summer reading notes 9

Gosine, Andil, 'Visual art after indenture: autoethnographic reflections', South Asian Studies, 33:1 (2017), pp. 105-12.

• Gosine is descendant of indenture (in Trinidad)
• 3 projects: WARDROBES, Our Holy Waters and Mine, After Indenture
• WARDROBES (2011-13): textile and metal based installation telling stories of Savitri (C19) and Jimmy (C21) 
• 'Cutlass': brooch in machete (sugarcane) shape
• 'Rum and Roti' bag
• 'Made with Love' doctor's scrubs with image of parents
• 'Ohrni' headscarf with replica of grandma's anchor tattoo
• Hoped final form of W. to be opera
• Included collabs with other diasporic-experienced artists, incl. Richard Fung, filmmaker
• "Both a private and public interrogation of desire, and its relationship to social trauma" (107)
• Our Holy Waters and Mine (2014)
• Bodies of water: Ganges, those crossed by indenture, and cities from Gosine's life
• Again: sociohistorical <--> personal, intimate: "they are entwined always, but neither is entirely productive of the other" (108) 
• Torabully 'coolitude': "de-essentialising geographical ties to India and biological ones to Indianness" (108)
• Glissant's créolité and Césaire's négritude
• After Indenture (2015-20)
• 'Coolitude' located in "shared experience of indentures, primarily their ship journeys and living conditions on plantations" (109)
• Goals: 
• Public digital archive of visual art re: indenture and post-ind.
• Analysis of art especially re: gender, class, sexuality
• Indenture and art in particular, under-researched
• Sharlene Khan, Wendy Nanan, Ian Harnarine, Roshini Kempadoo, Vannetta Seecharan, Kelly Sinnapah Mary 

Metzger, Sean, 'Roundtable: Imaging and imagining the Chinese Caribbean: Jeannette Kong, Maria Lau, and Laura Fong Prosper', Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 5 (2019), pp. 183-93.

• Jeannette Kong: Canadian filmmaker, Ms Chin Productions - Chinese Jamaicans
• Laura Fong Prosper - video and digital art
• Maria Lau - photography - Cuban Chinese
• Barthes Camera Lucida: stadium (what is immediately apparent to all viewers in image) and punctum (what attracts individual viewer's gaze, wounds them) --> "different orders of meaning" (184) as useful way to think of interacting identities
• Fong Prosper: grew up feeling 'Chinese-Panamanian', took cultural markers for granted -- visited China in 2012 and realised I wasn't Chinese but a hybrid
• "I like to use a lot of saturated color. I think that's my Caribbean heritage: the blue of the deep sea, the green jungle, the intense sun at noon." (186)
• Kong: pre-1980s, Chinese-Jamaicans were mainly all Hakka
• Grandfather arrived in Jam. 1920s
• Identity has expanded once moved to Canada: other Chinesenesses, other Caribbeannesses in community
• "The Chinese in Jamaica" (1957, 1963) by Lee Tom Yin, Jam. photographer Ray Chen's "The Shopkeepers" 
• 1920s-30s - mixed relationships between Jam. women and Chinese men (seen as "rich and virile" (192))

Attewell, Nadine, 'Looking in Stereo: school photography, interracial intimacy, and the pulse of the archive', ADVCATA, 4 (2018), pp. 19-44.

• Maria Lin Wong, Chinese-Liverpudlians (1989)
  
• "Charged sites of encounter between Chinese and other racialised people": Salt Spring Island (Wn Canada), Liverpool, HK
• Transnational resonations
• Tina Campt
• The school photos "disrupt conceptions of the nation (...) through drawing attention to the rhythmic dimensions of national becoming" (23) and imagined community
• Bhabha: nationalist idea of continuation/temporality --> pedagogy but undercut by repetition ('DissemiNation' essay)
• HK Diocesian Boys' School (1920s-1930s) students mainly Chinese but included other races such as European, South Asian, Jewish
• Similarly, 'Chinese Liverpool' must be linked to 'Black Liverpool' - lived in same ethnically diverse areas
• Often white women x men of color
• In BC, Canada, 1936: Chinese students banned from private school
• "Campt approaches the repetition that 'plagues' her archive in terms of black diasporic practices of 'creativity and improviastion', attending to the ways in which individuals actively take up, but also riff on, the sartorial and postural conventions of respectability." (27)
• Repetition in school photos as institutional" (27)
• Reproduction / self-perpetuation: across time (Caroline Levine (2015)) 
• Performative: ritual/ceremony, events made iterable into future
• "Schools, like families, are constituted through exchanges or networks of looks" (28)
• Chrononormativity/chronobiopolitics: making us feel all together/same: photo of today echoes photos of past. Both unified and specific.
• Brit private school 'esprit de corps': idea that each boy is a member of whole society and must act consciously to advance nation (Cecil Clementi, 1927) 
• Oxbridge --> imperial civil service
• Stuart Hall: colonial private schools as "formation and reproduction of the social elite" (Q28) (2017) 
• Students circulated among empire: school --> uni in metropole --> civil service
• Games, prefect system - building character = national progress
• 1922 Victoria, BC: Chinese striked to allow Chinese children into integrate schools
• Danger of recasting historical images as progressive racial mixing and 'diversity' rather than colonial violence
• HK, Liverpool schools endearingly called 'League of Nations' - curiosity, positive, appeal
• White self-congratulation for being 'egalitarian' 
• 'Harmony' as aesthetic
• Sunera Thobani (2007): post-WWII redefinition of whiteness (in Canada etc) as innocently tolerant and multicultural
• Multiculturalism must not be framed as response to Empire it claims to disavow, but as inheritance disseminated institutionally, effects of which we feel today in 'citizenship' ideas
• 'Listening' to a photo: Campt: "a method that reckons with the fissures, gaps, and interstices that emerge when we refuse to accept the 'truth' of images and archives the state seeks to proffer through its production of subjects posed to produce particular 'types' of regulated and regulatable subjects." (Q37) 
• "In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes subjects as 'orientation devices', that take us 'in some directions rather than others'" (66)
• Citation really as political and as love: Campt, Hall, Ahmed... showing her own intellectual lineage/respect
• Photo of 3 (Asian and Black) kids playing music on washtubs
• Chinese laundryman yellow peril trope
• G Formby song 'Chinese laundry blues' (1932)
• "Adapted to new ends, the bugle, washtubs, and ukulele facilitate a different kind of being together, one untethered from the promise of inclusion through which racialised people were (and are) enjoined to labor for the nation (as seamen, as laundrymen, as the entertainment." (40)

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia', Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 30 (2020), pp. 1-28

• American culture finds it hard to accept Afro-Asia because whiteness isn't included
• Juanita Hall, Af-Am actress best known for playing Chinese characters - even invested life savings into a Chinese restaurant
• Chop suey as mix, miscellany, hybrid/adapted
• Mme Liang in Flower Drum Song (1961) musical
• Cold War orientalism against COmmunist China - As-Ams as patriotic to US 
• "Born out of scarcity and legal exclusion, chop suey bears a history of the problem of digesting racial difference with the arrival of those racialised workers, their ahbits, their diets, their families." (5)
• The Afro-Chinese woman
• Food/eating/hunger as erotic
• Also politicised - she evades categorisation
• Black women as substitutes for Chinese feminine presence (due to restrictive immigration policies)
• "Colonial entanglement of the Black diasporic condition and the overseas Chinese" (6) 
• Chinese men as substitutes for Black labor, post-abolition --> married lcoal women esp. Black women, formed families

To be finished

summer reading notes 8: ayahs; afro-cuban/afro-american network; coolie literature; Chinese anarcho-feminism; UK punk zines

 Robinson, Olivia, 'Travelling Ayahs of the 19th and 20th centuries: global networks and mobilisation of agency', History Workshop Journal, 86 (2018), pp. 44-66.

• Thousands of ayahs, amahs 1890s-1930s arrived in UK
• Either permanently employed or hired just for sea voyage
• Challenging idea of ayah as passive - had agency
• Ayahs neither passengers nor crew - peripheral, Othered position
• "Intimate frontiers of empire"  (44) - Ann Laura Stoler on domestic as sociocultural space where race was negotiated and crucial role of servants in colony
• 3 sites of empire: colony - at sea - metropole
• India, Ceylon, HK, Sg, Malaya, China treaty ports
• Brit women moving to colonies to marry Brit men (from late 1850s) -- otherwise they would marry locals (dangerous)
• 1869 Suez Canal made eastbound trips easier
• In India, domestic service was male-dominated until 1930. Idea of childcare as 'woman's job' was imposed by British women -- created new employment sector for local women
• Childcare = most important role, proximity with mistress 
• Infants only - older children with British nurse or sent back to UK
• Being 'part of family' also reinforced loyalty
• Infantilising colonial natives - Brit mistresses (memsahib) must treat native servants like children
• But dilemma of ayah raising white children
• Need constant surveillance / policing of servants
• Thus both central and peripheral
• On ship, ayah couldn't travel First Class with family and white servant - relegated to mixed-gender deck (worst ticket)
• No bed: ayah needed to bring own mattress and overall seregation from family despite doing all the childcare
• 1920s got better but formalised distance - eg own toilets
• No names on passenger list - just 'Ayah', literally belonging to employers 
• Ayah's Home, London existed for many years before being taken over by Ldn City Mission (evangelists) - excl. for non-white nannies
• Only sources are Brit managers - racialised, infantilising 
• Idea of 'family unit' with superintendent and wife as 'parents' 
• Commercial and expensive (paid for by employer wife)
• Ayahs needed character references and could be expelled for misbehavior - not 'charity' 
• 12 instances of ayahs unable to return home - India Office denied responsibility, sent them to Ayah's Home to sort it out (find a new family)
• Resemblance to New Poor Law - out of sight, out of mind
• Overall Ayah never allowed to stay in the UK
• Overly victimising narrative - Ayahs found ways to capitalise on situation
• Many Ayahs specifically worked only on ships - hired out by agencies
• Much skill needed: able to serve and travel
• Some went to Australia, Americas etc - "sophisticated recruitment infrastructure" (54), much demand
• Also private ads: mistresses wanting Ayahs or trying to get new family for current Ayah
• Traveling ayahs were diverse whereas local (non-travelling) ayahs were sweeper caste and married to family's sweeper
• Many widows
• Very high wages compared to regular ayahs - very valued, kept considerable savings 
• Could negotiate or demand/set own payment
• Regularly went to UK - not 'lost'
• Sometimes sole adult carer of kids
• Not afraid to lodge complaints with authorities
• Ayah's Home stay seen as inevitable downtime between jobs - some did extra work (textiles, selling items between UK and colony) 
• Home segreg. by ethnicity but they mingled socially: games, sharing food 

Guridy, Frank Andre, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapell Hill, 2010)

Introduction

• Juan René Betancourt: anti-racist activist in Cuba since 1940s
• Castro liberates Cuba 1959: Betancourt participated in new gov's anti discrimination efforts- but clashed and exiled
• Critiqued gov's treatment of Afro-Cubans in 'Castro & the Cuban N-gro' (1961) - appealing to Af-Ams
• Af-Cub and Af-Am exchange history based on shared 'colored'/diasporic identity
• Black, upwardly mobile elite non-state
• Cuba's geog. proximity = unique
• Affected by Cold War - new idea of 'Third World' and 'wretched of the earth' liberation struggles who "framed their demands within the dominant discourse of nationalism" which "overshadowed forms of solidarity that were not driven by the precepts of nat'ism" (2) 
• Cuban Rev's explicit identification with African struggles = legitimacy of nation
• Rise of new Af-Cub/Am network (1959-60) initiated by Cub gov to get Af-Am support: incl Amiri Baraka
• Castro visits Harlem, Malcolm X in 1960
• Guridy examines pre-Castro network (mainly first half of C20)
• Diaspora identification did not contradict nationalism
• "We have yet to fully investigate how transnational modes of belonging are created and maintained" (4)
• Segregation and imperialism impelled Black people to develop alternative networks - material benefit eg education, political support
• 'Routes' not 'roots' (slavery) which doesn't necessarily centralise African continental homeland
• James Clifford
• Not 'Black internationalism', not simple but v. varied
• Diaspora in practice
• Af-Cub patriots/nat'ists looked to Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute as role model
• Diaspora-making process: translations and misunderstandings
• 'US-Caribbean world': trade networks C18 --> war of 1898 when US started intervening more
• Linked northeastern US cities to southern US & Carib 
• Increased tourism in 1910s-30s, corporate transport/travel (steamships)
• Armed intervention and US cultural spread (protestantism, consumerism) incl. Panama Canal
• Cuba prominent due to size and proximity = appeal to US 
• Range of social actors with diff. interests in US presence
• Black people were main laborers, incl.  inter-island migration
• Happening alongside US 'great migration' which included Anglophone Carib. 
• Garveyism would be born here
•  US presence in Cuba shaped/encouraged construction of nat'l identity and of race
• "Cross-fertilisation" (10) 
• Cuba had a KKK from 1920s+ 
• Recreation and leisure segreg. in Cuba - under-studied
• Af-Cubs made own communities - 'sociedades de color' eg Club Atenas - elite
• Diaspora felt they were more civilised than Africans and wanted to 'uplift' Black race - esp Af-Ams (imperialism) 
• Garvey's UNIA (Universal N-gro Improvement Association) vibrant performance culture
• Cuba had most UNIA divisions outside USA 
• Harlem Ren <----> Afrocubanismo: artists taking up ethnic forms /motifs
• Black tourism 1930s - 50s to Cuba - adapting to racial exclusion in leisure industry

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the "Coolie"', Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, 22:1 (2014), pp. 53-61.

• 2 conemp novels: The Pagoda by P Powell (1998), The Book of Salt by M Truong (2003) - queering the colonial archive, giving voice
• The 'undocumented' means "to be rendered an 'impossible subject'" (Mae Ngai, 2004) - illegality, foreignness 
• Silence of coolies in the archive - eg intimacy, interiority
• Despite coolies pre-occupying/figuring in Euro colonial imaginary of C19
• The origin of word 'coolie' is uncertain - like the coolie himself
• Gujarati worker caste 'koli'? 
• Portuguese 'cule' - laborer in India? 
• Mandarin 'ku li' bitter strength? 
• Unskilled, inscrutable, desexualised (male)
• Coolies supposed to return after contract but in Carib they were 'buffer race' between white/Black post-slavery so encouraged to settle
• Women brought over to form families
• Usually derogative - reclaimed
• H. T. Tsing And China has hands: a Chinese coolie odyssey (1937)
• David Dabydeen Coolie Odyssey (1988)
• Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (2013)
• Khal Torabully - 'coolitude' (2002) - answer to 'negritude' 
• Coolie as active agent
• Lisa Lowe The intimacies of 4 continents (2006)
• Lisa Yun The coolie speaks (Cuba) (2010)
• Denise Helly A Hidden history of the Chinese in Cuba (1997)
• Chinese coolies subverted, protested, escaped -not passive
• Chinese gov ended 'coolie' trade, 1874
• Moon-Ho Jung Coolies  and Cane (2006)
• Richard Jean So dissertation 'Coolie democracy 1925-1955' (2009)
• Fiction intervenes in colonial records 
• Queering as "a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed" (55)
• Butler's analysis of N. Larsen Passing: "'queering' works as the exposure within language  - an exposure that disrupts the repressive surface of language - of both sexuality and race" (Q55)
• The Pagoda: cross-dressing/trans shopkeeper Lowe in late C19 Jamaica - if there were women coolies, would they have been recorded?
• Book of Salt - Viet cook, Binh, works for Gertrude Stein in Paris and is gay
• Both concern afterlife of coolie experience although are not actually coolies (plantation labor) 
• David Eng (2008): we shouldn't see historical ethnic texts as correcting/remedying - Truong's historical misnaming/playfulness shows it doesn't matter whether or not the story actually happened/is based in truth. 
• Both chars have sexual relationships with Black ppl - kinship in marginalisation, a connection not founded with white ppl
• "In The Pagoda and The Book of Salt, the 'coolie' does not just speak, the 'coolie' screams (...) This scream straddles the boundary between pleasure and pain" (56)
• 3 'intimate occupations': 
• 'Unskilled' laborer identity: marginal, yet crucial to the economy - esp as both handle food (store owner and cook) 
• Colonial settings pre-US occupation: 1890s British Jamaica, 1930s French Vietnam
• Occupying space in colonial archive
• --> "Refusing to assimilate to fixed constructions of race, gender, and sexuality" (57)
• They actually have much skill and power and control in their jobs
• 'Chiney' groceries in Jamaica: social space; known to extend credit more generously
• Yet marginalised due to class, race, sexuality
• Not rewriting the past: "meditate on teh production of history and the role of power" (59)
• In the end, Binh and Lowe are freed from their occupations

Liu, Lydia H., R. E. Karl,  and D. Ko (eds.), The Birth of Chinese feminism: essential texts in transnational theory (New York, 2013) unfinished

Introduction

• 'The Women's Bell' (1903), Jin Tianhe (male) - seen as first Chinese feminist manifesto, very popular and influential 
• He-Yin Zhen (anarcho-feminist, founder of Natural Justice journal) critiqued male feminists in 1907-8 as "pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women's liberation" (Q2)
• Modelling themselves on Wn/modern societies
• "As far as Jin Tianhe was concerned, women's emancipation was part of a larger project of enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either 'male' or 'patriarchal'" (7)
• 'Modern woman' in Shanghai ads = progress
• Tianyi/Nat Justice pub by Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights, Tokyo
• Featured first Chinese trans. of Communist Manifesto! (1908)
• For HYZ: feminism "was the beginning and outcome of a total social revolution that would abolish the state and private property to bring about true social equality" (7) and anticapitalist
• Plurality and contradictions of Chinese feminisms
• Defies East/West binary
• HYZ's analysis was totalising: everything is connected
• 'Woman' as "transhistorical global category (...) constituted through scholarship, ritual, law, and social and labor practices over time" (9)
• "History is formed by a continuously reproduced injustice in the manner of what the Annales school of French historians would come to call the longue durée" (9)
• Woman = "product of historical social relations" (10)
• Political ontology
• Analytical category of Nannü (男女) - a framework to understand this totality/structure and always-gendered life (more comprehensive than the word 'gender')
• Shengji / livelihood - more than 'class'
• Nannü is single concept: both noun and adjective, which "lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction." (11) - hard to translate
• HYZ's own moment was porous for language : influences from Jp and W, pioneering new vernacular
• "Far more productive is to tease out the theoretical resonances in the spaces opened up between nannü and 'gender' or any such categories in contemp. feminist theories, which have always passed back and forth through a multiplicity of mod. langs." (12)
• "Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create 'gendered' identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstractions such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin" (14)
• No biological view of sexual differnce, unlike in Europe. So there was no need for HYZ to oppose this on the sex/gender differention aspect, like Europeans had to.
• Critique from "within -- and against -- the indig. Confucian tradition, especially its theories of human nature" (15)

Ripped, torn, and cut: pop, politics, and punk fanzines from 1976, ed. Subcultures Network (Manchester, 2018). Unfinished

Introduction: adventures in reality, why (punk) fanzines matter - M. Worley, K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L Robinson, J Street, P Webb

• UK's first self-defined punk fanzine: Sniffin' Glue by Mark Perry, 1976
• Fanzines as "residues of youthful agency" (2)
• Cut and paste imagery, Xeroxed/Roneo-stencilled, sold for low cost at gigs, schools, record shops
• Increasingly political and experimental - eg Lucy Whitman JOLT (1977) 
• Help map shifts from 1976-77 punk 'moment' to 1980s culture
• Shows punk in provinces and outside London - diverse
• Nancy Fraser, 'subaltern counterpublic' - alternate, oppositional
• Teal Triggs Fanzines (2010); Stephen Duncombe Notes from the Underground: Zines and the politics of alt. culture (2008) 
• History of zines:
• 1930s sci-fi, US and Uk
• Expanded across cultural spheres
• Punk zines' visual language essential to aesthetic
• Riot grrrl material @ Fales library, NY
• Zines in BL, V&A, Manchester District Music Archive, Bristol Arch Records

summer reading notes 7: Hawaiian feminism; Spanish imperial botany; Mexican artists in Maoist China; Black anarchism; Black Panther visual culture

 Hall, Lisa Kahaleole, 'Navigating our own "Sea of islands": remapping a theoretical space for Hawaiian women and Indigenous feminism', Wicazo Sa Review, 24:2 (2009), pp. 15-38

• Centering Pacific islands due to erasure in modern feminist theory 
• Hawaiian history almost entirely absent in uni curricula
• Denial of US imperial past
• Hawaii and Alaska as insets on US maps, other island territories never shown: spatial/visual closeness of HI which is actually very far away
• Black/white racial dichotomy erases Indigenous people -- trope of 'vanishing' Indig. culture/presence
• Indigeneity as 'blood quantum' -- have to be a certain % to be legally authentic and only applies to Indig. definition
• Imposing US ideas onto Hawaiian genealogy: 50% rule in 1920 and affects today because it gives you access to gov. resources and land
• Upon arrival, definition of native HIans was flux: sometimes characterised as Black
• HIan women sometimes classified as Native but rarely addressed in this framework; grouped in as 'Asian Pacific Islander' which is over-focused on immigrant status
• "Asian Americans have taken up the use of the APA etc. construction in an attempt to be inclusive, but the crucial difference between inclusion and appropriation is whether the included benefit equally from their inclusion." (23)
• Detrimental to statistics (until 2000 when API was split) 
• PI group includes many types including migrants
• HIans stereotyped as 'savage', not Orientalised
• Thus Indig. HIan women reluctant to identify with feminism: white feminism; divisive to HIan solidarity overall
• Belief that patriarchy is a colonial imposition -- thus Indig. sovereignty will solve sexism. 
• Ignores unique gendered dimension of Empire
• Can't go back to 'pure' precolonial culture
• Helping women helps whole of people
• Crucial interventions by Kanaka Maoli women:
• Lilikala Kame'elehiwa Native lands and foreign desires uses HIan-language sources; Na Wabine Kapu on role of women in precolonial HI; researching HIan sexuality - transcends heteronormativity
• Noenoe Silva Aloha betrayed
• S. E. Merry Colonising HI: Cultural powr of law on defining fornication as crime <--> licentiousness of Indig. women
• Leilani Holmes Ancestry of Experience: A journey into HIan ways of knowing

Bleichmar, Daniela, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, 2012).

• Plants of Spanish empire; 12,000 images 1770s-1800s
• Central, S. America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, N America, Philippines
• Expeditions (highly precarious) and people based in colonies --> extensive visual archive.
• At least 60 artists made these professionally
• Every ill. is collaborative: collectors, scientists, artists
• Visualisation projects "make global nature visible across distances (...) Visibility, in turn, would make imperial nature movable, knowable, and - ideally - governable." (7)
• C18 European (due to interchange) naturalists' epistemology was visual and they shared a visual language
• "Both science and empire aspired to universality and both found images important tools for extending their reach." (10)
• Visualising/making visible (eg acts of observation and preservation) vs. seeing (not many people actually saw the images made)

Bleichmar chapter 5: 'Visions of imperial nature: global white space, local color'

• Selective visibility: some aspects of empire made invisible
• Euro nat. hist.: botanical ills -- detail on white page, decontextualised (literally uprooted, "deracinated" (151))
• Larger cosmopolitan vocab: erases geographical specificity = "extractive vision of nature" (152)
• C18 Spanish American paintings that seek to embed native in specific locales with specific people
• Cuadros de mestizaje (miscegenation paintings)
• 6 canvases painted in Quito in 1783 by Vicente Alban, prob intended for Madrid's Nat Hist cabinet -- depict local humans posing next to showcases of a region's flora and fauna
• Rare detail and attention - fertility
• Includes cartouche of text identifying elements
• The central human is item A - a specimen (one example is an elite lady who has a Black female slave; 4 are Indig.)
• Refined Indians, urbane ladies, un-Hispanised ('savage') Indians -- 3 pairs/sets
• "In crucial contrast to the white space of nat. hist. illustration, these American paintings fill up the canvas with profusions of local color, insisting on the inalienable interconnectedness of the American territory, flora, fauna, and humane populations." (152)
• Decontextualised blank page ills. were meant to show exotic plants but didn't visually indicate geography: "18th century nat. hist. insisted on the centrality of visual epistemology but demanded that views remain partial." (154)
• Indices of the plants -- stand- ins for archive/repetitive
• Engravings showing scientific process separate fieldwork with collecting/analysis indoors
• Virgin of Guadalupe cult arose in C16 Mexico with Indig. converts --> C17, 18 became associated with "Creole elites and their growing sense of patriotic pride" (174)
• Casta paintings showing race dynamics (human 'types' -- social hierarchy/order) as well as nature
• 'Quadro de Hist. Nat, Civil, y Geografica del Reyno del Peru' by Luis Thiebaut, 1799 commissioned by elite J. I. Lequanda (enlightened intellectual concerned with local politics and econ)
• Large-scale: 115 x 325 cm
• Gift to Spanish admins: shows L's first hand experience of Peru and is a "microcosm" of Peru - "encyclopedic" (175)
• Many sections and subsections around a map of Peru and view of a mine at the center
• 32 human types: 16 civilised (many races represented but not Spaniards), 16 savages (noble savages) -- male and female pairs
• Overall 214 images inside and dense text in 'blank' spaces
• Test shows anthropocentricity
• Compartmentalised -- no clear narrative, relationships only implicit

Cao, Jing, 'Introduction to "A Conversation between Chinese artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros"', ARTMargins, 9:1 (2020), pp. 83-91.

• October 1956: 
• Exh. at Working People's Cultural Palace, Beijing org. by Mexican group National Front for Plastic Arts (FNAP) 
• D. A. Siqueiros (1896-1974) and wife A. A. Bastar visit Beijing, S. talks to CAA artists (lecture and conversation)
• Org. by José Venturelli, Chilean artist who was 'ambassador' for leftist Lat-Ams to China.
• Moved to Beijing for Asian and Pacific Regions' Peace Conference and stayed to be the conf's secretary general
• China-Mexico radical interchange:
• Lu Xun (1931) promoted Diego Rivera, suggesting R. was suitable model for future of Chinese art (as opposed to Western modernism) 
• 1933: Miguel Covarrubias and Rosa Rolanda visit Shanghai and met many intellectuals including Ye Qianyu
• 1956: fraying of Sino-Soviet relations --> China orients towards nonaligned countries in Asia, Africa, LatAm
• Siqueiros visit highly important - met Zhou Enlai (Bandung 1955: a new network for the third world) and Zhou Yang (who visited exh. and said muralism and print were "fundamental forms of art that is definitively intended for the masses" (Q96))
• "Realism cannot be in any way a recipe, a formula, something immobile, but a fact in perennial change, according to the transformation and development of the corresponding society." (Q Zhou Yang, 87)
• S. had similar ideas -- criticised Soviet Realism for being too static/lacking innovation
• CCP shift from S Realism to nativist traditions -- from Jiang Feng to guohua's adaptation
• 1956 June 13: Hundred Floewrs Movement -- Liu Dingyi of Propaganda Dept telling artists to be more diverse --> tension between styles, which style is more socialist? 
• Convo with CAA artists: 
• Dong Xiwen - every country should have its own style
• Li Zongjin - USSR art system is too narrow, doesnt allow debate 
• S: Artists should pay attention to technological development eg new paints
• Wang Qi: new uses for old tools - Communist themes

Conversation trans. Feng Xiangsheng

• Participants incl: Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren, Cai Ruohong, Shao Yu, Ni Yide, Dong Xiwen, Wang Xun, Wang Qi, Zheng Wuzhen, Li Zongjin, Li Hua, Ye Fu, etc
• S: Mexican artists oppose Euro avant-garde ("the Paris school" (Q93))
• Realism develops -- eg middle ages to Renaissance perspective -- and we are still a part of it
• Abstractionists believe there is nothing left to do with realism so changed direction
• Soviet art is boring -- too fixed, meaningless
• S on realism: 
• Direct realism: study of all of a person incl. internal feelings
• Objective method: photos, someone's political ideas...
• Spirit realism: looking at every angle -- eg Chinese landscape
• Realist imagination: grounding fantasy in reality
• Wang Qi: masses might not understand a complex/composite work like S's Fascist Process -- need explanation
• Painting should be immediately legible; most important is "integrity and harmony" (Q95)
• Dong Xiwen on copying past masters being boring: "Certainly we can't use past artists' feelings in place of our own feelings" (Q96)
• We shouldn't be too derivative/collage-like -- artists should develop own style
• Li Zongjin: problem of Soviet art is "it has let go of the power within visual language" (Q97)
• But Mexican art lacks lifelike, invigorating imagery
• S: artistic freedom/liberal pluralism isnt the issue -- "the important thing is to give artists the concepts to advance; give them a measure of strength, encourage them. Give this kind of communitarian spirit to the artists." (Q98) 
• "'Simple' and 'clear' has ruined Soviet art. Soviet artists have forgotten how to use emotion to speak, to use the forms of plastic arts to speak." (Q99)

Ervin, Lorenzo Kom'boa, 'Authoritarian Leftists: Kill the Cop in your Head', Black Autonomy (April 1996)

• (LKE: b. 1947, former BPP member, anti-Vietnam war, became anarchist while incarcerated in the 1970s)
• Open letter to Euro-American leftists (MLs and MLMs)
• White privilege in capitalist US "is a prime factor in the creation and maintenance of bourgeois ideology in the minds of many whites of various classes" 
• Violent and nonviolent self defense is a basic Black human right
• White-led 'vanguard' in US dosen't do justice to Black and POC 
• COINTELPRO crushed Black leftist groups and white led groups like Progressive Labor Party, Revolutionary Union didn't help / support -- instead asserted 'vanguardship' 
• Want to convert people to "rigid political theology" instead of building coalition -- sectarianism, competition to 'win' meaning white left is "actively re-inventing and re-enforcing the very social, political, and economic relations you claim to be against." 
• American 'survival of fittest' and alienated culture -- which they avoid rejecting but simultaneously appropriate POC cultures = "left-wing white supremacy" 
• Eurocentric, ahistorical race analysis
• Black people have independent ideas of socialism/mutual aid -- eg BPP, Underground railroad -- not just a Euro thing
• Rejecting Joseph Green's condemnation of anarchism as unable to function on larger scales (1995)
• Spanish civil war CNT + FAI as examples of anarchism succeeding: failures were:
• Not exterminating fascists
• Underestimated people who joined liberal gov.
• No network abroad to support
• Today, anarchists are most involved in grassroots issues
• A. is rooted in practice not empty theory like Green
• "Any theory which cannot, at the very least be demonstrated in miniature scale (with the current reality of the economically, socially, and militarily imposed limitations of capitalist/white sup.ist society taken into consideration) in daily life is not even worth serious discussion because it is rigid dogma of the worst kind"
• State planning/MLism hasn't dealt with power dynamic between working class and middle class 'vanguard' who seize state power 'for' wc
• Reassertion of white sup. and patriarchy interpersonally in leftist orgs
• Last 30 years have seen creation of Black elite -- liberal and conservative "puppets of the white power structure" who themselves have little actual power or control
• White leftists criticised 'Million Man March' (1995) - an Af-Am protest (criticised for sexism and for being led by Louis Farrakhan who was hugely antisemitic)
• Actually, Black women were in attendance -- ignored Farrakhan saying it was male-only
• MMM was opportunity to educate people on leftist ideas
• "The difference between revolutionary Black nationalists (like Huey P. Newton and the BPP) and cultural nationalists (like Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) is that we see our nationalism as a specific tool to defend ourselves from groups and indivs. (...) not as an exclusive or single means of liberation." 
• Black autonomists reject vanguardism because it doesn't build productive relationships
• "The primary contradiction within the wc is that of racial stratification as a class weapon of the bourg. and capitalists against the wc as a whole" -- which white people don't see
• What is 'dictatorship of proletariat' for white -led groups? Will Black people be empowered? 
• Black autonomy = demand separate nation state? Actually we reject nation statism. 

Morgan, Jo-Ann, The Black Arts Movement and the BPP in American Visual Culture (New York, 2019)

• 1965-72: Spiral, OBAC, AfriCOBRA
• Oakland Museum exh 1968: 'New perspectives on Black art' and impact of BPP on local art scene
• Photography: Stephen Shames, Ilka Hartmann
• Billy X. Jennings' It's About Time archive
• Huey Newton Collection, Green Library Stanford
• Cleaver had the idea to coordinate with Berkeley anti-war activists
• Cleaver coll. at Bancroft Lib, UCB 
• Beverly Axelrod, white lawyer whose role is overlooked - linked Black militants with white radicals
• Emory Douglas: designer and artist for BP newspapers
• Pioneered pig-like policemen cartoons
• BAM had initially been literary
• Spiral incl. Charles Alston, Romare Bearden - NYC 
• AfriCOBRA: African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists- Chicago
• BPP women: Kathleen Neal (Cleaver's wife), Angela Davis
• Davidson Lib at UCSB: Bay Area BPP collection
• Richard Aoki's newspapers archive
• LA center for study of political graphics --> posters
• Wall of Respect - community mural made by OBAC (org of Black Am. culture) --> formed AfriCOBRA a year later
• Idea of 'Black art' pioneered by Amiri Baraka in early 1960s 
• Baraka founded BART/S (Black arts repertory theatre/school) Harlem in 1965
• 1968, Larry Neal article 'the Black Arts Movement': "The BAM is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of black America. In order to perform this task, the BAM proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology." (Q4-5)
• Henry Ossawa Tanner - painter always labelled a 'Negro artist'
• Harlem Ren. as a cautionary tale: didn't engage working class audiences, funded by white philanthropists
• Pressure to conform to Modernism while keeping enough ethnic flavor to be distinctive / authentic
• Ironic as Cubist breakthrough was done by appropriating African art
• Black presence in Federal Art Project of WPA

Ch3: AfriCOBRA: Forging a Black aesthetic

• Initial core: Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Gerald Williams - local established artists
• By 1970 Nat'l exh. in Harlem, they were 10 people
• "Predicated on a premise that 'Black visual art' has innate and intrinsic creative components characteristic of our ethnic group'" (Q BJH 1973, 36)
• Wanted to empower Black audience -- from protest to prescription (engendering progress)
• "Jarrell considered art a 'visual language'. Therefore art that emerged from black culture should be based on a syntax that is encoded yet understandable to black people" (Q Mary DePillars, 37) 
• Bright colors, human figure, lost and found line, lettering, images that identified sociopolitical conditions (acc. to BJH) FORMALISM
• 'Cool-ade' (Kool-aid) colors: "orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime, and grape" (BJH, Q37)
• Donaldson: "color as bright and as real as the color dealing on the streets of Watts and the South Side" (Q37)
• AfriCOBRA met 2x monthly to discuss aesthetics and philosophy, and set themes for art (eg first theme: Black Family)
• Jae Jarrell (fashion designer): Ebony Family dress 
• Connection to 'Black classical music' of jazz
• Honored Black revolutionaries: Malcolm X, BPs, MLK, Davis, etc
• Adopting 'Africa' as homeland
• Malcolm X launching a Black 'cultural revolution': appropriation of African hair and clothes, baby names -- alternative to eurocentrism = Afrocentrism 
• Aim for mass-reproduction: printing versions of art
• Also BJH was printmaker by craft
• Elizabeth Catlett: independently advancing accessible art and Black aesthetic 
• Travelled to Mexico in 1947 to work with Mexican printmakers at Taller de Grafica Popular
• Made a series of 15 linocuts: 'The Negro Woman' ft. historical figures and everyday women
• BJH visited Catlett in Mx City in 1968, around Olympics -- later made print 'Unite' responding to raised fist salute
• Catlett explicitly made art with message to incite action and promote liberation

Tbc - BPP chapters

summer reading notes 6: tuck and yang

Eve Tuck: Associate Prof of Critical Race & Indigenous Studies at UToronto & works on education; indigenous Alaskan

K. Wayne Yang: Associate Prof, UC San Diego Ethnic studies, focuses on community/place and 'ghetto colonialism'. 

Link to the paper: here.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

• Hegemony of settler-colonial framework
• Superficial adoption of 'decolonise' into education and humanities - it is not interchangeable with any other social justice ideal
• Erasure of indigenous people and history
• "When metaphor enters decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it recenters theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future." (3)
• "Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict." (3)
• 2 main forms of colonialism: external (exogenous/exploitation) = the extraction of resources to feed First World; internal = within 'domestic' borders of imperial nation - control, policing, "both structural and interpersonal" (5)
• Settler colonialism is both: total appropriation
• Within settler colonisation, the most important thing is land
• Involves disappearing indigenous and use of slavery (people without land whose bodies/selves are property, who can exploit the land)
• Settlers are not immigrants: they become the law, but immigrants adapt/assimilate
• "Each of the features of settler colonialism in the US context -- empire, settlement, and internal colony -- make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires." (8)
• "Decolonisation as a metaphor allows people to equivocate" these (8)
• Settler moves to innocence -- avoiding culpability
• Eg claiming to have Native ancestry: misunderstanding of Native racialisation as subtractive, disappearing with each generation from 'authenticity'
• "An anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonising framework: anticolonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn't strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it." (19)
• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Liberation found in the mind of the oppressed -- unlike Fanon, not specifically situated in colonial framework
• "Fanon positions decolonisation as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over-determined by the violence of the coloniser and unresolved in its possible futures." (20)
• Decolonisation "is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of 'helping' the at-risk and suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. (...) Decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" (21) ie material demands
• Curriculum reform is more like settler harm reduction/white harm reduction -- only a stopgap
• Us-based calls for redistribution of wealth ignores the wealth/land originally belonged to Natives and isn't for giving away
• eg Occupy movement
• Settler moves to innocence = reconciliation ≠ decolonisation = guiding towards unsettling innocence
• Incommensurability: we don't need to answer to/satisfy settlers. This is about Indigenous futures. 

summer reading notes 5: edX japanese books 3/3 + degrowth

Module 3 - the Tale of Genji (c11)

• Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu and has appeared in every book format and reading experience available
• Texts handwritten / copied until C17
• Oldest surviving text is C12 (~100 years after Mursaki finished all 54 chapters) - elaborate calligraphy and art
• Alternating text-image, symbiotic
• Next oldest is c13: only 1 chapter - each chapter bound individually and kept in special cabinets
• 6x6 inches when closed
• Section binding (testuyoso) with string - easy to take apart and redo
• Separate allowed easy lending/exchange/copy
• Led to earliest examples of book cover design
• Mulberry paper, decorated
• Suhama (stylised sandbar) - yellow pigment
• Suminagashi (flowing ink) - patterns of ink, marble-like
• These pertain to chapter 12 set in Suma by the sea, sense of temporality (nostalgia), Buddhist idea of life as fleeting, incense smoke in temple = paperscape (worlds beneath script)
• Calligraphy also affective
• Intimate reading experience - immersive

Genji albums: individual leaves and paintings and excerpts from novel

• Popular in early modern period
• Lavish - for elite women as part of wedding trousseau
• Oldest from 1510: 1 painting and text per chapter
• By Tosa Mitsunobu, famous court artist and 6 prominent calligraphers
• Warrior family in Western Japan interested in literature
• Includes a post-C17 frontispiece painting showing lady M at the temple where she wrote the book, beginning in the back of a sutra with chapters 12-13 & inspired by the moon: welcomes reader into the tale
• Using shikishi (colored papers/poem sheets) - square shape: 5 colors alternating in strict order
• Resemble imported Chinese paper - C16 saw juxtapositions of CN/JP aesthetics
• Aesthetics/form help convey atmosphere of scene
• The album does not replace the novel - for readers already familiar
• Leaves can be removed and pasted onto new formats, hanging scrolls, screens, new albums etc
• Actually remounted in 1998 into 'accordion' style

First printed edition: c17

• Previous printed works focused on Buddhism
• Absence of true commercial publishing industry before 1600
• Also issues with aesthetics of Genji calligraphy - difficult to translate into print
• 1619 saw attempts to mimick brush writing in movable type - but woodblock printing was more practical and could include pictures
• First woodblock Genji: 'Illustrated tale of Genji' (Eiri Genji Monogatari), 1650 Kyoto
• Illustrations by Yamamoto Shunsho, 222 images that established seminal new iconography
• Included commentaries, genealogy, poetry index, and sequel by another author -- comprehensive
• Print allowed different versions of Genji to be introduced to much wider readership
• Center of publishing world shifted to Edo and prospered in C18 - audience: townspeople and samurai

Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Rustic Genji) - bestselling in c19, by Ryutei Tanehiko

• Borrows structure, characters, and some lines to create new work, set in C15 Ashikaga shogunate
• Draws on vernacular: ancient warrior tales, contemporary kabuki and joruri puppet theatre
• Gory violence, twists
• 76 volumes - serialised over 13 years (1829-42), until censored and Tanehiko died
• Wasn't intended to be so long, but was very popular
• Images by famous artist Utagawa Unisada 
• Colorful
• Karazuri (empty printing) - giving it an invisible texture that mimicks luxurious textile volumes owned by elite
• Includes brown specks - mimicking gold decoration on paper
• Imagining Edo-period woman author: Ofuji
• Purple on her robe ('murasaki') links her to Murasaki - she is the fraudulent version of her real counterpart
• Volumes are paired: 2 per chapter, 上 and 下, visually complementary on covers
• Chapters 18-19 (4 vols) roughly correspond to original chapters 12-13 written first by Lady M: covers are connected
• Motifs relating to season of chapters' publication - plum tree
• Book bound using 'pouch binding' (fukurotoji) technique
• Book format: gokan (combined booklets)
• Booklets (maki/kan) bound together into 1 volume
• Booklets = 5 folded pouches, 10 pages - standard size for books until 1807, known as kibyoshi 'yellow-backs''
• Gokan = 2 kibyoshi, double
• Development of book formats
• Mikaeshi/mikaeshi-e: frontispiece (inner front cover) with bibliographic information, in a playful way
• Introduction for each chapter in the voice of Tanehiko
• Kuchi-e: frontispiece illustration, separated from text by frame (offset)
• In the story proper, the text is crammed/wrapped around the illustrations, blank spaces 
• Chapter 1 of Inaka Genji takes us through a building, much like 'tale of the rat'
• Narrative's forward propelling resembles handscroll 'unrolling' experience
• Sometimes illustrations play with handscroll, injecting it into the story
• Aware of own status as a book - meta
• Eg 'folding' a page in illustration
• Addresses the reader
• Theatre stage-like compositions: 3 dimensionality/trompe l'oeil
• Character illustrations sometimes reference contemporary actors' ukiyo-e prints
• Characters names indicated with medallion logo: visual symbols that exist outside narrative world (extra-diegetic)
• Also small symbols to guide reader for text 
• Interactions between images: telescope --> looing into the telescope represented by circle
• New visual devices to play with perspective
• Maximum potential for storytelling

------ 

Tyberg, Jamie, 'Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonisation', Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office (May 2020): http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/degrowthfinal.pdf

• AOC's Green New Deal not entirely convincing: IPCC (2018) says we must radically transform to avoid climate catastrophe
• Must start in the US: biggest consumer, least green
• Need to remove military, police, and stop US imperialism
• "A materialist approach, in the tradition of Epicurus and Marx, would interrogate the contradictions of infinite consumption of energy on a planet with finite resources" (4) 
• Degrowth resists idea of 'infinite growth'
• Degrowth is designed for arrivants and settlers (as opposed to indigenous)
• Degrowth started as social critique, now a "fully - fledged alternative to it" (4)
• Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies calling for new ideas of society and new formulations of hte future
• The end goal of degrowht (as a process of unlearning) as decolonisation
• Sylvia Wynter: "nomadic or sedentary indigenous traditionally stateless societies" (Q5) like Masai, San, Pygmy as examples
• Rejecting Western ideas of care work as gendered: "care is fundamental in supporting the mental, physical, and relational integrity of each and every human being and our ecosystems" (5-6)
• Care-based economy
• Autonomy vs. independence: A. as inherently collective (including collective restraint)
• "argues against technological solutions to the crisis" (6)
• Sufficiency: satisfy all human needs; redistribute surplus energy for community benefit
• Need to unlearn individualism
• Degrowth as new epistemology - rewriting our current institutionalised knowledge
• Degrowth = care + autonomy + sufficiency
• Mutual aid responses to Covid is good but inherently short-term (unsustainable)
• Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation - 10 point program
• Degrowth is "a set of practices".

summer reading notes 4 - edX japanese books 2

Module 2 introduction

• Scroll format for illustrated narratives
• Cinematic - temporal component which can be controlled by both reader (unrolling) and artist (pacing of narrative)
• Including 'different time same scene' (iji dozu) where 2 different moments are shown side by side
• Ko-e (short story small scrolls)
• Tale of the Rat (Nezumi soshi) and Chrysanthemum Spirit (Kiku no sei monogatari)
• Usually 15cm high (half size of standard scroll)
• Text-image-text-image: condensed impact
• Emerged in C14 but peaked C15-16
• Illustrates a short story from a collection - anticipating a modern viewing/reading experience as individual engagement
• Single protagonist, plot-driven, epiphanic ending
• Didactic - for young readers as hobby
• Lent out and exchanged among peers

Tale of the Rat (C16) - 3 paintings

• Unroll so you only see 1 portion at a time - shoulder-width, held in hands
• Fluid text - easy to read (kana and kanji)
• Overlaps with painting section at the start - dreamlike introduction
• Opens with gate illustration: beckons reader into another world
• Poor household: no roof, dilapidated
• Daughter of nun wants/needs to be married - makes a wish
• Painting supplements text: extra information
• Woman pounding cloth - allusion to noh theatre motif of woman beckoning for lost husband, full of longing = indicates theme
• Sleeping dog = peaceful household
• Straw mat = presages new visitor
• Architecture plays important framing role for characters, themes, setting
• Proscenium: stage set for story
• Young courtier appears in front of daughter
• Autumn scene: poetic
• Section 2: Courtier continues visits, enriches household and provides luxurious objects, food, repairs
• Frontal view of architecture = stability of household
• Section 3: sequence showing revelation of cat eating rat, to the sadness of the women who feel that it is Karma/destiny
• Temporal rhythm: slow/poetic intro --> dramatic ending, then moment of reflection (Buddhist: becoming aware of illusory nature of world)
• Final scene's architecture is intimate, allowing visceral engagement

Comparing ko-e

• Rat: text/image divided page by page, with professional art
• Chrysanthemum: looser, calligraphy and art more fluid, uses juxtaposition of image/text
• Both about women's encounters with non-human men - both didactic
• Chrysanthemum is about imperial ideology and importance of perpetuating aristocratic lineage

The Chrysanthemum Spirit

• Woman becomes lovers with spirit of the chrysanthemum but he is plucked for the emperor
• Dies giving birth to their child, but daughter becomes consort to emperor and has prosperous children
• In painting, flowers in garden are diverse and large, swaying
• All important for evoking in poetry - primer for flowers for youths
• No buildings - relationships told/visualised interpersonally
• Metamorphosis of chrysanthemum spirit is evident visually to the reader, though the character does not know 
• Birthing scene unusual as it actually shows baby emerging from her robe - more explicit, hints at didactic nature of scroll
• Ends on a note of regeneration - descendants, perpetuation of imperial line/lineage in general.

summer reading notes 3 - edX class on japanese books 1

'Japanese books: from manuscript to print' - Melissa McCormick, Harvard 

Module 1 - Intro

• Books interred inside the Buddhist sculpture of Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Shaishi, figure from C7 Japan)
• Portrays him at age 2, when he stands up and pays homage to Budha, manifesting a relic (eyeball of Buddha) in hands
• Sacred biography - miraculous events through his life = mythical presence
• Thought to be a reincarnation of Buddha - very popular sculpture motif in C13
• This sculpture - can be dated to 1292 by objects inside
• Oldest of its kind
• Much detail to make him childlike
• Eyes are reflective - catch the light Gell - Art & Agency
• = also an icon / iconic presence
• Body would have glowed - pale/white with blue/green head
• Now candle smoke darkens him afterlife of the object
• Lotus seed in his hand - 'relic'
• Sculpture split in half (wari hagi) to fit objects inside the cavity
• Common practice among E-Asian Buddhist sculptures
• This reminds me of a Buddhist statue that had internal 'organs' inside made of silk -- don't remember where I encountered it anymore!!! A temple in Japan maybe?? 

How the sculpture came to Boston

• Purchased in 1930s by Ellery Sedgwick (editor of Atlantic magazine)
• Sedgwick encountered it in a temple in 1930, came back looking for it in 1936 and hired a dealer to find it But how lol... sounds violent
• Came to MFA Boston and curator found objects inside, 1937

Objects inside

• Some in linen bags - but don't know how they might have all fit
• 5 miniature sculptures, 1 shrine sculpture, 1 set of relic beads inside a scroll, then put in a bag and placed in belly
• Aizen - religious king who burns passions/repels Mongol invaders - in chest (heart)
• Important to monk Eizon (c13) who helped propagate the Shotoku cult
• Pamphlets folded creased, unsure where in the body they were
• Separate fragments of paper including ordination slips, depicting Chinese and Sanskrit characters
• Slips given to people ordained as lay monks/nuns, who commit to following the Buddhist way
• Highly personal - one is inscribed on the back with a personal vow
• People wanted something of themselves inside the sculpture, carried through into future lives
• Text as sacred, words sacred in themselves
• Prints of Buddha: from Ippen (an itinerant monk who travelled across Japan and made Buddhism accessible)
• Kamakura period (1185-1333): widespread interest in Shotoku

The scroll (kansusou)

• Unrolled from right to left
• Sheets of paper glued together - made of mulbery fibres (kozo), very soft, absorbant, light, thin
• Writing bleeds through so you could annotate on the back and see this from the front -- unique to scroll
• 'Shinnyokan': Contemplation of Suchness
• Kanji and katakana
• Personal copy - includes pronounciation notes for kanji
• End of scroll has: date (1282), no mounting material (very informal)
• No cover, unlike other highly sacred texts/scrolls (sutras)
• Including migaeshi-e: picture appended to start of sutra

The pasted page (detchoso)

• Small books made of dry, crispy paper: paper is ganpi fibre mixed with other materials like clay and vegetable fibres
• Binding: folded paper glued together into pages
• Writing on this object is 'kana': syllabic alphabet, phonetic, vernacular
• Very personal
• Range of formality in objects - some more like sutras, more ordered, with silk binding
• Well-used: everyday devotion

Lotus Sutra

• Hanging scroll from Heian period (794-1186): Lotus Sutra fragment cut out of scroll and mounted vertically
• Patterned/ornamented paper: making surface sacred
• Contains paintings in margins
• Lotus Sutra text demands worship/veneration: rewards if you practice, punishment if not

Pocket binding

• Papers folded and sewn at open edge, creating 'pockets' out of each page
• Simple binding using twisted paper as 'string' = 'monk's binding'
• Pockets prevented ink bleeds from showing due to double layer
• Could also hide/contain extra sheets of paper

Accordion style book

• Paper folded into multiple sections - small and compact
• The book in the Shotoku sculpture was given to Library of Congress so looking at a similar one: an accordion Lotus Sutra remounted as 8 scrolls: lavish, elaborate
• Woodblock printed in China (1160) then imported to Japan - Pan-Asian bookmaking tradition
• Includes illustration of Hell, where you would go if you disobeyed Sutra: transformed into animals, beaten
• Accordion creases can still be seen - damage, helped by new scroll format
• Only Buddhist books were woodblock printed in Japan until C17

End of module 1

summer reading notes 2 - quick list

jotting down some stuff i hope to read in july (in order): 

tina campt

'the intimacies of 4 continents' by lisa lowe

'decolonisation is not a metaphor' by tuck and yang

thomas sankara

saidiya hartman

the 'asian diasporic visual cultures and histories' journal

lenin (apparently i'm 0% marxist leninist)

ho chi minh

I can't sleep, again, so I'm here to tapoter un peu so that hopefully all the thoughts running around in my brain have somewhere to go instead of my head.

I've started rereading Do Not Say We Have Nothing and it is still exquisite. In novels people are always quoting stuff, like they know a ton of Literature by heart. Obviously I know that, especially in the past, people were probably able to quote stuff a lot, but there's a part for instance in this book where Zhuli, in a moment of crisis, thinks of a quote from Faust that she heard orally just the other day. In contrast I feel like words come in from one ear and out the other. I'll remember ideas and events (though as the start of my previous post attested I seem to forget really important stuff as well) but I could never just quote a whole chunk of text from something I read or heard in passing.

The closest thing I have to that is this single-line poem from Yanyi, which I'm not even sure I have word for word: "There are places I can't go, like outside my body." It really struck me when I read it and I've thought about it a few times in the few days since I've read it, not only in terms of my heart palpitations but also how I hate things like mindfulness/yoga/Headspace/meditation because they make me acutely aware of my body which is an extremely uncomfortable feeling and also how I often imagine myself in the third person as I'm experiencing events.

I actually don't really have that much to write about, which is annoying. There's a rabbit hole about social media I could go down but I'm not sure if I really have the energy to do it right now. But I know that if I clamber upstairs back into bed I'm going to start wildly jumping from topic to topic in my head again, so now I'm not super sure what to do. I suppose I could go back to reading but I'm kind of scared to get sucked back in too much and sleep too late and be tired all of tomorrow.

august

My mom won't let me re-read The Bell Jar because she thinks it'll be bad for my mental health, which kinda sucks because I was really looking forward to it. Jia Tolentino talks a bit about it in part of Trick Mirror and it made me realise that I really remember nothing from that even though I think I read it twice when I was 13/14. It's funny how little I remember from stuff: I've seen Inglourious Basterds at least 3 times but when I rewatched it this summer I realised that I always forget that LaPadite betrays the Jewish family in the tense opening scene, and also that Christoph Waltz ends up doing a deal with the Americans. I guess that's a good thing, because I can keep revisiting stuff and get new things out of it each time. I managed to read about 5 pages of The Bell Jar before my mom took it away and whaddaya know, zero recollections.

Heart palpitations, still. I ended up sleeping 5 hours last night because I had a dentist appointment, and then fell asleep on the sofa from 6-9pm which doesn't bode well for my sleep schedule. Right now my heart is just beating too fast and strong for me to really want to turn off the lights and just lie there, so....

Earlier I laid on the floor for a while looking at the light fixture in our living room. It's the same one that we first got when we first moved into this house in 2006 and I'd never noticed it before, really. It's kind of ugly, this Dalek-looking assemblage of concentric rings with golf-sized crystal balls hanging off of it. It felt good to lie on the floor because of the cool tiles. I'd wanted to do it back in Palo Alto but most of the Airbnb was carpeted except for the toilet, and I wasn't going to lie on the poop and pee floor. Also, the toilets are shared, and it would've been pretty weird for someone to see me. More specifically, I remember the evening when I had the strongest urge to go lie there I really didn't want O to come and see me because it would look like some massive desperate cry for attention. I didn't want attention, or at least not more than usual. Just that nice cool feeling. The next morning I sat at the kitchen island, which is covered in these beautiful deep turquoise tiles (but that make the surface of the counter uneven) and just pressed my face against it. I did look crazy, and I felt it, but it was more acceptable. I could just say, "I'm really tired" (which was true because I'd had a Breakdown the evening before and not gotten that much sleep). That's something you can just say and people will accept it. In the movie The Farewell, which I saw twice, they say that a lot so that family members won't probe. In late-stage capitalism I guess everyone's just always tired and other issues are, to some extent, about being tired anyways. Or is that a reach. Anyway, I had my arms on the counter in this frame-like shape and placed my face into the center, like at the massage places where they have a hole in the cushion. Then I took my arms away and pressed by forehead there. After O finished his breakfast and left I cried a little bit, still with my face there. I didn't know what I wanted or needed. I had Mitski's "Crack Baby" stuck in my head because I'd been listening to it on repeat. The most dramatic moment, I'm sure.

Today I finished reading The Idiot and read through Yanyi's The Year of Blue Water, which Lis gifted me and said was similar in some ways to Elif Batuman. I definitely enjoyed it a bit more than I normally enjoy poetry, since I don't really understand much of poetry and feel kinda bad that I don't. Some of the lines in there were good. He talked a lot about writing -- writing as a way to survive, writing as something that he had to do like it was just bursting out of him, he needed it to make sense of his life -- which is also something Jia Tolentino talks about and just stuff I've been thinking about lately. Like, do you have to need to write to be a writer? I don't know if I need to write or if I just write because I don't really have anyone to talk to / writing as a way to force someone or something to listen to me. I feel like writing the blog post yesterday helped in some way. Proper punctuation and capitalisation and all that. I guess writing stuff down like this feels better because I'm not really expecting any kind of reply from the void, whereas I tend to be frequently disappointed by interpersonal exchanges.

Sidenote: Why does Min Jin Lee have to retweet basically every mention of her on Twitter? I mean I see why, but she always does them in a huge batch when she comes online and it just floods my feed. I suppose I should just unfollow her.

Thinking, now, about the man in the Economy check-in line at SFO who got upgraded to First Class because the San Francisco - Zurich flight was hopelessly overbooked. As he walked away from the red-carpeted counter he had that expression where you're trying really hard not to smile. First Class -- First, not Business!

I told O that I was trying to be more generous to my friends, which is true. I'm usually quite stingy and get stressed about spending money, but I tell myself that buying gifts for friends, whether it's their birthday or I've just been thinking of them, is a good thing. I said this when he protested about me buying him boba, even though I had said I would because I'd lost a Love Island bet. I hadn't thought Amber would pick Greg over Michael, but she did. When she did, it was a moment of absolute euphoria. We screamed and cheered, and O threw himself onto the floor, I think. It was carpeted. I find that a bit gross, because carpets have accumulated years and years of dust whereas at least you can scrub down toilet tiles. But yes, generosity. My friend E, who to be honest I don't know super well but who is just an absolute darling, very sweet and adorable, had a birthday picnic back in May and I went and got her some stuff from Lush. I even paid for a little handkerchief to wrap it in. And it felt really good that I was doing this for someone else.

What I'm trying to say is I'm trying to be kind and generous and open-hearted, partly because I feel like have a slight mean streak or at least used to, partly because I always feel like I'm too self-absorbed and selfish and self-centered, partly because people are always talking about how important friendship is and I agree but I don't know if I really have that kind of Perks of Being a Wallflower type of thing going on and I try to invest in the people I'm around. I always try really hard to not try and expect anything back because interpersonal relationships aren't transactional, they're built over time -- like how whenever E (a different E from the Lush one) pays for me at mealtimes and I try to pay him back, he shrugs and says "I'm sure it'll even out in the future. At some point you'll spot me for something." It's annoying, but it's also very moving. What he's saying is that he likes me, that we're friends, that we're going to continue to hang out a lot in the future and continue to be friends and he'll continue to like me. That's a pretty nice thing. Nevertheless, it always hurts a bit when I feel like I haven't gotten back what I've given. Like how when I'm depressed and it's pretty clear that I could do with some help (sometimes I specifically ask for help, like for help making soup or something) and my friends don't really show up for me. Or I'm just not asking properly. Or I'm isolating myself on purpose. I sometimes don't have the energy to talk, but I always kind of need someone there to absorb the unspoken energy that I have, if that makes sense. I don't have any study buddies.

I'm making myself a bit sad writing this. I hadn't expected to go into how I'm really lonely or whatever. Basically I shouldn't have such high expectations about anything and I should stop trying to make stuff into things and just let it be, and I should be kind. I was telling O (and this is again something like what I wrote on Tumblr like 2 weeks ago and I'm annoyed at myself for wasting time re-hashing stuff but I guess I've led myself here so) that if we'd met in some more organic situation like if we attended the same university, I would've probably made some kind of snap judgment and dismissed him and we would never have been friends. He says he thinks we would've been friends but not best friends, but he thinks that because he's good with people and somehow adapts to whoever he's with. I think he's very different in different contexts, and I would've seen the way he behaves when he's with others just categorised him as some typical American dude who's way too much in his comfort zone, who moved with too much ease. Or, I don't know, I can't really imagine what I would be like at an American university -- probably I would've just become an Asian-American which is depressing as fuck. "So if we weren't friends, it would be your fault", he said, and yeah, basically.

The only reason why we became so close is because we were in this weird situation where we only had each other, 24/7, and saw each other all the time. It made me sad when we both left (and still sad, now, because he's a terrible texter (he had warned me) which doesn't help my attachment issues) because I felt like this was one of the deepest friendships I'd ever had, and it had only lasted around a month, and I was basically never going to see him again and that was that. I knew, again, that the only reason we were so close was because of this highly unique and almost artificial context... like being the only two people on a spaceship, or being stuck at an Arctic science lab during a blizzard, etc etc -- fanfiction setups, almost. In a regular situation everyone has many acquaintances and you kind of cycle them around. Given the choice I would've obviously hung out with different people instead of giving O this impression that I was some kind of unhinged suicidal witch who needed to be looked at all the time or else she would evaporate, like how the Weeping Angels from Dr Who turn into stone when someone is looking at them so you just have to keep your eyes on them all of the time and not blink. So because it was so unique, I know that I shouldn't see this as some kind of indictment of all my other friendships, but I can't help but feel like my regular friendships don't really match up to this. At university, aren't you actually supposed to have breakfast together, watch Love Island in the evenings together, go out for a weekly dinner on Saturday night, late night talks every once in a while, have banter inbetween? I mean these are regular things you do with your so-called best friends, so when you distill it, it does feel like I'm missing out on something because I'm doing them with a handful or rotation of individuals. Like how when I told E (a third E!) that I ate alone all the time and had no hangups about it, it was just convenient, and she said she couldn't conceive of it -- even if she was at home making pasta she had to take it into her friend's room for a chat. This is a weird example but I think I'm bringing it up because my month in Palo Alto I was a lot like this E.

Here I am again talking about how I "don't seem to be able to make connections with my peers" when I was trying to talk about something positive, about how I'm trying to be kind. My point was that I wouldn't've normally given O a chance and so I should give more people chances; and that I shouldn't let my quick closeness with O make me feel bad since it's such unique circumstances and so I should stop fretting over my other friendships' "deepness" and just let them be; and finally that I shouldn't fret about my friendship with O now, because I know a lot about being a terrible texter and bad at maintaining a friendship over text and not having energy and not wanting to, so I shouldn't let dry texting give me the fatalistic impression that he now hates me/never liked me, wants nothing more to do with me, and that I should just disappear altogether, because what does that achieve, really. What's the point of playing hard-to-get when we're already friends and he already knows I'm needy as fuck? Reading about Selin's exchanges with Ivan I wondered if I could relate to her feelings, and turns out I can't, not at all, because we're in very very different situations. I was mainly thinking about how I spend my days waiting for a Whatsapp notification and then pretending like I wasn't, and feeling excited every time I'm hit up proactively. The only similar thing I guess is just that excitement and uncertainty, like having a crush, but a friend crush -- or since we're already friends, a friend continuation crush? It's not crazy that I'm like this, because underneath is the very human desire to feel like you matter, that you still matter even outside of those extenuating circumstances, that Airbnb bubble, that turquoise kitchen island, that TV room with the HDMI cable unplugged from the DVD player, Stanford campus and its ugliness and all that unhappiness, Emerson Street, carpeted corridor, Philz Coffee, boba, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Salt and Straw. That you weren't just someone he was stuck with. Just like when I meet people through activities like Isis and really want to become friends beyond that but don't know how to make it work. I need to stop playing this bitter and ugly game of viewing friendship as transactions, why didn't you hit me up first it's because you don't really care about me, it's awful. I'm a terrible friend online, to others, so why freak out when it happens to me. If I see a meme I should send it. If I think of anything I should say it. What's the point of angst and nervousness, it's not like I'll ever express it, it only stays on the inside of me so I might as well just... not. I should give and give and give and give and give and ultimately it evens out in a way that can't be calculated. It's scary because women always do that and get trampled and flattened completely, but surely that's only in romantic relationships, not friendships? I think people need to talk about friendship a lot more.

On one of our last nights in Palo Alto, O and I hugged and he was like, "You're pretty great, I care about you a lot." Obviously people have showed me direct affection before, but not as direct as this. It was a pretty great feeling that this was said, out loud, to me, friend to friend. I just need to be as nice to everyone, be honest and direct. Kind and generous, as I've said about a million times in this post already.

It's past midnight and my mom keeps coming in to check on me because she's worried I can't sleep. I eventually had to admit I was writing a blog post -- I don't think my mom or anyone really has been reading my blog posts recently since I've been so inactive -- but now she's going to read this which is annoying because it's going to change the way she sees me. I've been more vulnerable in this post than I've allowed myself to be -- to myself and to others -- in a long time. I hope she pretends like she never read this.

heart palpitations

I got back from California the other day and I've just read half of The Idiot again because I'm jetlagged, and I'm thinking about how fiction (especially debuts) seems to always be autobiographical to an extent, and about the interview I did with Jessica J. Lee where she said writing about her experience in her (non-fiction) book Swimming actually ended up helping her resolve a lot of her baggage and learn how to let go, and how my response was to invoke Elif Batuman and how it made me think that all I have to do is survive and write about it later and it'll all be worth it. It's 3:38am and raining outside, thunder and lightning, and I can't sleep at all, and Twitter is dead (impossible!) and I'm just so full of anxiety. I'm sorry, mom, because she totally thought that I would be all cured and ok once I got home because my unhappiness always has some distinct cause (like antihistamines maybe) that can be subtracted from me like pulling a blanket off. But I don't know if there is a "real me" underneath all this, just like, um, how there might not be a "real", essential culture in a non-Western context untainted by colonial and postcolonial Western ideas that you can just uncover and reveal if you tried hard enough. 

I spent some of today watching this ASMR Youtube channel, it's a young Korean housewife who makes really high-quality videos detailing her daily life, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and highlighting the small joys in her everyday routine. Apart from the fact that aesthetically it's really pleasing, I also think I really connect to it because (at least based on the English translations of her subtitles) it's clear that she's deeply depressed and using these videos to try so, so, so hard to find something that will make her feel happy, or at least good, something to live for, like the sizzling of oil in a pan, her son's little feet standing on a stool, an ant crawling across a tree root, a folded towel. And while that's all and good, it's also pretty depressing, still, to me. I've been following this poet on Instagram and Twitter who is totally awesome, half-Sino, in her twenties, MFA, doing a lot of great creative stuff, loves nature, posts a lot about the tomatoes she grows on her windowsill. And she's friends with Jessica, who's just turned 33 and whose social media is basically the same stuff. Cooking with friends. Swimming. You'd think looking at these posts is really calming and nice, but there's something about it that makes me lose all hope... This life is probably a pretty accurate picture of what my life is going to look like in the coming years, my twenties, my thirties, maybe even after that. Just going to work, doing something creative whether that's for my job or just on the side, coming back and watering the plants by the window and taking a photo of something nice. And that's... just as good as it gets. I mean, it's nice, but that's just it, for the rest of my life, tomatoes on the windowsill. A trip to Italy every once in a while. And I mean it's good, it's good to love the little things, but is that really just going to be how I live, waiting for that next little fleeting thing that will make me feel like not-shit for 2 fucking seconds and grabbing onto that for dear life, until I die? 

Thinking now about this quote from Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Rachel recommended the essay after I posted about the poem she'd had in the New Yorker, one of the only TNY poems I ever read when I had my subscription. That poem was called "hammond b3 organ cistern" and the quote from a different essay is this, specifically the bolded part:

Why did my mother kill herself and I didn’t that year and have not? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday, though never during moments of despair. The thought never comes to me then. I ask myself at the farmer’s market when David shows me the black radishes that I use in risotto or when Sarah takes me to the ranch and the horses press in on me so I’m nothing but warmth and breath and their snot on my hair. Is it this? Is this the reason? I ask myself at the rodeo and the rowdy square dance when the rain starts to fall. I don’t mean for it to sound romantic. I have questions about what keeps us alive. I don’t believe it’s a phone call or trying harder. I don’t believe it’s an act of cowardice to take your life. Or that it’s brave. I think it’s the most natural unnatural thing in the world. My analyst said, You have to decide her story is not your story. Even if it’s the last place you know to find her and you really have to say goodbye.

Every time I pass by a pretty flower or smell tapioca when I walk past a boba shop or witness golden hour I'm like is this why I'm alive? Is this why? Is this just what I have to keep waiting for? And this is supposed to be worth it? This is supposed to make it all ok just in this one moment? 

I didn't really mean to make this post be about death again. It's pretty embarrassing to be so earnest and vulnerable and sincere, and not just because this is the Internet and anyone that I know could read this even though nobody reads this someone could see it, someone who usually knows me by a Cool Girl reputation I've tried hard to build up so that boys in high school would be scared of me. (I wonder if they still are. Probably not.) I probably couldn't even write it down in private. This is especially true when it comes to talking about other people, my friends, people I think are cool, because god is it not the worst thing ever to want, to feel, to take oneself seriously? Thinking about the part in The Idiot where Selin is mortified to read her story at the magazine event even though it won first prize because "I didn't want anyone to think I thought it was good." (150) 

Like how I used to have a mild I'd-be-down-if-you-were-but-otherwise-I-don't-really-care crush on M when we'd banter over Messenger, both measuring our intellectual dicks, and continued to think he was hot even after I was no longer single, but when I saw him again for the first time in over a year after we'd both spent 4 terms at Oxbridge I immediately, suddenly, and irrevocably lost all interest in him. Emily (not abbreviating because I think Emily actually does still read this so it would be weird to act like she needs anonymity due to me writing without her knowledge or whatever, plus, there are like a billion people named Emily just in my life) and I met up with him briefly and when he came to pick us up because we were lost in Downing College I didn't recognise him at first, in that oversized black cardigan, those tight black jeans, those black Dr Martens, that comically posh accent, God, who had he become, I mean really? The point wasn't that he was now a total softboy, since I happen to be quite attracted to that kind of man (I know, I know), but that he'd become this kind of person overnight after having spent years as some nondescript, cerebral, slightly nerdy dude who hadn't seemed to care what others thought about him at all. It turned out that he really, really did, because clearly he'd felt some desperate need to remodel himself based on the latest trends, to change who he was (at least externally, which of course is the most immediate and important facet) in order to please others' standards. Emily and I had very different views on this: she thought that it would be vindicative to come back changed, new, suddenly Cool, and to see the looks on the faces to those who had scorned or ostracised you before. I think that's the worst thing, to give in, because doesn't it show that they, whoever they are, were right all along, that you were wrong and all you had to do was change to be accepted? That what they'd done had indeed hurt you, struck some deeply buried internal chord? I would much rather they realise that I was the one who was right all along, that the things I'd liked were suddenly cool. And I still don't really know what that means, specifically in what ways Emily's and my stances differ and what that says about us. I do know that it means I think showing you care is really, really fucking lame. 

All this is to say, again, that I find it so hard to be personal in part because I'm constantly assuming that I have an audience. In a way, I can't really exist without an audience: all of my thoughts only really get crafted when I imagine in my head that I'm saying them to someone, writing them down somewhere, posting it on my blog... otherwise they kind of just float around as concepts, some weird fog with no substance. 

Back to California, which is the reason why I was makin this post that has just turned out to be a collection of some of my recent concerns (ie better-phrased versions of my panicked Tumblr posts). I was feeling so listless in part because my experience there was so liminal: a vacation but not; work but not; alone but not; far away but not; my own boss but not... One Monday, after a weekend of allowing myself to do nothing productive since it was "the weekend", I found myself unable to decide precisely what I was going to do for lunch: every option seemed to entail some kind of loss, cost, or reveal some kind of failure, and deciding precisely what to do after lunch was also absolutely paralysing -- I had become Chidi from the Good Place, unable to even move, unable to do anything -- I ended up missing appropriate lunch times and missing the movie that my boyfriend was trying to get me to go watch even though it was a Monday -- it was one of those awful depranxiety attacks where I really just could not do anything at all -- eventually I calmed down enough (after crying in front of the cleaning ladies) to go back down to my room with a bowl of plain tortillas and gear myself up for dinner -- which turned out to be poké, a huge portion of it because this was America, I felt suddenly dizzy and ill and light-headed so I picked out the rest of the fish and threw the bowl away in a trash can outside so the employees wouldn't see what I'd done -- I passed by Trader Joe's to pick up some groceries and try to turn the rest of my week around -- I ran into my only friend and housemate O who was boycotting Whole Foods because of the Prime Day strikes. Later that evening after watching Love Island, O, who was in much of the same situation as me except he really did have a boss who assigned him tasks and expected him to complete them at a reasonable time, had been there for a month already, and also wasn't a crazy dumb bitch who hated being alive, told me that ever since I'd arrived it had thrown him off his groove, because seeing me drift from coffeeshop to coffeeshop had made him realise that he could kind of just dally around too. I was like, "Um, okay, well I had a breakdown today because I'd run out of food in the pantry but also didn't think I deserved to spend money on a lunch. I have way too much freedom." And indeed every morning I woke up filled with emptiness and unhappiness and dread because there was basically nothing stopping me from just lying around in bed all day watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews. Who cared what I did with my time, I was spending half my stipend on this Airbnb and flown halfway across the world just to sit around and do the same shit I'd do back home for free, which is be depressed and scroll on social media. I needed to be working and that had a lot of other complications. For the second time in my life (the first time being September 2018 when I briefly broke up with my boyfriend) I had heart palpitations, or maybe my heartbeat was normal and I was just overly aware of it, but basically, even after I'd cut caffeine, I would just feel my heartbeat all the time and it would drive me crazy and I would just wish it would stop once and for all. This is just to provide a bit more context. I tried to express this jitteriness over poetry but mostly failed. 

So anyway, I was increasingly, 'ow you say, losing it, and increasingly crawling into O's room after Love Island to just sit and stare and talk because I could not stand being alone, just really really needed some other human being to be there and absorb all of this energy I had, which was difficult because I had only 1 friend whom I did not know super well and needed to constantly limit myself so that I would not come off as an absolute psychopath. I had to set myself a quota on Depressed Anxious Bitch Hours With O and it was hard because I felt like that all of the time. (I put O through a lot, I felt awful about it but I also just really needed to. But there's a lot there.) One night we were talking and I made a comment about how I'm either emotionally numb or having a breakdown -- but that I doubt the authenticity of my breakdowns because it feels like I'm doing it for attention, but not someone else's, my own. His insight (and thank you God for a male friend with EQ, finally) was: "Do you feel like your feelings don't matter unless it's a disaster?" And I was like, wow, yeah, probably. He asked if there are moments when I do think about myself or prioritise myself, and I said I talk about myself quite a lot when I'm with others, and maybe that's because being-yourself and making conversation is an inherent part of being friends with someone. When I'm hanging out with someone I identify these moments as worthy because I'm socialising, and anything I do within that framework is productive and net-positive because I'm contributing to the strengthening of my relationship with this person. So that brings us back to me existing only really in terms of others, or allowing myself to do so. I don't really know what to do about it though, because I tried "spending time with myself" and "focusing on myself" -- California was basically an experiment of this -- and it fucking sucked, because there isn't really a me, again, without all the stuff I'm doing all the time, so what does spending time with myself even mean, apart from hearing my own heartbeat at night and getting really freaked out and crying? 

Going back to the start again. I had a terrible and confusing and highly liminal time in California and I feel like the only way I can make sense of it, and also the best way to feel like it was all worth it, is to write about it and then profit from that, in every way possible. Jia Tolentino says she hasn't got that much to say about her year in Kyrgyzstan because she really didn't take that many notes, and now I'm like, shit, do I have to take notes while it's still fresh in my memory? Or can I just get away with posts and Instagram story archives and stuff? Because I feel like it's much too fresh to start writing about it now, I certainly don't feel comfortable writing about the friendship I formed with O because it feels a bit like a betrayal and also is way too much vulnerability for me. What parts am I meant to fictionalise and what parts am I meant to add and.... I don't know. I guess I was gonna try to take notes but I really just can't, not just because it's traumatic, not just because to put it into words out loud or written down, whether in private or online, feels dirty and crass, but because it's just, god it's just so embarrassing to have feelings, real feelings, about myself and about others, and to write about them, as if every thought that came tumbling through my head was so important that it would be a crime not to publish (loose paraphrase of Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which I saw both on the plane to and from San Francisco), as if I thought it was good. And it's 4:40, the rain has stopped, and I'm still not tired.