Aesthetics of Everywhere

The popular gathering-place for social progressives and their ilk, Busboys and Poets, held an unforgettable tribute last night to the late Howard Zinn. Zinn, known widely as the people’s historian for A People’s History of the United States (and all of its incarnations), was an active organizer, an inspiring author, and a voice alongside others at the crucial moments when they needed to be heard. He didn’t pick his battles. He opposed against all injustices, the entire system of war. In his mind, there was no possible justification for it. Zinn wrote of war, “The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain.” As a soldier during WWII, he dropped napalm on a town in France. He was unable to shake that experience – Zinn returned to this small town after the war as a civilian, vowing never again to participate in the killing of innocent civilians.

…the thing is you’d bomb from 30,000 feet. You don’t see what’s happening down there. You don’t see people suffering. You don’t see people burning. You don’t see limbs falling. You just see little flashes in the dark. And you go back, and you’re debriefed and you don’t think about it. And it’s horrifying. [Interview with Brian Lamb]

Howard Zinn died at the age of 87, just a few weeks ago. But sounds and spirits, past and present, filtered through the space of the cafe and bookstore and even outside, to those standing strong in the snow. When Bernice Johnson Reagon (of Sweet Honey in the Rock) called for song, voices of varying shapes and tones rose in a chorus to resurrect the voice of the people. Howard Zinn was a man who lived out of necessity, who knew individuals everywhere were being stripped of their basic rights and dignity. Many voices of resistance were born and first taught of triumph through his work.

Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Extended observations on the state of our reading, by Sam Anderson:

“Bolaño’s relationship to narrative grew organically out of his many years as a poet, but it resonates nicely with our new habits of web-inflected incremental reading. We are increasingly fluent in (to quote 2666) “images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.”

Read more: Sam Anderson on When the Meganovel Shrank – The 00′s Issue — New York Magazine

This also reminds me that I intend to read some Bolaño this year. His books have been personally recommended enough times now for me to act. Persistence is key with a memory like mine, heh. Martin Amis is another author that has been suggested to me multiple times, so I’ll make time to read more of his work soon. My first read of the year, however, will be the short novels in Kenzaburō Ōe’s Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (another recommendation from a friend).

End of 2009 reads were Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, David Benioff’s City of Thieves, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. All three are quick, compelling reads.

I’d say 2009 was a good year for my blog – the first complete year of blogging, and I kept with it fairly well. I found that writing a blog is easy: it’s all about showing up. And I am sure that 2010 brings glad tidings. Bonne année, с новым годом, 새해 복 많이 받으세요!

We return from our travels, edges and everyday stresses worn smooth by foreign sands, dressed down in a weary sort of fulfillment. We come bearing gifts: postcards and photos and scarves. A souvenir, we say, but these objects… pour souvenir… keep their meanings hid to one.

Our friends want the stories instead, the laughs and blank looks that came with the language difference, the reason that shot’s blurred. They want to feel the presence of the teenagers that trailed for a few too many blocks in the wild of the urban night. And how was the food, they ask. We try to wrap our words around an entire nation’s cuisine to set the table for them, and the interplay between our home and that place, the yawning divide opening further still – it doesn’t provide a satisfying relay. Again, we’re lost. Again we yearn to venture out, saying to ourselves, yes, an understanding’s possible but I simply need more time…

Over a year into this blog now, and have I learned anything yet?
In short, yes.

I’ve learned over and over again that success is about showing up. Commit to writing regularly on whatever schedule works for you… mine isn’t even a set time of day or week, though I try to spread them out rather than having bursts of posts followed by a silence. Start writing a post even when your thoughts are half-developed. Having the initial start will prompt you to follow up with research and some deeper analysis. If you’re anything like me, you’ll not want to abandon an entry once it’s there as a draft. Psychologists study the much greater value that people attach to an item they own, known as the “endowment effect” or “status quo bias”, and I think that’s applicable here. To “delete” is so hard. (I often think the Internet has made it so easy to “save” content for yourself online that it has contributed to pack-ratting in new forms. Digg, I’m looking at you. But not only at you.)

Fresh content is important, but make sure it’s not a continuous rehashing of what’s already been said. When re-posting an article or blog post, insert your opinion or take on it. Your readers are following your blog because they value your perspective. Or they mistook you for that other guy.

Also, it’s the Internet, possibilities are wide open, but don’t try to do everything. I’m often guilty – I want to write about everything that catches my interest, which is a lot.
I’m starting to look at stats such as search engine terms to find which posts are bringing in traffic, and it’s primarily the ones related to writers and literature. Take for example my post from 5 months ago on Art Spiegelman’s Maus talk, which is still bringing in new visitors almost daily. Maybe this will help me find my own focus. Since I do spend a lot of my free time reading (and writing about English lit at university), I should set a goal to post more book reviews and analysis.

Although my readership and blog engagement is still getting off the ground, I’m working on being a better blog citizen. I’ve been following many many blogs – you should see my Google Reader, I can’t ever keep up – and I’m now setting a goal to take more time to comment on others’. Bloggers value your input much more than you think. Hint, hint.

This all being said, here’s to the start of another school year for me, and continued blogging for any readers out there in the inter-web-space.

Considering I’m something of a pack-rat, I started to scrapbook recently in order to keep all my ticket stubs, scraps of paper, photos, etc. all together for some future nostalgia-ridden viewing. Here’s a scribbled note I came upon from 2005- or 2006ish: “I can’t even express how beautiful it was flying into Atlanta as the sun set, through big fluffy clouds like wisps of pulled cotton candy.” The handwriting’s shaky, as if the thoughts were pinned to paper amidst a scene more viscerally confrontational than careful ink and set line-widths. And that’s it, you know – the scrambling attempt to turn those feelings into sticky preserves, knowing all the while that the pulp’ll liquefy, spill away. Words can come close, and they’ll capture the pulse behind it, but mostly they will sound less real, more idealized.
I don’t remember that sunset now (I barely remember flying to ATL): I can guess at the sensations from the words I saved through this minute description.

John Updike
March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

John Updike died yesterday at the age of 76. A classmate announced it in one of my English classes – turns out that we were discussing realism that day too.
It had seemed that John Updike was the one man who would never stop writing. He often crafted sentences that drew our attention to a detail of suburban life that we would never have otherwise noticed. And crafted a vast, rolling landscape of them – enough reading to last well beyond his death. There was a poignancy in the care he took to portray American life, as flawed as it is. On the subject of suburban adultery, which was often a topic of his writing (as in Rabbit, Run), Updike said it was “a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me.”
And not only did he write novels – so many of them – he wrote essays, short stories, poetry… even continued to write reviews. It’s probable that he frustrated many with his prolific writing – how can one person write so much and possibly have it be so good? – but it’s certain he also charmed many more.

Sometime last year, Rabbit, Run became the first work of John Updike’s that I had read. I won’t spoil it, but I loved it. Certain passages are absolutely tragic. And fortunately, he left a lot more to us.

From Rabbit, Run:

“I had forgotten,” she says.
“Forgotten what?”
“That I … could have it too.”
“What’s it like?”
“Oh. It’s like falling through.”
“Where do you fall to?”
“Nowhere. I can’t talk about it.”

Sure, it’s a conversation about orgasm, but the quote has its resonances in death as well.

It’s now December. Where does the time go?

Lots to remember about the year 2008:
Barack Obama elected first African-American president of the U.S. (and my first time voting in a presidential election), much global worry over the financial crisis, first tattoo, summer Olympics in Beijing, pirates and vampires abound, house shows and living in the Columbia Heights house with Aaron and Katie and Sarah (plus signing my first lease), countless bombings and crashes worldwide, trips to North Carolina and Montreal, one of my best friends finally getting out of the hospital, training new employees at work and going to concerts with co-workers, and appreciating youth as I turned 20.

Going back to visit my parents in the wealthy suburban area they inhabit became a bit bleak when I started thinking about how tragic it is that so many teenagers find themselves victim of the restlessness that they channel into racing their expensive sports cars, and burning through a huge amount of their parents money to fuel their drug habits. Indeed, these are separate problems. But I believe they’re both rooted in the same cause… the burn-out, the numbing that comes from a life of hazy excess.

These are the kids I saw in high school driving too fast just for something to do, spending money simply to kill the time, popping painkillers and always always smoking. “Nothing to do,” the mantra and the excuse for doing nothing worthwhile. Too many students’ lives cut short by it. Hell, multiple preventable deaths of my high school peers should not have occurred in the few short years I spent there. No wonder we hated high school. That’s the pressure to escape, because every single person that stayed is now working a dead-end job, unhappy, or addicted… at least that’s how it seems. Seemed. It’s why we invented so many terrible nicknames for our town, in reference to the wealth-flaunting we came to resent and embrace simultaneously. Or to distance ourselves from everything that was associated with the place, a “yeah I’m living here, no I would not be if I had had a choice.” There we are: none of us had a choice, and those who did got out.

And I’m feeling myself more and more a product of that world of apathy, the world of feeling and emotion reduced to dollar signs – never clear in the head, moving too much, stumbling over all my words. My new focus is to reset my focus. I could learn a lot from mucking around in my memories.
I’m young but I have my starting-point. Know the saying, “nip the problem in the bud”? Yeah, I am so relieved that I recognize this vacancy.

I have always inhabited a sort of observer position in most spheres through which I have passed. With my family, it is becoming more and more apparent that I feel out of step with my Korean culture, as I was raised by American culture – television, day care, video games. In my elementary school I was not only a minority – I could literally count the number of kids with Asian descent on one hand.
Often, it just sucks. Try as you might to elevate it into the highest form of learning cultural tolerance, but as a being coming to age it is maddeningly difficult. Especially in a society such as we have here in the United States, which is often ill-defined as it is.
Find one’s place amongst the multiple blurry groupings? A task to make all else seem laughable. I wish I knew.