pond

I realised recently that I've let myself become an anxious mess in the past few years, and I won't get into it now because I don't really want to talk about it, but in short, I'm a chronic worrier and it's starting to get a little self-destructive.

On one of our flights, my brother had a book with him that he'd bought back in Europe, called Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. I didn't really have anything to read so while he slept I snuck about 40 pages. It's been two or three weeks since I read the beginning of that book, but I think it stayed with me... this sense of folding towels and eating breakfast and opening the windows to let the air and light in, of living alone and having this space in which thoughts swim and things are quiet and you can do laundry by yourself.

Our house has been in a state of unprecedented mess ever since we returned from China, because we've been too busy to tidy up and also in general we just have too much Stuff. Yesterday I had a breakdown because I couldn't stop thinking about the mess and the clutter, and it stressed me out to no end. Everywhere I looked there was something to be done. I had to do something right then and there. But I couldn't, because it's a family house, and I can't just go in and start sorting things out because different objects belong to different people, and my parents have their own system and plan. So I just sat there, crying and shaking and feeling really upset. A small part of it, I think, was to do with the latent feelings of peace and serenity that I got from reading Pond. Before my stress got the better of me, I was taking clothes off the drying rack and folding them, sorting them into different piles for different people. And then I went to the washing machine to get the latest load to hang up, and that's when I couldn't handle it anymore. Part of me started thinking again about the comfort of routine in Pond, and the voice of the narrator and all that. Just this idea of this little stone cottage somewhere in Ireland (I guess) in a small town, and a young woman with no apparent employment and a lot of furniture, sweeping the floor.

Pond is a really mesmerising book, it draws you in even though it's about nothing, because it's about nothing. I picked it up again even though I really should be reading The Tiger Flu. It's so calming. The narrator also has thoughts that never stops, but because she's in a space (her house) that she completely controls, and because she's in control of her life, she just lets her thoughts run wherever they want. Here's a quote I really like that I find quite relatable:

"Quite often I'm terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that's usually my own fault for the simple reason that I'm too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely."

I think that probably sums up almost every single thing I've ever been anxious about.

the idiot

Saw this meme online and it really reminds me of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and the character of Selin. There's a key moment in the book where Svetlana tells Selin that both of them see their lives and experiences as part of a narrative about their lives, which means that other people they encounter aren't perceived as real human beings but rather as side characters - which leads Svetlana to conclude that two such people cannot truly be close, and instead such people should be close with normal people. That's why The Idiot feels like an absurd or surrealist novel even though it's entirely set in the real world - it's because of Selin's voice and how removed from reality she is, because she's constantly turning everything she sees into a narrative.

glenn greenwald

Been reading this massive New Yorker article about Glenn Greenwald, so I just want to note some stuff down. I definitely agree with what he has to say about the Trump-Russia thing, because a lot of this hysteria over Russian interference stinks of people trying to absolve the US of responsibility... like at the end of the day an overwhelming amount of Americans voted Trump, especially college-educated middle-class white people. It's like this outcry over the ICE separation of families that calls it "un-American", when based on history that's actually the most American thing there is. But both Gabriel (to whom I sent the article) and I agree that Greenwald has some pretty serious anger control issues, easily revealed in the way he talks about small family conflicts ("I wanted to drown them in the pool"). Although he's extremely intelligent and strikingly observant, he often gets angry and goes on a reckless rant that hyperbolises and generalises, which is directly broadcast to his audiences without even going through an editor, and which he is too proud to retract or modify once he has calmed down. This not only makes him come off as aggressive, confrontational, and irrational, thus discrediting the actually interesting and thought-provoking things he has to say, but also leads to misunderstanding of facts.

that state of limbo where you don't have a current read and nothing seems to satisfy you, like when you hit shuffle on a playlist and just skip every single song without any idea what you're looking for

I'm finally back home in Geneva – just landed this morning – and I've resolved to once and for all finish a good enough draft of my absurdist novel that I've been working on since 2014 so I can start thinking about agents (!!!). But I also want to keep reading. Jialong has this book called Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett that I started on the plane from Taiyuan to Beijing but I can't really touch it since it's his 'Currently Reading' right now so he kind of always has it on his person. I'm not in the mood for the political books I bought when I got super excited about being an intellectual, or my summer reading list. But none of the books at home are calling to me... I picked up To The Lighthouse and didn't feel up to reading something so difficult, so instead I took out The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which I started a while ago but felt that the narrator's voice was too intense for me at the time. Frances keeps telling me to read it though, so I should at some point. But then I saw The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (a Swiss book!) that I bought in London over a year ago because I was seeing it everywhere and stopped after a page because it was ........ so bad. I picked it up again just now, thinking that I could race through this trashy thriller and feel good about finishing such a hefty volume, but I don't know if I can do it. Maybe because I'm reading it in translation (but no professional translator can be THIS bad, right?) but it is awful, awful, insufferable. I can't even describe how bad it is. I just can't believe this was considered for the Prix Goncourt. The way it introduces exposition is so awkward and clunky, and the narration isn't immersive at all. It feels like someone summarising, in high detail, the plot of the book, instead of the book itself. I had a sharp headache in my temple earlier today that has just returned because of this book.

Should I finish it? Is the cheap thrill derived from watching a complex mystery unravel worth the deeply irritating writing style? Is there even going to be a good ending? Are these 600 pages going to be the end of me?

To the 3 people who read my blog, please advise in the comments. I'm suffering. I need something to read. Yes I could be reading Proust on my iPad, or Woolf, or The Sellout, or any of the many, many books I have. But right now please tell me yes or no - should I force my way through this drivel? Is patriotism a good reason? Maybe I should be motivated by writing an awful review after... but will I even have the strength to?

I guess first things first is to go to the Apple Store and have this rattling noise on my Macbook looked at.

a dream and the idiot

Two nights ago I had a really vivid dream that I barely remember now. I know that it involved some kind of a party in an open space, like a field, at night, with those bright white football field lights that make everything look photographic. The partygoers were people from high school, like Sam, the guy I had a crush on between from Year 8 to Year 10, who in the dream was asked if he had ever liked me back and said "for about three weeks, yeah." There was also Burke, Sam's closest friend who moved to the US after Year 10 and with whom I lost touch even though he visited often and partied with other people from the year (I never went. It wasn't my thing so I wasn't really invited). Now he has really long hair and is some kind of frat boy at UVA who hangs out with a lot of white Christian-looking people. I mainly just remember entering this sort of shed with Burke, and the interior was really this massive warehouse space. We were on the balcony and we took the metal grid stairs down, and on the ground floor there was an elevator. It was completely empty and then I think some security guard appeared and asked us to leave.

I'm reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman, whose protagonist is a Turkish-American girl in her first year studying at Harvard in the 90s, just like Batuman. Emily recommended it to me back in April, and I made a mental note to get to it at some point, but I only remembered it again after I was binge-reading Jia Tolentino articles on The New Yorker a few weeks ago and she wrote about reading the book, and about love. Suddenly I was consumed by this urgent, almost life-or-death desire to read The Idiot. I made my mom bring it to me from Geneva (my family arrived yesterday and I'm already 40% through with the book.. going way too fast as usual) and meanwhile I trawled through Batuman's New Yorker bibliography, too, hungry for anything at all from that author.

Anyway, so I'm reading The Idiot and so far I absolutely love it. I think it's going to be one of my favorite books. I love Selin's voice, this wry, bored voice that registers details and arranges thoughts in the most interesting way. She's so sharply observant, and sees through things immediately. The writing style is sparse and not that descriptive. It only and always notes the most peculiar things that make the whole story seem absurdist, like the implication that Selin got into her freshman film seminar because both she and the professor had a cold, and that she was rejected from the literature seminar because she had a cold and the professor didn't. I loved all the references to the places around Cambridge and Boston, because it reminds me of the summer I spent there in 2016. In many ways I had a very similar Harvard experience to Selin: I had about two friends, spent a lot of the time by myself doing work and thinking about things, and I took classes purely out of interest that turned out to be quite anecdotal. Now I could write about the Hungarian middle-aged man in my Advanced Narrative Non-Fiction evening class who introduced himself as Gabe but whose real name was Gabor, which is Gabriel in Hungarian, apparently, or the kid from Tokyo named Tokio, and it would be quite Selin, I think. Usually when I read books about kids my age they're leading really cool and interesting lives and have lots of friends and lots of adventures, and it makes me feel sad because I'm not having all these adventures and my life seems mundane. Selin's life is pretty dead too, and only novelisable because we're able to see into her head and read her thoughts, but I somehow find a way to be jealous of all the exercise she does (running every day, not being completely, mortifyingly incompetent at tae kwon do). And of course how easy it is for her to write a story.

I'm completely preoccupied with this idea of what my life should be like (a text: a film, a book), which is this exciting thing full of shenanigans and inside jokes, but, like Emily said, The Idiot "gives visibility to all the sad pretentious teen girls out there." I'd personally probably replace 'sad' with 'lonely', but both adjectives probably fit. The book is helping me realise that it's all really about perspective, that even the most boring events can be interesting to read if the right person is writing about them. I don't know if Batuman was like Selin in college, but if she was, I'm sure it was satisfying to go back to those monotonous, depressing days and make them into a story –– make all that nothingness that she experienced actually matter because it becomes a contribution to a wider, transcendent narrative. It's a completely different thing to people like John Green, who write these fantastical YA novels where a ton of really cool stuff happens to the self-insert protagonist, so that he can relive his nerdy youth and pretend that it was full of manic pixie dream girls.

I've become a lot more confident and accepting of myself these past few years, but something that's always remained a dark cloud has been my teen years, the ages between 12 and 15 or 16 when I kind of just hung around wearing ugly clothes, reading books, having a loud and boisterous personality, and feeling like white noise. I'm really ashamed and embarrassed about those years, partly because I was really uncool and lame (this partly had to do with my desperate crush on Sam) and partly because I resent past me for being so completely unashamed and unembarrassed and not self-conscious. I may have hated myself at the time, but I had the courage to carry around an A3 sketchbook with me all day, every day and sketch in the British Museum and explain to strangers my family tree that displayed all the relationships between the dozens of characters in the story I was writing. I can't imagine doing that now. I've pushed out most of my memories of the past by actively avoiding thinking about them and reliving them, to the point where I really don't remember much from those years. I was the kind of kid who recommended stuff to the teachers to show to the rest of the class and who sang alone in public. I wasn't afraid of anyone and I genuinely thought everybody liked me to some extent.

For a while (between the ages of 16 and 18), looking back, I could only project my own current unhappiness onto the past version of myself. I was unhappy, I did cry a lot, and I did constantly feel like there was a hand pressing against my throat making it hard for me to breathe and making my heart feel heavy –– I still feel these things –– but I was also such an interesting kid. I used to resent the fact that I'd wasted my teenage years, those wonderful years of complete lack of responsibility, when I could've loafed around, not studied, and taken drugs, but that I instead spent on Tumblr and bossing around my so-called friends. But first of all I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been who I was, and second of all my years were only wasted if you have a very narrow view of what teenage girlhood is supposed to be, no thanks to film and TV and literature. (Although, to note, my usual response to "What would you do differently if you woke up tomorrow back in Year 7 with all of your memories?" is actually "Read all the classic literature that I haven't read yet, like Goethe and Virginia Woolf and Hegel".)

The Idiot helped me realise that things that you may feel anguished about can actually be looked at with a perspective that makes the experience productive. I can't believe that I'm posting on my very public blog on the Internet about how pathetically infatuated I was with Sam (I recently found a long poem that I wrote recording all of our significant interactions and analysing them, lamenting my unrequited love, that is so cringeworthy it made me want to kill myself when I skimmed it) but it's been a long enough time that I can view it with amusement and endearment rather than soul-crushing, agonising humiliation. My philosophy up until pretty much this very evening has been "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be." (The Last Jedi (2017) dir. Rian Johnson) but that's not really a way to live healthily. So here's to writing funny fiction based on my very lame teenage experience in the future. I wonder how Princeton's treating my old crush these days.

emotions in the postmodern age

I'm reading Brideshead Revisited and I came across this passage:

Which I just want to document because it expresses this idea I've been thinking about for a while, because I read The Name of the Rose over Christmas and am now intermittently reading a few pages of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, this idea that we can't express our emotions, which belong wholly to ourselves, without alluding to existing texts and quotes because we're so saturated by other people's thoughts. I was going to write a short story about that, about a girl who's grown up reading all these really cool things about life and love and who then expects her own life to be as exciting and interesting, but it obviously isn't. She gets into a relationship when she's 17, a year after she feels she's supposed to, and she's constantly analysing it and herself and she doesn't really know the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she should have. She's supposed to break up with him after a year but then she gets pregnant and stays with him. I haven't started writing it, and probably never will, I just came up with it in an attempt to squeeze some fiction out of myself. Not only do all texts speak of other and previous texts but we also want our lives to be a text, which it obviously can't be. It also relates to young-girl stuff, like the fact that no matter what I'm doing at all times there's a second part of my mind that constantly visualises how I look in the third person, how other people (specifically men, who have the power to judge and compare in this utterly entitled and inhumane way - something that I also touched upon when I talked about Franzen's description of women in Purity) see me. My self-consciousness consumes everything I do.

Why must we see everything second-hand?

Purity

margaret atwood saying 'male fantasies, male fantasies' over and over - 10 hours | YouTube

I bought Purity by Jonathan Franzen for ¥128 (actually quite a bargain, as the jacket says £20) at the Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore for precisely two reasons: 1) It was 600 pages long and I figured it would last me a couple weeks; 2) I've heard the name Jonathan Franzen before so I had some kind of assurance that it would be quality literature. I ended up reading the bulk of it while lying around in bed on Sunday and finished it way too fast. I now have 2 weeks left in Beijing and nothing to read except for The New Yorker, yet again. I'm hopefully going to keep this quite short.

While I acknowledge that Jonathan Franzen is a good writer – he writes scenes really well and is very good at building up emotion and sustaining interest – I found his style to be annoying. It was annoying in itself, and made more annoying by the fact that it was only just annoying enough for me to find it annoying, but not infuriatingly annoying that I couldn't bear to keep reading. I had to continue to read whilst annoyed. It was annoying. It was annoying because there wasn't anything inherently bad or low-quality about it: it just emanated white male entitlement and self-satisfaction. He made little jabs at the literary world, including a reference to Michiko Kakutani whom he'd once called stupid after she gave him a bad review, and one about the amount of authors named Jonathan, that were obviously meant to be coy, witty, and satirising, but are really not funny at all. It actively reduced his dignity in my eyes. And it's just one of the many instances in which Franzen thinks he is soooooooo intelligent. I feel embarrassed for him, I really do. The worst part is that he really does think he's being self-deprecating, when the narcissism emanates from every word that he types, every space between each letter (I did learn that this is called the kerning, which is cool).

One of the major ways in which Franzen demonstrates just how smart and cool and interesting he thinks that he is is his Freud obsession. Everyone has daddy issues or mommy issues, and it could not be more transparent. He constantly brings up how Andreas Wolf (the same name as one of my friends at uni, actually the third reason why I decided to choose this book over others) literally sought his mother in the women that he was sleeping with. And the same with Pip. Like, it was so shockingly unsubtle. It really made me lose respect for Franzen. 2015, and he really thinks that constant allusions to Freud makes his book interesting.

I also take issue with his portrayal of women. I don't think that Franzen is a misogynist, because this means that he oppresses women, but I genuinely believe that he hates women. He hates women not in the institutional way in which society hates women, but in the way that ignorant people believe sexism works, which is just straightforward personal hatred. There is a bit of misogyny, in the way that he describes women – this sort of condescending, judgemental description full of contempt, dismissal, and pity that only a man could muster, because only a man would truly see women as objects to the point where he ever thought he had a right to write about someone, even a fictional character, in such a matter-of-fact, cruel, and completely dehumanising manner. In terms of hating women, that's the thing: his female characters are very fleshed-out, entirely three-dimensional, and all have their own motivations and aren't merely used as tools in male narratives, although it does sometimes feel as though they are. He does justice by them. The titular character, Purity, is the least fucked-up character and she gets a nice happy ending. I'm no English student, and I don't really want to open this book ever again, so I'm not going to go back and analyse it, but there was something about the way that women are portrayed as manipulators of men, as 'making' them do this or 'not letting them' do that, that makes me uncomfortable. Twice in the book Franzen uses the word 'train', as in 'She had trained him not to say X because she didn't like it when he did'. As if she were some kind of witch for whom men were but pets to be trained to obey. Both times I was really unsettled by the casual use of that word, as if this is what relationships are like. I don't know. But it made me feel really weird and I think it's a good way to demonstrate the way that women are portrayed in this book – and not just in Tom's story because that's written in the first person by the character Tom himself so is obviously biased and doesn't necessarily reflect Franzen's own opinions – but in pretty much every heterosexual relationship in the novel. I guess it's this classic male thing of deflecting blame and shifting responsibility. Everything a man does is somehow his girlfriend's/mother's fault, something she had somehow provoked him to do.

In a way it reminds me of Westworld, which I watched earlier this month and absolutely loved (Ah I love Lisa Joy!). I was concerned by William's attribution of the awakening of his evil to Dolores. He explicitly says that Dolores helped him to realise that he loved to kill and commit violence, and he constantly returns to Dolores throughout the next thirty years, paying tribute to her as the turning point of his story. But why is she somehow responsible, and not him? Why do women always 'make' men do things? Dolores was experiencing her own purgatory, had been and continued to be in hell for decades upon decades. She was living her own life – meanwhile William projected himself onto her and made her into a plot device for his own story. It's like men always have to be the protagonist, the special boy, but also can't bear to be in control of their own decisions, especially when the consequences come to light. Nobody is responsible for anything you do except for yourself.

Edit: I've been reading some Goodreads review that I wholeheartedly agree with and I forgot to mention: ALL THE MEN KEEP THINKING ABOUT KILLING THEIR WIVES/MOTHERS BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH THEY HATE THEM LMAO. LIKE........... ENOUGH SAID.

Also a review by Karen on goodreads says: "the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying "oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!" and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler." And wow. I really felt that. So much. Like I said, this is one of the white-male-est things I've ever read in my life. Also I just remembered what he wrote in the story of Leila Helou, the Lebanese-American journalist, which, like many of his descriptions of women, was soooo unfair and mean because he made the character, a woman or an immigrant respectively, say it, as if it was their point of view, as if they would think like that. When Leila goes to grad school to get an MFA in literature she says that she had more "immigrant lore" than the white men in her course which made her writing more interesting. That reminds me, once more, of Jenny Zhang's Buzzfeed article, which is so good that I keep on thinking about it. Like, boo hoo, Leila/women of color in MFAs get to be immigrant women and that gives them soooo much privilege because they get to write about it. Lucky them! Okay I'm done now. I need to cleanse myself. I've been meaning to read Brideshead Revisited so I'm gonna go see if it's free online somewhere.