chết rồi,
Nghẹn ngào tôi khóc... Quả tôi yêu nàng.
Hồn trinh còn ở trần gian?
Nhập vào bướm trắng mà sang bên này!
The White Butterfly
Her house is next to mine,
Separated by a hedge of deep green Malabar nightshade.
Lived in loneliness she and I,
It appeared that her sadness was similar to mine.
I would walk over and say hi
If not for the hedge of Malabar nightshade.
I had a recurring, gentle dream
Where a white butterfly fluttered to this side of the nightshade.
My dear butterfly, please come inside
And allow me to inquire
As to why she never smiled.
She often raised her eyes to the sky
When she dried the raw, wet threads of silk on the roof of the veranda.
The white butterfly flew back to the other side!
Suddenly, I felt fretful and ill at ease,
And I sadly asked myself: "Do I love thee?"
---No, ever since my love flew away,
My heart has been ashen-cold.
She had not moved the threads of silk,
The white butterfly kept coming every day.
For days she was no where in sight,
I wished I had raw, wet threads of silk to dry.
Something like longing hanging in the air?
Did I miss her? No, I definitely would not!
Yes, ever since my love went away,
It was my love that I longed for.
Gently, rain kept falling down,
Today was the fourth day of rain.
Loneliness heaped upon sadness without end.
When the rain stopped, would the butterfly come for a visit?
Today the rain stopped falling!
No more threads of silks to be dried,
The butterfly was too lazy to fly.
And she still didn't appear by the veranda.
I bent down at the table, sobbing and crying...
I missed the white butterfly.
I missed the golden threads of silk,
But I was not missing her.
Oh, the white butterfly and the golden silk,
Please hurry back home and pay her a last visit!
For she passed away last night.
I am crying now...for I love her
If her virginal soul still hovers close by,
Please enter the white butterfly
And get to this side.
Translated by NKBa'/Wissai by special request.
April 20, 2011
On a related note, once an asshole challenged me to translate Viet poetry into English. I didn't want to take up his challenge as I knew it would be very difficult. I have seen some, including the asshole, trying their hands at it, and I was not impressed. And I was afraid my efforts would have the same result.
All literary endeavors, even translations, should be the labor of love. We must first possess the feelings. Over time the feelings will find their way into words.
I can write a book about feelings and words. In some ways, my feelings and the mysterious and exciting ways my feelings have journeyed really captivate me. Many women like my feelings. And what's not to like? I am disarming, vulnerable, respectful, and uncommonly romantic, and I have a way to convey my feelings with words.
Nhà nàng ở cạnh nhà tôi,
Cách nhau cái dậu mùng tơi xanh rờn.
Hai người sống giữa cô đơn,
Nàng như cũng có nỗi buồn giống tôi.
Giá đừng có dậu mùng tơi,
Thế nào tôi cũng sang chơi thăm nàng.
Tôi chiêm bao rất nhẹ nhàng...
Có con bướm trắng thường sang bên này.
Bướm ơi! Bướm hãy vào đây!
Cho tôi hỏi nhỏ câu này chút thôi...
Chả bao giờ thấy nàng cười,
Nàng hong tơ ướt ra ngoài mái hiên.
Mắt nàng đăm đắm trông lên...
Con bươm bướm trắng về bên ấy rồi!
Bỗng dưng tôi thấy bồi hồi,
Tôi buồn tự hỏi: "Hay tôi yêu nàng?"
-- Không, từ ân ái lỡ làng,
Tình tôi than lạnh gio tàn làm sao?
Tơ hong nàng chả cất vào,
Con bươm bướm trắng hôm nào cũng sang.
Mấy hôm nay chẳng thấy nàng,
Giá tôi cũng có tơ vàng mà hong.
Cái gì như thể nhớ mong?
Nhớ nàng? Không! Quyết là không nhớ nàng!
Vâng, từ ân ái nhỡ nhàng,
Lòng tôi riêng nhớ bạn vàng ngày xưa.
Tầm tầm giời cứ đổ mưa,
Hết hôm nay nữa là vừa bốn hôm.
Cô đơn buồn lại thêm buồn,
Tạnh mưa bươm bướm biết còn sang chơi?
Hôm nay mưa đã tạnh rồi!
Tơ không hong nữa, bướm lười không sang.
Bên hiên vẫn vắng bóng nàng,
Rưng rưng... tôi gục xuống bàn rưng rưng...
Nhớ con bướm trắng lạ lùng!
Nhớ tơ vàng nữa, nhưng không nhớ nàng.
Hỡi ơi! Bướm trắng tơ vàng!
Mau về mà chịu tang nàng đi thôi!
Đêm qua nàng đã chết rồi,
Nghẹn ngào tôi khóc... Quả tôi yêu nàng.
Hồn trinh còn ở trần gian?
Nhập vào bướm trắng mà sang bên này!
The White Butterfly
Her house is next to mine,
Separated by a hedge of deep green Malabar nightshade.
Lived in loneliness she and I,
It appeared that her sadness was similar to mine.
I would walk over and say hi
If not for the hedge of Malabar nightshade.
I had a recurring, gentle dream
Where a white butterfly fluttered to this side of the nightshade.
My dear butterfly, please come inside
And allow me to inquire
As to why she never smiled.
She often raised her eyes to the sky
When she dried the raw, wet threads of silk on the roof of the veranda.
The white butterfly flew back to the other side!
Suddenly, I felt fretful and ill at ease,
And I sadly asked myself: "Do I love thee?"
---No, ever since my love flew away,
My heart has been ashen-cold.
She had not moved the threads of silk,
The white butterfly kept coming every day.
For days she was no where in sight,
I wished I had raw, wet threads of silk to dry.
Something like longing hanging in the air?
Did I miss her? No, I definitely would not!
Yes, ever since my love went away,
It was my love that I longed for.
Gently, rain kept falling down,
Today was the fourth day of rain.
Loneliness heaped upon sadness without end.
When the rain stopped, would the butterfly come for a visit?
Today the rain stopped falling!
No more threads of silks to be dried,
The butterfly was too lazy to fly.
And she still didn't appear by the veranda.
I bent down at the table, sobbing and crying...
I missed the white butterfly.
I missed the golden threads of silk,
But I was not missing her.
Oh, the white butterfly and the golden silk,
Please hurry back home and pay her a last visit!
For she passed away last night.
I am crying now...for I love her
If her virginal soul still hovers close by,
Please enter the white butterfly
And get to this side.
Translated by NKBa'/Wissai by special request.
April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
An Apology for Blowhardia
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Why Trump Soars
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 18, 2011
Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.
But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.
These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.
Thus, there has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control.
And today, apparently, Donald Trump is that man. Trump, currently most famous for telling people that they are fired, has surged toward the top of the presidential primary polls. In one poll, he was in (remote) striking distance in a head-to-head against President Obama. Many people regard Trump as a joke and his popularity a disgrace. But he is actually riding a deep public fantasy: The hunger for the ultimate blowhard who can lead us through dark times.
He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.
It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.
Trump, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to such conventions. When it comes to success, as in so many other things, he is the perpetual boy. He is the enthusiastic adventurer thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.
He labors under the belief — unacceptable in polite society — that two is better than one and that four is better than two. If he can afford a car, a flashy one is better than a boring one. In private jets, lavish is better than dull. In skyscrapers, brass is better than brick, and gold is better than brass.
This boyish enthusiasm for glory has propelled him to enormous accomplishment. He has literally changed the landscape of New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and many places in between. He has survived a ruinous crash and come back stronger than ever.
Moreover, he shares this unambivalent attitude toward success with millions around the country. Though he cannot possibly need the money, he spends his days proselytizing the Gospel of Success through Trump University, his motivational speeches, his TV shows and relentlessly flowing books.
A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way.
In 2009, Trump published a book with a very Trumpian title: “Think Like a Champion.” In that book, he praised Obama’s “amazing” and “phenomenal” accomplishments. “Barack Obama proved that determination combined with opportunity and intelligence can make things happen — and in an exceptional way,” Trump gushed.
Now he spouts birther nonsense and calls Obama the worst president in American history. Now he leads rallies that make Michele Bachmann events look like the League of Women Voters. Even angry American voters want some level of seriousness, prudence and self-control.
But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.
Commentary by Wissai:
A douche bag used the first two paragraphs of this essay as part of the self-conferred clever flank, cowardly, sneak attack on you. So you countered with the following words:
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Likewise, blowhardia or conviction is a matter of perception. Frontal assault is more honorable than flank, sneak attack. It's much better to dismantle the alleged blowhard's views by one's own solid counter-arguments than resorting to cheap quote out of context of the words of somebody else.
When one is at a loss of one's own words and has to borrow the words of somebody else to convey one's feelings and thoughts, it is pitiful indeed.
Why Trump Soars
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 18, 2011
Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.
But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.
These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.
Thus, there has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control.
And today, apparently, Donald Trump is that man. Trump, currently most famous for telling people that they are fired, has surged toward the top of the presidential primary polls. In one poll, he was in (remote) striking distance in a head-to-head against President Obama. Many people regard Trump as a joke and his popularity a disgrace. But he is actually riding a deep public fantasy: The hunger for the ultimate blowhard who can lead us through dark times.
He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.
It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.
Trump, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to such conventions. When it comes to success, as in so many other things, he is the perpetual boy. He is the enthusiastic adventurer thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.
He labors under the belief — unacceptable in polite society — that two is better than one and that four is better than two. If he can afford a car, a flashy one is better than a boring one. In private jets, lavish is better than dull. In skyscrapers, brass is better than brick, and gold is better than brass.
This boyish enthusiasm for glory has propelled him to enormous accomplishment. He has literally changed the landscape of New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and many places in between. He has survived a ruinous crash and come back stronger than ever.
Moreover, he shares this unambivalent attitude toward success with millions around the country. Though he cannot possibly need the money, he spends his days proselytizing the Gospel of Success through Trump University, his motivational speeches, his TV shows and relentlessly flowing books.
A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way.
In 2009, Trump published a book with a very Trumpian title: “Think Like a Champion.” In that book, he praised Obama’s “amazing” and “phenomenal” accomplishments. “Barack Obama proved that determination combined with opportunity and intelligence can make things happen — and in an exceptional way,” Trump gushed.
Now he spouts birther nonsense and calls Obama the worst president in American history. Now he leads rallies that make Michele Bachmann events look like the League of Women Voters. Even angry American voters want some level of seriousness, prudence and self-control.
But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.
Commentary by Wissai:
A douche bag used the first two paragraphs of this essay as part of the self-conferred clever flank, cowardly, sneak attack on you. So you countered with the following words:
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Likewise, blowhardia or conviction is a matter of perception. Frontal assault is more honorable than flank, sneak attack. It's much better to dismantle the alleged blowhard's views by one's own solid counter-arguments than resorting to cheap quote out of context of the words of somebody else.
When one is at a loss of one's own words and has to borrow the words of somebody else to convey one's feelings and thoughts, it is pitiful indeed.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Lessons learned
Every attack invites counter-attack. Be nice and magnanimous. Avoid harsh words. Work on yourself. Stay away from douche bags.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Flashbacks on a beautiful day
Springtime in a semi-desert, high plateau area is just gorgeous. The air is fresh, coupled with a bounty of sunlight and cloudless blue sky, make you feel alive and lusty. Still, flashbacks involving Agnes and various assholes are occurring and you don't really mind. Flashbacks are here for a reason. They force you to come to terms with long repressed memories. In the case of Agnes, your own stupid penchant for romanticism despite all the obstacles and roadblocks involved. In the case of the assholes, the situation is much simpler. The assholes are animals and you were stupid to get yourself in a situation where the douche bags could exert "power" over you. You just have to wait for the right moment. Meanwhile train and steel yourself to act when the moment arrives.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Stupidity
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the stupidity and arrogance displayed by the asshole with his biased comment. Any lingering respect I had for him vanished. That bolstered my thesis that assholes and cowards don't know about to exercise power. They just rush headlong into the thick of things and grab for power, thinking that they deserve it. Little do they know having power without the wisdom to wield it is like playing Russian roulette. Sooner or later they will get killed. What we have is a slow burn of annoyance metamorphosed into active hatred. Fools are usually overly optimistic.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Silence
In the zeal to preserve and protect our public image, we refuse to admit publicly that we have made a mistake. So we hem and haw, sputter and stutter, twist and contort ourselves in coming up with stupid, unconvincing excuses and unsound reasons which are then roundly demolished publicly by our opponents, making us look really stupid, hypocritical, and senile. We thus put ourselves in a social quagmire and we get an emotional turbulence as well, all because of dishonesty and emotional cowardice. That's why a person's integrity is only known when he is tested. All public flowery and mellifluous words are usually just bullshit. The moment his mask falls off his pimpled, pimpish face, nobody believes what comes out of his mouth anymore. Dishonesty has a very high social cost.
A strong man observes silence religiously. He controls his thoughts and feelings.
A strong man observes silence religiously. He controls his thoughts and feelings.
Nguyen Tuong An and Ngo Bao Chau
sợ hãi? «Ông quan tòa» hay giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu?
Tháng Tư 9, 2011 dailyvnews1 Để lại phản hồi Go to comments
Nguyễn Tường An
Theo: Tiền Vệ
-
Bài viết «Về sự sợ hãi» đã góp phần vẽ lên một bức chân dung sống động của giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu: một con người xuất chúng về mặt khoa học, nhưng hết sức ngây thơ về mặt chính trị: giáo sư ngỡ rằng Đảng tặng mình căn hộ trị giá sáu trăm nghìn đô-la và chức giám đốc viện Toán cao cấp kinh phí bảy trăm tỷ đồng là vì Đảng thực sự trọng dụng nhân tài! Đương nhiên, giáo sư đã tá hỏa trước phản ứng – thất vọng, phẫn nộ, coi thường – của không ít người. Vì thế, nhân vụ Cù Huy Hà Vũ (được dư luận đánh giá là quan trọng nhất trong sinh họat chính trị xã hội Việt Nam trong vòng 5 năm nay), giáo sư cũng muốn làm một hành động gì đó để đánh bóng lại cái tên tuổi của mình đã phần nào bị hoen xỉn. Nhưng viết thế nào để vừa khen Cù Huy Hà Vũ (ra vẻ mình cũng là trí thức am hiểu và chính trực) nhưng cũng không được mất lòng đồng chí Nguyễn Tấn Dũng (là người vừa tặng nhà tặng chức cho mình)?
Và kết quả là bài viết «Về sự sợ hãi».
Hai câu đầu: «Tôi vốn không đặc biệt hâm mộ ông Cù Huy Hà Vũ. Những lý lẽ ông đưa ra tôi cũng không thấy có tính thuyết phục đặc biệt» là viết cho Đảng đọc. Giáo sư muốn khẳng định ngay với nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam rằng mình không «cùng hội cùng thuyền» với Cù Huy Hà Vũ.
Người ta chưng hửng: là một nhà khoa học lớn, nhưng giáo sư viết hoàn toàn cảm tính, không một dòng lập luận. Ơ, giáo sư viết cho các đồng chí Ban văn hóa tư tưởng đọc cơ mà!
Mấy câu tiếp theo: «… ông Vũ không hề sợ hãi khi phải đối mặt với số phận của mình…», giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu vẫn viết trong nỗi lo kiểm duyệt. Một người bình thường sẽ viết: «ông Vũ không hề sợ hãi khi phải đối mặt với nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam». Nhưng bị ám ảnh bởi cái máy soi của Ban văn hóa tư tưởng, nên câu chữ của giáo sư trở nên u u mê mê. «Đối mặt với số phận của mình» là gì vậy, thưa giáo sư?
Đoạn sau cũng theo cùng một logic như thế. Giáo sư đóng kịch «Nghĩ mãi tôi cũng chỉ tìm ra hai cách lý giải», rồi thình lình đi đến một bổ đề cơ bản: tất cả sai lầm là do «ông quan tòa»! Khán giả ngã bổ chửng. Kẻ ngớ ngẩn nhất Việt Nam cũng phải biết đây là một vụ án ở tầm quốc gia: lần đầu tiên một công dân Việt Nam dám kiện cả bộ máy cầm quyền. «Ông quan tòa» chỉ là đầy tớ của các «đầy tớ nhân dân» thôi, giáo sư ạ.
Thiết nghĩ, cái giọng u u mê mê đó của giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu là tất nhiên thôi, vì mục tiêu giáo sư đặt ra, có Thánh cũng chẳng làm được. Ai lại có thể vừa khen Cù Huy Hà Vũ lại vừa không làm phật lòng Đảng?
Vậy nên giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu thông minh, khéo léo đến mấy cũng bị lộ tẩy. Đi hai hàng giỏi mấy cũng khó tránh khỏi tai nạn. Và người «sợ hãi» đầu tiên là chính giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu! Ngay trên blog riêng của mình ở mãi tận xứ Chicago, giáo sư vẫn run lẩy bẩy!
Đương nhiên, không ai có quyền bắt giáo sư phải hô khẩu hiệu ủng hộ Cù Huy Hà Vũ, nhưng người ta có quyền đòi hỏi giáo sư sự thành thật.
Tôi biết nhiều trí thức chưa đủ dũng cảm để lên tiếng trước vụ Cù Huy Hà Vũ. Nhưng thà im lặng còn hơn bóp méo sự thật. La moitié de la vérité ce n’est pas la vérité – Một nửa sự thât không còn là sự thật.
Ngược lại, giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu cũng có quyền nói «những lý lẽ» Cù Huy Hà Vũ đưa ra «không thấy có tính thuyết phục đặc biệt», nhưng ít nhất giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu cũng nên phân tích cụ thể: «Những lý lẽ» là gì? Vì sao giáo sư không thấy thuyết phục? Điều này rất cần thiết để đảm bảo công bằng cho người vắng mặt, hơn nữa một người đang bị nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam giam giữ, một người không thể tự bảo vệ mình.
Paris 8 tháng 4 năm 2011.
Two issues need to be addressed:
1. NBC didn't have to say anything about the trial of CHHV. The fact that he spoke up at all reflected his courage and concern.
2. How did the author know that NBC's views reflect the materialistic concerns of hanging on the house and the position in Vietnam? Did he actually hold many conversations with NBC? Has he been a bosom friend of NBC since childhood? To attribute unsavory motives to somebody's actions require solid facts and sound reasoning, not baseless conjectures and wild speculations, and is a poor reflection on the integrity of the accuser as well as on his intellectual acumen.
As for the author of using the French saying of condemning half-truths, he must remember that in the current oppressive atmosphere in Vietnam, to speak up any truth at all, as NBC has done, let alone half-truths, is an act of courage. What's about the author? Has he done anything concrete for Vietnam? Has he spoken up or taken actions against the corrupt and inept Hanoi regime? Or is he busy sniping at individuals like NBC so his name can be linked with that of NBC?
NBC is one of the earliest signers of the Bauxite petition, way before his winning the Fields prize and subsequent coddling by the state.
Wissai
Tháng Tư 9, 2011 dailyvnews1 Để lại phản hồi Go to comments
Nguyễn Tường An
Theo: Tiền Vệ
-
Bài viết «Về sự sợ hãi» đã góp phần vẽ lên một bức chân dung sống động của giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu: một con người xuất chúng về mặt khoa học, nhưng hết sức ngây thơ về mặt chính trị: giáo sư ngỡ rằng Đảng tặng mình căn hộ trị giá sáu trăm nghìn đô-la và chức giám đốc viện Toán cao cấp kinh phí bảy trăm tỷ đồng là vì Đảng thực sự trọng dụng nhân tài! Đương nhiên, giáo sư đã tá hỏa trước phản ứng – thất vọng, phẫn nộ, coi thường – của không ít người. Vì thế, nhân vụ Cù Huy Hà Vũ (được dư luận đánh giá là quan trọng nhất trong sinh họat chính trị xã hội Việt Nam trong vòng 5 năm nay), giáo sư cũng muốn làm một hành động gì đó để đánh bóng lại cái tên tuổi của mình đã phần nào bị hoen xỉn. Nhưng viết thế nào để vừa khen Cù Huy Hà Vũ (ra vẻ mình cũng là trí thức am hiểu và chính trực) nhưng cũng không được mất lòng đồng chí Nguyễn Tấn Dũng (là người vừa tặng nhà tặng chức cho mình)?
Và kết quả là bài viết «Về sự sợ hãi».
Hai câu đầu: «Tôi vốn không đặc biệt hâm mộ ông Cù Huy Hà Vũ. Những lý lẽ ông đưa ra tôi cũng không thấy có tính thuyết phục đặc biệt» là viết cho Đảng đọc. Giáo sư muốn khẳng định ngay với nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam rằng mình không «cùng hội cùng thuyền» với Cù Huy Hà Vũ.
Người ta chưng hửng: là một nhà khoa học lớn, nhưng giáo sư viết hoàn toàn cảm tính, không một dòng lập luận. Ơ, giáo sư viết cho các đồng chí Ban văn hóa tư tưởng đọc cơ mà!
Mấy câu tiếp theo: «… ông Vũ không hề sợ hãi khi phải đối mặt với số phận của mình…», giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu vẫn viết trong nỗi lo kiểm duyệt. Một người bình thường sẽ viết: «ông Vũ không hề sợ hãi khi phải đối mặt với nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam». Nhưng bị ám ảnh bởi cái máy soi của Ban văn hóa tư tưởng, nên câu chữ của giáo sư trở nên u u mê mê. «Đối mặt với số phận của mình» là gì vậy, thưa giáo sư?
Đoạn sau cũng theo cùng một logic như thế. Giáo sư đóng kịch «Nghĩ mãi tôi cũng chỉ tìm ra hai cách lý giải», rồi thình lình đi đến một bổ đề cơ bản: tất cả sai lầm là do «ông quan tòa»! Khán giả ngã bổ chửng. Kẻ ngớ ngẩn nhất Việt Nam cũng phải biết đây là một vụ án ở tầm quốc gia: lần đầu tiên một công dân Việt Nam dám kiện cả bộ máy cầm quyền. «Ông quan tòa» chỉ là đầy tớ của các «đầy tớ nhân dân» thôi, giáo sư ạ.
Thiết nghĩ, cái giọng u u mê mê đó của giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu là tất nhiên thôi, vì mục tiêu giáo sư đặt ra, có Thánh cũng chẳng làm được. Ai lại có thể vừa khen Cù Huy Hà Vũ lại vừa không làm phật lòng Đảng?
Vậy nên giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu thông minh, khéo léo đến mấy cũng bị lộ tẩy. Đi hai hàng giỏi mấy cũng khó tránh khỏi tai nạn. Và người «sợ hãi» đầu tiên là chính giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu! Ngay trên blog riêng của mình ở mãi tận xứ Chicago, giáo sư vẫn run lẩy bẩy!
Đương nhiên, không ai có quyền bắt giáo sư phải hô khẩu hiệu ủng hộ Cù Huy Hà Vũ, nhưng người ta có quyền đòi hỏi giáo sư sự thành thật.
Tôi biết nhiều trí thức chưa đủ dũng cảm để lên tiếng trước vụ Cù Huy Hà Vũ. Nhưng thà im lặng còn hơn bóp méo sự thật. La moitié de la vérité ce n’est pas la vérité – Một nửa sự thât không còn là sự thật.
Ngược lại, giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu cũng có quyền nói «những lý lẽ» Cù Huy Hà Vũ đưa ra «không thấy có tính thuyết phục đặc biệt», nhưng ít nhất giáo sư Ngô Bảo Châu cũng nên phân tích cụ thể: «Những lý lẽ» là gì? Vì sao giáo sư không thấy thuyết phục? Điều này rất cần thiết để đảm bảo công bằng cho người vắng mặt, hơn nữa một người đang bị nhà cầm quyền Việt Nam giam giữ, một người không thể tự bảo vệ mình.
Paris 8 tháng 4 năm 2011.
Two issues need to be addressed:
1. NBC didn't have to say anything about the trial of CHHV. The fact that he spoke up at all reflected his courage and concern.
2. How did the author know that NBC's views reflect the materialistic concerns of hanging on the house and the position in Vietnam? Did he actually hold many conversations with NBC? Has he been a bosom friend of NBC since childhood? To attribute unsavory motives to somebody's actions require solid facts and sound reasoning, not baseless conjectures and wild speculations, and is a poor reflection on the integrity of the accuser as well as on his intellectual acumen.
As for the author of using the French saying of condemning half-truths, he must remember that in the current oppressive atmosphere in Vietnam, to speak up any truth at all, as NBC has done, let alone half-truths, is an act of courage. What's about the author? Has he done anything concrete for Vietnam? Has he spoken up or taken actions against the corrupt and inept Hanoi regime? Or is he busy sniping at individuals like NBC so his name can be linked with that of NBC?
NBC is one of the earliest signers of the Bauxite petition, way before his winning the Fields prize and subsequent coddling by the state.
Wissai
Metaphor and Thinking
Article by David Brooks of NYTimes
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Poetry for Everyday Life
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 11, 2011
Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.”
The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.
In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked.
When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.
When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.
The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.
Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events. we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.
Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.
Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen.
Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.
Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm.
To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.
Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.
Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Poetry for Everyday Life
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 11, 2011
Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.”
The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.
In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked.
When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.
When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.
The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.
Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events. we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.
Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.
Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen.
Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.
Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm.
To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.
Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.
Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”
Indian Philosophy
The so-called Indian "philosophy", as presented here, can be concisely viewed as follows:
A) The What:
I am not sure what the post I encountered recently is actually about the essence of Indian Philosophy, but their verbiage could be grouped under the concepts of:
Karma
Chance
Acceptance
Adaptability
B) Why Is There Such a "Philosophy"?
I am not smart enough to figure out yet except I can't help thinking this is a philosophy of a person finding himself stuck in a quagmire. The "philosophy" could be a result of the contemplation of the wisdom of passivity. In a similar vein, Nietzsche once attributed Christian ethics to the mentality of slaves. He went on making cogent analysis. Before anybody condemns him as a crackpot, his views on ethics have been influential. He has exerted an enormous influence on thinkers and artists. Blithely dismissing him based on scattered hearsay, as many have done, without bothering to take the time to find out what the man thought and especially how he expressed himself is a sign of laziness and gross insensitivity, besides intellectual dishonesty.
Wissai
A) The What:
I am not sure what the post I encountered recently is actually about the essence of Indian Philosophy, but their verbiage could be grouped under the concepts of:
Karma
Chance
Acceptance
Adaptability
B) Why Is There Such a "Philosophy"?
I am not smart enough to figure out yet except I can't help thinking this is a philosophy of a person finding himself stuck in a quagmire. The "philosophy" could be a result of the contemplation of the wisdom of passivity. In a similar vein, Nietzsche once attributed Christian ethics to the mentality of slaves. He went on making cogent analysis. Before anybody condemns him as a crackpot, his views on ethics have been influential. He has exerted an enormous influence on thinkers and artists. Blithely dismissing him based on scattered hearsay, as many have done, without bothering to take the time to find out what the man thought and especially how he expressed himself is a sign of laziness and gross insensitivity, besides intellectual dishonesty.
Wissai
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sometimes I wonder
Sometimes I wonder
Sometimes I wonder whether
certain people with whom I happen to interact
are really fools as they appear to be
or they just pretend to be so,
because I find it hard to believe
how they can be so self-righteous with others
and yet so blind about themselves.
Don't they have eyes?
Can't they think?
Or is it because they're cowards at heart,
refusing to see the truth for what it is.
Wissai
April 11, 2011
Sometimes I wonder whether
certain people with whom I happen to interact
are really fools as they appear to be
or they just pretend to be so,
because I find it hard to believe
how they can be so self-righteous with others
and yet so blind about themselves.
Don't they have eyes?
Can't they think?
Or is it because they're cowards at heart,
refusing to see the truth for what it is.
Wissai
April 11, 2011
Thoughts on Mental Illness and Despicable Hypocrisy
Robbing the Chinese to give to the poor? Ha Vasko, who is facing up to four years in jail on possible hate crime charges
It may not be exactly what the legendary bandit had in mind - but this Vietnamese woman does not seem to care.
Ha Vasko, 68, is accused of pickpocketing. But not just any pickpocketing: Vasko is accused of flying all the way from her $400,000 home in Florida, where she lives with her wealthy husband, to New York's Chinatown, where she then allegedly robs only the Chinese - and gives her ill-gotten gains to the needy.
But it seems, after four arrests in nine months, her alleged one-woman crime spree has come to an end. Vasko is now jailed at Rikers Island, where she could be facing four years in jail on hate crime charges.
Her husband John, she said, is refusing to pay her bail because he wants to teach her a lesson.
Vasko apparently hates the Chinese. 'They cheat, and they are greedy and are on welfare,' she told the New York Post.
The mother-of-two claimed her husband gave her $50,000 to help strangers and friends in need, but that she has spent it all.
She also gets an allowance of $5,000-$6,000 a month from her husband but that, also, is apparently not enough.
'She's very charitable,' Mr Vasko told the Post from the couple's waterfront home in Melbourne, Florida, adding that his wife has 'good intentions'.
Nevertheless, he appeared to feel it was time for some tough love, and is said to be refusing to pay the $124,000 bail to set his wife free from Rikers.
'He's very, very mad at me,' she confessed in an interview with the New York Post, adding that Mr Vasko is a 'good, good man' who could 'get any woman, but he sticks with me'.
Vasko and her husband have been married for 41 years. They met in Hanoi, where he was working as a civilian engineer on military satellites.
Vasko's pickpocketing rampage through New York is believed to have begun last June, when she allegedly stole $500 from a Chinese woman. Over the next nine months she was arrested four times, the last time on March 21.
Vasko admitted that she herself has Chinese blood, and told the Post she does not know why she hates them so much.
She also claimed that she first began stealing when, at five years old, she saw her mother crying because she was hungry.
At least three times she allegedly walked from appearing in a Manhattan court straight back out on the street to pickpocket again. There are fears she has struck more than 100 times.
After one arrest, apparently worried she would miss her Delta flight home, Vasko allegedly told a police officer she would give him $1,000 to let her get on the plane. Bribery was promptly added to the list of charges against her.
She has now been labelled a 'persistent offender' by the Manhattan District Attorney, which could prosecute the latest case as a hate crime.
That could see her spend up to four years in prison.
A date for a psychiatric hearing has been set.
Comment:
1. The lady is definitely mentally unbalanced. Is she aware of her mental state? Does she know what she did was legally wrong but could not help herself because of some persistent urges? Or does she think that what she did was right and beautiful and the laws were just the nuisance that got in the way?
2. If we just look at the What (her violation of the laws and punish her for her crimes) and neglect the Why (she steals and pickpockets from a specific group of people in order to give the proceeds to the poor and needy), we are no longer sentient beings and have been reduced to robots.
3. Despite having Chinese blood, why does she hate the Chinese so much? What is the root cause of this self-hatred?
4. Mental illness is a fascinating field. I submit that most of us are emotionally disturbed and unhinged in varying degrees, as a consequence of coping with life's demands. The most pathetic and most despicable manifestations of mental illness are those who are afflicted with the lack of self-awareness. There are those among us persistently clinging to a distorted view that they are morally superior to others and thus are inclined to behave in a holier-than-thou manner while conveniently overlooking three things: first, they commit the same offense that they piously and self-righteously attack and condemn in others; second, their views and their expressions of them lack the internal logic; third, their words and deeds are not consistent and congruous.
Wissai
It may not be exactly what the legendary bandit had in mind - but this Vietnamese woman does not seem to care.
Ha Vasko, 68, is accused of pickpocketing. But not just any pickpocketing: Vasko is accused of flying all the way from her $400,000 home in Florida, where she lives with her wealthy husband, to New York's Chinatown, where she then allegedly robs only the Chinese - and gives her ill-gotten gains to the needy.
But it seems, after four arrests in nine months, her alleged one-woman crime spree has come to an end. Vasko is now jailed at Rikers Island, where she could be facing four years in jail on hate crime charges.
Her husband John, she said, is refusing to pay her bail because he wants to teach her a lesson.
Vasko apparently hates the Chinese. 'They cheat, and they are greedy and are on welfare,' she told the New York Post.
The mother-of-two claimed her husband gave her $50,000 to help strangers and friends in need, but that she has spent it all.
She also gets an allowance of $5,000-$6,000 a month from her husband but that, also, is apparently not enough.
'She's very charitable,' Mr Vasko told the Post from the couple's waterfront home in Melbourne, Florida, adding that his wife has 'good intentions'.
Nevertheless, he appeared to feel it was time for some tough love, and is said to be refusing to pay the $124,000 bail to set his wife free from Rikers.
'He's very, very mad at me,' she confessed in an interview with the New York Post, adding that Mr Vasko is a 'good, good man' who could 'get any woman, but he sticks with me'.
Vasko and her husband have been married for 41 years. They met in Hanoi, where he was working as a civilian engineer on military satellites.
Vasko's pickpocketing rampage through New York is believed to have begun last June, when she allegedly stole $500 from a Chinese woman. Over the next nine months she was arrested four times, the last time on March 21.
Vasko admitted that she herself has Chinese blood, and told the Post she does not know why she hates them so much.
She also claimed that she first began stealing when, at five years old, she saw her mother crying because she was hungry.
At least three times she allegedly walked from appearing in a Manhattan court straight back out on the street to pickpocket again. There are fears she has struck more than 100 times.
After one arrest, apparently worried she would miss her Delta flight home, Vasko allegedly told a police officer she would give him $1,000 to let her get on the plane. Bribery was promptly added to the list of charges against her.
She has now been labelled a 'persistent offender' by the Manhattan District Attorney, which could prosecute the latest case as a hate crime.
That could see her spend up to four years in prison.
A date for a psychiatric hearing has been set.
Comment:
1. The lady is definitely mentally unbalanced. Is she aware of her mental state? Does she know what she did was legally wrong but could not help herself because of some persistent urges? Or does she think that what she did was right and beautiful and the laws were just the nuisance that got in the way?
2. If we just look at the What (her violation of the laws and punish her for her crimes) and neglect the Why (she steals and pickpockets from a specific group of people in order to give the proceeds to the poor and needy), we are no longer sentient beings and have been reduced to robots.
3. Despite having Chinese blood, why does she hate the Chinese so much? What is the root cause of this self-hatred?
4. Mental illness is a fascinating field. I submit that most of us are emotionally disturbed and unhinged in varying degrees, as a consequence of coping with life's demands. The most pathetic and most despicable manifestations of mental illness are those who are afflicted with the lack of self-awareness. There are those among us persistently clinging to a distorted view that they are morally superior to others and thus are inclined to behave in a holier-than-thou manner while conveniently overlooking three things: first, they commit the same offense that they piously and self-righteously attack and condemn in others; second, their views and their expressions of them lack the internal logic; third, their words and deeds are not consistent and congruous.
Wissai
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Is Geography really Destiny?
The Rains of Dictators
When it comes to the distribution of democracy across the globe, it's mostly about the rainfall, a study suggests.
To get a metric for democracy, researchers used average ratings from an oft-cited political-science database called Polity 2. For the period 1965 to 2009, they found that there were just two democracies, Cyprus and Israel, and 14 "persistent" autocracies among countries with an average annual rainfall of less than 21½ inches. Between 21½ inches and 51 inches, there were 18 stable democracies (out of a total of 26 in the data set) and seven persistent autocracies. Above 51 inches, the balance tipped back to closed societies. That relationship persisted even when colonial history, the presence of oil and ethnic division were controlled for.
The authors argue that moderate rainfall and arable land create economies in which small farms produce grain and legumes above the subsistence level. In turn, the trading of crops helps a broad swath of the population to build up financial and educational capital, an important foundation of democracy. By contrast, the authors say, growing and storing food in arid or tropical lands presents challenges favoring plantations and large landholders, not a broader citizenry.
"Rainfall, Human Capital and Democracy," Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo, working paper (April)
Comment by Roberto Wissai:
The thesis that geography impacts human behavior was given wide circulation after the success of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Gems, and Steel. The thesis is another version of the influence of environment.
Nature versus Nurture or Free Will versus Predestination has been part of the landscape of a debate on What is like being Human. Are we at the mercy of the environment or we are the creature that can transcend the environment thanks to our free will and deep universal longings, one of which is democracy? Although the thesis that geography is destiny is not without merits, I think it selectively used data to fit into a preconceived notion. India has long been a democracy. There are nascent and budding democracies as well in Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These countries have very high rainfall.
I think Man is a combination of Nature and Nurture. Overemphasis of one over the other does not reflect reality. Having said that, I recognize there is a tendency among those with autocratic bent to hold a materialistic, deterministic view of Man, of which Nazism and Communism were prime examples, but Man throughout ages has shown he does not fit into one theory and one view. He is wondrously protean and has proven time and again that he is more than a victim of his circumstances.
Wissai
Note by the commentator:
With this commentary, I showed to all the assholes and douche bags out there the superiority of my intellect. Unlike them, I could read critically. Most of them are not fit to carry my sandals and wipe my ass, yet some of them have the stupidity and temerity to enter a debate with me. There are two nitwits who fancy that they can argue, but over and over again I demolish their arguments and expose their ignorance, and they have to resort to humiliated silence. But one, in particular, would try again, I know. I am ready for him. There is another who is a coward but fantasizes that he is morally superior to me. I have exposed his hypocrisy.
All the bastards out there need to know that to attack me without due cause or try to exert power over me will invite a withering counter-attack from me.
When it comes to the distribution of democracy across the globe, it's mostly about the rainfall, a study suggests.
To get a metric for democracy, researchers used average ratings from an oft-cited political-science database called Polity 2. For the period 1965 to 2009, they found that there were just two democracies, Cyprus and Israel, and 14 "persistent" autocracies among countries with an average annual rainfall of less than 21½ inches. Between 21½ inches and 51 inches, there were 18 stable democracies (out of a total of 26 in the data set) and seven persistent autocracies. Above 51 inches, the balance tipped back to closed societies. That relationship persisted even when colonial history, the presence of oil and ethnic division were controlled for.
The authors argue that moderate rainfall and arable land create economies in which small farms produce grain and legumes above the subsistence level. In turn, the trading of crops helps a broad swath of the population to build up financial and educational capital, an important foundation of democracy. By contrast, the authors say, growing and storing food in arid or tropical lands presents challenges favoring plantations and large landholders, not a broader citizenry.
"Rainfall, Human Capital and Democracy," Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo, working paper (April)
Comment by Roberto Wissai:
The thesis that geography impacts human behavior was given wide circulation after the success of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Gems, and Steel. The thesis is another version of the influence of environment.
Nature versus Nurture or Free Will versus Predestination has been part of the landscape of a debate on What is like being Human. Are we at the mercy of the environment or we are the creature that can transcend the environment thanks to our free will and deep universal longings, one of which is democracy? Although the thesis that geography is destiny is not without merits, I think it selectively used data to fit into a preconceived notion. India has long been a democracy. There are nascent and budding democracies as well in Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These countries have very high rainfall.
I think Man is a combination of Nature and Nurture. Overemphasis of one over the other does not reflect reality. Having said that, I recognize there is a tendency among those with autocratic bent to hold a materialistic, deterministic view of Man, of which Nazism and Communism were prime examples, but Man throughout ages has shown he does not fit into one theory and one view. He is wondrously protean and has proven time and again that he is more than a victim of his circumstances.
Wissai
Note by the commentator:
With this commentary, I showed to all the assholes and douche bags out there the superiority of my intellect. Unlike them, I could read critically. Most of them are not fit to carry my sandals and wipe my ass, yet some of them have the stupidity and temerity to enter a debate with me. There are two nitwits who fancy that they can argue, but over and over again I demolish their arguments and expose their ignorance, and they have to resort to humiliated silence. But one, in particular, would try again, I know. I am ready for him. There is another who is a coward but fantasizes that he is morally superior to me. I have exposed his hypocrisy.
All the bastards out there need to know that to attack me without due cause or try to exert power over me will invite a withering counter-attack from me.
Friday, April 8, 2011
In "Praise" of Phoniness
They use words that show their phoniness and sophistry. Come on, whom the f-ck they thought they could fool. You couldn't find an ounce of modesty in them. Instead, all pride and lies and phoniness. Liars get together and congratulate themselves on being honest and truthful. They make you want to throw up!
You have come across imbeciles who received some schooling and then fancy they are educated and smart. They lie, cheat, steal, and make monkeys of themselves as they journey through life. Today you came across two brazen thieves. Then you met an aggressive, stupid, but lucky dude who brought out homicidal impulses in you. But you controlled yourself. You are waiting for the right moment. Good things come to those who wait. Right timing is important for success. There is a difference between bravery and bravado. Steel and train yourself for moments of testing.
The absence of the unctuous politician surprised you. Once again, you don't know what people are made of until and unless they are tested. You suppose there is a limit to what a human can take in terms of public taunting and "kidding". Additionally, for the very first time the words "karmic retribution" came to your febrile mind. The sins of a father will be atoned with unimaginable anguish for generations to come. So, attacking others must be the last resort and only as a defense of a righteous cause and your honor. Wanton, unprovoked, self-righteous attacks would just invite unforeseen consequences.
May the grace of wisdom shine upon thee and give thee peace. May you have the strength to curb thy temper and enable thee to wait. May thou never be self-righteous.
You have come across imbeciles who received some schooling and then fancy they are educated and smart. They lie, cheat, steal, and make monkeys of themselves as they journey through life. Today you came across two brazen thieves. Then you met an aggressive, stupid, but lucky dude who brought out homicidal impulses in you. But you controlled yourself. You are waiting for the right moment. Good things come to those who wait. Right timing is important for success. There is a difference between bravery and bravado. Steel and train yourself for moments of testing.
The absence of the unctuous politician surprised you. Once again, you don't know what people are made of until and unless they are tested. You suppose there is a limit to what a human can take in terms of public taunting and "kidding". Additionally, for the very first time the words "karmic retribution" came to your febrile mind. The sins of a father will be atoned with unimaginable anguish for generations to come. So, attacking others must be the last resort and only as a defense of a righteous cause and your honor. Wanton, unprovoked, self-righteous attacks would just invite unforeseen consequences.
May the grace of wisdom shine upon thee and give thee peace. May you have the strength to curb thy temper and enable thee to wait. May thou never be self-righteous.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Soul on Fire, Body on Ice
That's what you are. Soul on Fire and Body on Ice. You state your arguments calmly, exposing the fallacies of reasoning and cowardly behavior of your opponents. You don't patently embrace double talk and hypocrisy. Instead, your words have basis in fact and logical irrefutable reasoning, and not in conjecture and sophistical reasoning as those of your opponents which often border on being absurd and nonsensical. Sometimes you feel compelled to tell others to take their verbal game of pretense to somewhere else. You hope that you don't get any impairment of judgment as others do when you get old. You earnestly wish you will maintain a high standard of propriety and aesthetics.
Others have taken upon themselves the odious task of policing and enforcing the community ethics, but they themselves routinely engage in acts of moral reprehension.
Something in you has died. You have crossed the shore of nihilism which is populated by the likes of assholes and douche bags who previously nauseated you. Upon further reflection, you realize that they are not really that clever. Instead of protecting their ego since their image is already shot by your unmasking them, they should just admit that they have made a mistake. But because they are vain, they would never admit they make mistake. They thus resort to dancing around and looking for cheap excuses. They are so cowardly, so craven that they are pitiful. Now some of them go through a motion of being sensitive and empathetic, but you know they are selfish and hardened to the core. Nothing going in this world would touch their inner self except their own interests. They have to go through the necessary social dance to appear acceptable. Life is nothing but a game of pretense.
You looked at her. The smile. The feminine charm of coquetry reminded you of Agnes and your awkward discovery of being affected by the opposite sex. You are wiser now. You don't let yourself be carried away because you know morel about women.
Others have taken upon themselves the odious task of policing and enforcing the community ethics, but they themselves routinely engage in acts of moral reprehension.
Something in you has died. You have crossed the shore of nihilism which is populated by the likes of assholes and douche bags who previously nauseated you. Upon further reflection, you realize that they are not really that clever. Instead of protecting their ego since their image is already shot by your unmasking them, they should just admit that they have made a mistake. But because they are vain, they would never admit they make mistake. They thus resort to dancing around and looking for cheap excuses. They are so cowardly, so craven that they are pitiful. Now some of them go through a motion of being sensitive and empathetic, but you know they are selfish and hardened to the core. Nothing going in this world would touch their inner self except their own interests. They have to go through the necessary social dance to appear acceptable. Life is nothing but a game of pretense.
You looked at her. The smile. The feminine charm of coquetry reminded you of Agnes and your awkward discovery of being affected by the opposite sex. You are wiser now. You don't let yourself be carried away because you know morel about women.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Indifference and Pretense and Thirst for Vengeance
So you must curb your lack of discipline. You pour your frustrations here, and not elsewhere. Don't you ever let the fucking assholes and cowards use the technicality and box you in, ever again. You have to play the game of life right. Keep your mouth shut and keep your thoughts to yourself. Admire yourself. You are capable of analysis and self-analysis. Stop looking for validation and affimartion. Be strong. Stop being sentimental.
Laugh more often. Don't take yourself too seriously. Be empathetic.
Laugh more often. Don't take yourself too seriously. Be empathetic.
Love is both a mystery and a naked truth
They say love is a mystery,
a wonder, an enigma and all that shit.
They say you don't know what love is
until it hits you on the head with a two by four,
rendering you crazy and dreamy
and do things you would not ordinarily do.
I say that's all bullshit.
I should know
'cause I've been in and out of love
so many times I stop counting.
Love is an impairment of reasoning,
a magnification of lust,
a desire to possess the Other,
and a surrender to loneliness,
until one day you realize
that the woman you thought as sweet
now makes you want to make a hasty retreat.
Love is a longing for the complement
while being saddled with a sentiment
of acceptance,
Of being driven with a fear of rejection.
Once you overcome concerns of rejection and acceptance,,
you would come to know what love really is:
An embrace of what's good inside you.
More women would then love you
and you would have a hard time choosing,
So you start building a harem of love.
Other men would envy
and foam at the mouth that you're lucky.
Little do they know Luck has nothing to do with Love.
Love is what it is.
Peace, Forgiveness, Acceptance, Giving.
Roberto Wissai
April 4, 2011
a wonder, an enigma and all that shit.
They say you don't know what love is
until it hits you on the head with a two by four,
rendering you crazy and dreamy
and do things you would not ordinarily do.
I say that's all bullshit.
I should know
'cause I've been in and out of love
so many times I stop counting.
Love is an impairment of reasoning,
a magnification of lust,
a desire to possess the Other,
and a surrender to loneliness,
until one day you realize
that the woman you thought as sweet
now makes you want to make a hasty retreat.
Love is a longing for the complement
while being saddled with a sentiment
of acceptance,
Of being driven with a fear of rejection.
Once you overcome concerns of rejection and acceptance,,
you would come to know what love really is:
An embrace of what's good inside you.
More women would then love you
and you would have a hard time choosing,
So you start building a harem of love.
Other men would envy
and foam at the mouth that you're lucky.
Little do they know Luck has nothing to do with Love.
Love is what it is.
Peace, Forgiveness, Acceptance, Giving.
Roberto Wissai
April 4, 2011
On the Perils of Self-Adulation
On the Perils of Self-Adulation
While self-hatred is the most pathetic and pitiful display of human behavior, self-adulation is the most odious, and which you--- that's right, you Roberto--- must guard against, otherwise you are fast becoming an unwitting laughing stock of the stupid, the insensitive, and the ignorant who would readily jump on the bandwagon of decorum and flail their arms and scream at the top of their lungs in order to denounce you. Remember, the stance and pretense of moral superiority is not your monopoly.
You must avoid your penchant to indulge in an orgy of depraving profanity. Stay away from being a caricature of yourself. Write from the heart, from what you know and feel most passionate about, even if you have to repeat yourself. Be true. Don't be a phony.
Be grandiloquent if you must. Skid close to the edge of the abyss if you wish, but everything you say must have a ring of authenticity and poetry. Yes, poetry because that's where your home is. An adobe of loss and pain and loneliness. Rise above the mayhem of petty resentment and repressed anger. Show the world your tender, lyrical and humorous sides. Find the right mix and alloy of self-mockery, honesty, poetry, and bravado.
Roberto Wissai
April 4, 2911
While self-hatred is the most pathetic and pitiful display of human behavior, self-adulation is the most odious, and which you--- that's right, you Roberto--- must guard against, otherwise you are fast becoming an unwitting laughing stock of the stupid, the insensitive, and the ignorant who would readily jump on the bandwagon of decorum and flail their arms and scream at the top of their lungs in order to denounce you. Remember, the stance and pretense of moral superiority is not your monopoly.
You must avoid your penchant to indulge in an orgy of depraving profanity. Stay away from being a caricature of yourself. Write from the heart, from what you know and feel most passionate about, even if you have to repeat yourself. Be true. Don't be a phony.
Be grandiloquent if you must. Skid close to the edge of the abyss if you wish, but everything you say must have a ring of authenticity and poetry. Yes, poetry because that's where your home is. An adobe of loss and pain and loneliness. Rise above the mayhem of petty resentment and repressed anger. Show the world your tender, lyrical and humorous sides. Find the right mix and alloy of self-mockery, honesty, poetry, and bravado.
Roberto Wissai
April 4, 2911
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Death
David Foster Wallace, a writer of immense intellgence and learning struggled with depression for years. He finally killed himself. You are no stranger with the black dog. You struggled with the beast for the long time. You emerged triumphant, with tremendous costs.
This morning, you meditated on the subject of rejection and anger, two contributing causes of your depression. You now laugh at your emotional and social immaturity which were products of social isolation and idealism. The more you interact with human animals, the more you realize life is just a fucking game of power and pretense. The the ultimate objective of the game is to stay alive and enjoy whatever that brings you peace and a sense of fulfillment, which in your case are the acquisition of knowledge and self-expression through words. Concepts like love and friendship are noble but fraught with dangers and disappointments. You finally accepted Laura's rejection as well as the rejections of others, just ax you yourself have rejected many others. Happiness must be internally generated, not externally induced. Meanwhile, you try to make and save money.
Be calm at all times. Assholes and douche bags are galore. Humans are just another kind of animals, your potential biggest sources of annoyance and danger. Deal with them with guile and firmness. Don't get yourself hurt. Be ready to be ruthless when opportunities present themselves. Don't let others box you in.
Be clever. You can do it.
This morning, you meditated on the subject of rejection and anger, two contributing causes of your depression. You now laugh at your emotional and social immaturity which were products of social isolation and idealism. The more you interact with human animals, the more you realize life is just a fucking game of power and pretense. The the ultimate objective of the game is to stay alive and enjoy whatever that brings you peace and a sense of fulfillment, which in your case are the acquisition of knowledge and self-expression through words. Concepts like love and friendship are noble but fraught with dangers and disappointments. You finally accepted Laura's rejection as well as the rejections of others, just ax you yourself have rejected many others. Happiness must be internally generated, not externally induced. Meanwhile, you try to make and save money.
Be calm at all times. Assholes and douche bags are galore. Humans are just another kind of animals, your potential biggest sources of annoyance and danger. Deal with them with guile and firmness. Don't get yourself hurt. Be ready to be ruthless when opportunities present themselves. Don't let others box you in.
Be clever. You can do it.
David Foster Wallace and Roberto Silvio Wissai
Foreword:
You might have heard about David Foster Wallace. Three odd things about him.
First, he identified himself by full names---first, middle, and last, an uncommon practice.
Second, he was considered a genius. He got many awards and grants, including the MacArthur Foundation Grant which annually gives out hundreds of thousands to each recipient (supposed genius) with no string attached.
Third, he killed himself a few years ago by. Novelists don't kill themselves as often as poets do. Many literate people instinctively turn to words as self-therapy, and those who do usually write verses instead of prose because somehow verses are a better vehicle to deal with problems. When words failed them, some of them killed themselves. Famous cases were Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. Hemingway, that macho writer of masculine themes, shot himself with a shotgun or a rifle (I don't quite remember which). His father, a doctor, also took his own life. Again, it may be useful to reflect on the assertion by Albert Camus that suicide is the only true philosophical question.
I have a feeling, a half-baked, unsubstantiated notion that most people don't just decide at an early age in childhood that they will become creative writers when they grow up. Instead, they turn to writing as a way to work out their own problems. Some writers leave other careers, especially law, and turn to writing. It has been said that a doctor saves lives probably of no more than 1,000 people during his entire career. A politician can save or kill millions of lives. A writer, if he is good, can save hundreds of millions of lives from boredom and ignorance.
All creative writers have a very strong sense of self, sometimes bordering on arrogance. They can't help but hold those pseudo-writers who maim, mangle, and even murder language with sputtering and stuttering prose, in contempt. You are what and how you write. A man's essence is laid bare by the way he handles words, in how he argues his case. He stands naked in the glittering sunlight for all to see.
So, you see, a man who thinks and writes too much about the meanings of life, as Wallace did, tends to end up taking his own life, despite the availability of all modern mood-regulating medicines. Man is an animal that feels and thinks too much. Moderation is the key to survival. There are times when you just have to let all feelings and thoughts go. You lie empty and naked, surrounded and shielded from the elements by your family, wailing then immediately pacified by the warmth of your mom's skin and your mouth is pressed to her teat. You take in your first suck of sustenance, your first drink of life. And your journey through a brief or stultifyingly long existence called life just begins.
Yesterday, a Laotian woman whom your friend Joe has taken a liking called you up and wanted to treat you to a Laotian lunch. She said she wanted to ask you some questions about Joe. You were curious and surprised, so you said yes.
She was already at the restaurant when you showed up. She greeted you warmly. Her eyes sparkled and she was resplendent in a Lao shirt . Her face was adorned with a tasteful make-up. She ordered food in rapid-fired Lao language.
-So, what do you want to ask me about?
-Roberto, that's what both delights and exasperates me about you. So direct, so disarming. No subtlety. No patience. Yet moody, neurotic, vulnerable, elegiac, and strangely romantic at the same rime.
-Wow! What a minute. What's going on here? What's happening between you and Joe?
-Plenty.
-Plenty? Are you saying, forgive me if I sound crass, Joe has hit a home run as he told me he would?
-Home run, huh? That was what he told you, that I am a game to him?
-No, no, pardon me. He just bragged to me that he was going to score, that I would just wait and see. He also told me to stay away from you. I told him, "no problem. I am not competing. That's not my style."
-So noble of you.
-Not noble at all. That's just the way I operate. Joe is my friend.
-How close are you with him?
-Close enough. We are friends. We like each other. I respect his intelligence, his smooth way around women.
-Wait a minute. Smooth way around women! Is Joe seeing anybody, besides me?
-What's going on here? You need to be straight with me. Why the last minute lunch invitation? Why all these questions?
-Joe's been telling me he's lonely and he's not been with a woman for over two years, and yes, he's been pressuring me to have sex with him.
-Have you?
-Am not gonna say anything.
-Suit yourself.
-Are you going to tell me or not?
-Tell you what?
-That Joe's seeing somebody besides me.
-I am not going to say anything either. Ask him yourself.
-I already did!
-Ask him again!
-Listen, Roberto, I need you to tell me please, a simple yes or no answer.
-Laura, why ask me?
-Because you're the only friend of Joe that I know. I thought you were my friend also.
-I am your friend.
-So, tell me.
-How serious are you with Joe?
-It's getting there.
-Jesus!
-Jesus what?
-Listen, what's going on between you and Joe is none of my business. I like you both.
-Stop beating around the fucking bush, tell me the truth!
- About what?
-Is Joe seeing somebody? Tell me!
-Okay, I know Joe likes women, Asian women especially. I complimented him on his smooth talks with women. I've seen him in actions. He's proud of himself. I told him, " please, especially with Asian women, don't make them fall in love with you, because that's not right". He assured me that he would not let them fall in love with him. But I said, "Joe, sometimes people couldn't help themselves. Love is an involuntary reflex. People fall victims to it. You don't want complications, love and marriage and all that shit, but most women do."
-You still haven't told me what I want to know. Is he seeing somebody, besides me?
-I already just told you.
-I want to hear again. Clear, simple, not beating around the bush.
-Yes, at least two others, as far as I know.
-I thought so. It was not so hard, was it? To tell me the truth.
-I feel terrible. Please don't tell Joe that you heard from me. Joe is my friend.
-No, I won't. Let's eat.
-I don't think I can, after what you just put me through.
-Don't be silly. Now tell me another thing.
-Now what?
-Don't look so scared and miserable. Do you like me?
-What kind of a question is that? Of course, I am your friend.
-More than a friend?
-I would rather not say
-A wimp!
Book Review
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI in New York Times March 31, 2011
David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” depicted an America so distracted and obsessed with entertainment that a mesmerizing movie becomes a potential terrorist weapon — capable of making viewers die of pleasure.
His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.
Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to “Infinite Jest,” so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace’s view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”
Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”
Although “The Pale King” was pieced together by Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, it feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished his work from the beginning. After all, Wallace always disdained closure, and this volume showcases his embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America’s obsession with self-gratification and entertainment.
“The Pale King” is less inventive and exuberantly imagined than Wallace’s previous novels: no herds of feral hamsters roaming the land, no artificially created deserts in Ohio, no ad-bearing Statue of Liberty. But like “Infinite Jest” it depicts an America in thrall to myopic consumerism, and like his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” it grapples with corrugated questions of identity and the difficulties of communication.
By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac — “The Pale King” will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America, toward the end of the 20th century, by worker bees employed as number crunchers for the federal government, worried that they are going to be replaced by computers.
Told in fragmented, strobe-lighted chapters that depict an assortment of misfits, outsiders and eccentrics, the novel sometimes feels like the TV show “The Office” as rewritten with a magnifying glass by Nicholson Baker. Sometimes it feels like a hallucinatory variation on Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” giving the reader a choral portrait of a Midwestern community — though in this case, that community is not a town, but the I.R.S. Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1985.
Little happens dramatically in real time in this novel; rather, the graphic deaths and accidents chronicled in its pages are almost always part of its characters’ back stories. In fact “The Pale King” is in some ways an ode to stasis and perseverance, to the human ability to endure all the slings and arrows of monotony and everyday misfortune.
Among those characters is a fictional version of the author himself — he claims that this novel is really a memoir — who says he took a year off from college to work at the I.R.S., “in exile from anything I even remotely cared about or was interested in” and who is mistaken there for a higher ranking employee also named David Wallace.
This narrator named David Wallace says he “dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike,” and at times this narrator feels like a might-have-been version of the real author had he not become a writer — much the way that Harry Rabbit Angstrom feels like a might-have-been version of John Updike.
The other characters include a sad sack named Sylvanshine, who regards himself as “a dithering ninny”; a colleague by the name of Cusk, who is embarrassed by his own heavy sweating; an executive named Stecyk, who was an “insufferable do-gooder” as a child; a beautiful woman named Meredith, who did a stint in a psych hospital; and a young man named Lane A. Dean Jr., who married his pregnant girlfriend even though he didn’t love her and now needs to support his new family.
THE PALE KING
By David Foster Wallace
548 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.
Related
Wallace is focused on how various characters came to work at the I.R.S. — what combination of psychological tics, childhood trauma, financial circumstance and random luck propelled them into the rat race and tossed them onto the hamster wheel that is life as accountants there, pushing paper and numbers in a deadeningly generic office fitted with fluorescent lights, modular shelving and the ceaseless “whisper of sourceless ventilation.”
Though at least one character argues that being an accountant is heroic — providing order in a chaotic world, corralling and organizing a torrential flow of information — Lane Dean, for one, feels that the work is “boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt,” and he begins thinking suicidal thoughts.
“He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.”
Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” or some of Beckett’s bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.
The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.
Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against “paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.” Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning “more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning” than the real thing.
In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when “the wing of despair” passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish “thrashing in the nets” of one’s own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to “cover the monthly nut.”
Along the way he gives us chilling, Grand Guignol scenes involving a ghastly subway accident and a grotesque industrial-arts class accident. And he makes us see, with gorgeous sleight of hand, the “very old land” in a Middle America that exists somewhere between Grandma Moses and “Blue Velvet”: the “flannel plains” and “the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight,” an “arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch,” a “sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding.”
This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in.
It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.
You might have heard about David Foster Wallace. Three odd things about him.
First, he identified himself by full names---first, middle, and last, an uncommon practice.
Second, he was considered a genius. He got many awards and grants, including the MacArthur Foundation Grant which annually gives out hundreds of thousands to each recipient (supposed genius) with no string attached.
Third, he killed himself a few years ago by. Novelists don't kill themselves as often as poets do. Many literate people instinctively turn to words as self-therapy, and those who do usually write verses instead of prose because somehow verses are a better vehicle to deal with problems. When words failed them, some of them killed themselves. Famous cases were Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. Hemingway, that macho writer of masculine themes, shot himself with a shotgun or a rifle (I don't quite remember which). His father, a doctor, also took his own life. Again, it may be useful to reflect on the assertion by Albert Camus that suicide is the only true philosophical question.
I have a feeling, a half-baked, unsubstantiated notion that most people don't just decide at an early age in childhood that they will become creative writers when they grow up. Instead, they turn to writing as a way to work out their own problems. Some writers leave other careers, especially law, and turn to writing. It has been said that a doctor saves lives probably of no more than 1,000 people during his entire career. A politician can save or kill millions of lives. A writer, if he is good, can save hundreds of millions of lives from boredom and ignorance.
All creative writers have a very strong sense of self, sometimes bordering on arrogance. They can't help but hold those pseudo-writers who maim, mangle, and even murder language with sputtering and stuttering prose, in contempt. You are what and how you write. A man's essence is laid bare by the way he handles words, in how he argues his case. He stands naked in the glittering sunlight for all to see.
So, you see, a man who thinks and writes too much about the meanings of life, as Wallace did, tends to end up taking his own life, despite the availability of all modern mood-regulating medicines. Man is an animal that feels and thinks too much. Moderation is the key to survival. There are times when you just have to let all feelings and thoughts go. You lie empty and naked, surrounded and shielded from the elements by your family, wailing then immediately pacified by the warmth of your mom's skin and your mouth is pressed to her teat. You take in your first suck of sustenance, your first drink of life. And your journey through a brief or stultifyingly long existence called life just begins.
Yesterday, a Laotian woman whom your friend Joe has taken a liking called you up and wanted to treat you to a Laotian lunch. She said she wanted to ask you some questions about Joe. You were curious and surprised, so you said yes.
She was already at the restaurant when you showed up. She greeted you warmly. Her eyes sparkled and she was resplendent in a Lao shirt . Her face was adorned with a tasteful make-up. She ordered food in rapid-fired Lao language.
-So, what do you want to ask me about?
-Roberto, that's what both delights and exasperates me about you. So direct, so disarming. No subtlety. No patience. Yet moody, neurotic, vulnerable, elegiac, and strangely romantic at the same rime.
-Wow! What a minute. What's going on here? What's happening between you and Joe?
-Plenty.
-Plenty? Are you saying, forgive me if I sound crass, Joe has hit a home run as he told me he would?
-Home run, huh? That was what he told you, that I am a game to him?
-No, no, pardon me. He just bragged to me that he was going to score, that I would just wait and see. He also told me to stay away from you. I told him, "no problem. I am not competing. That's not my style."
-So noble of you.
-Not noble at all. That's just the way I operate. Joe is my friend.
-How close are you with him?
-Close enough. We are friends. We like each other. I respect his intelligence, his smooth way around women.
-Wait a minute. Smooth way around women! Is Joe seeing anybody, besides me?
-What's going on here? You need to be straight with me. Why the last minute lunch invitation? Why all these questions?
-Joe's been telling me he's lonely and he's not been with a woman for over two years, and yes, he's been pressuring me to have sex with him.
-Have you?
-Am not gonna say anything.
-Suit yourself.
-Are you going to tell me or not?
-Tell you what?
-That Joe's seeing somebody besides me.
-I am not going to say anything either. Ask him yourself.
-I already did!
-Ask him again!
-Listen, Roberto, I need you to tell me please, a simple yes or no answer.
-Laura, why ask me?
-Because you're the only friend of Joe that I know. I thought you were my friend also.
-I am your friend.
-So, tell me.
-How serious are you with Joe?
-It's getting there.
-Jesus!
-Jesus what?
-Listen, what's going on between you and Joe is none of my business. I like you both.
-Stop beating around the fucking bush, tell me the truth!
- About what?
-Is Joe seeing somebody? Tell me!
-Okay, I know Joe likes women, Asian women especially. I complimented him on his smooth talks with women. I've seen him in actions. He's proud of himself. I told him, " please, especially with Asian women, don't make them fall in love with you, because that's not right". He assured me that he would not let them fall in love with him. But I said, "Joe, sometimes people couldn't help themselves. Love is an involuntary reflex. People fall victims to it. You don't want complications, love and marriage and all that shit, but most women do."
-You still haven't told me what I want to know. Is he seeing somebody, besides me?
-I already just told you.
-I want to hear again. Clear, simple, not beating around the bush.
-Yes, at least two others, as far as I know.
-I thought so. It was not so hard, was it? To tell me the truth.
-I feel terrible. Please don't tell Joe that you heard from me. Joe is my friend.
-No, I won't. Let's eat.
-I don't think I can, after what you just put me through.
-Don't be silly. Now tell me another thing.
-Now what?
-Don't look so scared and miserable. Do you like me?
-What kind of a question is that? Of course, I am your friend.
-More than a friend?
-I would rather not say
-A wimp!
Book Review
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI in New York Times March 31, 2011
David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” depicted an America so distracted and obsessed with entertainment that a mesmerizing movie becomes a potential terrorist weapon — capable of making viewers die of pleasure.
His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.
Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to “Infinite Jest,” so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace’s view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”
Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”
Although “The Pale King” was pieced together by Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, it feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished his work from the beginning. After all, Wallace always disdained closure, and this volume showcases his embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America’s obsession with self-gratification and entertainment.
“The Pale King” is less inventive and exuberantly imagined than Wallace’s previous novels: no herds of feral hamsters roaming the land, no artificially created deserts in Ohio, no ad-bearing Statue of Liberty. But like “Infinite Jest” it depicts an America in thrall to myopic consumerism, and like his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” it grapples with corrugated questions of identity and the difficulties of communication.
By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac — “The Pale King” will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America, toward the end of the 20th century, by worker bees employed as number crunchers for the federal government, worried that they are going to be replaced by computers.
Told in fragmented, strobe-lighted chapters that depict an assortment of misfits, outsiders and eccentrics, the novel sometimes feels like the TV show “The Office” as rewritten with a magnifying glass by Nicholson Baker. Sometimes it feels like a hallucinatory variation on Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” giving the reader a choral portrait of a Midwestern community — though in this case, that community is not a town, but the I.R.S. Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1985.
Little happens dramatically in real time in this novel; rather, the graphic deaths and accidents chronicled in its pages are almost always part of its characters’ back stories. In fact “The Pale King” is in some ways an ode to stasis and perseverance, to the human ability to endure all the slings and arrows of monotony and everyday misfortune.
Among those characters is a fictional version of the author himself — he claims that this novel is really a memoir — who says he took a year off from college to work at the I.R.S., “in exile from anything I even remotely cared about or was interested in” and who is mistaken there for a higher ranking employee also named David Wallace.
This narrator named David Wallace says he “dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike,” and at times this narrator feels like a might-have-been version of the real author had he not become a writer — much the way that Harry Rabbit Angstrom feels like a might-have-been version of John Updike.
The other characters include a sad sack named Sylvanshine, who regards himself as “a dithering ninny”; a colleague by the name of Cusk, who is embarrassed by his own heavy sweating; an executive named Stecyk, who was an “insufferable do-gooder” as a child; a beautiful woman named Meredith, who did a stint in a psych hospital; and a young man named Lane A. Dean Jr., who married his pregnant girlfriend even though he didn’t love her and now needs to support his new family.
THE PALE KING
By David Foster Wallace
548 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.
Related
Wallace is focused on how various characters came to work at the I.R.S. — what combination of psychological tics, childhood trauma, financial circumstance and random luck propelled them into the rat race and tossed them onto the hamster wheel that is life as accountants there, pushing paper and numbers in a deadeningly generic office fitted with fluorescent lights, modular shelving and the ceaseless “whisper of sourceless ventilation.”
Though at least one character argues that being an accountant is heroic — providing order in a chaotic world, corralling and organizing a torrential flow of information — Lane Dean, for one, feels that the work is “boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt,” and he begins thinking suicidal thoughts.
“He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.”
Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” or some of Beckett’s bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.
The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.
Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against “paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.” Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning “more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning” than the real thing.
In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when “the wing of despair” passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish “thrashing in the nets” of one’s own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to “cover the monthly nut.”
Along the way he gives us chilling, Grand Guignol scenes involving a ghastly subway accident and a grotesque industrial-arts class accident. And he makes us see, with gorgeous sleight of hand, the “very old land” in a Middle America that exists somewhere between Grandma Moses and “Blue Velvet”: the “flannel plains” and “the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight,” an “arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch,” a “sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding.”
This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in.
It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
So, you think Life has dealt you a bad hand?
Think again. You are wrong. Look at you. You are good-looking, intelligent (135), educated, in good health, and not destitute. Then think further. You are well-read, conversant in multiple languages, terrific in logic and reasoning, and verbally gifted. That's not all. At last count, 21 women of diverse ethnicities and cultures (Viet, Chinese, American (European White), Hispanic (Mexican, Ecuadorian) Jewish, Filipina, and Iranian) have professed love for you. On top of all that, your son is good-looking (just like his Dad in his prime), intelligent (IQ 140), educated, and self-supporting.
What else do you want, man? Be happy. Don't worry. You have been very lucky. Many dudes would like to trade their places with yours.
But, Silvio, I have not published any books or even stories and poems. I have not made a name for myself in world stage. I have not contributed anything original to the human thought although the following ideas are what I have arrived on my own, but I am not claiming they are original:
1. There is absolutely no personal God. Those who think so are either stupid or deluded or both.
2. Everything that rises will converge. Diversity is just various manifestations of unity. Macro and micro realities complement each other. Singularity is the origin of everything. Just think of the following staggering fact:
An average human male sexual ejaculation contains 100 million sperms, out of that multitude, only one sperm can penetrate a human female egg. Each human is the result of that chance encounter.
3. The below cannot comprehend the above. Stupid people can never understand the more intelligent folks. There is an hierarchy of understanding.
4. Humans don't fully understand who they are unless they are tested by the circumstances.
Roberto, still, at the end of the day, you must hold fast to a conviction that you are indeed rare, uncommon, and exquisitely sensitive and aesthetically-minded. You have the right to be contemptuous to certain cowards and hypocrites and selfish, insensitive clods out there. You should not be uncomfortable of feeling superior to them. You have to be honest with yourself. False modesty is despicable.
Roberto Wissai
What else do you want, man? Be happy. Don't worry. You have been very lucky. Many dudes would like to trade their places with yours.
But, Silvio, I have not published any books or even stories and poems. I have not made a name for myself in world stage. I have not contributed anything original to the human thought although the following ideas are what I have arrived on my own, but I am not claiming they are original:
1. There is absolutely no personal God. Those who think so are either stupid or deluded or both.
2. Everything that rises will converge. Diversity is just various manifestations of unity. Macro and micro realities complement each other. Singularity is the origin of everything. Just think of the following staggering fact:
An average human male sexual ejaculation contains 100 million sperms, out of that multitude, only one sperm can penetrate a human female egg. Each human is the result of that chance encounter.
3. The below cannot comprehend the above. Stupid people can never understand the more intelligent folks. There is an hierarchy of understanding.
4. Humans don't fully understand who they are unless they are tested by the circumstances.
Roberto, still, at the end of the day, you must hold fast to a conviction that you are indeed rare, uncommon, and exquisitely sensitive and aesthetically-minded. You have the right to be contemptuous to certain cowards and hypocrites and selfish, insensitive clods out there. You should not be uncomfortable of feeling superior to them. You have to be honest with yourself. False modesty is despicable.
Roberto Wissai
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